PRICE $8.99 AUG.

27, 2018
 BEST NEW PLAY BEST NEW PLAY BEST
OLIVIER AWARD CRITICS’ CIRCLE THEATRE AWARD EVENING STANDARD

“
AN INSTAN
“A FIERCELY GRIPPING PLAY. THE SHOW’S EVERY

BROADWAY PREVIEWS BEGIN OCTOBER 2

PLAY BEST DIRECTOR BEST DIRECTOR
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T CLASSIC.
MOLECULE VIBRATES WITH BOUNTEOUS LIFE.”
”

BERNARD B. JACOBS THEATRE, 242 W. 45th St. · TheFerrymanBroadway.com

 Our members
return each year
as faithfully as
the tides. AUGUST 27, 2018

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

75 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

George Packer on the anniversary of the crash;
Brett’s basketball beat; a Warhol celebration;
not-so-wild swimming; canning the can.
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
Elizabeth Kolbert 30 Shaking the Foundations
The donor class in a new Gilded Age.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Colin Nissan 35 Tick Check
ANNALS OF LAW ENFORCEMENT
Dana Goodyear 36 Shock to the System
Can Tasers and cameras reduce police violence?
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Sheelah Kolhatkar 44 The Doomsday Investor
Paul Singer and the rise of “activist” shareholding.
PROFILES
Calvin Tomkins 56 Painterly Virtues
The world as Alex Katz sees it.
FICTION
Now you too are invited for Sana Krasikov 66 “Ways and Means”
a rare visit to our legendary THE CRITICS
private club through the BOOKS
pages of Living magazine. Joan Acocella 75 The power of “Little Women.”
Alex Ross 81 Surveying the new-music landscape.
85 Briefly Noted
Visit OceanReefClubMagazine.com
Dan Chiasson 86 Forrest Gander’s poetry of grief.
to request your complimentary copy
or call 305.367.5921 to ON TELEVISION
Emily Nussbaum 88 “Random Acts of Flyness.”
inquire about the possibilities
of a guest stay. POEMS
Jim Moore 48 “Whatever Else”
Jane Miller 70 “Whether the Goat Is a Metaphor”
COVER
Kadir Nelson “The Queen of Soul”
(After Charles White’s “Folksinger”)

DRAWINGS Julia Suits, Benjamin Schwartz, Drew Dernavich,

David Sipress, Ellis Rosen, P. C. Vey, Seth Fleishman, Caitlin Cass, Roz Chast,
Paul Noth, Frank Cotham, Joe Dator, Victoria Roberts, Michael Maslin,
PRIVATE • AUTHENTIC • UNIQUE Emma Hunsinger, David Borchart SPOTS Tibor Kárpáti
2
 DRAMA IN
EVERY BREATH
PHOTO: VINCENT PETERS / MET OPERA

Don’t miss the electrifying duo of Elıˉna Garanča and Roberto

Alagna in the Met’s new production of Samson et Dalila. The
opening weeks of the season also see the U.S. premiere of
Nico Muhly’s Marnie and star diva Anna Netrebko as Aida.

To learn more about all available ticket offers, visit

metopera.org/tickets or call 212.362.6000.
Peter Gelb Yannick Nézet-Séguin
GENERAL MANAGER JEANETTE LERMAN-NEUBAUER MUSIC DIRECTOR
 The instant #1 New York
Times bestseller
NOW IN PAPERBACK
“Psychologists have
spent decades searching
for the secret of success,
but Duckworth is the
one who found it.”
—Daniel Gilbert
“Duckworth…made grit the
reigning buzzword…her
ideas have clearly changed
lives for the better.”
—The New York Times
“Persuasive and fascinating…
Duckworth reminds us that it
is character and perserverance
that set the successful apart.”
—Malcolm Gladwell
“A fascinating tour of the psycho-
logical research on success.”
—The Wall Street Journal
ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN
EBOOK AND AN AUDIOBOOK
4 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
CONTRIBUTORS
Calvin Tomkins (“Painterly Virtues,”
p. 56) covers art and culture for The
New Yorker. “The Bride and the Bach-
elors” is one of his many books.
Elizabeth Kolbert (“Shaking the Foun-
dations,” p. 30) has been a staff writer
since 1999. Her book “The Sixth Ex-
tinction: An Unnatural History” won
the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
Zach Helfand (The Talk of the Town,
p. 26), a member of The New Yorker’s
editorial staff, was previously a sports
reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
Sana Krasikov (Fiction, p. 66) has pub-
lished the novel “The Patriots” and the
story collection “One More Year.” In
2017, she was named to Granta’s “Best
of Young American Novelists.”
Jim Moore (Poem, p. 48) is the author
of, most recently, “Underground: New
and Selected Poems.”
Joan Acocella (Books, p. 75), the maga-
zine’s dance critic since 1998, is at work
on a biography of Mikhail Baryshnikov.
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
POSTSCRIPT
New Yorker writers pay tribute to the
incomparable voice and the immense
influence of Aretha Franklin.
Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
Sheelah Kolhatkar (“The Doomsday
Investor,” p. 44), a staff writer, is the au-
thor of “Black Edge: Inside Informa-
tion, Dirty Money, and the Quest to
Bring Down the Most Wanted Man
on Wall Street.”
Dan Chiasson (Books, p. 86) teaches
English at Wellesley College. His lat-
est book of poems is “Bicentennial.”
Dana Goodyear (“Shock to the System,”
p. 36), a staff writer, has published
“Honey and Junk,” “The Oracle of Hol-
lywood Boulevard,” and “Anything That
Moves.”
Kadir Nelson (Cover), an artist, has
received Caldecott Honors, a Sibert
Medal, and N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards.
Jane Miller (Poem, p. 70) will publish
her eleventh poetry collection, “Who
Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Ques-
tions,” in September.
Alisha Haridasani Gupta (The Talk
of the Town, p. 29) is a writer for the
Times.
LEFT: PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL OCHS/GETTY
DAILY SHOUTS
Roz Chast illustrates a lonely
little traffic cone’s misadventures
around the city.

THE MAIL
NOT MY BROTHER’S KEEPER
Patrick Radden Keefe, in his otherwise
excellent article on Astrid Holleeder’s
choice to expose her criminal brother,
Wim, claims that Sophocles’ Antigone
chooses loyalty to family over fidelity
to Theban laws (“Crime Family,” Au-
gust 6th & 13th). But is this really
true? The standard for dead bodies in
Thebes, according to Sophocles, was
the same as in the rest of Greece: that
they should, except in rare circum-
stances, be buried. Antigone acts in
keeping with that standard when she
attempts to bury her brother Polyneices.
It is the ruler, Creon, who acts like a
criminal by issuing the erratic injunc-
tion that Polyneices be left to rot on the
surface of the earth, picked apart by
dogs and birds. This command—im-
pulsive, impious, and soon retracted—
is contrary to custom, to precedent,
and, the play tells us, to “the unwrit-
ten and unfailing ordinances of the
gods.” It may have force, but it is surely
lacking in law.
In other words, to contrast Astrid
and Antigone is to miss an important
point: each, in her controversial behav-
ior toward her brother in the face of
cruel and arbitrary authority, risks death
to obey what she and the rest of soci-
ety understand to be the law.
Adam Lehner
Paris, France
1 cried have returned, his prestige as le
REMEMBER THE SEQUELS
Anthony Lane, in his review of “Mis-
sion: Impossible—Fallout,” is correct
in observing that movie sequels are by
no means a recent innovation (The
Current Cinema, August 6th & 13th).
But, back in the glory days of “The
Thin Man,” Crosby and Hope road
movies, Rin Tin Tin, Charlie Chan,
and Bulldog Drummond, the film in-
dustry produced and released far more
movies in a year than it does today. To
be sure, most have been justifiably for-
gotten, but at least there was plenty of
product. Whatever the odds of success,
Hollywood rolled the dice more fre-
New from the bestselling author
of A Short History of Women
quently back then. Now the major stu- “EXACTLY THE BOOK
dios seem intent on concentrating most
of their investments on relatively few FOR OUR TIMES . . .
films, ones that often cost a fortune to
make and—like the “Mission: Impos-
a novel that is riveting,
sible” movies—have a pretty good chance terrifying, and yet always
of generating staggering profits in the
international market. Who can calcu- charmingly buoyant.”
late the number of potentially interest-
ing films that never have a prayer of —Ann Patchett,
being green-lighted because of this
approach? Lane may also be right in
author of Commonwealth
contending that people are “storyvores,”
eager for a diet of narrative and repe-
tition. But it seems to me that our hun-
ger for this is precisely why the gods
His
of mass entertainment invented epi-
sodic television.
David English
Favorites
Acton, Mass.
1 By
DEFENDING DE GAULLE
Adam Gopnik’s account of Julian Jack-
son’s new biography of Charles de Gaulle
Kate
presents a rather perplexing portrait of
modern French people’s relationship to
the General (Books, August 23th). It is
Walbert
surprising to read that Gopnik has al-
most never “heard [de Gaulle] pointed An unforgettable novel about
to as an exemplar useful in any way for a teenage girl, a predatory teacher,
today’s crises.” While de Gaulle’s Pres-
idency and his role in establishing the and a school’s complicity.
Fifth Republic have understandably re-
ceded in current French consciousness, “DEVASTATINGLY
even as the political divisions he so de-
BRILLIANT.”
sauveur de la France and as a figure of —Vogue
uncommon vision and absolute integ-
rity remains strong. If Gaullism as a
political force is, for all practical pur-
“THE WRITING IS
poses, defunct, it is partly because many BEAUTIFUL...STARTLING
of his self-proclaimed followers have IN EVERY SENTENCE. 
betrayed its principal tenets and have
moved on. This novel shines with a
Jean-Pierre Cauvin laser beam, lighting what
Austin, Texas
needs to be lit.”
• —Joan Silber, author of
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to Improvement
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume EBOOK AND AN AUDIOBOOK
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 5
 AUGUST 22 – 28, 2018

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

“Razzle dazzle” is more than a song from the Broadway hit “Chicago.” A hundred years ago, the term was used
to describe the red-and-white camouflage pattern invented by the British painter Norman Wilkinson during
the First World War to confuse enemy submarines. To commemorate the centennial of the end of the war,
the American artist Tauba Auerbach has “dazzled” the John J. Harvey fireboat (above) for the Public Art Fund
project “Flow Separation,” which can be seen at various locations along the Hudson River until May 12, 2019.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC

 MOVIES

FALL PREVIEW

True Stories, Historical Dramas, Twists of Fantasy

Among the season’s notable films based idents of an Arizona town re-create a as ever this fall, starting with “The Land
on true stories is “The Old Man and 1917 strike by copper miners that was of Steady Habits” (Sept. 14), written and
the Gun” (Sept. 28), directed by David violently suppressed by police and vig- directed by Nicole Holofcener, about a
Lowery and adapted from an article ilantes. For her first feature, “I Am Not a middle-aged suburban retiree (Ben Men-
in The New Yorker by David Grann. It Witch” (Sept. 7), the Zambian director delsohn) who abandons his wife (Edie
stars Robert Redford (who has said that Rungano Nyoni tells the story of an un- Falco) and takes an apartment alone. “Pri-
it will be his last film), in the role of loved eight-year-old girl (Margaret Mu- vate Life” (Oct. 5), the first film directed
Forrest Tucker, a man of seventy-nine lubwa) who is sent to live in a prisonlike by Tamara Jenkins since 2008, is a drama
who, in 1999, capped off an impressive compound for women accused of being about a middle-aged couple (Kathryn
lifetime of crime with one last bank witches. In “Widows” (Nov. 16), based Hahn and Paul Giamatti) who are strug-
robbery. Ryan Gosling plays the astro- on a British television show from 1983, gling with infertility. And “Mid90s”
naut Neil Armstrong in “First Man” four Chicago women try to pull off an (Oct. 19), the first feature directed by
(Oct. 12), a drama about the 1969 mis- armed robbery after their husbands are Jonah Hill (who also wrote the script),
sion to the moon, directed by Damien killed attempting the same job. The di- is the story of a thirteen-year-old skater
Chazelle; Claire Foy co-stars, as Arm- rector, Steve McQueen, wrote the script (Sunny Suljic) in Los Angeles who’s cop-
strong’s wife, Janet. “Can You Ever For- with Gillian Flynn. ing with his dysfunctional family.
give Me?” (Oct. 19), directed by Mari- Tales of family life are as prominent —Richard Brody
elle Heller, features Melissa McCarthy
in an adaptation of a memoir by Lee
Israel, a literary biographer who forged
letters by celebrities and then sold them.
Existing properties feature promi-
nently this fall, as in “A Star Is Born”
(Oct. 5), the nineteen-thirties drama’s
third remake and Bradley Cooper’s
directorial début. He also co-stars, as
an alcoholic country musician on the
downturn whose relationship with a
younger singer (Lady Gaga) founders as
she becomes successful. As a teen-ager
in the nineteen-nineties, the Singapor-
ean director Sandi Tan made an inde-
pendent science-fiction feature but then
lost the footage; she recently got hold of
it, and, in “Shirkers” (Oct. 26), she both
presents the work and tells the story
of the lives of its participants. Orson
Welles’s last, unfinished feature, “The
Other Side of the Wind” (Nov. 2), which
he shot in the nineteen-seventies, has
finally been completed, thanks to a con-
sortium of consultants, including Peter
Bogdanovich. The drama is centered on
a burned-out filmmaker (played by John
ILLUSTRATION BY BENE ROHLMANN

Huston) who returns to Hollywood

in quest of a comeback. The teeming
cast includes Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar,
Susan Strasberg, and Dennis Hopper.
History gets a twist of fantasy in new
releases such as “Bisbee ’17” (Sept. 5),
the director Robert Greene’s fusion of
documentary and fiction, in which res-

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 7

Fall in DC means a season filled with fascinating arts and culture.
Check out can’t-miss plays, museum exhibits and festivals.

S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S E C T I O N | Discover Washington, DC
 ANASTASIA

THEATER
Catch multiple performances during
theatreWeek (Sept. 12 – Oct. 7) or see the
world premiere of Beetlejuice (Oct. 14 – Nov. 18)
before it heads to Broadway at National Theater.
Other hotly anticipated productions include
Stephen Sondheim’s Passion (Aug. 14 – Sept. 23)
at Signature Theatre Company in Arlington, Va.,
traveling Broadway smash musical Anastasia
(Oct. 30 – Nov. 25) at the Kennedy Center and
Twelve Angry Men (Jan. 18 – Feb. 17, 2019) at
historic Ford’s Theatre.

MUSEUMS
Discover Smithsonian American Art Museum’s
landmark exhibition about Bill Traylor (Sept.
28 – March 17, 2019), an artist born into slavery,
and then see heartbeats illuminate light bulbs in
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse (Nov. 1 – April 28),
an interactive exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum.
Additional highlights include the Oct. 4 debut
of the newly expanded, 230-acre Glenstone
Museum, the National Gallery of Art showcase
Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-
1950 (Nov. 4 – Feb. 18), National Museum of
Women in the Arts’ Rodarte (Nov. 10 – Feb. 10) and
Renwick Gallery’s popular No Spectators: The Art
of Burning Man (ends Jan. 21).

NO SPECTATORS
THE ART

OF BURNING MAN
 dance
The Washington Ballet kicks off its 2018-19 season
at the Kennedy Center with TWB Welcomes
(Sept. 26-30), a special display featuring some
of dance’s most well-known practitioners. Local
flavor and international influence converge in
ADAMS MORGAN the Global Perspectives Festival (Oct. 27-28) at
Dance Place, highlighting DC-area performers
who specialize in various dances from around the
world. From Dec. 15-30, check out Step Afrika!’s
Magical, Musical Holiday Step Show at the Atlas

Celebrate some of DC’s most exciting

neighborhoods at the family-friendly Adams
Morgan Festival (Sept. 9) and the foodie-favored
Taste of Georgetown (Sept. 23). Union Market
puts on the All Things Go Fall Classic (Oct. 6-7),
featuring live performances from Maggie Rogers,
Børns and Carly Rae Jepsen. Join beer lovers
on their pilgrimage to Snallygaster (Oct. 13), a
celebration with 350 cra brews, food trucks,
live music and games now set on America’s Main
Street, Pennsylvania Avenue.

THE WASHINGTON BALLET

By Dean Alexander

a picture of a District where local,

national and international cultures
join together to create a metropolis
of artistic magic. You’ll gain in-depth
insight into the city’s music, museums,
mural arts, theater and dance.

WATCH THE SERIES AT

washington.org September 28, 2018–March 17, 2019
Experience the powerful visual storytelling of Bill Traylor, who lived from the
final decade of slavery to the dawn of Civil Rights in the American South.

Smithsonian 8th and F Streets, NW | Free | AmericanArt.si.edu | #atSAAM

Bill Traylor (American, 1856–1949), House, about 1941, watercolor and graphite on cardboard, 22 1/4 x 14 1/8 inches,
SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, Gift of Charles and Eugenia Shannon, 1982.4.29

Discover Washington, DC
1
MOVIES
BlacKkKlansman
Believe it or not, the story told by Spike
Lee’s latest film is true. The setting is the
late nineteen-seventies, but it’s the present
day and its lingering injustices that lie within
the movie’s sights. John David Washington
plays Ron Stallworth, the first black police-
man in Colorado Springs, who hatches a
scheme to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan by
making friendly contact with Klansmen—
including their Grand Wizard, David Duke
(Topher Grace)—over the phone. For face-
to-face meetings, Ron is impersonated by a
fellow-cop, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver).
Lee, as nimble as he’s ever been, remains
alert to the absurdist comedy of this setup
as well as its nastiness and risk. The result is
a switchback ride that by the end veers into
documentary outrage, but that wildness feels
both pertinent and true. With Laura Harrier,
cool and collected, as a student leader.—An-
thony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 8/20/18.)
(In wide release.)
M (1951)
The police investigation at the heart of Jo-
seph Losey’s 1951 remake of Fritz Lang’s
1931 German classic, about the hunt for a
serial child-killer, reflects the McCarthyite
inquisitions that Losey was enduring at the
time. Losey turns the story into pungent
Americana through his attention to allur-
ingly grubby Los Angeles locations. Ernest
Laszlo’s cinematography renders the mottled
sidewalks and grim façades eloquent; urgent
tracking and crane shots convey the paranoid
pairing of menace and surveillance. David
Wayne brings a hectic pathos to the role of
the psychopath at war with his urges, and
such character actors as Howard Da Silva
and Raymond Burr lend streetwise flair to
the police officers and the underworld posse
competing to catch the killer. The Brechtian
irony of criminals delivering punishment is
a Berlin import, the Freudian psychology is
an American touch, and the corrosive view of
the government is the kind that could—and
did—get a filmmaker in trouble.—Richard
Brody (Film Forum, Aug. 27.)
Memoir of War
This adaptation, by the director Emmanuel
Finkiel, of Marguerite Duras’s account of life
in Paris during and after the Nazi Occupa-
tion, reduces her incantatory style and fierce
emotions to a creamy historical romance. In
1944, Duras (Mélanie Thierry), a writer and
Resistance activist, struggles to bear up after
the arrest of her husband, Robert Antelme
(Emmanuel Bourdieu), a poet and resister
whose friend, Dionys Mascolo (Benjamin
Biolay), also a Resistance member, is her
lover. Inquiring about Robert in a govern-
ment bureau, she’s received graciously by
Pierre Rabier (Benoît Magimel), a French col-
laborationist official with literary pretensions;
despite the risks, she continues to meet with
him for news about Robert. Then, in 1945,
after the Liberation of Paris, Duras grows
increasingly desperate about Robert’s fate.
Despite a few gripping scenes of high-stakes
political and intimate maneuvers, Finkiel
trivializes the story with clichés and short-
cuts (such as casting very thin people to play
concentration-camp survivors) while avoiding
Duras’s enduringly confrontational original-
ity. In French.—R.B. (In limited release.)
Notes on an Appearance
For his first feature, Ricky D’Ambrose con-
jures a vast imaginary world of intellectual
intrigue in tiny, antic touches, which provide
the context for a febrile drama of youthful
ambition and frustration. David (Bingham
Bryant) is an aspiring writer who leaves his
girlfriend, Madeleine (Tallie Medel), in Italy
and returns to his parents’ house in a New
York suburb. Soon, he moves to Brooklyn
and becomes the research assistant to a friend
named Todd (Keith Poulson), the biographer
of a controversial political theorist whose work
has sparked violence. Then David vanishes,
and Todd searches for him. D’Ambrose an-
chors his story in a faux archive of documents,
including letters, maps, posters, and fictional
articles from The New Yorker, the Times, and
other publications. He evokes maximal ideas
by minimalist means; his spare compositions
reveal a paranoiac grid of world-historical
conflicts and fierce desires looming behind
a panel discussion at a bookstore, a chat in a
café, and other arch surfaces of postgraduate
urbanity.—R.B. (In limited release.)
The Rest I Make Up
Michelle Memran’s intimate and exhilarat-
ing documentary portrait of the playwright
María Irene Fornés unfolds the details of their
decade-plus collaboration in ample, illumi-
nating discussions between the two of them.
Fornés, a crucial theatrical innovator since
the nineteen-sixties, speaks of her unbridled
self-revelation to the camera, which she calls
“her beloved”—and it certainly loves her back.
Fornés exerts a hypnotic force of stardom,
while her offhanded yet urgent remarks re-
sound with life-tested literary authority. Yet
tragedy is built in from the start: Fornés’s
bouts of memory loss prove to be the onset of
Alzheimer’s disease. Though her perception
and imagination remain vivid and vital, she
can no longer recall recent activities—such as
a hearty return visit to her native Cuba, which
Memran films. The movie sketches the back-
ground of Fornés’s remarkable life and career
with interviews and archival footage, while
highlighting her enduring creative inspiration
on the wing, long after the end of her play-
writing career.—R.B. (MOMA, Aug. 23-29.)
Support the Girls
In this exuberant yet intricate comedy-drama,
the writer and director Andrew Bujalski goes
behind the scenes of a Texas sports bar—where
young waitresses in crop tops and hot pants
serve up good clean flirtation to the largely
male clientele—and unfolds the relationships,
laws, and mores on which it runs. The result is
a thrilling whirl of vital and spirited perfor-
mances. Regina Hall commands the screen as
Lisa, the bar’s compassionate and all-seeing
manager, who bends the rules and defies her
boss (James Le Gros) to help several em-
ployees with legal problems while competing
with a glitzier pub nearby. Despite her own
romantic troubles, Lisa is mainly devoted to
the bar’s waitresses, especially the discerning
and sarcastic Danyelle (Shayna McHayle)
and the energetic, imaginative Maci (Haley
Lu Richardson)—and is quietly anguished
by the torrent of details on which the whole
enterprise, and each woman’s life, depends.
Bujalski builds the insightful analysis of man-
agement and entertainment on a volcano of
passion.—R.B. (In limited release.)
1
CLASSICAL MUSIC
“Candide”
Tanglewood
OUT OF TOWN With his whip-smart operetta,
based on the satirical novella by Voltaire,
Bernstein has it both ways. He parodies op-
eratic conventions even as he relies on them
for his most dazzling effects, from the pro-
pulsive overture to Cunégonde’s showpiece,
“Glitter and Be Gay”; likewise, he makes
his doe-eyed hero the butt of almost every
joke while steadily building the audience’s
sympathy for him. For this production, orig-
inally conceived for the Orlando Philhar-
monic Orchestra, Alison Moritz takes that
idea to its logical extreme by presenting life
as a circus and Candide as its much put-
upon Pierrot. Eric Jacobsen conducts the
chamber orchestra the Knights and a cast
that includes Miles Mykkanen and Sharleen
Joynt. Two days later, the festival pulls out all
the stops for a starry concert celebration of
Bernstein—featuring John Williams, Audra
McDonald, and Yo-Yo Ma, among others—on
what would have been the composer’s hun-
dredth birthday.—Oussama Zahr (Aug. 22-23
at 8; Aug. 25 at 8.)
Summer HD Festival
Metropolitan Opera House
Every August for the past ten years, New York’s
glitziest opera company has affixed a giant
screen to the center arch of its well-known
façade to present alfresco movie nights. The
free series kicks off with the Marx Brothers
classic “A Night at the Opera”—a ploy, per-
haps, to achieve an air of informality. Over the
following week and a half, the festival proper
offers either mainstream appeal (with shows
like “Madama Butterfly”) or truly special per-
formances. In the latter category, you’ll find
Nina Stemme in an intense staging of “Elek-
tra”; Dmitri Hvorostovsky, in one of his best
roles, in “Un Ballo in Maschera”; and Renée
Fleming in the sumptuous “Der Rosenkavalier,”
whose notoriously long and diva-free Act II
provides the perfect opportunity for a popcorn
run.—O.Z. (Aug. 24-Sept. 3; no tickets required.)
Cassatt String Quartet
Music Mountain
OUT OF TOWN This admirable quartet brings
two disparate, dynamic programs to the
venerable Music Mountain series. In a fami-
ly-friendly Saturday-morning event, children
are invited to paint in response to music;
then, the Cassatts play new pieces inspired
by visual art, and participate in a live-paint-
ing collaboration with Vincent Inconiglios,
a fixture on the New York art scene. A more
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 11
 advertisement
FROZEN like you’ve never seen it before…
Oram brings Kristoff (Jelani Alladin) and
Sven (Andrew Pirozzi) to life for the stage.
NATURE AND NORWAY
DESIGNER CHRISTOPHER ORAM TALKS ABOUT FROZEN
When Disney Theatrical Group decided to adapt the
animated film FROZEN for the Broadway stage, they
enlisted a team with more than just stellar theatrical bona
fides. Not only do they have a collective 16 Tony Awards®, but
they also have art and design in their bones.
When it came time to design the sets and costumes,
Christopher Oram had an artistic game plan. He filled, as
he put it, “sketchbook after sketchbook of scribbles and ideas
and shapes” inspired by everything from Nordic architecture
to royal costuming. What emerged from those early ideas are
the beautifully icy winterscapes and earth-toned greenways
that today greet audiences at Broadway’s St. James Theatre.
Oram said his designs were primarily inspired by research
trips he took to Scandinavia, where “glaciers and forests and
churches” inspired his lush design concepts that reflect the
region’s magic and mystery.
“You’re out in the middle of a fjord and there’s literally no
one else around,” he said of his visit to Norway. “You see tiny
houses clinging to the bottom of giant steep cliffs. The water
The set and costume designer Christopher Oram.
Rosemåling details accent the set to bring
Nordic touches to the St. James stage.
is bottomless beneath you, and it’s pitch black. You get that
there may be goblins in the woods and fairies under the rocks.
Nature is so present around you.”
He drew on those inspirations in his scenic design. He took
cues from the timber-based architecture in Norway, all heavy
woods and pillars and planks. Oram embedded the traditional
Norwegian folk art called Rosemåling—a type of decorative
painting that features stylized flowers—into many elements
of the set. It’s a nod to the “wonderful juxtaposition of heavy
wood and delicate floral motifs,” giving a “big masculine
space with all this feminine detailing.”
“It’s all in service of the narrative of the story, visually,”
he said.
The costumes are just as inspired.
“All Disney animated characters have iconic looks,” he said.
“But for the stage you have to interpret that work for an older,
more sophisticated audience.”
 Oram worked closely with the actresses Caissie Levy, who
plays Elsa, and Patti Murin, who portrays Anna, to ensure
their royal personas were both eye-popping and accurate.

“You have to conceive of garments in a different way, but make

them iconic and recognizable and beautiful,” he said.

Oram did that by maintaining the silhouettes from the film

but using fabrics that move in certain ways to give the actors
physicality and weight. The costumes feature layers of satins
and silks, with beading and embroidery as lush accents. Hand
dying created stunning ombré effects in blues, golds, scarlets
and whites.

Oram was especially excited about a scene featuring Levy

in a pant suit, a switch which gave her “modern-day
independence and fierceness.”

“You can’t stage a fight scene with her in a ball gown,” he said
with a laugh.

Oram said he was thrilled to design and conjure the world of

Oram’s costume sketches evolve the trolls from the animated film
into ‘Hidden Folk’ for the show-stopper, ‘Fixer Upper.’ (Above, with
Jelani Alladin and company).
FROZEN for the stage. Critics agreed. Variety called his work
“very theatrical,” and the Los Angeles Times had high praise for
the designer’s “imaginative handiwork.”
“I’m absolutely an aesthetic designer,” said Oram. “I love beauty.
I love texture. I love design. I love the world around me.”

That sense of enchantment, inspired by Mother Nature,

Anna’s 12-pound coronation gown in motion during ‘Love is An Open Door.’
(Patti Murin and John Riddle) ultimately infuses every lavish stage picture that Oram
created for FROZEN. It’s a universe that’s splendid, rustic and
charming, but also chic, smart and stately.

“And that’s what makes it wondrous,” he said.

Oram’s final
sketch of
Anna’s
coronation
day gown.

(Caissie Levy), from costume

sketch (above) to the stage.
Photos by Deen van Meer and Marc Brenner; Sketches by Christopher Oram ©Disney
 CLASSICAL MUSIC
FALL PREVIEW
A Shanghainese Polymath, a New “Marnie”
In the last days of summer, the New
York Philharmonic returns to David
Geffen Hall, and it’s back to business.
For Jaap van Zweden’s first program as
the orchestra’s music director, he conducts
Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” as well as a
new piece by Ashley Fure and two piano
concertos (Ravel’s in G for the first, gala
night, and Beethoven’s “Emperor” there-
after) played by the scintillating Daniil
Trifonov (Sept. 20-22 and Sept. 25). Later,
van Zweden conducts two fiendish, un-
derperformed violin concertos: Stravin-
sky’s, with Leila Josefowicz as the soloist
(Oct. 4-6), and Britten’s, with Simone
Lamsma (Nov. 29-30 and Dec. 4).
The San Francisco Symphony opens
Carnegie Hall’s season with a rival Stra-
vinsky program: its own interpretation
of “The Rite of Spring” and the Violin
Concerto (with Leonidas Kavakos),
as well as “Petrushka” (Oct. 4). A week
later, the Detroit-based chamber or-
chestra Sphinx Virtuosi brings a pro-
gram of diverse sounds drawn from
traditional sources and composers
including Terence Blanchard, Shosta-
kovich, and Kareem Roustom (Oct. 11).
And Daniel Barenboim conducts the
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (Nov.
8), whose project of peaceful dialogue
is needed now more than ever.
A pacific mood pervades the Church
of St. Mary the Virgin, where Stile An-
14 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
tico sings motets written for Queen
Elizabeth I (Oct. 13). At the Park Av-
enue Armory, the Crossing presents
“Of Arms and the Man,” a program of
contemporary choral works (Sept. 16).
Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Opera
season (beginning Sept. 24) includes
new productions of Saint-Saëns’s lushly
Romantic “Samson et Dalila”—with
the superstar duo of Elīna Garanča and
Roberto Alagna—and “La Traviata,”
as well as a holy trinity of repertory
revivals (“Aida,” “La Bohème,” “Tosca”).
Sex and violence predominate again in
“Carmen,” while Nico Muhly’s “Mar-
nie,” an adaptation of the novel that
inspired Hitchcock’s film, examines the
hollow glamour that both exude.
Opera meets Aristotle in Kate Sop-
er’s “Ipsa Dixit” (Oct. 27), which Soper
performs as part of the Miller Theatre’s
“Composer Portraits” series. Next, the
spotlight is on Du Yun, the multitalented
Shanghai native who won last year’s Pu-
litzer Prize for her opera “Angel’s Bone”:
at the Miller, the International Contem-
porary Ensemble performs a selection
of Yun’s music from the past sixteen
years (Nov. 15). And, at National Saw-
dust, the composer Joan Tower curates
her own eightieth-birthday concert
(Nov. 11), which celebrates music writ-
ten by women.
—Fergus McIntosh
conventional Sunday matinée features quartets
by Borodin (No. 2) and Shostakovich (No. 8)
and, with the cellist Paul Katz, Schubert’s
great Quintet in C Major (D. 956).—Steve
Smith (Aug. 25 at 11:30 A.M. and Aug. 26 at 3.)
“Rigoletto”
Berkshire Opera Festival
OUT OF TOWN In many stagings of Verdi’s opera
about a licentious nobleman’s abuse of his
power, the central characters—the Duke of
Mantua and Gilda, the woman whose life
he ruins—exhibit a codependency born of
mutual attraction. But in the wake of the
#MeToo movement the Pittsfield-based fes-
tival’s co-founder and go-to stage director,
Jonathon Loy, plans to modernize the dy-
namic of their relationship while keeping the
opera in the nineteenth century. Brian Gar-
man conducts a cast led by Sebastian Catana,
Maria Valdes, and Jonathan Tetelman.—O.Z.
(Aug. 25 at 1 and Aug. 28 and Aug. 31 at 7:30.)
“FALLA!”
Angel Orensanz Foundation
The Perspectives Ensemble, established in
1993 by the flutist Sato Moughalian, lives up
to its name by emphasizing the historical and
cultural contexts of the works it performs.
This program focusses on the distinguished
Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, whose
deft balance of folkloric, antiquarian, and
modernist elements is illuminated by two
well-loved pieces. Angel Gil-Ordóñez con-
ducts “El Amor Brujo”—offered in its rarely
encountered original 1915 version, featuring
a flamenco singer (here, the eminent Espe-
ranza Fernández)—and “El Retablo de Maese
Pedro,” a piquant puppet opera based on an
episode from “Don Quixote.”—S.S. (Aug. 26
at 7. Tickets are free, but reservations are advised.)
Taka Kigawa
Le Poisson Rouge
Kigawa, an intrepid pianist of boundless curi-
osity and skill, is also a diligent advocate for
composers. Here, he surrounds the Italian
master Luciano Berio’s Piano Sonata—a titanic
late-career work from 2001—with an enticing
mix of pieces by the Swiss-born Austrian inno-
vator Beat Furrer (“Phasma”) and two younger
composers of vast imagination, Akiko Yamane
(“Illustrated Baby”) and Matthew Aucoin
(Three Études).—S.S. (Aug. 27 at 7.)
1
ART
“Bodys Isek Kingelez”
ILLUSTRATION BY BENE ROHLMANN
MOMA
The Congolese sculptor, who died in 2015,
is the subject of a phenomenal exhibition,
curated by Sarah Suzuki and wonderfully
installed with help from the German artist
Carsten Höller. It presents scores of imaginary
buildings and cities made mostly of cut and
painted paper, card stock, and plastics, with
occasional urban detritus (used packaging,
bottle caps, soda cans). In shape, these “ex-
treme maquettes,” as Kingelez termed them,
are variously tiered, towering, serpentine,
pinnate, finned, and scalloped. Colonnades
and grand staircases abound, as do decorative
grids of circles, stripes, diamonds, stars, and
floral motifs. Kingelez was a great and subtle
colorist, with a palette anchored by the red,
yellow, and green of the national flag of Zaire—
he once said, “A building without color is like a
naked person.” Kinships with craftwork, toys,
folk or outsider art, and bricolage inevita-
bly suggest themselves, only to be plowed
under by the rigor of an aesthetic as sophis-
ticated as that of Alexander Calder or Joseph
Cornell.—Peter Schjeldahl (Through Jan. 1, 2019.)
“Celebrating Bill Cunningham”
New-York Historical Society
Unflagging delight was Cunningham’s hall-
mark. The fashion photographer, who died
in 2016 at the age of eighty-seven, captured
the sartorial daring of ordinary New Yorkers
and boldface names alike, while crisscrossing
town on his bicycle. This intimate exhibition
is a suitably buoyant tribute, documenting his
path from whimsical milliner to Times colum-
nist through archival materials and personal
effects—including one of his signature French
workman’s jackets and his last bike. Among the
hats on display, from 1960, are a fanciful raffia
number festooned with rooster feathers and
two chic corduroy berets; valentines made of
felt and tulle for friends in the eighties show
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that Cunningham never lost his passion for
ornamentation. A film portrait by Josef Astor
features Cunningham’s vivid reminiscences
(of Jackie O. sale shopping at Chez Ninon,
for example). Though the beatific, diplomatic
photographer was not known to be especially
forthcoming, if the show leaves you wanting
more, you’re in luck: Cunningham’s long-
awaited memoir arrives next month.—Johanna
Fateman (Through Sept. 9.)
“Multiply, Identify, Her”
International Center of
Photography
This intergenerational exhibition of ten top-
notch artists, each represented by a single work
or series, is undercut by its title—though per-
haps the invocation of throwback postmodern
feminism is intentional. The notion that pho-
tography has been a rich medium for women in
particular to explore the cultural construction
of identity may be old hat, but it’s not wrong,
and the curator Marina Chao makes the point
fresh with her exciting selections, contrasting
well-known names (Roni Horn, Lorna Simp-
son, Mickalene Thomas) with up-and-comers
(notably, Sondra Perry). A small work by the
Romanian artist Geta Brătescu, from 2001,
employs a simple trick to produce a hybrid
image—cut-up photos of her own face partially
obscure a mirror, interrupting the viewer’s
reflection with the artist’s features. The film-
maker Barbara Hammer uses X-rays of her own
St. James Theatre | FrozenTheMusical.com
body in collaged self-portraits, and Stephanie
Dinkins, in a grid of videos, mimics the move-
ments of the humanoid robot Bina48 as she
engages it in strangely poignant philosophical
exchanges.—J.F. (Through Sept. 2.)
“Reza Abdoh”
MOMA PS1
One of the more profound and original theatre
artists of the twentieth century, Abdoh died of
AIDS in the spring of 1995; he was thirty-two.
We have the privilege of hearing his voice—
political, inconsolable—once again in the first
large-scale retrospective devoted to this Ira-
nian-born spinner of epic, omnivorous tales
about queerness, American TV and violence,
the cult of celebrity, and the gay child’s rela-
tionship to the patriarchy. Co-curated by the
museum’s director Klaus Biesenbach, and Negar
Azimi, Tiffany Malakooti, and Babak Radboy,
of Bidoun, the show is a marvel of archival
research and curatorial empathy. In six rooms,
monitors flicker with scenes from the nine pro-
ductions that Abdoh wrote and directed. He
felt that his work could not be performed after
his death—and he was right. His nerve and his
nervousness were particular to the chemistry
of his own body—a chemistry that, ultimately,
failed him. But, until he died, he allowed us
to inhabit his righteous and turgid, pure and
debased universe, which he filled with the true
and fake news of who we were, if only we would
listen.—Hilton Als (Through Sept. 3.)

FALL PREVIEW
A Pop Icon, an American Maverick, a Witty Brit
When Jack Whitten died, in January,
at the age of seventy-eight, he was a
renowned, category-defying abstract
painter. But the sculptures he made
in his studios in New York and Crete
were more or less secret. Fashioned by
the Alabama-born artist from wood,
marble, fishing line, nails, glass, and
other materials, the totemic works will
be seen at the Met Breuer in the com-
pany of his paintings and a selection of
relics from Africa, ancient Greece, and
the American South which informed
his aesthetic. “Odyssey: Jack Whitten
16 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
ART
Sculpture, 1963–2017” opens Sept. 6. At
the Brooklyn Museum, Whitten’s 1970
painting “Homage to Malcolm” is among
the hundred and fifty works by sixty
artists in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the
Age of Black Power,” arriving Sept. 14.
People cavil about the influence of
the art market today, but patrons have
been holding sway for hundreds of
years. The Frick exhibits two fifteenth-
century Netherlandish altar panels
commissioned by—and portraying,
alongside the Virgin, her child, and
saints—the Carthusian monk Jan Vos.
“The Charterhouse of Bruges: Jan van
Eyck, Petrus Christus, and Jan Vos”
opens Sept. 18.
“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel,” the first
U.S. retrospective of the British artist,
takes its title from a sculpture she made
in 1994: two oranges and a cucumber
placed on a mattress next to a pair of
melons and a water bucket for a slap-
stick-Surrealist take on a male and a
female nude. Lucas, who has been
tweaking figurative conventions since
the late nineteen-eighties, is less well
known than her former classmate and
fellow-provocateur Tracey Emin; that
may change when the New Museum
fills three floors with Lucas’s work, be-
ginning Sept. 26.
By 1906, well before Kandinsky
wrote about the influence of color on
the soul, or Malevich sought refuge
from realism in the form of a square,
the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint
had invented an abstract visual language
that reflected her intense involvement
with mysticism (she also worked as a
spiritualist medium). The Guggenheim
revises the origin story of European ab-
straction with “Hilma af Klint: Paintings
for the Future,” opening Oct. 12.
Bruce Nauman is arguably the most
important living American artist and
certainly among the most influential.
Since the mid-nineteen-sixties, work-
ing in sculpture, performance, video,
drawing, neon, photography, and room-
size installations, he has explored the
discomforts of the human condition
with sharp wit and formal dexterity.
The sixth floor of moma and the en-
tirety of moma PS1 are dedicated to
“Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts,”
which opens Oct. 21.
Andy Warhol, who would have
turned ninety this year, is so legendary
that even his handwriting is famous—it
inspired an award-winning font. What
ILLUSTRATION BY BENE ROHLMANN
more is there to learn about this deeply
superficial artist? The Whitney’s brilliant
curator Donna De Salvo answers the
question with the largest Warhol survey
ever, featuring more than three hundred
and fifty works. “Andy Warhol: From A to
B and Back Again” opens Nov. 12.
—Andrea K. Scott
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 DANCE
FALL PREVIEW
A Ballet Legacy, a Tap Innovator, a Puppet Fantasy
If you’ve attended a dance perfor-
mance in which people walked around,
hummed, sat down, or played a game of
checkers, chances are the choreography
was influenced by the movement known
as Judson Dance Theatre. Born, in part,
out of a composition class inspired by
the philosophical ideas of John Cage,
Judson represented a major break from
the theatricality and the moral seri-
ousness of the titans of modern dance
(people like Martha Graham and José
Limón). The Museum of Modern Art
holds a major retrospective, “Judson
Dance Theater: The Work Is Never
Done” (Sept. 16-Feb. 3), which will in-
clude performances of works by Yvonne
Rainer, David Gordon, and Deborah
Hay, as well as films by Charles Atlas
and others, ephemera, and workshops.
The starriest event of the season is a
Balanchine-a-rama at New York City
Center (Oct. 31-Nov. 4). No fewer than
eight major companies—including
St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet, the
Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Ballet, and
Miami City Ballet—will perform works
by Balanchine. They range from the early
Stravinsky opus “Apollo” and the elegiac
“Serenade” to the spare “Scotch Sym-
phony.” It’s extremely rare to see this many
topnotch troupes performing side by side;
“Balanchine: The City Center Years”
will offer a fascinating glimpse into the
18 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
varying approaches to the greatest ballet
choreographer of the twentieth century.
But ballet does not end with Bal-
anchine. New York City Ballet (David H.
Koch, Sept. 18-Oct. 14), now under the
interim leadership of a team of young
ballet masters, is getting a new work
from the stylishly urbane Kyle Abraham,
who hails from the modern-dance world
(opens Sept. 27). And the tap innova-
tor Michelle Dorrance has promised to
mine the sonic potential of point shoes
in her new work for American Ballet
Theatre (David H. Koch, Oct. 17-28)
at its fall gala, on Oct. 17.
The Belgian post-minimalist Anne
Teresa De Keersmaeker takes on
Bach’s six “Brandenburg” Concertos
(Park Avenue Armory, Oct. 1-7). And
the cheekily theatrical British chore-
ographer Arthur Pita works with the
dancer James Whiteside, of A.B.T., to
produce a version of Roland Topor’s
psycho-thriller “The Tenant” ( Joyce,
Nov. 6-11). John Heginbotham’s “Fan-
tasque” (Skirball, Nov. 17-18), which
premièred at Bard two years ago, is a
gently surrealist musical fantasia for
dancers, stilt walkers, and giant puppets
(created by Amy Trompetter), set to a
charming suite of lively piano pieces
by Rossini and Respighi, which will
be played onstage by George Shevtsov.
—Marina Harss
1
DANCE
Gallim / “Mr. Gaga”
Rumsey Playfield, Central Park
The focus of Gaga, a technique developed by
the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, is in-
ternal—the aim is not to achieve a certain shape
but to unleash sensations and energies within the
body. This free evening at SummerStage begins
with a movement workshop, open to all. It’s fol-
lowed by a performance by the Brooklyn-based
company Gallim, founded by Andrea Miller,
a former member of Naharin’s Batsheva—The
Young Ensemble, based in Tel Aviv. Afterward,
there will be a screening of the documentary
“Mr. Gaga,” a portrait of the charismatic, de-
manding, somewhat guru-like choreographer
Naharin.—Marina Harss (Aug. 22.)
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
Becket, Massachusetts
OUT OF TOWN As another summer of dance in the
Berkshires draws to a close, the high-flying Daniel
Ulbricht gathers some of his New York City Bal-
let colleagues for an off-season gig. The Stars of
American Ballet program at the Ted Shawn The-
atre is all Jerome Robbins, including “Interplay,”
the late rarities “Andantino” and “Concertino,” a
medley of Chopin pieces, and “A Suite of Dances,”
which, with its need for offhand virtuosity, should
be a good stretch for Ulbricht. At the Doris Duke
Theatre, ODC/Dance, a venerable San Francisco
institution, makes its first festival visit since 1994,
bringing K. T. Nelson’s “Dead Reckoning,” a hand-
some, inscrutable flow of slides and kicks amid a
leaf storm of confetti.—Brian Seibert (Aug. 22-26.)
“Screamers”
Abrons Arts Center
This is not a dance film but, rather, an art-house
horror movie made by people from the world of
experimental dance and theatre. Brian Rogers,
the artistic director of the Chocolate Factory,
directs a cast that includes such downtown lu-
minaries as Jim Findlay, Jay Wegman, Daniel
Fish, and Keely Garfield. The darkly captivating
Molly Lieber stars as a dancer who’s moved into
an unconsecrated church. While the main draw
is the fun of watching these folks adapt their
sensibilities to horror-flick conventions, the
movie is actually good, a cross between “The
Shining” and “Gaslight” in the mode of David
Lynch.—B.S. (Aug. 24-25.)
Lumberyard
Hudson Hall
OUT OF TOWN Before Savion Glover inaugurates
the fancy facility that Lumberyard has built in
ILLUSTRATION BY BENE ROHLMANN
Catskill, New York, the organization presents one
last entry in its summer preview series in nearby
Hudson. “Variations on Themes from Lost and
Found: Scenes from a Life and Other Works by
John Bernd” is a collage-style retrospective of
the pathbreaking performance artist, who died
from AIDS-related complications in 1988. Or-
ganized by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Miguel
Gutierrez in 2016, the show is rough-edged and
defiantly joyful, handling painful material with
pathos-deepening humor.—B.S. (Aug. 24-26.)
ONE OF THE MOST
REMARKABLE
SHOWS IN MUSICAL
THEATER HISTORY.
– Peter Marks,

BROADWAY’S
BEST MUSICAL
2017 TONY AWARD. 2018 GRAMMY AWARD.
® ®

A BRILLIANT MUSICAL.
The message of hope and humanity is central in this
incredible show. Get yourself a ticket any way you can.
–
ONLINE IN PERSON BY PHONE
DearEvanHansen.com Music Box Theatre Box Office, 239 W. 45th St. Telecharge at 212-239-6200

FALL PREVIEW
Superstar Vehicles, a Radical “Oklahoma!”
Who’s the bigger boss: King Kong or
Cher? Granted, one of them made it
from Skull Island to the top of the
Empire State Building, has held Fay
Wray and Jessica Lange in the palm of
his hand, and is roughly the size of a
white oak. But only Cher pulled off a
black plumed headdress at the Oscars.
Both are unquestionably larger than
life, and that alone qualifies them for
Broadway, where each will be repre-
sented this fall. “King Kong,” directed
and choreographed by Drew McOnie,
begins previews Oct. 5, at the Broad-
way Theatre, and will bring the big
gorilla to life using animatronics, pup-
petry, and songs by Marius de Vries
and Eddie Perfect. One block south,
“The Cher Show” sets up its spangles
on Nov. 1, at the Neil Simon, trac-
ing the life, loves, and outfits of the
mahogany-voiced megastar (played
by three actresses) via thirty-five of
her hits. New York City, prepare to be
conquered, one way or another.
Down in the land of regular people,
Kenneth Lonergan, whose sense of
20 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
THE THEATRE
dramatic scale is as delicate as a paper
flower, returns with “The Waverly Gal-
lery” (beginning previews Sept. 25, at
the Golden), starring Elaine May as a
lefty grandmother fighting Alzheimer’s.
Two Lonergan veterans, Lucas Hedges
(“Manchester by the Sea”) and Mi-
chael Cera (“Lobby Hero”), along with
David Cromer and Joan Allen, round
out Lila Neugebauer’s cast. Daniel Rad-
cliffe plays a beleaguered magazine fact
checker in “The Lifespan of a Fact”
(Sept. 20, Studio 54), written by Jeremy
Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon
Farrell and directed by Leigh Silver-
man. Drawn from a real-life saga, the
comedy features Bobby Cannavale as a
writer who plays fast and loose with the
truth and Cherry Jones as his editor. In
“The Ferryman” (Oct. 2, Jacobs), a new
drama by Jez Butterworth (“Jerusalem”),
political violence intrudes on a harvest
feast in Northern Ireland in 1981; Sam
Mendes directs the production, which
premièred at the Royal Court. And
Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale
play an interracial couple searching for
their missing teen-ager in Christopher
Demos-Brown’s “American Son” (Oct. 6,
Booth), directed by Kenny Leon.
Other offerings reinvent the old to
make something new, or newish. Jeff
Daniels plays Atticus Finch in Aaron
Sorkin’s adaptation of “To Kill a Mock-
ingbird” (Nov. 1, Shubert), directed
by Bartlett Sher; the show has already
become its own courtroom drama, after
a lawsuit and a countersuit with the
Harper Lee estate. Bryan Cranston is
the mad-as-hell news anchor Howard
Beale in “Network” (Nov. 10, Cort),
Ivo van Hove’s reimagining of the 1976
film. In “Girl from the North Country”
(Sept. 11, Public), the playwright and
director Conor McPherson uses the
Bob Dylan songbook to tell a story set
in Dylan’s home town of Duluth, Min-
nesota, in 1934. And Daniel Fish brings
his radical restaging of “Oklahoma!”
to Brooklyn (Sept. 27, St. Ann’s Ware-
ILLUSTRATION BY BENE ROHLMANN
house), starring Rebecca Naomi Jones.
The production, which originated at
Bard SummerScape and coincides with
the show’s seventy-fifth anniversary, sets
the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic
in close quarters with the audience, in-
cluding a shared communal meal.
—Michael Schulman
 NIGHT LIFE
1
THE THEATRE

Gettin’ the Band Back Together

Belasco
The dregs of summer have delivered this bland
Broadway musical, in which a forty-year-old
finance dude (the colorless, odorless Mitchell
Jarvis) gets fired, moves back to his New Jersey
home town, and reconvenes his high-school rock
band in an attempt to save his childhood home
from foreclosure. It all comes down to the Battle
of the Bands, where he faces off against his for-
mer rival, Tygen Billows (Brandon Williams).
Along the way, John Rando’s production leaves
plenty of room for racial stereotypes (traditional
Indian father, sassy black woman) and generic
rock numbers, by Mark Allen. Remarkably, the
piece was developed through improvisation by a
collective of actors called the Grundleshotz—so
why is it the most paint-by-numbers musical
comedy on Broadway? With Marilu Henner,
as the hero’s mother, generally agreed to be a
MILF.—Michael Schulman (Open run.)

The Heart of Robin Hood
Boscobel House & Gardens
David Farr’s 2011 play, directed by Suzanne
Agins, turns the familiar legend on its feath-
er-hatted head, and is all the more interesting
for it. The Sherwood Forest denizen, char-
ismatically played by Benjamin Bonenfant,
is a highwayman who robs from the rich and
keeps the loot for himself. It takes the influ-
ence of the noble Marion (a feisty Robyn Kerr)
to inspire a charitable change in the outlaw.
Drawing amusingly from influences as diverse
as Shakespeare and the Little Rascals, the play
contains a number of elements that this summer
company is primed to knock out of the park:
an arch-villain, Prince John, acted with quiet,
insinuating intensity by Sean McNall; Marion’s
faithful sidekick, Pierre (Wesley Mann, pulling
out all the comedic stops); the clash of steel in
some acrobatic sword fights; and a theatrical
backdrop perfectly suited to the region’s beau-
tiful natural setting. The production runs in
repertory with “Richard II” and “The Taming
of the Shrew.”—Ken Marks (Through Aug. 25.)
Pretty Woman
Nederlander
In adapting their 1990 megahit for the stage,
J. F. Lawton and the late Garry Marshall took
the “Don’t mess with success” route, preserving
every outfit reveal and iconic line (“Big mis-
take. Big. Huge.”). So what’s new? Pop-rock
anthems by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance,
stuffed with platitudes about how everyone has
a dream. Stepping into Julia Roberts’s leather
boots, Samantha Barks is agreeable as Vivian,
ILLUSTRATION BY BENE ROHLMANN
FALL PREVIEW
A Singing Comedian, Canadian Jangle Pop
Will this fall be concertgoers’ last audience
with Childish Gambino? Donald Glover,
the comedian, TV showrunner, and all-
around creative nuisance, has been threat-
ening to retire Gambino, his rap alter ego,
for some time now, and, even though his
rumored final album has not yet appeared,
Glover/Gambino gave the world plenty
to digest in May, with his provocative
video for the stand-alone single “This Is
America.” Its topicality is an apt back-
drop for the potentially pivotal midterm
elections, in November. The song’s more
escapist bits (“We just wanna party . . . we
just want the money”) seem like an intro
tailor-made for Rae Sremmurd, Glover’s
tour mates at Madison Square Garden
(Sept. 14-15); they’re the bacchanalian
brother team from Tupelo, Mississippi,
that released “SR3MM,” three disks of
party-fuelled extravagance, in the spring.
That’s just one of the noteworthy dou-
ble bills this season. David Byrne meets up
with tUnE-yArDs (Forest Hills Stadium,
Sept. 15; King’s Theatre, Sept. 16-17),
while Christina Aguilera’s comeback tour
Her band’s interplay of guitars, keyboard,
and backing vocals manages to evoke both
grunginess and ethereality. “Antisocialites,”
their gorgeous second album, has kept
them on the road almost non-stop since
it was released, in late 2017, but their only
New York gig this year was at the Gov-
ernor’s Ball. They’re remedying that with
concerts at Warsaw (Sept. 26-28).
Many of the Democratic Republic of
Congo’s most prominent musicians relo-
cated to Europe to avoid the fallout from
the nation’s civil war, but the bandleader
Jupiter Bokondji has maintained his home
base in Kinshasa, the capital city. Jupiter &
Okwess (Littlefield, Oct. 3), the group
fronted by Bokondji, who often writes
socially charged lyrics, further differs from
other Congolese acts via the band’s rock-
ing, highly danceable music, rooted not
in Afro-Cuban rumba but in rhythms
indigenous to the vast country.
The trend of bands playing classic al-
bums in their entirety on tour continues.
TV on the Radio, a once experimental
group that came up in Williamsburg,

the upwardly mobile Hollywood call girl, with

Andy Karl as Edward, the corporate shark whose
heart she melts. “I want the fairy tale,” Viv-
ian famously declares, and “Pretty Woman”
is unquestionably a Cinderella story, with all
the dated gender politics that implies. More
striking, though, is its gospel of conspicuous
consumption. (The moral: Shop your way to
self-worth.) The bright spot in Jerry Mitchell’s
production is Orfeh, who, as Vivian’s gal pal, ac-
tually seems to be having fun.—M.S. (Open run.)
pulls in OutKast’s Big Boi (Radio City
Music Hall, Oct. 3-4). Gorillaz, the car-
toon dance-music concept, is supported by
The Internet (Barclays Center, Oct. 13).
Molly Rankin, the lead singer-song-
writer in the Toronto-based quintet Alvvays
(pronounced “always”), is often noted for
the directness of her flattened soprano.
marks the tenth anniversary of its pop
breakthrough, “Dear Science,” at the
Knockdown Center (Sept. 20). The ven-
erable institution Steely Dan takes over
the Beacon Theatre (Oct. 17-30), playing
a different record from its storied cata-
logue each night.
—K. Leander Williams
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 21
1
NIGHT LIFE
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in
advance to confirm engagements.
Harold Mabern
Village Vanguard
This fluent and eminently soulful pianist is no
stranger to New York clubs, but it’s always an
event when he appears at this hallowed venue.
A Memphis transplant who carried his deep
blues roots up North with him in the early six-
ties, Mabern will be supported by two trusted
associates: the bassist John Webber and the
drummer Joe Farnsworth.—Steve Futterman
(Aug. 21-26.)
Beach House
United Palace
Since 2006, the Baltimore duo Beach House
has crafted songs that feel familiar yet
opaque; listening to the group is not unlike
trying to recall a dream’s hazy details the next
morning. In much of their work, drum ma-
chines, cascading vocals, and vintage organs
come together to evoke otherworldliness.
But their latest album, the extraordinary
“7,” whirs with devastating reflections about
this life: “Memory’s a sacred meat / That’s
drying all the time,” sings Victoria Legrand
on “Drunk in L.A.” Their performance at
this historic theatre promises to be nothing
short of memorable; they’re doing a second
show the following night at the elegantly
restored King’s Theatre in Brooklyn.—Paula
Mejia (Aug. 22.)
Iris DeMent
The Bell House
The singer-songwriter DeMent’s calling is
to make music that both feeds and soothes
the spirit. Whether her rustic storytelling is
thought of as folk or country, her distinctive
delivery is a testament to Pentecostal roots
that have retained their power long after
the career that she chose—one that includes
Grammy nominations and contributions to
TV and film soundtracks—took her away from
the church. She tends to take long breaks
between albums, but listeners have been en-
ergized by “We Won’t Keep Quiet,” the fine
protest song she recorded last year.—K. Le-
ander Williams (Aug. 23.)
Deadbeat
Elsewhere
For the Berlin-based producer and d.j. Scott
Monteith, the term “dub techno” is less a case
of one word modifying the other than their
being roughly coequal. On Deadbeat albums
such as “Drawn and Quartered” (2011) and
“Eight” (2012), grooves tease their way open
over long periods, with more reggae lilt than
techno propulsion—and, of course, lots of
bass. His new album, “Wax Poetic for This
Our Great Resolve,” builds those grooves
around spoken “messages of hope”—Mon-
teith’s phrase—from fellow techno luminar-
22 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
ies. He performs live at Elsewhere between
the d.j. Lisa Frank and the headliner, Carl
Craig.—Michaelangelo Matos (Aug. 24.)
Charles Tolliver
Marcus Garvey Park
If “Paper Man,” the 1968 début album by
Tolliver, isn’t one of the canonical recordings
of jazz history, it certainly is an early high
point of the trumpeter’s peripatetic career.
The original recording was stocked with such
Tolliver confrères as Herbie Hancock and
Ron Carter. This fiftieth-anniversary celebra-
tion—staged as the uptown part of the Charlie
Parker Jazz Festival—features its own roster
of heavyweights, including Gary Bartz, the
classic session’s saxophonist, the drummer
Jack DeJohnette, and the bassist Buster Wil-
liams.—S.F. (Aug. 24.)
Drake + Migos
Madison Square Garden
“Scorpion,” the new album by the artist born
Aubrey Drake Graham, became the most
streamed recording of the year within weeks
of its late-June release. Its R.&B.-based sin-
gles have sparked a feud (with the m.c. Pusha
T), a viral dance craze (the “In My Feelings”
challenge), and, now, the late summer’s block-
buster Aubrey and the Three Migos Tour,
which touches down in Gotham for a week.
(Four nights at the Garden are followed by
three at Barclays Center, Aug. 30-Sept. 1.) The
Atlanta trap-rap trio Migos is still riding the
wave created in no small part by the infectious
nonsense syllables (Skrrrt! Bwah! Brrrup!)
that punctuate hot tracks like last year’s “Bad
and Boujee” and the new Drake collaboration
“Walk It Talk It.” The artists will undoubtedly
turn the concert version of the latter into one
of the evening’s climactic moments.—K.L.W.
(Aug. 24-25 and Aug. 27-28.)
Karrin Allyson
Smoke
In her search for repertoire that fits her like
a glove, this veteran singer has lighted on
touchstones from, among a small universe
of disparate sources, Joni Mitchell, Rodgers
and Hammerstein, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and
John Coltrane. With her new album, “Some
of That Sunshine,” Allyson presents her first
recording of all-original material. She will
sprinkle some shiny new tunes throughout
her sets.—S.F. (Aug. 24-26.)
Afropunk Fest
Commodore Barry Park
The festival hasn’t been exclusively about punk
for several years now, but the “Afro” part of
this immensely popular two-day event offers
up so much alt-creativity that questioning its
cred would be ludicrous. The first evening’s
highlights belong to the soul band the Internet,
the crooner Miguel, and the Haitian-Cana-
dian d.j. Kaytranada. Day two is even more
star-studded, as the m.c. Pusha T, the Odd
Future co-founder Tyler, the Creator, and the
Prince mentee Janelle Monáe lead up to a set by
Erykah Badu.—K.L.W. (Aug. 25-26.)
Belly
Music Hall of Williamsburg
Those examining the alternative-rock explosion
of the nineties could find a case study in Belly, a
New England quartet whose breezy 1993 single
“Feed the Tree” made the band a fast favorite
of dreamy teen-agers and MTV programming
executives alike. Two years later, a subtle shift
of cultural winds presented a less welcome cli-
mate for a sophomore release, and the musicians
scattered to careers as photographers and doulas.
Like many hibernating nineties rock groups,
Belly has recently reunited; a crowd-funded
album, “Dove,” was released in May. As in the
group’s first wave, even snarling guitars cannot
mask a fundamental gentleness.—Jay Ruttenberg
(Aug. 25-26.)
Charlie Parker Jazz Festival
Tompkins Square Park
Charlie Parker, the once and future king of
bebop, would have been ninety-eight years old
this summer. This year, the annual tribute to his
imperishable genius will feature Gary Bartz, the
Bad Plus, and Amina Claudine Myers, a multi-
faceted pianist, organist, and singer who was
among the founding members of the influential
Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians (A.A.C.M.) in Chicago in the mid-
sixties.—S.F. (Aug. 26.)
1
READINGS AND TALKS
Kate Walbert
Greenlight Bookstore
The power relationships at work in “His Favor-
ites,” Walbert’s new novel, are only intensified by
the age differences of the central characters. The
narrator, Jo Hadley, reflects upon her troubled
teen years, in which a tragic accident sent her
to a boarding school in Massachusetts and into
the uncomfortable orbit of one of her teachers.
Hadley no longer conceals her rage at the school
administrator who failed to consider her youthful
confusion and vulnerability and all but dismissed
her requests for help thwarting the predator.
Walbert discusses the new work with the Na-
tional Book Critics Circle Award winner Joan
Silber.—K. Leander Williams (Aug. 23 at 7:30.)
A People’s History
Rumsey Playfield, Central Park
Part reading, part music event, and one-hundred-
per-cent call for social justice, this roundup of
performers was curated by VOICES, an educa-
tion nonprofit co-founded by Howard Zinn, the
historian and author of “A People’s History of the
United States.” Many of the evening’s readings
will come from Zinn’s companion anthology,
“Voices of a People’s History.” The singer-song-
writer Rosanne Cash heads up a bill that includes
actors (Viggo Mortensen, Uzo Aduba, Rebecca
Hall), poets (Staceyann Chin), and musicians
of various stripes (Valerie June, Celisse Hender-
son).—K.L.W. (Aug. 28 at 7.)
1
For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town
 1
TABLES FOR TWO
Harlem Hops
The other night at Harlem Hops, a new
beer bar and restaurant on Adam Clayton
Powell Jr. Boulevard, a neighborhood old-
timer peered at a fellow-patron’s drink
selection and gestured for the bartender’s
attention. “Interestingly enough, this
young lady has, like, four different beers,”
he observed. The bartender laughed. “It’s
called a flight,” he explained. “A flight?”
replied the old-timer. “Like takeoff ?”
Harlem Hops is a thoroughly modern
establishment, with a rotation of sixteen
craft brews on tap, geeky tasting notes
(“raw wheat, malted oat, milk sugar, ly-
chee” for a sour I.P.A. from the Hudson
PHOTOGRAPH BY COLE WILSON FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
Valley), and a mostly young, hip crowd.
You’ll want to take a picture of the
enormous, buttery Bavarian pretzel,
flecked with salt crystals, which arrives
swinging from the kind of metal stand
you might use to hang bananas on your
kitchen counter. You’ll want to return
at least as many times as it takes to try
each of the snappy-skinned bratwursts,
from Jake’s Handcrafted, in Brooklyn,
served on griddled pretzel buns. The one
made with chicken—laced with sansho
peppercorn and sweet soy sauce—and
the one that repurposes intensely smoky,
burnt-brisket ends are especially exciting.
The owners, Kevin Bradford, Kim
Harris, and Stacey Lee, three beer lovers
in their forties, were tired of having to
leave the neighborhood to get the variety
they craved. They wanted to highlight
small, local breweries, especially those run
by brewers of color. They wanted to exca-
vate history, too. Did you know that some
of the earliest evidence of beer-making,
using warm-climate cereals like millet
and sorghum, was found in Africa? That
ancient Egyptians developed a malting
process? That slaves in the American
South brewed beer? Bradford, Harris, and
Lee, all graduates of historically black
colleges and universities, enlisted a histo-
rian named Tonya Hopkins, known as the
Food Griot, to provide these reminders
of the past, which are written in chalk on
a pillar at the end of the bar. They also
serve a whiskey, made in Tennessee, called
Uncle Nearest; Nathan (Nearest) Green
was a black master distiller believed to
have taught Jack Daniel everything he
knew. Where Jack Daniel’s is harsh, the
bartender argued—“the opposite of that
first gulp of water in the morning”—
Uncle Nearest moves through your mouth
“like a curl. It plays on your lips.”
The whiskey went down easy—citrus
on the nose, spicy caramel and vanilla on
the palate—and paired well with a crispy
“Guma pie,” a tortilla wrapped like a
sharp-cornered package around ground
beef seasoned with habanero and African
allspice, shipped up from a Virginia-based
company started by a Ugandan refugee.
The old-timer, who’d taken a phone call,
sipped his own whiskey and shared his
newfound trivia with whoever was on
the other end of the line. “Uncle Nearest
got ripped off by Jack Daniel,” he said,
laughing heartily. “I’d have been looking
for him.” (2268 Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Blvd. 646-998-3444. Bites $6-$12.)
—Hannah Goldfield
BAR TAB
Mykonos Blue
Chelsea
In June, the American models Gigi Hadid
and Emily Ratajkowski visited Mykonos, the
Greek island, and confirmed via Instagram that
money and beauty do beget happiness—or, at
least, a pouty stare passing as happy. A month
later, two women in possession of somewhat
less square footage, in both the real-estate and
leg departments, visited Mykonos, the bar.
Could an evening of fifteen-dollar cocktails at
a Chelsea hotel’s rooftop offer, if not all-around
good fortune, then its believable illusion? The
women hailed an elevator and deboarded at the
roof. The Maroon 5 on the sound system was
loud, but not as loud as the vacation-volume
howl of bronzed women in their forties, draped
on white couches; not as loud, either, as the
fiftysomething man courting his date, while
drooping into the personal space of a stranger.
But what Mykonos party is not loud? thought
one of the women, who had never partied in
Mykonos. She ordered the Onassis Martini;
it came with cucumbers, which, much as they
do at the spa, successfully convinced her that
she would shortly be transformed. The fried
calamari was likewise so transportive that the
woman transcended her doubts (would a super-
model have ordered her sea life grilled?) and
ate it all. After a bartender asked the women if
they had put a credit card down, he said, “O.K.,
back to your girl talk.” What did he mean by
“girl talk”? wondered one of them. Cuticles
and crushes? Or the matter the two had been
discussing—Ph.D. programs? Either way—both
dating and the G.R.E.s being nail-bitingly dis-
tressing—the obvious thing to do was to order
another cocktail. Erubescent, one appeared
before her. It was expensive and beautiful, and
who’s to say whether she, holding it, did not
also appear so? (127 W. 28th St. 646-484-4339.)
—Elizabeth Barber
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 23
OPENS SEP T 18
# S W E AT B E A U T Y
P H OTO BY GA B R IE LA CE LE STE © 2017
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
TEN YEARS AFTER
he financial crisis that broke out a
T decade ago was a long time in the
making, and a long time in the playing
out. Over just a few days in September,
2008, Lehman Brothers essentially ceased
to exist, the Federal Reserve took over
American International Group to prevent
a wider collapse, and commercial banks
and mortgage lenders around the coun-
try failed. The speed and the scale of de-
struction were so breathtaking that only
the direst analogies seemed adequate—
the stock market crash of 1929, or an eco-
nomic 9/11. Citigroup appeared poised
to go down next, with General Motors
and Chrysler to follow. Everything solid
in the American economy turned out to
be built on sand. But the crisis took years
to emerge. It was caused by reckless lend-
ing practices, Wall Street greed, outright
fraud, lax government oversight in the
George W. Bush years, and deregulation
of the financial sector in the Bill Clin-
ton years. The deepest source, going back
decades, was rising inequality. In good
times and bad, no matter which party
held power, the squeezed middle class
sank ever further into debt.
You could pick up early warning signs
in 2006, in states such as Florida, where
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
the high-flying housing market, sus-
pended in midair by irrational faith, sud-
denly looked down and fell to earth.Then
American homeowners learned that their
most valuable and tangible asset had be-
come tangled up in obscure entities called
derivatives, mortgage-backed securities,
and collateralized debt obligations—
financial instruments that spread around
the world and, once gone bad, threat-
ened to kill off whole banks, and to crip-
ple countries. If a defaulted loan on a
house in Tampa was used to make bonds
owned by investors in Japan, the house
infected the global economy.
When the crash came here, it wiped
out nine million jobs, took away nine
million homes, erased retirement ac-
counts, and pushed large numbers of
Americans out of the middle class. Every
economic calamity creates its own im-
agery. The Great Recession that accom-
panied the financial crisis didn’t bring
back breadlines or industrial strikes. This
time, the desperation was quiet and
lonely: a pile of mail at the doorstep of
a deserted house in a brand-new subdi-
vision; a foreclosure judge presiding over
a stack of files; a middle-aged man play-
ing video games all day with the shades
drawn; a retired woman trying to get a
human being on the phone at the bank.
At first, American institutions re-
sponded with signs of health: the Fed-
eral Reserve stopped the free fall of the
biggest banks; the press uncovered cor-
ruption and fraud; and a bipartisan Con-
gress passed legislation to get credit flow-
ing and rescue the financial sector. Then
the electorate turned out the party in
power. The financial crisis decided the
election of 2008. Americans who might
never have imagined themselves choos-
ing a black President voted for Barack
Obama because he understood the scope
of the disaster and offered hope for a
remedy.
But our democracy turned out to be
unwell. The first symptom of sickness
came within three weeks of Obama’s in-
auguration. In February, 2009, with the
economy losing seven hundred thousand
jobs a month, Congress passed a stimu-
lus bill—a nearly trillion-dollar package
of tax cuts, aid to states, and infrastruc-
ture spending, considered essential by
economists of every persuasion—with
the support of just three Republican sen-
ators and not a single Republican mem-
ber of the House. Rather than help save
the economy that their party had done
so much to wreck, Republicans, led by
Senator Mitch McConnell, chose to op-
pose every Democratic measure, includ-
ing Wall Street reform. In doing so, they
would impede the recovery and let the
other party take the fall. It was a bril-
liantly immoral strategy, and it pretty
much worked.
The President didn’t always aid his
own cause. He had campaigned as a vi-
sionary, but he governed as a technocrat.
His policies helped to end the recession
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 25
within months, but the recovery was ex-
cruciatingly slow. The stimulus package
could have been much larger, with added
money for job creation; more indebted
homeowners could have been kept in
their houses. Perhaps Obama made too
many compromises in the hope of ap-
pealing to a bipartisanship that was al-
ready dead. But his biggest mistake was
to save the bankers along with the banks.
After a financial crisis caused in part by
fraud, not a single top Wall Street exec-
utive was brought to trial. The public
wanted to punish the malefactors, but
justice was never done.
In the years after the crash, you could
feel the fabric of the country fraying.
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street
rose up as opposite expressions of anti-
establishment rage, nourished by the
sense that colluding élites in government
and business had got away with a crime.
The game was rigged—that became
the consensus of the alienated. The left
THE BENCH
BIG, STRONG, PSYCHED
ith Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme
W Court confirmation hearings ap-
proaching, Senate staffers are poring
over the judge’s journal articles and legal
decisions, looking for clues to how he
might rule on critical issues, such as chal-
lenges to Roe v. Wade and the limits of
executive privilege. One instructive text
might be his address in 2015 to law-
school students at the Catholic Univer-
sity of America. The title: “The Judge
as Umpire.” Kavanaugh urged his lis-
teners to study the career not of Earl
Warren but of Ed Hochuli, an N.F.L.
referee. “He’s a model for concise judi-
cial decision-making,” Kavanaugh said.
He went on to make the case for the
precise drafting of laws by citing a 2014
game between the Green Bay Packers
and the Dallas Cowboys. “The Dez Bry-
ant catch this year in the playoff game,
right? There was all this debate, Was it
a catch?” He said the answer was in the
rulebook: “Cowboys fans won’t like this,
but it had been drafted quite clearly to
26 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
turned its anger on corporations and
banks; the right blamed bureaucrats, mi-
nority groups, and immigrants. Rising
extremism, especially among Republi-
cans, made it impossible for important
facts uncovered by the press or asserted
by politicians to have an impact. Public
trust in just about every American in-
stitution declined. Obama’s inspiring
Presidency appeared to float high above
a landscape where bands of citizens were
adrift and quarrelling.
Economically, the country has changed
surprisingly little since 2008. The big
banks have returned to risky practices,
and Republicans are trying to undo the
Dodd-Frank reform law, which was en-
acted to prevent another collapse. The
distribution of income and wealth in
America is as lopsided as ever. Despite
almost ten years of economic growth,
real wages are stuck at their pre-crisis
level, while corporate profits are soaring
and stock prices have reached record
cover that situation. It was not a catch!”
Athletic frauds litter the political
landscape. (Recall Ted Cruz’s reference
to a “basketball ring,” and Mitt Rom-
ney’s insistence on using the singular
“sport.”) But Kavanaugh’s passion seems
genuine. He’s been seen carrying an
Adidas duffelbag to work instead of a
briefcase, and there were those tens of
thousands of dollars in credit-card debt
that the White House claimed went to-
ward baseball tickets. In his nomina-
tion-acceptance speech, in July, Kava-
naugh managed to thank his daughters
by bringing up “the historic Notre
Dame–UConn women’s basketball game
at this year’s Final Four. Unforgettable!”
Given all this, perhaps another body
of Kavanaugh’s work warrants closer in-
spection: the twenty-four articles that
he wrote, from 1983 to ’84, as a sports
reporter for the Yale Daily News. Kava-
naugh’s most ambitious writing came
out of the gate, in a story about the fresh-
man football team: “Big, strong, and
psyched, the Bullpups rolled over Brown
in their season opener.” After that, he
settled into workmanlike prose, taking
up the basketball beat his junior year.
Could there be hints of potential Su-
preme Court rulings under headlines
like “Elis Trounce Jaspers” and “Hoop-
sters Head West”? The question was
highs. All the misshapen economic trends
of the previous decade are still with us.
The lasting effect of the crisis is in
our politics. The Presidency of Donald
Trump is an overdetermined fluke, an
accident with a thousand causes. Among
them is the catastrophic event that gut-
ted millions of lives and ended in no fair
resolution, only cynicism. The economic
indicators are strong right now, but be-
fore long there will be another financial
crisis. They come every seven or ten years,
each bearing the features of its time. If
the previous one was the result of over-
confidence in free markets, the next might
be triggered—as in Turkey today—by
the behavior of an authoritarian leader.
When it comes, we’ll be less prepared to
address it than we were in 2008. This
President has made an enemy of facts,
Congress no longer passes rational laws,
and American democracy is ten years
unhealthier.
—George Packer
put to some experts. Steve Rushin, who
has written for Sports Illustrated for the
past three decades, saw a clue in Kava-
naugh’s language. “No one was ever
shooting room temperature,” Rushin
observed. “Everyone was either blazing
or ice-cold. In one single sentence:
‘As torrid as Yale’s shooting had been
twenty-four hours earlier, it was ice cold
in this contest.’” Rushin suggested this
might indicate “a kind of good-evil, hot-
cold, Manichean world view.”
Kavanaugh the sportswriter seemed
unwilling to challenge the status quo,
Brett Kavanaugh
noted J. A. Adande, who runs the sports-
journalism program at Northwestern’s
Medill School. “His tendency to ap-
proach his stories from the angles set
forth by the coach indicates that he
doesn’t want to buck authority figures,”
Adande wrote in an e-mail. “It would
make sense if he supported unlimited
Presidential power.”
William Eskridge, Jr., a constitutional-
law professor at Yale Law School, who
has praised Kavanaugh, wasn’t so sure
about Adande’s argument. “What he’s
criticizing in Brett’s sports articles is
Brett is too deferential to the subjective
understandings of the original coaches,”
Eskridge said. He argued that such def-
erence would be “in contrast to Brett’s
jurisprudence, which, both in statutory
interpretation and constitutional inter-
pretation, either slights or rejects—usu-
ally rejects—the subjective intentions
of the original drafters.”
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law pro-
fessor who mentored Barack Obama,
zeroed in on the lead sentence in Kava-
naugh’s account of a midseason game
against Cornell: “In basketball, as in few
other team sports, it is possible for one
person to completely dominate a game.”
Was this a harmless observation? Tribe
noted, “Kavanaugh’s seeming fascina-
tion with single-player domination
might be a muscular view of executive
power.” On the other hand, he found a
departure from Kavanaugh’s typical juris-
prudence in “Dartmouth Rally Upends
Streak.” “Kavanaugh complained that
the refs let the game ‘get completely out
of control’ as Dartmouth players ‘con-
sistently hammered’ a Yalie ‘without the
whistle blowing’ once,” Tribe said. “One
might see in that a rare early condem-
nation of judicial restraint.”
The experts moved on to style. “I
would’ve expected more color and
humor, particularly for a student news-
paper—for goodness’ sake, have some
fun, kids!” Eskridge said. “Contrast him
with Justice Scalia. Scalia would’ve been
the Howard Cosell of sportswriters, but
even better.”
Tribe, however, thought Kavanaugh’s
language “read almost like theatre re-
views.” He picked out a few phrases: “lit
up,” “bruising inside defense.” “Kava-
naugh could be one of the Court’s more
colorful writers, a group that’s now down
to Kagan and—well, just Kagan,” Tribe
said. He imagined a future Supreme
Court dissent: “Before half a minute of
his argument time had elapsed, the So-
licitor General hit a hanging curve ball
thrown by the Notorious RBG for a four-
hundred-and-twenty-five-foot homer.”
—Zach Helfand
1 at Serendipity 3, the restaurant where
DRAG AND DRAW DEPT.
SUPERSTARS
IU.S.ofn November, the Whitney Museum
American Art will feature the first
retrospective of Andy Warhol’s art
in some three decades, in an exhibition
that will occupy a great deal of the in-
stitution’s eight-story, High Line-adja-
cent building. On a recent Thursday,
around what would have been Warhol’s
ninetieth birthday, the Whitney hosted
a Warhol party attended by more than
three thousand people. Many were
dressed in themed festive wear: banana,
Pop art, flowers, Basquiat. Early on, the
Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes
Again” played and the setting sun filled
the first floor with dazzling golden light.
Some guests posed for photographs,
superstar style, in front of a step-and-
repeat wall adorned with silver and white
spheres; others watched live screen print-
ing, à la the Master, of feisty Warhol
quotations onto tote bags, such as “THE
IDEA OF AMERICA IS THEORETICALLY
SO GREAT.”
“Somebody showing up in a wig, I
see,” Donna De Salvo, the retrospec-
tive’s curator, said, pointing across the
room. (Warhol wig, Breton shirt.) She
looked amused. “That said, we cannot
sell wigs in the bookstore. I’m too in-
vested in moving beyond the myth.”
De Salvo met Warhol in 1986, when
she was a curator at the Dia Art Foun-
dation, where she did two exhibitions
of his work. “I was interested in the
work he’d made before he started to
silk-screen, the more hand-painted
things,” she said. “That led to a con-
versation about the fifties.” Warhol, who
grew up in Pittsburgh, came to New
York in 1949 and worked for more than
a decade as a commercial artist in the
fashion industry. His fifties works are
“wonderful and fanciful—Warhol be-
fore he became the Warhol that every-
one came to know,” De Salvo said.
“They’re more fey; there are drawings
that are overtly homoerotic.” The ret-
rospective will include drawings from
a series of gold shoes that were shown
Warhol and his friends hung out, and
drawings he made for Truman Capote.
“He did a lot of drawings of men’s feet,”
she said. “ ‘Foot with Paintbrush,’ ‘Foot
with Dollar Bill.’ They’ve been described
as looking like Jean Cocteau. In ball-
point ink! Which is difficult.” In the
eighties, De Salvo interviewed Otto
Fenn, a fashion photographer whose
midtown photo studio was a gathering
place for men in the industry, includ-
ing Warhol. “They would go to the stu-
dio and dress in drag,” De Salvo said.
Warhol drew caricatures of Fenn, “as
well as a man with a suit and tie and a
wonderful dangling earring.”
As David Bowie’s cheeky “Andy War-
hol” played (“He’ll think about paint
and he’ll think about glue / what a jolly
Andy Warhol
boring thing to do”), De Salvo chatted
with Flora Irving, a great-great-grand-
daughter of the museum’s founder, Ger-
trude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the art
critic Blake Gopnik. Gopnik and De
Salvo compared notes on their Warhol
writing projects. “Your essay, your essay!
Don’t give me from essays,” Gopnik said.
(He’s writing a book.) His phone sum-
moned him. “The DuPont Twins just
texted me,” he said. “They’re at the
Odeon. Where else would they be?” The
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 27
DuPont Twins, a.k.a. Richard and Rob-
ert Lasko, met Warhol via Studio 54 in
1977, when they were teen-agers work-
ing for Martha Stewart. They spent sev-
eral dizzying years in Warhol’s circle,
along with figures like Halston and Sal-
vador Dali. De Salvo headed toward the
third-floor salon, pausing to chat with
the artist Jacolby Satterwhite, who
danced a little, with what looked like
glee. “I was just taking pictures of the
drag-and-draw,” he said.
Upstairs, De Salvo encountered the
playwright Robert Heide (seersucker
suit, Campbell’s-soup-can T-shirt, cane)
and his partner, John Gilman (Inter-
view-cover shirt). In 1965, Warhol filmed
Heide’s play “The Bed,” first performed
at the theatre Caffe Cino, about two men
who stay in bed for days. Heide also
wrote a screenplay for Warhol’s movie
“Lupe,” from 1966, starring Edie Sedg-
wick. “I really miss him, as a person,
today,” Heide said. “He was sort of like
a little child. I could be quiet with him.
But he was interested in gossip.” As Heide
told a story that involved a café, Sedg-
wick crying into a glass of brandy, War-
hol, and a “Blonde on Blonde”-era Bob
Dylan pulling up in a limousine, Gilman
reached into Heide’s suit pocket, ex-
tracted a pair of reading glasses, and
turned back to his conversation.
De Salvo continued into a Warhol-
inspired art-making event called “Swish,
Sketch, Drag,” in which dozens of art-
“Well, if it isn’t the Fascinator Four.”
ists, many young, surrounded a catwalk,
studiously sketching drag performers.
Warhol’s caricatures and gold shoes ap-
peared on video monitors. By the en-
trance, De Salvo, smiling, looked up at
the performer Elle Emenopé, who had
a piratical beard and wore a mermaid-like
jumpsuit. “You have an Otto Fenn look
to you,” she said.
—Sarah Larson
1 Llyn Cwm Bychan, a lake in north
INK
FREE SWIM
t 8 a.m. one scorching summer Fri-
A day, Joe Minihane sat by the pool
at the William Vale hotel, in Williams-
burg. A slim thirty-six-year-old from
Essex, England, Minihane is an aficio-
nado of finding a nice place to swim. In
2010, he was unhappily freelancing as a
tech journalist in London when he dis-
covered the nature writer Roger Deakin’s
book “Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey
Through Britain,” in which Deakin took
a “frog’s-eye view” of his homeland via
its rivers, lochs, lidos, fens, moats, dykes,
aqueducts, and canals. Deakin died in
2006, but “Waterlog” helped launch a
wild-swimming craze in Britain; last
month, the Local Government Associ-
ation issued a warning after a spike in
drownings.
Like Julie Powell cooking her way
through Julia Child, Minihane decided
to reswim Deakin’s course. Also like
Powell, he got a book deal out of it, as
the author of “Floating: A Life Re-
gained.” Minihane took two and a half
years to cover seventy-seven locations,
from London’s Tooting Bec Lido to the
Wales. “It initially started out as this
lovely thing to help me get over my anx-
iety,” Minihane said. “And then it just
turned into a way of me getting quite
stressed about not doing the project. I
had to remember that swimming’s ac-
tually really fun.” (Deakin wrote, “I can
dive in with a long face and what feels
like a terminal case of depression and
come out a whistling idiot.”)
Minihane had flown in to New York
the night before, after a layover in Ice-
land, where he swam the Blue Lagoon,
near Grindavík. His goal: to swim in
each of the five boroughs in one day.
There had already been compromises.
He decided not to brave the rivers
(“Dealing with currents and angry boats
isn’t really calming”) or other uncon-
ventional waterways (the Gowanus
Canal, a friend had warned him, is “tech-
nically an open sewer”). He had wanted
to stick to public pools, but they didn’t
open until eleven, so he made an excep-
tion for his first borough. He stripped
down to orange-and-blue trunks, a
swimming cap, and goggles, and did ten
laps in the hotel pool. “Gorgeous,” he
said, drying off. That covered Brooklyn.
He showered and got on the subway.
Swimming the five boroughs is more of
a transportation challenge than an aquatic
one, but Minihane was used to logisti-
cal hurdles. Several of Deakin’s swim-
ming spots had been inaccessible, such
as a flooded quarry on the Scottish isle
of Belnahua. In “Julie & Julia,” Powell
has to conquer boning a duck; Mini-
hane’s ultimate challenge was bathing
in a series of limestone plunge pools in
Hell Gill, a gorge in the Yorkshire Dales.
“After that,” he said, “I realized that noth-
ing would be a problem.”
On his way to Queens, Minihane
had to drop off his knapsack at a friend’s
office in midtown, but when he arrived
he realized he’d gone to the wrong ad-
dress: it was Park Avenue South. Di-
saster! He hailed a cab and rode twenty-
seven blocks down. “We aren’t that late,”
he said in the elevator. “It just means
the swims will get shorter and shorter.”
He caught the W train out to the As-
toria Pool: the city’s oldest and largest,
at 54,450 square feet. A seniors’ water-
aerobics class was in session, but there
was plenty of room for Minihane to
do laps. “It’s what municipal pools
should be,” he said when he got out,
and quoted Josiah Stamp, the former
head of the Bank of England: “When
we get down to swimming, we get down
to democracy.”
Next, he took an Uber to the float-
ing pool at Barretto Point Park, in the
Bronx, where there were views of Rik-
ers Island and lots of kids splashing
around and yelling in Spanish. “Virtu-
ally impossible to swim in a straight
line,” Minihane reported, “but it was
fun.” He rode the 6 train down to the
Hamilton Fish Recreation Center, on
the Lower East Side, which was packed
with families cooling off. Minihane
breaststroked through the mayhem, like
a character in a “Where’s Waldo?” pan-
orama. “That was chaos—in a good
way,” he said. “I’ve got so much chlo-
rine in my hair.”
The pools closed for cleaning from
three to four, allowing just enough time
to get to Staten Island. On the ferry,
Minihane gazed out at the bay. “Maybe
I should have swum across,” he said. “I
prefer swimming in open bodies of water.
You set your own course.” At Lyons
Pool, on the northeast edge of Staten
Island, he locked up his things and did
his last set of laps. He leaned on the
edge of the pool. “I’m unaccountably
pleased that this thing exists,” he said,
happy as a whistling idiot.
—Michael Schulman
1 us?” an Aaptiv employee asked.
BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.
BUBBLY
everal weeks ago, a New York fitness
Stechstartup, Aaptiv, installed a new, high-
water cooler in its downtown offices.
The five-foot-tall, Internet-connected
contraption dispenses still or sparkling
water, and still or sparkling flavored water,
with hints of fruits and vegetables. In
other words, it’s LaCroix on tap. Before
the machine arrived, Aaptiv had been
swept up in the same post-cola craze
that turned the sparkling-with-a-hint-
of-pamplemousse beverage, beloved by
Midwestern moms, into a pop-culture
icon, referenced in Halloween costumes
and T-shirts demanding that girls choose
“LaCroixs Over Boys.”
“We were going through so many
cans of LaCroix every day it was ridic-
ulous,” Aaptiv’s employee-experience
manager, Kate Blain, recalled. She dis-
covered Bevi, the company that makes
the new water coolers, at a networking
event, and campaigned to have her office
acquire one. “It was a little sad how ex-
cited I was to get it,” she said. “I did a
post on Instagram: ‘I finally got my Bevi!’”
To mark the occasion, Bevi decided
to throw a party at Aaptiv’s offices. (The
company does this sometimes.) One Fri-
day evening, a d.j. blasted Billboard Top
Fifties from a standing desk, while Aat-
piv’s employees, dressed in sneakers and
hoodies, perched on stools or lounged
on ivory-colored sofas. Near the snack
cupboard, like a squat refrigerator, was
the new Bevi, which dispensed water
with four flavor options: lemon, coconut,
pear, and blueberry-cucumber. (Flavors
are typically made by boiling the peels
of fruits and vegetables.) Clients select
their machine’s flavors from a list of twelve
options; Bevi employees can monitor the
levels from their desks. The setup starts
at around four hundred dollars a month.
Two Bevi representatives—Jenny
Seto and Avi Greenberg—had set up a
bar in Aaptiv’s kitchen, with a mise en
place for fizzy-water cocktails: Mason
jars, fresh mint and lime wedges, vodka,
and rum. “Are you guys making it for
“We’ll start ’em for you,” Greenberg
said, muddling some lime and mint in
a Mason jar. Seto added a dash of rum.
“And then you head over to the Bevi
machine and add coconut sparkling,”
Greenberg said, pointing to the cooler.
The machine’s touch screen read “May
the Pour Be with You.”
Three people huddled around the
Bevi, taking group selfies. “Can we get
a Boomerang of us cheers-ing?” a young
woman asked. They lifted their cups.
Sean Grundy, Bevi’s co-founder and
C.E.O., who is thirty-four, wandered
into the party, wearing a blue-and-white
gingham shirt. He grabbed a com-
postable plastic cup with the beginnings
of a soda-water mojito. Grundy and his
fellow co-founders, Eliza Becton and
Frank Lee, teamed up in 2013, while
Grundy was studying at the M.I.T. Sloan
School of Management. He had just
quit his job at an environmental-con-
servation group, and Becton, a mechan-
ical engineer turned designer, was pas-
sionate about replacing disposable water
bottles. The trio created a Bevi proto-
type and parked it at a gym in Som-
merville, Massachusetts.
“Our first machine was super boot-
leg,” Grundy said. “We purchased a vend-
ing machine, built this white plastic frame
around it, and then hacked a touch screen
into it.” It broke down all the time. De-
spite this, some of the gym members in-
quired about installing a machine in their
offices. The thirst for water with bubbles
in it seemed unquenchable. “We got
twelve companies in Boston to sign up
for the second version,” Grundy said. Now
more than two thousand offices across
the U.S., Canada, and Hong Kong have
a Bevi installed, including the fictional
Pied Piper office from the HBO show
“Silicon Valley.” The company estimates
that in the last year or so they’ve helped
save twenty-five million bottles and cans.
Blain, the employee-experience man-
ager, said of the flavor options, “I treat
it like I’m taking my SATs. I have to sit
and think, Do I want the strawberry
lemongrass, or the coconut?”
Danny Groner, Aaptiv’s director of
communications, said that the machine
was helping him drink more water, which
he called “about as boring an option as
you can get.”
“Water boredom” is a concept Grundy
didn’t fully appreciate until recently, he
said. “There’s a whole subset of people
who don’t like water and they also, for
health reasons, don’t want to drink super
sugary drinks,” he explained. “We track
those things, we try to understand.”
People at the office party were start-
ing to indulge in a little bit of dancing.
Some had moved on from Bevi cock-
tails to shots and glasses of bourbon.
“Technically, I’m going to the gym
after this,” Grundy muttered.
“Good luck with that!” Seto said.
—Alisha Haridasani Gupta
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 29

AMERICAN CHRONICLES
SHAKING THE FOUNDATIONS
Are the new donor classes solving our problems or posing new ones?
BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
n the spring of 1889, Andrew Carne-
Ipossession
gie published an essay on money. If
confers knowledge, then there
was no greater expert on the subject: Car-
negie was possibly the richest American
who ever lived. The essay, which was
printed first in the North American Re-
view, then in Britain’s Pall Mall Gazette,
and later reissued in a pamphlet, became
known as “The Gospel of Wealth.”
The “Gospel” opened with a discus-
sion of inequity. This was the Gilded
Age, and, even as most Americans were
struggling to get by, the one-per-cent-
ers were putting up “cottages” in New-
port. The disparity was, in Carnegie’s
view, unavoidable. It was the price
Skeptics fear philanthropies have gained undue influence on public policy.
30 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
of progress, and progress, ultimately,
benefitted everyone. “The ‘good old
times’ were not good old times,” he ob-
served. “Neither master nor servant was
as well situated then as today.”
Having dealt with accumulation of
wealth, Carnegie then turned to his real
concern: what to do with it. Passing on
riches to one’s children was a mistake,
he argued, for inheritances “often work
more for the injury than for the good
of the recipients.” Handing out money
to the poor was similarly ill-advised,
since “neither the individual nor the race
is improved by almsgiving.” Rather, the
best way to dispose of a fortune was to
endow institutions that would aid “those
who desire to rise.” Universities were a
good cause; so, too, were public librar-
ies, music halls, and swimming baths.
The “man of wealth,” Carnegie advised,
should consider himself “the mere trustee
and agent for his poorer brethren, bring-
ing to their service his superior wisdom,
experience, and ability to administer.”
“The Gospel of Wealth” has been
called the “ur-text of modern philan-
thropy.” It advocated a new kind of giv-
ing, a form of charity that wasn’t char-
ity but something more pragmatic and,
at the same time, more ambitious—a
giving aimed, in Carnegie’s words, at
improving “the general condition of the
people.” Acting on his own advice, Car-
negie went on to endow Carnegie Hall,
the Carnegie Foundation, the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, the
Carnegie Institute of Technology (now
part of Carnegie Mellon University),
and more than twenty-five hundred local
libraries. His contemporaries financed
the Rockefeller Foundation, the Russell
Sage Foundation, the Field Museum,
and the University of Chicago.
The “Gospel” also prompted the ur-
critiques of philanthropy. In 1890, the
Reverend Hugh Price Hughes, a Meth-
odist minister, wrote that, while he was
sure Carnegie was “a most estimable
and generous man,” his “Gospel” repre-
sented a “social monstrosity” and a “grave
political peril.” William Jewett Tucker,
a professor of religion who would later
become the president of Dartmouth,
was no less horrified. What the “Gos-
pel” advocated, Tucker wrote, was “a vast
system of patronage,” and nothing could
“in the final issue create a more hope-
less social condition.” To assume that
“wealth is the inevitable possession of
the few” was to evade the essential issue:
“The ethical question of today centres,
I am sure, in the distribution rather than
in the redistribution of wealth.”
Carnegie made his money from rail-
roads and steel. Three years after he
wrote “The Gospel of Wealth,” he de-
cided to break the union—the Amal-
gamated Association of Iron and Steel
Workers—at one of his company’s larg-
est plants, the Homestead steelworks,
outside Pittsburgh. Employees were pre-
sented with a new contract with pay
cuts up to thirty-five per cent. When
they rejected it, they were locked out.
Carnegie Steel brought in Pinkerton
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• •
agents to guard the plant, and in the re-
sulting melee at least sixteen people were
killed. In the end, the union collapsed.
To critics, the Homestead strike made
explicit the inconsistency of Carnegie’s
position. How could a person ruth-
lessly exploit his employees and, at the
same time, claim to be a benefactor of
the toiling masses? The Saturday Globe,
a Utica-based weekly, published a car-
toon showing two Carnegies, conjoined
at the hip. One, smiling, handed out
a library and a check; the other held
out a notice telling workers that their
pay had been slashed. “As the tight-
fisted employer he reduces wages that
he may play philanthropist,” the cap-
tion read.
e live, it is often said, in a new
W Gilded Age—an era of extrava-
gant wealth and almost as extravagant
displays of generosity. In the past fifteen
years, some thirty thousand private foun-
dations have been created, and the num-
ber of donor-advised funds has roughly
doubled. The Giving Pledge—signed
by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael
Bloomberg, Larry Ellison, and more than
a hundred and seventy other gazillion-
aires who have promised to dedicate most
of their wealth to philanthropy—is the
32 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
“Gospel” stripped down and updated.
And as the new philanthropies have
proliferated so, too, have the critiques.
Anand Giridharadas is a journalist
who, in 2011, was named a Henry Crown
Fellow of the Aspen Institute. The in-
stitute is financed by, among other
groups, the Carnegie Corporation, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the
Gates Foundation. The fellowship, ac-
cording to its Web site, aims to “de-
velop the next generation of community-
spirited leaders” by engaging them “in
a thought-provoking journey of per-
sonal exploration.”
Giridharadas at first found the fel-
lowship to be a pretty sweet deal; it
offered free trips to the Rockies and
led to invitations from the sorts of peo-
ple who own Western-themed man-
sions and fly private jets. After a while,
though, he started to feel that some-
thing was rotten in the state of Colo-
rado. In 2015, when he was asked to
deliver a speech to his fellow-fellows,
he used it to condemn what he called
“the Aspen Consensus.”
“The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell,
is this,” he said. “The winners of our age
must be challenged to do more good.
But never, ever tell them to do less harm.”
The speech made the Times; people began
asking for copies of it; and Giridharadas
decided to expand on it. The result is
“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade
of Changing the World.” “I hadn’t
planned to write a book on this topic,
but the topic chose me,” he writes.
“Winners Take All” is organized as
a series of portraits: of a young, ideal-
istic Georgetown graduate who goes
to work for McKinsey; of a former
McKinsey consultant who goes to work
for George Soros; of various wealthy
and generally liberal-leaning social
entrepreneurs. What these figures all
share, by Giridharadas’s account, is a
desire to do good without questioning
too deeply how it is they came to do
so well. At one point, he sits down with
Laurie Tisch, an heir to a family for-
tune estimated at twenty-one billion
dollars and the benefactor of a philan-
thropy—the Laurie M. Tisch Illumi-
nation Fund—whose stated mission is
“to improve access and opportunity for
all New Yorkers.” Tisch describes her-
self as racked by guilt. “It’s my com-
pass,” she tells Giridharadas. But when
he asks her whether she thinks inher-
itances like hers ought to be taxed more
heavily, thus leaving her with less to
feel guilty about, she won’t answer the
question. “You’d have to be a better stu-
dent of history than I am,” she says.
Perhaps aptly, a good deal of “Win-
ners Take All” is set in a limousine. One
day, Giridharadas rides in a black Lin-
coln with Darren Walker, the president
of the Ford Foundation. The two are
headed to the offices of K.K.R. & Co.,
the investment firm made famous by
“Barbarians at the Gate,” where Walker
is scheduled to give a lunchtime talk.
Like Giridharadas, Walker has ex-
pressed skepticism about changing the
world one glitzy gala at a time. Not
long after Giridharadas delivered his
speech in Aspen, Walker published a
short essay that he titled “Toward a
New Gospel of Wealth.” In his “New
Gospel,” Walker argued that it was
time to take a fresh look at the “prin-
ciples of philanthropy” set forth by Car-
negie—“to openly acknowledge and
confront the tension inherent in a sys-
tem that perpetuates vast differences
in privilege and then tasks the privi-
leged with improving the system.” The
essay was posted on the Ford Founda-
tion’s Web site and, according to Gi-
ridharadas, immediately “began to ric-
ochet around the philanthropic world,
some people receiving the same email
from three or four different people.”
The “New Gospel” would, you’d think,
make Walker a hero to Giridharadas,
and, as the limousine inches north—
midtown traffic is barely moving—it
seems that it has. Walker, who is Afri-
can-American, grew up poor in Texas,
and he tells Giridharadas that he plans
to use his position as the head of a major
foundation to “deeply interrogate” the
“systems and cultural practices” of priv-
ilege. But then, where the butter meets
the roll, Walker, too, disappoints. At
K.K.R., he makes no move to “interro-
gate” the culture of private equity and
leveraged buyouts, and he celebrates one
of the firm’s founders—the legendary
corporate raider Henry Kravis—as a
“philanthropist.” A few months after the
limousine trip, Walker joins the board
of PepsiCo, a step that, Giridharadas re-
lates, brings his annual compensation
to more than a million dollars a year.
Just about everyone who appears in
“Winners Take All” comes out looking
the worse for it. This includes former
President Bill Clinton—who tells Gi-
ridharadas that he doesn’t think giving
speeches to financial-industry groups
at two hundred thousand dollars a pop
has in any way influenced his outlook—
and Giridharadas himself. “There’s al-
most no problem probed in this book,
no myth, no cloud of self-serving justi-
fication that I haven’t found a way of
being part of,” he acknowledges. “This
is a critique of a system of which I am
absolutely, undeniably a part.”
philanthropy has been defined. Under
the federal tax code, an organization
that feeds the hungry can count as a
philanthropy, and so can a university
where students study the problem of
hunger, and so, too, can a think tank
devoted to downplaying hunger as a
problem. All these qualify as what
are known, after the relevant tax-code
provision, as 501(c)(3)s, meaning that
the contributions they receive are tax
deductible, and that the earnings on
their endowments are largely tax-free.
501(c)(3)s are prohibited from engag-
ing in partisan activity, but, as “The
Givers” convincingly argues, activists
on both sides of the ideological divide
have developed work-arounds.
As a left-leaning example, Callahan
cites Tim Gill, who’s been called “the
megadonor behind the L.G.B.T.Q.-rights
movement.” A software designer, Gill
became rich founding and then selling
a company called Quark, and he’s do-
nated more than three hundred million
dollars toward promoting L.G.B.T.Q.
rights. While some of this has been in
the form of straight-up political contri-
butions, much of it has been disbursed
by Gill’s tax-exempt foundation, which
has financed educational efforts, mes-
sage testing, and—perhaps most impor-
tant—legal research. “Without a doubt,
we would not be where we are without
Tim Gill and the Gill Foundation,” Mary
Bonauto, the attorney who argued the
2015 Supreme Court case that legalized
gay marriage, told Rolling Stone last year.
On the right, Callahan points to
Art Pope, the chairman of a privately
held discount-store chain called Vari-
ety Wholesalers. Pope has used his
wealth to support a network of foun-
dations, based in North Carolina, that
advocate for voter-identification—or,
if you prefer, voter-suppression—laws.
In 2013, pushed by Pope’s network, the
North Carolina state legislature en-
acted a measure requiring residents to
present state-issued photo I.D.s at the
polls. Then the North Carolina Insti-
tute for Constitutional Law—another
Pope-funded group—led the effort to
block challenges to the measure. (The

nside Philanthropy is a Web site de-

Iis “Who’s
voted to high-end giving; its tagline
Funding What, and Why.”
David Callahan is the site’s founder
and editor. If Giridharadas worries that
the super-wealthy just play at chang-
ing the world, Callahan worries they’re
going at it in earnest.
“An ever larger and richer upper class
is amplifying its influence through large-
scale giving in an era when it already
has too much clout,” he writes in “The
Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philan-
thropy in a New Gilded Age.” “Things
are going to get worse, too.”
Part of the problem, according to
Callahan, lies in the broad way that
I.D. law was struck down, in 2016, by
a federal appeals court that held it had
been “passed with racially discrimina-
tory intent.”)
It is difficult to say what fraction
of philanthropic giving goes toward
shaping public policy. Callahan esti-
mates that the figure is somewhere
around ten billion dollars a year. Such
an amount, he says, might not sound
huge, but it’s more than the annual
contributions made to candidates, par-
ties, and super-PACs combined. The
result is doubly undemocratic. For every
billion dollars spent on advocacy tricked
out as philanthropy, several hundred
million dollars in uncaptured taxes are
lost to the federal treasury.
“It’s not just that the megaphones
operated by 501(c)(3) groups and financed
by a sliver of rich donors have gotten
louder and louder, making it harder for
ordinary citizens to be heard,” Calla-
han notes. “It’s that these citizens are
helping foot the bill.” That both liber-
als and conservatives are exploiting the
tax code is small consolation.
“When it comes to who gets heard
in the public square, ordinary citizens
can’t begin to compete with an activ-
ist donor class,” Callahan writes. “How
many very rich people need to care in-
tensely about a cause to finance mega-
phones that drown out the voices of
everyone else?” he asks. “Not many.”
ob Reich is a professor of politi-
R cal science at Stanford and a co-
director of the university’s Center on
Philanthropy and Civil Society. He be-
gins his forthcoming book, “Just Giv-
ing: Why Philanthropy Is Failing De-
mocracy and How It Can Do Better,”
by noting that for every foundation
that existed in 1930 there are now five
hundred. The growth in foundation
assets in that time has been even more
staggering, from less than a billion dol-
lars to more than eight hundred bil-
lion dollars.
Meanwhile, the losses to the U.S.
Treasury keep mounting. In 2016, the
tax deduction for charitable contribu-
tions cost the federal government at
least fifty billion dollars. Is there any
justification for this arrangement?
Reich considers several possibilities.
One is that the government, by en-
couraging giving to private philanthro-
34 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
pies, is fostering participation in civic
affairs. This rationale he discards, since,
if anything, the correlation seems to
be negative. “The rise of nonprofit or-
ganizations in the United States and
the use of the charitable contributions
deduction coincides with the decline of
civic engagement and associational
life,” he observes.
A second possibility is that giving
promotes equality. Once again, Reich
is skeptical. The deduction for chari-
table contributions is available only to
taxpayers who itemize their returns, and
these people tend to be relatively affluent.
And the more affluent they are the more
the deduction is worth: families in the
highest tax bracket get a much bigger
break than those in the lowest.
How about all the needy families
that are being assisted? Here the figures
are harder to come by, but, even so, they
don’t look very good. A recent study
suggests that, at most, a third of all tax-
deductible giving goes toward aiding
the poor. And the donors who are get-
ting the biggest tax breaks are, it turns
out, the least likely to be aiding the in-
digent: Reich cites research that sug-
gests “the inclination to give to help
meet basic needs declines as one rises
up the income ladder.”
Instead of promoting equality, Reich
worries, tax subsidies for philanthropy
may actually be doing the reverse. He
cites, in particular, local-education foun-
dations, or LEFs. These are, essentially,
souped-up PTAs, formed to supple-
ment public-school budgets, and they’ve
grown dramatically in recent years. Some
LEFs raise only enough money to buy
paint sets or musical instruments, but
some, in more affluent districts, raise
thousands of dollars a pupil. In the town
of Hillsborough, California, just north
of Stanford, Reich reports, parents of
public-school students get a letter at
the start of the year asking for a con-
tribution of twenty-three hundred dol-
lars for each child enrolled. While the
contributing parents can’t dictate ex-
actly how the money will be spent, Reich
writes, it’s easy to imagine groups of
parents pressing the district to hire spe-
cialized teachers or to purchase sophis-
ticated equipment that “can be targeted
to benefit their own children.” This ar-
rangement, in his view, exacerbates ex-
isting inequities in school funding, and,
since contributions to LEFs are tax de-
ductible, rich districts are, in effect, re-
ceiving a subsidy from other taxpayers.
“Just Giving” takes up only legal
forms of self-dealing, not the illegal
sorts that the Donald J. Trump Foun-
dation has recently been accused of en-
gaging in. But, as Reich observes—and
as the Trump Foundation case demon-
strates—regulation of charitable orga-
nizations is extremely lax. “The current
practice of state-supported philanthropy,
especially in the United States, is in-
defensible,” he concludes.
ritiques of “The Gospel of Wealth”
C didn’t have much impact on An-
drew Carnegie. He continued to dis-
tribute his fortune, to libraries and mu-
seums and universities, until, at the
time of his death, in 1919, he had given
away some three hundred and fifty mil-
lion dollars—the equivalent of tens of
billions in today’s money. It is hard to
imagine that the critiques of the new
Carnegies will do much to alter cur-
rent trend lines.
The Gates Foundation alone, Cal-
lahan estimates, will disburse more than
a hundred and fifty billion dollars over
the next several decades. In just the next
twenty years, affluent baby boomers are
expected to contribute almost seven
trillion dollars to philanthropy. And,
the more government spending gets
squeezed, the more important nongov-
ernmental spending will become. When
congressional Republicans passed their
so-called tax-reform bill, they preserved
the deduction for charitable contribu-
tions even as they capped the deduc-
tion for state and local tax payments.
Thus, a hundred-million-dollar gift to
Harvard will still be fully deductible,
while, in many parts of the country, the
property taxes paid to support local
public schools will not be. It is possi-
ble that in the not too distant future
philanthropic giving will outstrip fed-
eral outlays on non-defense discretion-
ary programs, like education and the
arts. This would represent, Callahan
notes, a “striking milestone.”
Is that the kind of future we want?
As the latest round of critiques makes
clear, we probably won’t have much of
a say in the matter. The philanthro-
pists will decide, and then it will be left
to their foundations to fight it out. 
 SHOUTS & MURMURS
TICK CHECK
BY COLIN NISSAN
ccording to the Centers for Dis-
A ease Control and Prevention, cases
of tick-borne diseases in the United
States have doubled in recent years.
Frequent and thorough tick checks,
however, can significantly reduce your
chances of enjoying summer. As a mat-
ter of fact, checking yourself for ticks
after going outside may be the only
way to see what your body looks like
covered in ticks.
Ticks wait in the grass and the leaves
with their legs outstretched, ready to
attach to a passing host, burrow into
the host’s skin, and feed on the host’s
blood while transmitting disease through
their saliva, often within a few hours of
contact, so it’s crucial to recognize how
fucking gross that is.
Kids are particularly vulnerable to
ticks because of their exposure to the
outdoors, so get in the habit of check-
ing them every ten minutes. More if
they’re yours. The elderly, too, are
highly susceptible to the diseases trans-
mitted by ticks, simply because they
no longer have the strength to argue
with Medicare.
If you finish a hike and see a “freckle”
on your arm that you hadn’t noticed
before, you might take a closer look at
this “freckle” only to realize, luckily,
that it is just a freckle. But that thing
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
next to it is a freaking tick!!!
When checking for ticks, start at
the bottom. First the feet and the an-
kles, then the legs. Keep going up until
you’re high enough to introduce your-
self to the person you’re checking and
explain what you’re doing.
Ticks infected with Lyme disease are
typically carried by deer or small ro-
dents. If you see any deer or rodents in
your area, it’s important that you check
them for ticks. God, it’s not easy, but
it’s important. Even your dog can carry
infected ticks into your yard or your
home, which is difficult to believe, con-
sidering all the crap you’ve done for him.
Nymph ticks can be as small as a
poppy seed. Just a little something to
think about the next time you check
your bagel for ticks.
If you find a tick on your body that
hasn’t yet embedded itself, resist the
urge to rip it out as quickly as possi-
ble while shouting, “Get it off ! Get it
off !” Instead, take a breath, find a good
pair of pointy tweezers and a bright
lamp, and then carefully remove it while
shouting, “Get it off ! Get it off !”
While it’s impossible to completely
protect yourself from ticks, spraying
the area around you can at least create
a momentarily safe space in which to
sit, relax, and check yourself for ticks.
In addition to checking and spray-
ing, it’s a good idea to monitor your
health for sudden changes—if you
feel feverish, or experience fatigue,
headaches, or muscle aches, this could
be a sign that your body is, in fact,
experiencing the effects of too many
tick checks. 

ANNALS OF LAW ENFORCEMENT
SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM
Can the manufacturer of Tasers provide the answer to police abuse?
BY DANA GOODYEAR
ick Smith, who made a fortune sell-
R ing conducted-energy weapons—
stun guns—likes to say that he is a
“techno-optimist.” Human beings create
problems, technology solves them, and
a few bold thinkers get phenomenally
rich in the process. Forty-eight years
old, with a coplike, jacked physique,
Smith is a co-founder and the C.E.O.
of Taser International, which supplies
police departments with weapons that
are less lethal than firearms. “A hundred
years ago in New York, they had a major
problem,” he said. “Horse manure was
spreading disease. You can imagine if
you’d gone around New York and told
people who love their horses, ‘We’re
Body cameras are changing police work, creating new businesses and new debates.
36 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
going to take your horses away.’ There’s
the same dynamic with Americans and
guns. What happened a hundred years
ago was that we had a technology shift.”
He paused, dwelling for a fraction of a
second on the implication that cars had
saved the world. “Now, that introduced
some other problems,” he continued
breezily. “And hopefully now we have
some new technology to solve the car-
bon problem.” Solutions that create
problems in need of solutions: that, he
told me, is the definition of business.
For twenty-five years, Smith said, his
mission—rarely expressed, for fear of
alienating customers and irritating the
National Rifle Association—has been
to make the bullet obsolete. “Today,
would you keep a sword by your bed?”
he asked me. “No! It’s ridiculous. But
firing hot projectiles of lead shrapnel
at people—we want to make that a ri-
diculous concept, because it’s a brutal,
outdated, terrible thing to do.”
Critics argue that, in the wrong hands,
Tasers can be equally brutal. Civil-
liberties and anti-torture groups have
long complained that police officers,
rather than resorting to Tasers strictly as
an alternative to deadly force, often use
them in situations that would never war-
rant firing a gun. Two years ago, after
police in North Carolina Tased a men-
tally ill man five times in two minutes
while trying to pry him off a stop sign—
he was pronounced dead at the hospi-
tal—the Court of Appeals for the Fourth
Circuit ruled that using a Taser against
someone resisting arrest was “unconsti-
tutionally excessive.” A recent Reuters
investigation found that, since 1983, a
thousand and five people had died in the
United States in incidents that involved
Tasers, as part of a “larger mosaic of force.”
Tasers are carried by some six hun-
dred thousand law-enforcement officers
around the world—a kind of market
saturation that also presents a problem.
“One of the challenges with Taser is:
where do you go next, what’s Act II?”
Smith said. “For us, luckily, Act II is
cameras.” He began adding cameras
to his company’s weapons in 2006, to
defend against allegations of abuse, and
in the process inadvertently opened a
business line that may soon overshadow
the Taser. In recent years, body cam-
eras—the officer’s answer to bystander
cell-phone video—have become ubiq-
uitous, and Smith’s company, now worth
four billion dollars, is their largest man-
ufacturer, holding contracts with more
than half the major police departments
in the country.
The cameras have little intrinsic value,
but the information they collect is worth
a fortune to whoever can organize and
safeguard it. Smith has what he calls an
iPod/iTunes opportunity—a chance to
pair a hardware business with an end-
lessly recurring and expanding data-
storage subscription plan. In service of
an intensifying surveillance state and
the objectives of police as they battle
the public for control of the story, Smith
is building a network of electrical weap-
PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM MEBANE
ons, cameras, drones, and someday, pos-
sibly, robots, connected by a software
platform called Evidence.com. In the
process, he is trying to reposition his
company in the public imagination, not
as a dubious purveyor of stun guns but
as a heroic seeker of truth.
A year ago, Smith changed Taser’s
name to Axon Enterprise, referring
to the conductive fibre of a nerve cell.
Taser was founded in Scottsdale, Ari-
zona, where Smith lives; to transform
into Axon, he opened an office in Se-
attle, hiring designers and engineers
from Uber, Google, and Apple. When
I met him at the Seattle office this spring,
he wore a company T-shirt that read
“Expect Candor” and a pair of leather
sneakers in caution yellow, the same
color as Axon’s logo: a delta symbol—
for change—which also resembles the
lens of a surveillance camera.
Axon occupies two floors of an office
tower near Amazon’s headquarters. Two
years ago, it was named Seattle’s “Geek-
iest Tech Office” by Geekwire, a technol-
ogy-news site: its entry portal, inspired
by the air lock in “Alien,” is scarred with
fake battle marks, and the conference
rooms have names like Hedy Lamarr and
Ada Lovelace. There is a Ping-Pong table,
bottomless La Croix. Accompanied by
an Axon employee who scanned her irises
at each doorway (“Thank you—you have
been identified”), Smith and I headed
for the “library,” a windowless sanctuary
with green-shaded banker’s lamps and
leather armchairs. He invited me to in-
spect the oil paintings, pastoral scenes
with hidden futuristic details. His favor-
ite is a robo-dog amid a pack of setters.
As we sat at a polished wooden table,
Smith described the frustrations that po-
lice face in trying to manage the data
they collect. “Many say they spend half
their time typing away on a keyboard,”
he said. “What we’ve realized is that
these cameras could automate all the in-
formation flow of policing.” Axon em-
ployees sometimes call the platform
Dropbox for Cops, because it allows a
department to share video, statements,
and other information with the district
attorney, easing prosecution.
Already, Axon’s servers, at Microsoft,
store nearly thirty petabytes of video—a
quarter-million DVDs’ worth—and add
approximately two petabytes each
month. When body-camera footage is
released—say, in the case of Stephon
Clark, an unarmed black man killed by
police in Sacramento, or of the mass
shooting in Las Vegas, this past fall—
Axon’s logo is often visible in the upper-
right corner of the screen. The com-
pany’s stock is up a hundred and thirty
per cent since January. (Disclosure: I
own approximately eighty-four dollars’
worth of Axon stock in a mutual fund.)
Axon’s products are designed to trans-
form police work. Already, it is testing
software, aided by artificial intelligence,
that can automatically transcribe dia-
logue and collect identification informa-
tion, capabilities that could one day ob-
viate written reports. In the near future,
its software may be able to search data-
bases to create a detailed portrait of a
suspect, including a Facebook-like net-
work of his prior arrests, properties he is
associated with, and people to whom he
is connected. Smith said, “If we do our
job right, police officers should be really
engaged, and the tech should start to
melt into the background, rather than
intimidating in the foreground. That’s
where you balance the sci-fi stuff with
the world we want to live in. We don’t
want to build the dystopian world.”
Since entering the cloud, Smith has
recast his company’s proposition. “Our
mission has expanded,” he said. “We are
the tech company that’s going to make
the world less violent.” When conflict is
the precondition of the marketplace, the
solution to violence promises to be long
and lucrative. “We see an opportunity to
build the public-safety nervous system,”
Smith has said. He understands that this
makes some people uneasy.
he video that George Holliday cap-
T tured from his balcony, in the spring
of 1991, showing Los Angeles Police De-
partment officers attacking Rodney King,
has been hailed as the first viral cop video
and the birth of citizen journalism. It is
a defining moment for black activism,
and a significant one in Axon’s prehis-
tory. In some frames of the video, a long,
silvery thread is barely perceptible: wire
from the precursor of the modern Taser.
The L.A.P.D. was the first department
in the country to use the devices, start-
ing in the seventies. In a memoir, Officer
Stacey C. Koon describes shooting King
with two Tasers. When he tried to use
one of them a second time, it failed: “it
threw a new rush of voltage into Rod-
ney King before the TASTR expired.” At
that point, the officers resorted to beat-
ing and kicking King into submission.
Because of that, Tom Smith, Rick’s older
brother and co-founder, says, “We had a
reputation issue within law enforcement
to overcome. As we brought Taser to law
enforcement, they were, like, chuckling
and laughing that it doesn’t work.”
The original Taser was the invention
of an aerospace engineer named Jack
Cover, inspired by the sci-fi story “Tom
Swift and His Electric Rifle,” about a
boy inventor whose long gun fires a five-
thousand-volt charge. Early experiments
were comical: Cover wired the family
couch to shock his sister and her boy-
friend as they were on the brink of mak-
ing out. Later, he discovered that he
could fell buffalo when he hit them with
electrified darts. In 1974, Cover got a
patent and began to manufacture an
electric gun. That weapon was similar
to today’s Taser: a Glock-shaped object
that sends out two live wires, loaded
with fifty thousand volts of electricity
and ending in barbed darts that attach
to a target. When the hooks connect,
they create a charged circuit, which
causes muscles to contract painfully, ren-
dering the subject temporarily incapac-
itated. More inventor than entrepreneur,
Cover designed the Taser to propel its
darts with an explosive, leading the Bu-
reau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
to classify it a Title II weapon (a cate-
gory that also includes sawed-off shot-
guns), which required an arduous reg-
istration process and narrowed its appeal.
Rick Smith learned about Cover’s in-
vention while researching patents in the
business library at Arizona State Uni-
versity, his mother’s alma mater. He was
twenty-three, back home in Scottsdale
after graduating from Harvard—biol-
ogy, three years—and two business
schools, and he was looking to start a
company. (His other idea was a shop
where you could make custom mix CDs.)
He called Cover, who was living in Tuc-
son, a retiree in his seventies who was
still eager to see his idea come to frui-
tion. Smith borrowed the family R.V.
and went to Tucson. For six months,
he and Cover worked on prototypes
in Cover’s garage, while Tom set up an
office in Scottsdale. The new Taser was
reconfigured with a compressed-air firing
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 37
mechanism, so that it would no longer ‘Wow! You make things! You have rev-
be under the jurisdiction of the A.T.F. enue!’ So we were able to go public.”
The Air Taser, marketed as a tool On the I.P.O. road show, the Smiths
for self-defense, sold limpingly in the Tased the stockbrokers—eliciting, in
Sharper Image catalogue, alongside Rick’s telling, screams, laughs, and high
revolving tie racks. Rick and Tom’s father, fives. In order to look “tactical,”Tom told
Phil—a Silicon Valley executive who in- me, the brothers wore black turtlenecks
vested some four million dollars in the with “taser” sewn on the neck. “We
business—called the device “the walk- were the Men in Black.” In the spring
ing dead,” selling just enough to keep of 2001, the brothers, wearing their
the company going. The Smiths believed matching turtlenecks, rang the bell at the
that the Taser would always be perceived Nasdaq opening, and the stock took off.
as a silly gadget unless, like the Maglite, The company was defiantly unconven-
it was endorsed by law enforcement. But tional—the office, in a strip mall with
the Air Taser wasn’t strong enough to roll-up garage doors, was nicknamed the
deter a highly motivated perpetrator— Bunker, and the chief financial officer
some humiliating trials in which Czech hadn’t finished college. Over time, the
police were able to fight through repeated environment became more corporate,
shocks proved that. By the late nineties, with executives attending investor meet-
the company was down to its last mil- ings in blue blazers rather than in the
lion dollars: five hundred thousand from all-black uniform. Tom left in 2013; he
Dad, matched by Dad’s friend. now manages a body-armor startup, in
Rick had been working on a model Scottsdale. I asked if he and Rick still
to pitch to cops, one that caused mus- got along. “We never really got along,”
cles to contract nineteen times a second, he said. “He goes to Vegas, I go to Mon-
delivering a complete freeze rather than tana. We’re polar opposites.”
just excruciating pain. “By the time we The Smiths had proved the technol-
got it out, we had absolutely no money ogy, but the first model to attract inter-
for the launch,” he said in April, on a est from law enforcement was heavy
podcast devoted to innovation. “Our and cumbersome, requiring eight AA
launch plan was literally a guy in a Win- batteries. With more than ten million
nebago going cross-country, doing dollars raised through the I.P.O., they
demos. But, luckily, the product, we got developed the X26, a lighter, sleeker
it right, and within six months we were weapon that used lithium batteries.
cash-flow positive. And then the Internet Though less bulky than its predecessor,
bubble popped, and all of a sudden com- it was still an additional piece of equip-
panies that made things were pretty cool. ment that needed to justify its place on
“This speeds up the game significantly.”
an officer’s already laden belt. Smith
could not plausibly pitch the Taser as a
replacement for a handgun to stop a
homicidally violent suspect. He told me,
“What you don’t want to say is ‘We’ll
give you something better than a gun’
and have a cop hear ‘They want to take
my gun away.’” Instead, Taser argued
that its weapons filled a distinct niche.
Promotional materials suggested that
they be used “to incapacitate dangerous,
combative, or high risk subjects that may
be impervious to other less-lethal means,
regardless of pain tolerance, drug use,
or body size.” The beauty of it, the com-
pany said, was that the suspect would
stand up again five minutes later—ide-
ally cuffed, but more or less unscathed.
Police departments loved the X26,
and at times the company’s relationship
to law enforcement became question-
ably close. Taser cultivated chiefs and
officers, treating them to junkets and
conferences and hiring recently retired
officials as consultants. “Between 2000
and 2005, we became pretty ubiquitous
in law enforcement,” Rick told me. “Taser
is probably the fastest phenomenon in
public safety ever. Radios didn’t spread
as fast as Tasers did.”
According to Axon, Tasers have been
deployed more than 3.7 million times,
and have prevented loss of life or seri-
ous injury in more than two hundred
thousand instances. (The company ar-
rives at this figure by extrapolating from
a single study, conducted in Dallas in
2008.) Many agencies reported a drop
in the number of times officers deployed
their guns after acquiring Tasers. But
parameters for use varied from depart-
ment to department, and officers, who
had been instructed to think of the Taser
as safe, began to experiment with a wide
range of applications. A 2004 report by
Amnesty International, calling for a ban
on Tasers until an independent inquiry
could evaluate them, decried their adop-
tion as “a routine force option,” com-
monly deployed against “unruly school-
children; unarmed mentally disturbed
or intoxicated individuals; suspects flee-
ing minor crime scenes and people who
argue with police or fail to comply im-
mediately with a command.” The com-
pany was proud that the vast majority
of people who got Tased bore almost
no mark of injury, but to Amnesty this
feature was especially worrisome. A pain-
inflicting weapon that leaves little trace
can easily become a torture device.
Tom told me, “When we started this,
we thought our biggest fan was going
to be Amnesty International. I kid you
not. We thought they were going to be
thinking, These guys, what a fantastic
tool this is—they’re not having to have
police use brutal force and kill people.
And they became our biggest enemy. I
mean, they hate us. ”
A few years after Tasers went on the
market, Rick Smith added a data port to
track each trigger pull. The idea, he told
me, came from the Baltimore Police De-
partment, which was resisting Tasers out
of a concern that officers would abuse
people with them. In theory, with a data
port, cops would use their Tasers more
conscientiously, knowing that each de-
ployment would be recorded and subject
to review. But in Baltimore it didn’t work
out that way. Recent reports in the Sun
revealed that nearly sixty per cent of peo-
ple Tased by police in Maryland between
2012 and 2014—primarily black and liv-
ing in low-income neighborhoods—were
“non-compliant and non-threatening.”
As Tasers proliferated, so did reports
of deaths. An investigation by the
Arizona Republic counted a hundred
and sixty-seven Taser-related fatalities
in the United States and Canada be-
tween 1999 and early 2006. Smith’s com-
pany typically disputed responsibility
for fatalities, twice suing the offices of
medical examiners who named Tasers
as a cause of death. Conceding that the
company might have been overzealous,
Tom told me, “That was the mental-
ity of ‘We’re right, we know we’re right,
and we’re gonna fight anybody that
wants to fight us.’”
Especially in the early years, Taser’s
connection to cardiac arrest was a recur-
ring issue. Mark Kroll, a cardiac-device
inventor who has served on Axon’s board
since 2003, says that a preponderance of
scientific evidence has disproved the
claim. Nonetheless, in 2009, Taser added
charge metering to the X26, and con-
sented to begin warning cops against
shooting people in the chest. “We said,
even though we don’t believe there’s ev-
idence this happens in humans, it’s worth
giving the warning in an abundance of
caution,” Rick told me. “So our train-
ing says, if you can avoid the chest, by
all means avoid the chest.” When Axon
acknowledges Tasers’ role in killing peo-
ple, it blames improper use. A study that
Kroll led cites nineteen people who were
Tased and then fell to their death, many
from traumatic brain injury. The sec-
ond most common fatality, reported in
a handful of cases, is catching fire.
Stegicteve Tuttle, one of Axon’s first em-
ployees and currently its head of stra-
communications, describes himself
as a connoisseur of pain. Over the years,
he has often been a guinea pig for ex-
periments with various wave forms and
pulse rates. “Some pulses have a parapet
shape, up-over-down, like a hammer,
like a pounding. Then we made it like a
jigsaw, and it felt like a saw. One is
smooth—it felt good, almost like phys-
ical therapy. You can turn it up and make
it hurt. Some were horrific. There was
one where I screamed. They were, like,
‘That’s it!’ But I could still bend my leg.
Pain compliance is very inefficient.”
Tuttle works at the Scottsdale office,
a hundred-thousand-square-foot build-
ing, with a looming, metal-clad façade
that, Smith told me, he designed to be
intimidating. Inside, a three-story open
atrium is crisscrossed with catwalks, an
homage to “Star Wars.” The staircases
are painted primer gray, and there are
fake thrusters on the back of the build-
ing. Employees call it the Battleship in
the Desert. “We were thwarted from Day
One,” Tuttle told me. “Getting beat up
along the way gives you this mentality
of ‘Damn the torpedoes and full steam
ahead.’” In June, when it was a hundred
and ten degrees in Scottsdale—the kind
of weather in which Tuttle likes to go
for a lunch-hour run—I visited the Bat-
tleship. Naturally, someone had to scan
her irises for me to gain entry.
Tuttle took me up to the roof deck,
so that we could watch Exposures, a reg-
ular event in which interns, employees,
and visitors undergo voluntary Tasing.
Rick, who has been Tased seven times,
doesn’t like to watch Exposures anymore.
“For me, it’s a bit like the smell of tequila
after a hangover,” he said. “ ‘Oh, yeah, I
remember—that’s not fun.’ ” His wife,
Brenda, to whom he has been married
since 2001, has never taken a hit, though
they keep an arsenal of Tasers in a bio-
metric safe inside their home. They have
eight-year-old twins and a fourteen-year-
old. The Smiths banned firearms from
the house a long time ago, and Rick says
that he would prefer his children to be
Tased than to be shot, pepper-sprayed,
or struck with a baton.
On the roof, two muscular men, Axon
Taser trainers, dragged a pair of blue gym-
nastics mats to an open area. The volun-
teers signed waivers and got a pep talk.
“It can give you a reset, like the old
shock-therapy days,” one of the trainers
joked. Someone asked about the elec-
tronics in his pocket. “I would take keys
out,” the trainer said. A woman in black
leggings and rainbow flip-flops said, under
her breath, “I just don’t want to pee.”
Tuttle leaned in close. “Typically, the
women go silent,” he told me. “If you
hear the phrase ‘He took it like a girl,’
it’s a positive thing. They don’t scream.
Guys tend to scream, F-bomb like crazy.”
A man in his thirties approached the
mats. A spotter on each side held his
arms as he stood with his back facing
the shooter. The Taser rattled with elec-
tricity. As the darts hit, the man howled,
and then, with the help of the spotters,
he fell, frozen, to the mat. The spotters
removed the probes and cleaned the tiny
entry wounds. “He wants Paw Patrol
bandages,” someone in the crowd said.
“Give him Rocky and Skye.” After a few
seconds, the man got up, and walked
stiffly to a lounge chair, where he sat,
seemingly lost in thought, as the next
volunteer, an adrenaline junkie, requested
a double shot.
Later, talking about Exposures, Tom
Smith said to me, “Would we be doing
that if we thought we were going to kill
them?” It was a reasonable point. But,
watching the demonstration, I thought
about the fact that the safest way to use
a Taser is to shoot someone in the back.
It forced a contradictory image: a dan-
gerous, combative, high-risk subject,
gunless and running away.
ct II begins in the nauseous sum-
A mer of 2014, when Eric Garner
died after being put in a choke hold by
police in Staten Island and Michael
Brown was shot by Darren Wilson, of
the Ferguson Police. After a grand jury
decided not to indict Wilson—witness
statements differed wildly, and no foot-
age of the shooting came to light—
Brown’s family released a statement call-
ing on the public to “join with us in our
campaign to ensure that every police
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 39
officer working the streets in this coun-
try wears a body camera.”
In the months that followed, Presi-
dent Obama convened a Task Force on
21st Century Policing, which recom-
mended less-lethal options, “subject to
the appropriate use of force continuum
restrictions,” and considered the role
that body cameras might play. At that
point, one of the only studies on the
cameras’ effectiveness came from Rialto,
a small California city with a police de-
partment that was threatened with dis-
mantlement after a series of scandals.
The Rialto report, from 2012, showed
that the use of force dropped by sixty
per cent in the first year after body cam-
eras were introduced.
Obama’s Department of Justice com-
mitted to funding body-camera programs
at agencies across the country, a grant
that continues under Donald Trump. So
far, fifty-eight million dollars has been
distributed, and there are more than fifty-
two thousand new cameras on police.
“Within four months of Michael Brown
being killed in Ferguson, the President
is giving a speech at the White House
pledging seventy-five million dollars for
a technology of which there are only a
few efficacy studies,” Michael White, a
professor of criminology and criminal
justice at Arizona State University who
works with the Justice Department’s
Body-Worn Camera Policy and Imple-
mentation Program, told me. “Prior to
2014, there were probably only dozens of
departments using cameras.
Now we’re talking nine or ten
thousand agencies, just over
half of the departments in the
United States.”
Bystander video had re-
vealed a level of habitual, often
sanctioned police violence that
the public found alarming. As
the deaths of unarmed black
men at the hands of police
dominated the news, a na-
tional conversation began about the need
to make certain that officers acted as
protectors rather than as aggressors. Taser,
which had released its first “point of view”
camera in 2012, began to speak the lan-
guage of reform. “Cameras really do
change the dynamic,” Rick Smith told
me. “Cops are just a little more careful.
I’ve had cops tell me it’s like an angel on
their shoulder. One way you could look
40 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
at this is, ‘Look, Rick reframes every-
thing into a sales opportunity.’ But at
least my own self-image of this is we
view each problem as an opportunity
where technology can help solve it.”The
call to change the dynamics around po-
licing worked to his advantage. He told
me, “It was good for us, in that we build
systems for transparency and to reduce
use of force, and those were two of the
major themes of this shift of the mind-
set from warrior to guardian. That’s been
our mission all along.”
But, at Axon, the notion of account-
ability was often aimed at keeping sus-
pects straight. Explaining the decision,
in 2006, to add cameras to Tasers, Steve
Tuttle said that, while the data port made
it impossible for suspects to lie about
how many times they had been hit, they
could still lie about the circumstances.
“The suspects got smart,” he said. “ ‘O.K.,
he only shot me once, but I had my
hands up. He shot me for no reason.’
We were, like, ‘Well, how do we defend
that?’ Put a camera on the end.”
In the fall of 2014, Taser débuted the
Officer Safety Plan, which now costs a
hundred and nine dollars a month and
includes Tasers, cameras, and a sensor
that wirelessly activates all the cameras
in its range whenever a cop draws his
sidearm. This feature is described on
the Web site as a prudent hedge in cha-
otic times: “In today’s online culture
where videos go viral in an instant,
officers must capture the truth of a crit-
ical event. But the intensity
of the moment can mean that
hitting ‘record’ is an after-
thought. Both officers and
communities facing confu-
sion and unrest have asked
for a solution that turns cam-
eras on reliably, leaving no
room for dispute.” According
to White’s review of current
literature, half of the random-
ized controlled studies show
a substantial or statistically significant
reduction in use of force following the
introduction of body cameras. The re-
search into citizen complaints is more
definitive: cameras clearly reduce the
number of complaints from the public.
The practice of “testi-lying”—officers
lying under oath—is made much more
difficult by the presence of video. Bren-
don Woods is the top public defender
in Alameda County, California, which
includes Oakland, where officers have
had body cameras for eight years. “We’ve
seen how increased technology normally
disadvantages the defense—DNA, fin-
gerprinting, and other ‘sciences’ which
initially seemed infallible and are now
clearly quite fallible—but I can’t say that’s
necessarily the case for body-worn cam-
eras,” he said. “They’ve given us a fuller
picture of the police interactions at the
time and the witness interactions at the
time. In the past, police have shaded ev-
idence to comport with the narrative
they want to portray. They can’t do it
when it’s on video.”
There have also, however, been sen-
sational instances of police using the new
technology to dissemble. In 2014, in Mar-
ion County, Florida, officers chased a
suspect into a parking lot; the footage
from their body cameras showed officers
attempting to subdue the man, shout-
ing, “Stop resisting!” as they kicked and
punched him in the head. Later, footage
from a fixed-point camera on a nearby
building became available. In it, the man
runs into the parking lot and lies down
prone on the pavement, awaiting arrest.
Officers arrive and attack him, while per-
forming for their cameras the lines that
would seem to justify their behavior. (Four
of the deputies involved later pleaded
guilty to federal civil-rights charges.)
Even without flagrant dissimulation,
body-camera footage is often highly con-
tentious. Michael White said, “The tech-
nology is the easy part. The human use
of the technology really is making things
very complex.” Policies on how and when
cameras should be used, and how and
when and by whom footage can be ac-
cessed, vary widely from region to re-
gion. Jay Stanley, who researches tech-
nology for the American Civil Liberties
Union, said that the value of a body cam-
era to support democracy depends on
those details. “When is it activated?
When is it turned off? How vigorously
are those rules enforced? What happens
to the video footage, how long is it re-
tained, is it released to the public?” he
said. “These are the questions that shape
the nature of the technology and decide
whether it just furthers the police state.”
Increasingly, civil-liberties groups fear
that body cameras will do more to am-
plify police officers’ power than to re-
strain their behavior. Black Lives Mat-
ter activists view body-camera programs
with suspicion, arguing that communi-
ties of color need better educational and
employment opportunities, environmen-
tal justice, and adequate housing, rather
than souped-up robo-cops. They also
argue that video has been ineffectual:
many times, the public has watched the
police abuse and kill black men without
facing conviction. Melina Abdullah, a
professor of Pan-African studies at Cal
State Los Angeles, who is active in Black
Lives Matter, told me, “Video surveil-
lance, including body cameras, are being
used to bolster police claims, to hide what
police are doing, and engage in what we
call the double murder of our people.
They kill the body and use the footage
to increase accusations around the char-
acter of the person they just killed.” In
her view, police use video as a weapon:
a black man shown in a liquor store in
a rough neighborhood becomes a sus-
pect in the public mind. Video gener-
ated by civilians, on the other hand, she
sees as a potential check on abuses. She
stops to record with her cell phone al-
most every time she witnesses a law-
enforcement interaction with a civilian.
The Los Angeles Police Department
piloted a camera program in late 2013.
After Ferguson, Chief Charlie Beck an-
nounced that all seven thousand of the
department’s street officers would get
them, the country’s first deployment on
that scale. Initially, officers were reluc-
tant to accept cameras, for fear of being
scrutinized by their superiors or by a
public unaccustomed to the realities of
policing. But Craig Lally, the president
of the Los Angeles Police Protective
League, the union that represents the
department’s rank and file, told me that
many members had come around. “It’s
a game-changer,” he said. “We get a lot
of false complaints against police officers
for various reasons. Some of them are
excessive force. Some of them are what
we call mouth beefs—that the officer
swore at a person.” The policy in L.A.,
which requires that officers review video
before submitting a report, in order to
make the two cohere, allows an officer
to leave out any impropriety that wasn’t
caught on tape. It also eliminates in-
consistencies between the notes, writ-
ten immediately after an incident, and
the video—the kind of discrepancy that
can prove invaluable to a defense.
“I’m sorry, but a singularity inside the apartment
is hardly the co-op’s responsibility.”
• •
In March, the Los Angeles Police
Commission, a powerful civilian board
that guides the L.A.P.D.’s policies, an-
nounced a new approach to releasing
video. In cases where an officer fires
a gun, or where a suspect is seriously
injured or killed, the department will
make footage public within forty-five
days, long before a full investigation is
complete. The first release took place at
the end of June. In the video, made by
Axon body cameras, officers respond to
a 911 call about a prowler in South Los
Angeles who is wandering around with
a brick in his hand.
As the video begins, a wide-angle
lens captures a quiet street lined with
neat stucco houses. A man in long shorts
stands alone in the street, wary, swaying
gently like a boxer before the bell rings,
as music from an ice-cream truck sounds
discordantly. “Vives por aquí ? You live
around here?” an officer asks. “You O.K.,
man? People are concerned for you, man.”
The man does not answer; in the sev-
enteen minutes of the video—edited
from a two-hour incident—he never an-
swers. “We’re asking if you’re O.K. You
going to answer me, dude, or what?” He
keeps walking, a little forward, a little
back, a man on a slow yo-yo. “Hey, get
out of the street, man. You gotta get out
of the street, bud.” He picks up a metal
dustpan. “Drop the weapon,” the officers
tell him. When he doesn’t, they warn
him, then fire beanbags from a rifle. Still,
he won’t do a thing they say.
He goes over to the lawn of one of
the houses and picks a white flower,
wagging it in the direction of the
officers. Then he huffs something from
a can, which is identified, in a voice-
over, as automotive fluid. At some point,
the mental-evaluation unit is called, but
it’s busy elsewhere; the officers must
make an arrest. Again they issue a warn-
ing, and then hit the man with a Taser.
As he goes down, they swarm and cuff
him—“Stop resisting! Stop resisting!”;
“Relax, relax”—and not long after that
he begins to have trouble breathing, is
taken to the hospital, and dies.
his past spring, Axon bought VieVu,
T its closest competitor. The acquisi-
tion, pragmatic for business, was also per-
sonally satisfying. Steve Ward, the founder
of VieVu, a former Seattle SWAT officer,
had been an employee at Taser and a
close friend of Rick Smith’s. In 2007, Ward
left the company to launch a line of body
cameras for police, setting up his busi-
ness in Seattle. Taser sued him, claiming
that he had stolen proprietary information
about a product in development. The suit
was settled, and Ward eventually sold his
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 41

• •
company, but VieVu’s achievements still
rankled. In 2016, officials in Phoenix
recommended VieVu for a $3.6-million
contract, pending a city-council vote;
that day, Smith invited the mayor to
coffee, and the vote was postponed. Taser,
which had been disqualified from com-
peting due to inappropriate contacts
with officials, was given another chance.
VieVu sued, saying that Taser had ille-
gally interfered with its contract; Taser
countersued, saying that VieVu was
falsely advertising its cameras’ capabili-
ties. “We fight hard to win every deal,”
Smith told me. “Phoenix being our home
town, there was probably more focus.
You don’t want a competitor winning
the major city in your back yard.”
As irksome as the Phoenix situation
was, it was worse when VieVu, in 2016,
won the bid for the New York Police
Department. News of the deal, poten-
tially worth a quarter of a billion dollars
over fifteen years, drove Taser’s stock
down fourteen per cent and Smith into
high gear. According to Politico, Taser,
in an effort to thwart the agreement,
hired a lobbyist to spread anxiety among
the black clergy in New York about the
effectiveness of VieVu cameras and
petitioned the public advocate, in what
Mayor Bill de Blasio described as a smear
42 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
campaign; it also offered to give New
York a thousand free Axon cameras. (The
department declined.) When Smith talks
about the conflict now, it’s as if he were
describing a minor disagreement about
a neighborhood zoning issue. “We got
pretty engaged,” he says. “It’s the only
time we’ve been that aggressive about
questioning the outcome of the process.
There was some negative energy around
that.” But, he said, “I would like to have
all that negativity behind us.”
The value of the N.Y.P.D. contract
is more than monetary; the department,
the largest in the country, represents a
critical node in Axon’s nervous system.
“When you’re building a network, it’s
really important to have the biggest agen-
cies on board,” Smith told me. “To not
have the nation’s largest police depart-
ment would have limited the utility of
the network over time.” With New York,
Chicago, L.A., and a majority of the
other largest cities in the country using
Axon’s cameras and data storage, the
company can design the ways that evi-
dence is collected, held, and shared—in
systems that the public can’t opt out of.
In May, a few days after the sale was
announced, Smith went to meet his new
employees at their office, a few miles
from Axon’s Seattle headquarters. He
was wearing a company T-shirt, with
the slogan “Aim Far.” Thirty VieVu em-
ployees, assembled in a conference room,
looked up apprehensively when he
walked in. “Given the relationship, I had
no idea what we’d be walking into,” he
said, chipper. “Everyone we’ve met has
been frickin’ awesome.”
He invited the VieVu team to ask
questions. There was nervous laughter,
then someone raised a hand. “I was
watching an interview you did where it
said that the entire executive staff has to
get Tased. Is that true?” Smith assured
them that it wasn’t required, although,
he said, “in our office we do occasionally
hear a pop and screams.” Then he offered
each of them a free Taser, and said that,
local laws permitting, they would be wel-
come to wear a weapon to work.
When a VieVu employee asked if
Axon had made inroads with the De-
partment of Defense, Smith sighed heav-
ily. “We will,” he said. “We sell the Taser
weapons primarily to military police—
we haven’t effectively made our way into
combat operations yet. I just met with
the guys who run nonlethal weapons
for the military. It was pretty depress-
ing. The military takes this stance that
‘It’s our job to kill people.’ ” For the past
nine months, he said, Axon had been
in discussions with the U.S. Border Pa-
trol. It turned out that VieVu, before
the acquisition, had beat them to it. “We
placed units with the Border Patrol about
a year ago,” an executive said.
ne evening, Axon held an open
O house, inviting potential recruits
to its newly decorated upper floor. At
a catered cocktail hour, employees milled
around wearing T-shirts printed with
“Write Code. Save Lives.” The com-
pany mottoes, which also include “Join
Forces” and “Win Fair,” were written
by a woman who previously worked at
Coach. “We acted like we were saving
the world one handbag at a time,” she
said. “But here we really are changing
lives.” There were trays of Axon-yellow
cupcakes, with the company logo printed
on fondant. Every few minutes, the air
crackled with the sound of electricity.
When Smith got up to speak, he
framed Axon not as a supplier of tactical
paramilitary gear but as an agent of re-
form. “We can complain about what
police are doing, or we can step in and
address it and help solve the problems,”
he said. The good path, he allowed, can
be a bumpy one. “When you’ve read
about our products, it’s not always
glowing reviews, because we’re solving
really ugly, difficult situations that hap-
pen in the dark corners of the world,”
he said. “We brought you here to Jedi-
mind-trick you into joining our mission.”
Bringing in talented engineers is cru-
cial to Smith’s vision. The public-safety
nervous system that he is building runs
on artificial intelligence, software that
can process and analyze an ever-expand-
ing trove of video evidence.The L.A.P.D.
alone has already made some five mil-
lion videos, and adds more than eleven
thousand every day. At the moment,
A.I. is used for redaction, and Axon
technicians at a special facility in Scott-
sdale are using data from police depart-
ments to train the software to detect
and blur license plates and faces.
Facial recognition, which techno-
pessimists see as the advent of the Or-
wellian state, is not far behind. Recently,
Smith assembled an A.I. Ethics Board,
to help steer Axon’s decisions. (His lead
A.I. researcher, recruited from Uber, told
him that he wouldn’t be able to hire the
best engineers without an ethics board.)
Smith told me, “I don’t want to wake
up like the guy Nobel, who spent his
life making things that kill people, and
then, at the end of his life, it’s, like, ‘O.K.,
I have to buy my way out of this.’”
Tracy Ann Kosa, a privacy researcher
and a member of the ethics board, sees
the potential of Axon’s technology to ex-
acerbate power imbalances between the
police and civilians. “The data belong-
ing to the police department—that’s one
of the big philosophical concerns I have,”
she told me. “There are lots of ways to
put controls around access to data, but
the larger issue is that once you release
that into the wild it is up to each de-
partment and each office and each gov-
ernment to figure out how they’re going
to do it. That’s the place where we will
see the explosion of any issues that al-
ready exist in the system, with much big-
ger consequences.” She told me that, at
the first meeting of the board, “We did
discuss this—who are we designing for?
The end customer shouldn’t be law en-
forcement. It’s the larger population.”
She went on, “There’s going to be a lot
of disagreement between the board and
the company, and that’s a good thing.”
Axon employees, like those at other
companies trying to craft a responsible
approach to A.I., talk about the impor-
tance of having a “human in the loop.”
Who that human is matters a great
deal. Regardless of the technology
Smith introduces to police, the way that
officers view their role will determine
how the products function and what
they come to mean.
In June, Axon hosted its annual con-
ference, Accelerate, at a golf resort in
Scottsdale: a lot of scalp, very little body
fat, and never a long line for the ladies’
room. In its third year, Accelerate had
grown to thirteen hundred client cops,
including a few international agencies;
London Metropolitan, which owns
twenty-two thousand Axon body cam-
eras, sent a team.
Smith cruised through the hotel base-
ment, on his way to an “ideation session”
led by an expert from Google. The room
was full of police officers, trying to de-
sign a product to address a need they
had decided on as a group: how to reas-
sert the rule of law. (Other problems that
made it to the whiteboard: “getting older,”
“too much equipment,” “scentless mary
jane.”) The Google expert handed out
materials—rainbow-colored glitter pipe
cleaners, Play-Doh, pompoms, construc-
tion paper—and the officers broke into
teams to try to figure out how to get
back some respect. A sergeant with the
L.A.P.D. said to Smith, “You put a Taser
on every policeman. Why can’t you make
everyone love every policeman? We’re
back to where we started, when every-
one hated us in 1990. We need a hero. A
way to become Superman.”
Smith stopped by a table where a
team had come up with a hands-on way
of reëstablishing authority: a modified
wheelchair for transporting combative
prisoners. A muscle-bound man with a
shaved head explained that the chair
could be loaded, backward, into a po-
lice car, using a system similar to that
on a public bus. The suspect’s arms, legs,
and feet would be bound to the chair,
making it safer for the officer and more
comfortable for the prisoner.
“Now, would this be every police car,
or just one you call for when you have a
bad dude?” Smith asked. It would depend
on the size of the department, the officer
said, adding that combative prisoners
were becoming more and more common.
“Have you seen anything like this?”
Smith asked. The officer had not. “Awe-
some,” Smith said. “That dog could run!”
The next day, Smith appeared on-
stage in a large ballroom, wearing a “Join
Forces” T-shirt. This year, as the com-
pany celebrates its twenty-fifth anniver-
sary, he has outed his covert mission—
making the bullet obsolete—to the
audience that has always meant the most
to him. Within a decade, he told the
crowd, Tasers will outperform handguns
at close range. “We’re going to give you
something so good you’re actually going
to feel more comfortable using it, be-
cause it’ll drop the target faster,” he said.
“And you won’t have to make a life-or-
death decision in the dark when your
adrenaline is pumping.” He said, “I’ve
seen the technology that will get us there.”
Aglow in Axon-yellow light, Smith
introduced the latest array of gadgets
and features. The future, according to
the vision he laid out, would be shaped
by a police monopoly on video. A role
player ran through the crowd, imper-
sonating a perp; the cops were encour-
aged to snap a photo on their iPhones
and upload it to Axon Citizen, a new
offering designed to make bystander
video accessible to the nervous system.
At a signal from Smith, a drone flew in
from stage right, filming the crowd. A
live feed was visible on a large screen at
his back: announcing Axon Air!
Smith argued for an ecosystem of de-
vices and applications—networked,
efficient, and tailored to law-enforcement
needs. “As things become connected, they
become intelligent and powerful,” he said.
“It’s the processing of information, and
there’s nothing more powerful in this
world than nervous systems. It’s what’s
led to all of human progress, our rising
dominance on the planet.” He ended his
remarks on a note of appeal. “We need
your help,” he said. “We can build this
stuff, if you tell us what to build.” 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 43

THE DOOMSDAY INVESTOR
Paul Singer’s hedge fund always wins.
O
n May 18, 2017, Jonathan Bush
was standing at the stern of
his luxury catamaran, the Zen­
yatta, named for a champion Thor­
oughbred racehorse, when he received
a text message from a colleague warning
him not to answer calls from phone num­
bers he didn’t recognize. Bush, the co­
founder and C.E.O. of the health­care
technology company Athenahealth, had
just finished a three­day race with his
company’s sailing team, going from the
Bahamas to Bermuda. Bush is the nephew
of one former President, George H. W.,
and the cousin of another, George W.,
and his professional and personal lives
were intertwined. He socialized with
members of Athena’s staff as if they
were college friends. (“We have a drink­
ing team that has a sailing problem,”
he said, half­jokingly, of the Bermuda
group.) On social media, he docu­
mented nights spent partying with em­
ployees alongside his family visits to
Kennebunkport and his kids’ soccer
games. That day, as the Zenyatta sat in
the Bermuda harbor, Bush’s phone rang.
He answered it.
On the line was a man named Jesse
Cohn, who worked for the hedge fund
Elliott Management. Cohn said that
he was calling as a courtesy, to give Bush
a “heads­up” that Elliott had amassed
a 9.2­per­cent holding in Athenahealth
and was now one of its largest share­
holders. It wasn’t unusual for a major
shareholder to talk with the C.E.O.,
but this interaction, Bush thought, had
a menacing tone. Although he wasn’t
familiar with Elliott Management, an
unsettled feeling came over him.
Bush had co­founded Athenahealth,
a platform that digitizes patient med­
ical records and billing claims for hos­
pitals and health­care providers, in
1999, and he had built it into an en­
terprise with more than a billion dol­
lars in revenue. One of the firm’s mar­
keting taglines was that it freed doctors
44 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
A REPORTER AT LARGE
BY SHEELAH KOLHATKAR
and nurses to spend more time doing
what they loved—practicing medi­
cine—and less time on paperwork.
Athena served more than a hundred
thousand health­care providers.
Cohn told Bush that Athenahealth
was a great business, and that he should
be proud of it. Still, Cohn went on,
there were problems. Athena’s stock
price had recently declined, which he
said was hurting morale and affecting
the company’s ability to recruit em­
ployees. Cohn said that he had spo­
ken with Athena’s other investors, who
were also unhappy. Bush had the im­
pression that Cohn was making his
way through a script, repeating famil­
iar talking points.
Bush was planning to take one of
his daughters to Europe, and he asked
Cohn whether he should cancel the
trip and hurry back to the U.S. Cohn
replied, “No, I’d never ask you to do
that.” Bush told me that Cohn also
said something he found curious: “Don’t
worry, I’ve told my P.R. people to stand
down for now.” (Cohn, who does fol­
low a script, which he has taped next
to his desk, told me that this would
not have been part of the exchange.)
Cohn, Bush soon discovered, was
the thirty­seven­year­old protégé of
Paul Singer, the founder of Elliott Man­
agement and one of the most power­
ful, and most unyielding, investors in
the world. Singer, who is seventy­three,
with a trim white beard and oval spec­
tacles, is deeply involved in everything
Elliott does. The firm has many kinds
of investments, but Singer is best known
as an “activist” investor, using his fund’s
resources—about thirty­five billion dol­
lars—to buy stock in companies in
which it detects weaknesses. Elliott
then pressures the company to make
changes to its business, with the goal
of improving the stock price. Elliott’s
executives say that most of their in­
vestment campaigns proceed without
significant conflict, but a noticeable
number seem to end up mired in drama.
A signature Elliott tactic is the release
of a letter harshly criticizing the tar­
get company’s C.E.O., which is often
followed by the executive’s resignation
or the sale of the company. One of
Singer’s few unsuccessful campaigns,
to block a merger within Samsung,
eventually led to the impeachment and
imprisonment of the South Korean
President after Singer’s opponents be­
came so desperate to fend off his at­
tack that they allegedly began bribing
government officials. From the outside,
it can seem as if Elliott is causing the
drama, but the firm argues that it sim­
ply identifies preëxisting problems and
acts as a check on the system.
Activist investing is controversial:
critics believe that it can force compa­
nies to lay off workers and curtail in­
vestment in new products in favor of
schemes that boost short­term profits,
while proponents view it as a useful
source of pressure on C.E.O.s to reduce
waste and manage their companies more
effectively. In the press, Singer and sim­
ilar investors have been compared to
vultures, wolves, and hyenas. Bloomberg
has called Singer “aggressive, tenacious
and litigious to a fault,” anointing him
“The World’s Most Feared Investor.”
Singer’s ventures have been consis­
tently successful, with average annual
returns of almost fourteen per cent,
making him and his employees enor­
mously wealthy. The mere news that
Elliott has invested in a company often
causes its stock price to go up—creat­
ing even more wealth for Elliott. Singer
has been deploying his riches in Re­
publican politics, where he is one of
the G.O.P.’s top donors and a power­
ful influence on the Party and its Pres­
ident. According to those who know
Singer, in politics, as in business, he is
intent on doing whatever it takes to win.
Bush told me that, when he began
PHOTOGRAPH (MAN): CHRIS RATCLIFFE/BLOOMBERG/GETTY

Singer, through his hedge fund, Elliott Management, has developed a unique, and profitable, brand of adversarial investing.
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTIAN NORTHEAST THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 45
to research Elliott online, the expe-
rience was like “Googling this thing
on your arm and it says, ‘You’re going
to die.’ ” Shortly after Bush’s call with
Cohn ended, Elliott’s stake in Athena
became public, and Bush’s phone
was deluged with messages from
friends and colleagues expressing pan-
icky concern. Some sent pledges of
support; others offered advice. Many
asked him not to tell anyone that they
had been in touch. Bush recalled that
one of Athena’s longtime investors
simply wrote, “They’re going to ask
for your head.”
Gradually, Bush diverted his atten-
tion from running Athena to focus on
repelling, or appeasing, the hedge fund.
He was surprised to learn that an en-
tire industry of crisis-communication
firms, investment banks, corporate-law
firms, and management consultants
had sprung up to defend companies
against investors like Singer. For fees
reaching into millions of dollars, these
advisers would counsel Bush about
ways to keep the stock price up and
what to say, and not say, to Elliott. If
Athena was ultimately broken into
pieces or sold, they would advise on
that, too. Some of these companies
also worked with activist investors;
the whole ecosystem, Bush thought,
“I liked the old you better.”
added little value to the economy.
Still, Bush decided to view Elliott’s
investment as an opportunity for self-
reflection. The hedge fund’s tactics
seemed thuggish, but he had proba-
bly become negligent about address-
ing certain issues. He was a firm be-
liever in the virtues of free-market
capitalism, and, he reasoned, here it
was at work. “Nobody likes to hear
your baby is fat,” he told me. “But
maybe we needed to hear that.” He
was reminded of a scene in “The Poi-
sonwood Bible,” a novel by Barbara
Kingsolver about a missionary family
that moves from Georgia to the Bel-
gian Congo in 1959. The family settles
in a rural village, which is struggling
with a dysentery epidemic until an
army of flesh-eating ants invades and
starts devouring everything in sight.
The villagers—or the ones who are
strong enough—run to the river, where
boats transport them to safety. “A baby
left behind, a dog no one untied—they
just get picked clean, there is nothing
left,” Bush said. “But when they come
back to the village there’s no more dys-
entery. The ants ate everything, even
if there was some collateral damage.
That’s sort of a metaphor for markets.
Sometimes a crisis wipes the slate
clean.” In Bush’s analogy, Paul Singer
and his hedge fund were the ants. All
Bush had to do was make it across the
river in time.
Smacistinger grew up in Tenafly, New Jer-
sey, one of three children of a phar-
father and a homemaker mother.
He graduated from the University of
Rochester with a degree in psychology
in 1966, and from Harvard Law School
three years later. He began his career
trading with his father, but lost most of
their money. Singer still cites those losses
as a reason for his preoccupation with
managing risk. He started Elliott Man-
agement in 1977, after a brief stint in cor-
porate law, with $1.3 million. Singer’s ed-
ucational background—in psychology
and law—has served him well in his
unique, and immensely profitable, brand
of adversarial investing. Elliott has lost
money in only two of its forty-one years
of existence, and one dollar invested in
the fund at its inception would now be
worth a hundred and seventy-nine dol-
lars. In a 2017 interview, Singer was asked
to describe what he wanted the “head-
line” of his life to be. He paused for sev-
eral moments before saying, “He tried to
make a difference. He protected a lot of
people’s capital over a long period of
time. He was steady, reliable.”
Singer never had much interest in
being just a “trader,” buying stock and
waiting for it to go up. He wanted to be
far more interventionist. In the nine-
teen-eighties, several years into the junk-
bond buyout boom, Elliott began focus-
sing on “distressed” investing: purchasing
the debt of companies in financial crisis,
and unable to make their debt payments,
for low rates. To be profitable, this strat-
egy requires patience and significant cap-
ital. It also requires negotiation and, often,
a methodical use of the legal system,
filing suits to obtain payments, or a long
journey through bankruptcy court, where
creditors fight over who gets paid back
first. At a conference in 2016, Singer de-
scribed his approach as “buying a bond
in a company and being in a multi-year
struggle where we say, ‘Our bonds are
senior to yours.’ And they say, ‘No, you’re
not.’ And we go back and forth yelling
about that for a few years.”
Elliott has invested in the distressed
debt of dozens of companies, including
Trans World Airlines, the Euro Tunnel,
Lehman Brothers, and the casino com-
pany Caesars Entertainment, whose
bankruptcy process was referred to in the
Financial Times as one of the “nastiest
corporate brawls in recent memory.”
Singer has excelled in this field in
part because of a canny ability to dis-
cern his opponents’ weaknesses and a
seeming imperviousness to public dis-
approval. He chooses his words with
care and precision, and speaks in a mild,
even voice. “What I came to feel rela-
tively early on in my career is that man-
ual effort—making something happen,
getting on the committee, becoming
part of the process, try to control your
own destiny, not just riding up and down
with the waves of the financial mar-
kets—was actually not only a driver, an
important driver, of value and profitabil-
ity but an important way to control risk,
dig yourself out of holes when you slip
into a ravine,” he has said. “These things
don’t arise out of my desire to fight with
people.” Like many financiers who have
achieved his level of success, Singer sees
himself as more than a skillful player
in the markets; he conducts himself
like a public intellectual whose ideas
on policy—on everything from taxa-
tion to regulation, education, and for-
eign affairs—should be heeded by pol-
iticians and other decision-makers on
both a national and a local level. He is
more than happy to pick a fight.
In 1995, Singer started working with
a trader named Jay Newman, who spe-
cialized in the government—or sover-
eign—debt of developing countries.
The collaboration led to the legal bat-
tle that would publicly define Singer:
his fourteen-year fight with the gov-
ernment of Argentina. Like Singer,
Newman was a lawyer by training, and,
also like Singer, he had no problem
making money using methods that oth-
ers might find distasteful. For many
years, sovereign loans were treated by
banks and other lenders much the way
that subprime mortgages were prior to
2008—as highly desirable, relatively
low-risk investments. But many coun-
tries, particularly poorer ones with frag-
ile economies or corrupt governments,
borrowed far more than they could re-
alistically repay, and, during the nine-
teen-eighties, approximately fifty coun-
tries defaulted or had to restructure
their debt, including Mexico, most of
Latin America, Poland, the Philippines,
Vietnam, and South Africa. In most
cases, the International Monetary Fund
would come in, impose budget cuts and
other austerity measures, and help the
governments renegotiate what they
owed. The countries’ debt holders gen-
erally traded their old bonds for new
ones under reduced terms, which al-
lowed the country to exit default.
Newman saw an opportunity in these
financial crises: purchase the defaulted
debt at a very low price and
then try to negotiate for, or
sue the country for, full re-
payment on the original
terms. An investor who pur-
sued this strategy came to
be known as a “rogue cred-
itor.”The tactic could prove
extremely profitable—as
long as you had the stom-
ach for it. Newman said that
he never sued a country that
couldn’t afford to pay, but critics argue
that rogue creditors interfere with a coun-
try’s ability to return to the financial mar-
kets, exacerbating the poverty and suffer-
ing of its citizens.
Singer hired Newman, initially offer-
ing him thirty thousand dollars a month
and twenty per cent of the profits on
investments he recommended. The Re-
public of Peru had defaulted on its debt
in 1984; in 1996, the government initi-
ated a debt exchange, and more than
ninety per cent of Peruvian debt hold-
ers traded in their old bonds for new
ones, taking a fifty-per-cent discount
on the original value. Singer purchased
eleven million dollars of defaulted Pe-
ruvian bonds, and then began a pro-
tracted legal battle to force the govern-
ment to pay back the full value. In 1998,
after a trial, a federal court found El-
liott to be in violation of the Dicken-
sian-sounding Champerty laws, which
prohibit buying debt with the sole pur-
pose of bringing legal action. Elliott
appealed the case and won. The com-
pany later engaged in an intense lob-
bying campaign to change the Cham-
perty laws in New York State. It also
filed a lawsuit in Brussels, attempting
to prevent Peru from paying interest
on any of its new bonds until it had
paid Elliott. Peru was left with an un-
palatable choice: default, again, on its
new bonds, or pay what it viewed as a
ransom to a New York hedge fund.
Peru finally paid Elliott the original
value of the bonds plus interest, almost
sixty million dollars. The victory set a
precedent that had global implications:
one wealthy foreign investor could po-
tentially determine whether or not a
troubled country would be able to bor-
row money.
Mark Cymrot, a partner at the law
firm BakerHostetler who defended the
Republic of Peru in the Elliott case,
said that Singer exploited
a loophole in the market.
But, he told me, “it’s a
problem with the system.
They are acting within the
system as it exists.” Sover-
eign-debt experts have
long argued that the inter-
national financial system
needs a version of bank-
ruptcy court, where coun-
tries could work out debts
they were no longer able to pay.
Singer had stress-tested his strategy
in Peru, and it had proved successful.
He decided to make a much bigger bet,
buying, according to one analysis, six
hundred million dollars’ worth of Ar-
gentine bonds for about a hundred mil-
lion dollars. A year after Elliott won its
final judgment on the Peruvian bonds,
Argentina defaulted. The country was
experiencing a severe economic depres-
sion. There was widespread unemploy-
ment, and seven out of ten children lived
in poverty. In December of 2001, citi-
zens’ bank accounts were frozen, and vi-
olent protests erupted in the streets. Five
different Presidents cycled in and out
of office within a matter of months; one
had to be airlifted out of the country
for his own safety. In 2003, the social-
ist-leaning populist Néstor Kirchner
was elected. He and his wife, Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner, who succeeded
Néstor in 2007, pledged to fend off for-
eign capitalists. Néstor and his succes-
sors undertook multiple restructurings
of the outstanding bonds, telling bond-
holders that their best hope of getting
repaid was to accept Argentina’s terms.
Eventually, holders of ninety-two per
cent of the debt complied. That left El-
liott and a handful of others as the pri-
mary holdouts. Elliott’s strategy was a
form of the prisoner’s dilemma: if the
company could be patient, and wait as
the other bondholders lost their resolve
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 47
and traded in, the holdout pool would
become smaller, increasing the likeli-
hood that Argentina could actually
afford to pay them in full. One person
involved in the litigation told me that
Singer “did something that nobody had
done quite as well, which was to say,
‘I’m going to buy this debt really cheap,
and I’m willing to hold it forever and
spend a lot of money litigating to get a
possible recovery.’”
The fight played out primarily in
federal court in New York, where El-
liott had sued Argentina for repayment.
On one side of the conflict was a hedge-
fund billionaire who many observers
thought was exploiting poor nations
to make a profit. On the other side
were the Kirchners, who were intrac-
table in their refusal even to consider
negotiating. They were facing mount-
ing corruption allegations in their home
country, and were using Singer and his
demands to generate political support.
The judge in the case, Thomas Griesa,
spent more than a decade presiding
over the litigation, and grew increas-
ingly irritated with both sides as he
aged into his eighties. In one aspect of
the case, someone involved in the lit-
igation told me, Singer was “unbeliev-
ably creative”: his attempts to seize Ar-
gentinean government assets. Most
government assets are protected by sov-
ereign-immunity laws, but Elliott zig-
zagged around the globe, trying to find
local courts that would grant orders for
it to take possession of property as col-
lateral for the country’s unpaid debts.
Elliott tried to seize Argentina’s cen-
tral bank reserves, its pension-fund as-
sets, and a satellite launch slot in Cal-
ifornia. Each time Singer took one of
these seemingly outrageous steps, Ar-
gentina’s lawyers would race to get a
court order to block the seizure. The
seizures gradually began to look like
stunts, but they had the effect of con-
suming resources and infuriating the
Argentines.
The most dramatic moment in the
dispute came in 2012, when Elliott made
international headlines by attempting
to take possession of an Argentine Navy
vessel. The three-hundred-and-thirty-
eight-foot ship, the Fragata Libertad,
was reportedly hosting a hundred and
ten naval cadets from several countries,
sixty-nine members of the Argentine
48 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
WHATEVER ELSE
Whatever else, the little smile on the face of the woman
listening to a music the rest of us can’t hear and a sky at dawn
with a moon all its own. Whatever else, the construction crane
high above us waiting to be told how to do our bidding,
we who bid and bid and bid. Whatever else, the way cook #1
looks with such longing at cook #2. Let’s not be too sad
about how sad we are. I know about the disappearance
of the river dolphins, the sea turtles with tumors.
I know about the way the dead
don’t return no matter how long they take to die
in the back of the police car. I know about the thousand ways our world
betrays itself. Whatever else, my friend, spreading wide his arms,
looks out at the river and says,老吉发布
“After all, what choice did I have?” After all,
I saw the man walking who’d had the stroke, saw the woman
whose body won’t stop shaking. I saw the frog in the tall grass,
boldly telling us who truly matters. I saw the world
proclaim itself an unlit vesper candle while a crow
flew into the tip of it, sleek black match, burning.
—Jim Moore
Navy, and a crew of two hundred and the Republic of the Congo, an impov-
twenty. As the ship settled into the larg- erished nation that had been ravaged
est berth in the Port of Tema, in Ghana, by a civil war in the late nineties. Half
a man appeared onshore wielding an the population still lacked access to clean
order for the ship to be impounded. Ar- drinking water, even though the coun-
gentina’s lawyers rushed to hire the best try was producing two hundred and
Ghanaian lawyer, Ace Ankomah, only sixty thousand barrels of oil a day. As
to discover that he had already been re- part of the campaign to get repayment
tained by Elliott. on its defaulted bonds, Elliott and other
Most of the cadets left the ship, but hedge funds became crusaders against
the Argentine soldiers remained on government corruption; their litigation
board while the two sides bickered in helped expose malfeasance by Congo-
court. At one point, according to some- lese leaders, including the European
one involved in the case, a Ghanaian shopping sprees and the extravagant
policeman arrived with a hydraulic crane New York hotel bills of the President
and announced that he was going to and his family. At the same time, hu-
board the ship. Weapons were drawn, man-rights groups accused the hedge
and he backed down. Eventually, the funds of siphoning money out of the
International Tribunal of the Law of country that could have gone to hospi-
the Sea invalidated Elliott’s court order, tals and schools. “The poor in develop-
and the ship sailed away. Two years later, ing countries are poor because the po-
after failing to reach an agreement with litical and economic systems in their
Elliott before a crucial deadline, Ar- countries have failed them,” Elliott re-
gentina defaulted on its debt once again. sponded at the time.
The country was already in a recession, The Argentina conflict dragged on
but the default likely made things worse, far longer than Singer probably antic-
contributing to layoffs, rising unem- ipated. By 2015, there had been little
ployment, and skyrocketing inflation. progress. He was at risk of suffering an
Average Argentines had difficulty pay- embarrassing public loss when exter-
ing for basic expenses. nal events suddenly unfolded to his ad-
Elliott pursued a similar investment vantage. Kirchner left office and was
strategy in other countries, including replaced by a much more business-
friendly President, a civil engineer
named Mauricio Macri, who made ne-
gotiating with the holdout hedge funds
a priority. (Kirchner was later indicted
on corruption-related charges.) The two
sides began talks in New York on Jan-
uary 13, 2016, but quickly reached an
impasse over several demands, includ-
ing the hedge funds’ insistence that Ar-
gentina sign a nondisclosure agreement.
After the second meeting, Singer, frus-
trated with the lack of headway, sent
an e-mail to Daniel Pollack, an attor-
ney overseeing the negotiations be-
tween the two sides, telling him that
he wanted to meet in person. Pollack
told me, “It quickly became clear to me
that Singer had completely supplanted
his subordinates and he was going to
take over the negotiations.” Before the
meeting, Singer’s personal security de-
tail arrived at Pollack’s office to con-
duct a sweep, checking the exits and
making sure that the premises were se-
cure. The “single most intense demand”
Singer made, Pollack said, was a re-
quest for most-favored-nation status,
which would have required Argentina
to promise that no other bondholder
would ever get a higher payout. Singer
was an “intense and demanding” ne-
gotiator, according to Pollack, but also,
ultimately, a practical one. He dropped
the demand for most-favored-nation
status. “His subordinates were very
much into the details and into the
weeds,” Pollack said, “whereas Singer
was fundamentally concerned with
money and pride.”
Elliott had spent fourteen years on
the legal fight, but in the end it was worth
it. Argentina agreed to pay the company
$2.4 billion, a 1,270-per-cent return on
its initial investment, according to one
analysis. The result sent a strong mes-
sage: Singer always wins.
Ja lotonathan Bush has the tanned, weath-
ered face of someone who spends
of time on the water, with blue
eyes and an asymmetrical smile. He’s
prone to say whatever comes into his
head, alternating between bracing hon-
esty and complete outrageousness.
Growing up, he struggled with dys-
lexia and felt that he wasn’t a strong
enough student to pursue his interest
in medicine. Instead, in 1990, while
still in college, he began working as
an ambulance driver in New Orleans.
In 1997, he started a maternity center
in San Diego with a friend named
Todd Park. The center, which aimed
to make childbirth more cost-effec-
tive and humane for mothers by inte-
grating midwives into the process,
proved not to be financially viable. But
the software that had been developed
to manage patient records and collect
insurance reimbursements became the
basis of Athenahealth. (Park later
served as a chief technology officer in
the Obama Administration.)
Athenahealth now occupies a large,
airy campus that features, in Bush’s
words, “good food, good beer, and en-
trepreneurs.” Bush regarded himself as
an unconventional C.E.O., and he told
me that he had tried to create a culture
reminiscent more of a young tech com-
pany than of a traditional health-care
business. He could be goofy or ribald
at times. He was known to play drink-
ing games shirtless with employees and
investors. He took venture capitalists
for moonlight swims and showed up
at corporate events dressed as pop-cul-
ture figures such as Ali G.
After Elliott’s investment in Athena
became public, Bush began to hear from
other C.E.O.s who had been in the
same situation. Many were deeply em-
bittered. They formed an unofficial sup-
port group, offering Bush their private
cell-phone numbers and expressing
sympathy while unburdening them-
selves of their horror stories. Bush re-
called that one C.E.O., whom he de-
scribed as “tough as nails,” said he feared
that Elliott would publicly release a
compendium of his board’s mistakes
unless he did what the hedge fund
wanted. Another felt that he had been
pressured into putting his company up
for sale even though he didn’t think a
sale was in the best interest of the busi-
ness. Another, Klaus Kleinfeld, the for-
mer C.E.O. of the metal-parts manu-
facturer Arconic, had taken the rare
approach of engaging in a prolonged
public battle with Elliott, which he ul-
timately lost. Jeffrey Immelt, the for-
mer C.E.O. of General Electric, who
had had a nasty tangle with the activ-
ist hedge fund Trian Partners, spoke
of activists most bluntly. Bush para-
phrased Immelt as saying, “They go
around with their false nobility and
their big donations and their wine tast-
ings. And then, in the evenings, they
kill guys and shove rats in their mouths.”
(Immelt denies making the statement.)
Most of Bush’s initial interactions
with Jesse Cohn, who ran activist in-
vestments in the U.S. for Singer, were
cordial. At the end of May, 2017, Bush
travelled to New York for his first
in-person meeting with Cohn. He spent
the morning preparing with his law-
yers, rehearsing possible questions and
responses as if he were practicing for
an interrogation. “The whole thrust
was don’t engage, don’t get argumen-
tative, don’t counter any of the obser-
vations he makes about the company,”
Bush said. “His objective will be to get
as much information as possible out
of the meeting, to learn things they
don’t know. And to test their theses
through your reactions. To find your
soft spots.”
Bush and two Athena employees at-
tended the meeting at the Elliott offices,
in Manhattan, overlooking Central Park.
Cohn, who is trim, with a neat dark
beard reminiscent of Singer’s, listed his
credentials and presented Bush with
thirty-four pages of research and anal-
ysis. According to Bush, Cohn said,
“Don’t believe everything you read about
me—I’m highly collaborative, I’m not
a slasher-and-burner. I don’t want things
to be highly personal.” Cohn denied
saying this, and instead recalled offer-
ing a substantive business analysis, ar-
guing that the company needed to hire
more experienced executives, address
weaknesses with its products and its
sales force, and stop the decline in the
stock price.
Bush had made an effort to encour-
age experimentation at the company,
investing in health-care startups and
constantly launching new products. He
interpreted Cohn’s comments to mean
that there were too many “science proj-
ects, side businesses, and offshoot ideas.”
(In fact, Cohn felt that most of these
projects had been failures.) Cohn
wanted Bush to behave more like other
C.E.O.s, and to cut a hundred million
dollars in costs from the company. Fi-
nally, Cohn said, “We think it’s a re-
markable thing to be a C.E.O. for
twenty years. It’s probably time for you
to take a step back.” Bush had heard
from his advisers that, when Elliott
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 49
wanted a C.E.O. to leave, the hedge
fund would create a Web site that crit-
icized him and would encourage neg-
ative press about him. (Elliott denied
creating such Web sites.) Cohn told
Bush that Elliott wanted to collabo-
rate—at least for now. But the sug-
gested changes had to happen soon.
Later, Cohn met separately with
Athena’s board of directors and pre-
sented a forty-five-page critique of
Bush’s leadership, much of it centered
on his behavior. Cohn highlighted Bush’s
irreverent tone when speaking about
business matters, as well as the heavy
drinking that occurred at company
events. The presentation included anon-
ymous comments from current and for-
mer employees complaining about Bush’s
antics. “This isn’t a frat house, it’s a cor-
poration,” a comment read. One slide
juxtaposed a time line of Athena’s finan-
cial results with images from Bush’s In-
stagram account. Interspersed with drops
in Athena’s stock price were pictures of
Bush sailing to the Bahamas five times
in three months; Athena employees on
a party bus just before the company an-
nounced disappointing earnings; and
Bush wearing a ridiculous costume.
There was nothing sordid, exactly, but
some photographs on the account—
such as one not included in the presen-
tation, which showed Bush at a resort
in the Bahamas looking hungover in
front of a sign that read “Exercise makes
you look better naked, so does Tequila.
Your choice.”—were publicly available
and painted a picture of a less than re-
sponsible C.E.O. (Cohn said that an
investor had initially directed him to
the Instagram account.) At one point,
Cohn told the board that, “while it was
none of his business,” it seemed that
Bush had been “taking a female Athena
employee on his boat.” (Bush acknowl-
edged that the woman had been on the
boat, as a member of the corporate sail-
ing team.) Bush told me that he had
expected Elliott to engage in “charac-
ter assassination,” but hearing that his
personal life was being used as a weapon
against him was upsetting. Cohn, on
the other hand, felt that he had made
a compelling argument that Bush should
no longer be running the company.
Bush had repeatedly been told that
the best defense against an activist
hedge fund was to get Athena’s stock
50 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
price up. He started working to cut a
hundred million dollars in costs from
the company.
lliott has made activist investments
E in around a hundred companies, and,
according to Cohn, the majority of the
campaigns have proceeded smoothly. El-
liott generally researches these busi-
nesses—interviewing customers, com-
petitors, and dozens of former employ-
ees—for months, or even years, before
launching an investment. “Our process
is very similar each time,” Cohn told me.
“We show up, we make operational sug-
gestions, and, in an overwhelming ma-
jority of cases, the company says, ‘O.K.,
that’s thoughtful, we’ll look into that.’
We work collaboratively. We’ve done that
with dozens of companies.” Cohn cited
Elliott’s work with businesses like Cog-
nizant, Citrix, and Akamai as examples
of “wonderful partnerships” that had
made the companies stronger. At Athena,
Cohn said, the situation played out differ-
ently. “We came with recommendations,
we laid them out to the board,” he said.
“They were not particularly interested
in most of the recommendations. It was
a case where we had uniquely limited
traction.” Cohn told me that many of
the arguments he made to Athena were
based on feedback from investors and
employees who were frustrated by Bush’s
lack of seriousness. Cohn was surprised
by the board’s response to his suggestion
that Bush’s habit of socializing with fe-
male employees might be inappropriate.
Instead of promising to look into the
matter, Cohn said, a board member asked
if he had proof of wrongdoing. When
he replied that he didn’t—he had only
heard stories—the conversation moved
on. (An Athenahealth spokesperson said
that the board takes seriously all input
it receives from shareholders.)
Although Cohn insists that most
C.E.O.s welcome Elliott’s involve-
ment, a remarkable number of the ac-
tivist campaigns have become ugly. The
oil-and-gas company Hess, and its
C.E.O., John Hess, have been em-
broiled in an acrimonious struggle with
Elliott off and on since 2013. Elliott
felt that some of Hess’s board mem-
bers had a conflict of interest, and even-
tually pressed for the sale of the com-
pany. Hess attempted to deflect Elliott
by selling parts of the business, includ-
ing the company’s gas stations, and by
buying back stock.
The pressure that Elliott exerts, com-
bined with its fearsome reputation, can
make even benign-sounding statements
seem sinister. In 2012, Elliott made an
investment in Compuware, a software
company based in Detroit. Arbitration
testimony by former Compuware board
members hints at just how negatively
they interpreted some of Elliott’s ac-
tions. During an early meeting, one of
them testified, Cohn presented folders
containing embarrassing personal in-
formation about board members, which
they saw as a threat to publicize the
contents. Cohn allegedly mentioned
the daughter of one board member, and
commented disapprovingly on the
C.E.O.’s vintage Aston Martin, a car
that few people knew he owned. The
company’s co-founder, Peter Karmanos,
accused Elliott of “blackmailing” Com-
puware’s board, and reportedly re-
marked that the fund “can come in, rip
apart the pieces” of a company, and “try
to have a fire sale and maybe make
twenty per cent on their money, and
they look like heroes.”
Cohn told me that Compuware’s ex-
ecutives were “very firmly in that fear
camp.” He was surprised that material
on their professional backgrounds—
which he says was all those folders con-
tained—was “interpreted as a dossier
of threatening personal information,”
and noted that driving an Aston Mar-
tin looked bad for a C.E.O. whose big-
gest customers were Detroit automak-
ers. Compuware was ultimately sold to
a private-equity firm.
In another instance, Elliott took an
8.9-per-cent stake in Telecom Italia
and then became locked in a fight for
control with another major share-
holder, the French media giant Vi-
vendi, and its chairman at the time,
Vincent Bolloré. Elliott’s fight once
again coincided with corruption
charges being filed against an adver-
sary. In April, just days before a share-
holders’ meeting to elect new direc-
tors, Bolloré was taken into police
custody on suspicion of bribing offi-
cials in two African countries. (Bol-
loré has denied any wrongdoing.) At
the meeting, Elliott took control of
two-thirds of the available board seats,
in what Reuters called “a boardroom
coup.” Elliott contended that its in-
vestment had merely helped expose
preëxisting problems.

ome of Singer’s tactics at Elliott have

SSinger
also cropped up in his political life.
supports numerous media out-
lets and research institutes that dissem-
inate his ideas. He is the chairman of
the think tank Manhattan Institute for
Policy Research, which encourages
free-market policies as a means of ad-
dressing domestic-policy issues. It hosts
dozens of fellows, who write op-eds, give
speeches, and publish books. Singer sits
on the board of the magazine Commen-
tary and is also a major financial backer
of the Washington Free Beacon, a con-
servative online news publication edited
by Matthew Continetti, the former opin-
ion editor at The Weekly Standard.
The Beacon has a long-standing and
controversial practice of paying for op-
position research, as it did against Hil-
lary Clinton throughout the 2016 Pres-
idential campaign. Singer was a vocal
opponent of Trump during the Repub-
lican primaries, and, last year, it was re-
vealed that the Beacon had retained the
firm Fusion GPS to conduct research
on Trump during the early months of
the campaign. By May, 2016, when it
had become clear that Trump would be
the Republican nominee, the Beacon
told Fusion to stop its investigation. Fu-
sion was also hired by the Democratic
National Committee, and eventually
compiled the Christopher Steele dos-
sier alleging collusion between the Trump
campaign and the Russian government.
Along with Charles and David Koch
and Robert Mercer, Singer is one of the
largest financial donors to Republican
political causes. During the 2016 elec-
tion cycle, he contributed twenty-four
million dollars. He is described as a
“donor activist,” a reference to his deep
involvement with candidates and cam-
paigns. Operatives who have worked
with Singer told me that he sometimes
jumps on the phone during critical pe-
riods in a campaign to share ideas or an-
alyze plans. Singer famously tried to warn
policymakers about the dangers of ex-
otic mortgage derivatives in 2007, before
the financial crisis. The fact that his warn-
ings weren’t heeded has contributed to
his sense that government leaders and
regulators can’t be trusted to keep the
• •
world safe and prosperous. Recently, those
close to Singer say, he has been express-
ing concern about the possibility of an-
other financial crisis. “He’s somebody
who believes that bad things are going
to happen, and that the people in charge
don’t know anything,” a political opera-
tive who has worked closely with Singer
told me. “And that maxim can be ap-
plied to almost any situation, whether it’s
the economy or politics or government.”
Over the years, Singer has become in-
creasingly politically engaged and sophis-
ticated. He first began donating exten-
sively in politics during the two-thousands,
when he made small contributions to a
variety of causes, including the contro-
versial Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
group, along with the campaigns of such
Republican senators as John McCain
and Tom DeLay. He backed Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s campaign for gover-
nor of California, and Rudy Giuliani’s
Presidential run. In the lead-up to the
2008 election, Singer donated roughly a
hundred and seventy thousand dollars to
advance a ballot measure that would have
changed the way Electoral College votes
were distributed in California, which
some argued would have increased the
likelihood of Giuliani’s winning the state.
Singer was heavily involved in Mitt
Romney’s 2012 Presidential run, both as
a donor and as a shaper of policy. He has
had a long and close relationship with
Speaker Paul Ryan, whom he reportedly
approached about a Presidential bid be-
fore Ryan became Romney’s Vice-Pres-
idential running mate. During the Re-
publican Convention in Tampa, Florida,
Singer sponsored policy discussions with
such prominent Republicans as Condo-
leezza Rice, Karl Rove, and Scott Walker.
After President Obama was reëlected,
Singer and like-minded donors from the
financial industry, many of whom had
poured millions into Romney’s losing
campaign, pledged to be more strategic
in the future. Singer formed a donor net-
work, called the American Opportunity
Alliance, which includes wealthy Wall
Street executives and hedge-fund mo-
guls who coördinate political spending.
“I think it’s important for informed cit-
izens to try to give assistance,” Singer
said, in April, of his political involve-
ment. “We have less parochial interests
in the things we talk to policymakers
about than most folks.”
In 2015, the announcement of Sing-
er’s support for a Republican candidate
in the primary was a closely watched
news event. His selection of the Florida
senator Marco Rubio created a much
needed sense of momentum for Rubio’s
campaign. Singer displayed characteristic
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 51
pragmatism in his argument that Rubio
was best positioned to defeat Clinton.
“For a guy who’s in the hedge-fund busi-
ness, he’s the least hedged person,” an
adviser who works with Singer told me.
“Paul doesn’t play both sides. He knows
what he believes.”
Mike Lofgren, a longtime Republi-
can congressional staffer who’s now a
critic of the Party, told me that Singer’s
conservative politics can be simplified
to two issues. “Taxes and regulations,
on the one hand,” he said. “And Israel
on the other.” People who work with
Singer say that his views are more nu-
anced. He advocated for increased reg-
ulation of the financial sector after the
financial crisis, and has been critical of
the decision to keep interest rates low,
which, he argues, has encouraged specu-
lative investments on Wall Street.
Singer is often compared to the Las
Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson,
another major Republican donor, be-
cause of their shared support of Israel;
both billionaires reportedly backed the
push to withdraw from the Iran nuclear
deal. Singer far outstrips Adelson, how-
ever, in his ability to raise money—he
can generate millions for a candidate by
hosting a single lunch. “He’s probably
one of the most effective, if not the most
effective, fund-raiser,” a former Rubio
campaign official told me. “He is cer-
tainly more politically astute on the me-
chanics of running a campaign than
ninety-nine per cent of donors out there.”
The campaign official added that Singer
approaches campaigns much the way he
does investments: “He wants it to be a
successful business that makes money.
He wants a pathway to victory.”
Singer was instrumental in the cam-
paign to legalize gay marriage. One of
his sons is gay, and got married in Mas-
sachusetts in 2009, which Singer spoke
about at a fund-raiser in 2010. “Good
and honorable men and women who
do not hate gay people oppose gay mar-
riage, and it would be foolish of us to
pretend that such a large social change
would not elicit some opposition,” he
said. “I believe that, a generation from
now, gay marriage will be seen as a pro-
foundly traditionalizing act.” Some po-
litical observers believe that Singer’s
support of the issue has helped insulate
him from the criticism levelled at other
major conservative donors.
52 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
In spite of Singer’s early differences
with Trump, many policies enacted under
the current Administration have aligned
with Singer’s interests, including cor-
porate tax cuts, the shrinking of gov-
ernmental agencies, and the aggressive
elimination of regulations, particularly
in the financial industry. Singer contrib-
uted a million dollars to Trump’s Inau-
guration, and the two have met at the
White House, at Trump’s request. In
February of 2017, Trump rushed out to
the podium in the East Room for a press
briefing. “Paul Singer has just left,” he
announced. “As you know, Paul was very
much involved with the anti-Trump, or,
as they say, ‘Never Trump.’ And Paul
just left, and he’s given us his total sup-
port. And it’s all about unification.”
Singer has remained politically active
during the Trump Presidency, donating
to the Republican National Committee,
as well as to individual Republican con-
gressional candidates. He was a supporter
of Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Su-
preme Court and has made significant
contributions to groups, such as the Fed-
eralist Society, that helped propel Gor-
such to the top of Trump’s list of nom-
inees. The former Rubio campaign
official told me that Singer’s tactics re-
minded him of the incremental, but re-
lentless, campaign of the pro-life move-
ment, which has been successful in
shifting opinion and policy on the issue
rightward even as the country, over-all,
becomes more liberal. “That’s very sim-
ilar to the approach that Paul takes in
moving the country in the direction he
wants it to go,” the campaign official told
me. “He says, ‘I may not agree with ev-
erything, but this is the guy who’s most
like me who can win.’”
uring the summer of 2017, as Bush
D tried to focus on improving profits
at Athenahealth, he noticed a new fol-
lower on his Instagram account. The
follower’s profile consisted of random
photographs of attractive women, with
closeups of cleavage and other body
parts. The account, which had no iden-
tifying information, appeared to be fake,
and had also started following Bush’s
brother, Billy, and Bush’s live-in girl-
friend, Fay Rotenberg. Toward the end
of the summer, Rotenberg received a
direct message from the account that
read “Do you know where your man is?”
Attached were photographs of Bush
walking through the Boston Common
with another woman. “It was really
creepy,” Rotenberg told me.
She showed the photographs to Bush
as soon as she got home that day, and
he recognized the woman as a friend
with whom he had once been roman-
tically involved. There was nothing sa-
lacious in the images—the two were
strolling through a public park. Bush
had no idea who had sent the photo-
graphs, and he had no evidence that
Elliott was behind them. But they
heightened his feeling of paranoia. (El-
liott denies obtaining or sending the
photographs.)
A few months later, in November of
2017, Cohn invited Bush to meet for
dinner. Bush had announced a plan to
sell a conference center that the com-
pany owned, as well as one of Athena’s
two corporate jets. The company was
in the process of closing offices in San
Francisco and Princeton, and laying off
nine per cent of its employees, around
four hundred people. Bush had con-
vinced himself that the whole problem
of Elliott might go away.
Elliott had recently raised five billion
dollars in twenty-four hours, and had
increased its private-equity investments,
taking over companies and running them.
Singer and his colleagues were sensitive
about their reputation among critics as
investors who cared only about short-
term profits. Last year, Singer even wrote
a rare defense, published in the Wall
Street Journal, titled “Efficient Markets
Need Guys Like Me,” in which he ar-
gued that his firm played a valuable role
by pressing corporations to “maximize
value” for their shareholders, which he
said benefitted everyone.
Bush recalled that at the dinner Cohn
seemed to regret his earlier, more hos-
tile behavior, saying things like “I made
misjudgments,” and “I’ve never seen a
founder act so well.” Cohn, however, re-
members telling Bush that his attempts
to fix the company on his own weren’t
working, and that it would be easier to
make changes if the company went pri-
vate. Elliott, as it turned out, was inter-
ested in buying Athena outright. Cohn
explained that in this scenario Bush could
remain active in the company, although
he would no longer be the C.E.O.
Bush was shocked by the suggestion,
which seemed, to him, to be an invita- said that they were working on behalf one, since the divorce was finalized more
tion to collaborate in shortchanging the of Arconic investors, and asked the than ten years ago. It seemed strange to
other Athena shareholders so that El- neighbors such questions as whether Bush that the details of his divorce would
liott could buy the company for less Kleinfeld ever had loud parties. suddenly be relevant to readers of a news-
than it might be worth as a public com- Norbert Essing, Kleinfeld’s press con- paper in the U.K.
pany. He told Cohn that he wouldn’t sultant, said, “Elliott is the ugly face of Bush found the article, published on
go along with the plan. “My sense was America.” He’s not alone in his assess- May 26th, devastating. “Bush confessed
that it was another tool,” Bush told me. ment: the chairman of the German in- to ‘numerous physical altercations’ with
“He tried the hammer, next he tried the dustrial conglomerate Thyssenkrupp re- ex-wife,” it read. “He ‘repeatedly slammed
velvet glove. Maybe next it’s napalm.” cently characterized the company’s his closed fist into her sternum . . . just
In May, Bush received a text message actions against it as “psycho-terror.” inches from their baby.’” The allegations
from Cohn, informing him that Elliott Kleinfeld ultimately stepped down after were drawn from an affidavit that Selden
was making a public offer for Athena, sending a retaliatory note to Singer, at- had filed while she was petitioning for
for approximately seven billion dollars, tached to an Adidas soccer ball, hint- temporary custody of the couple’s five
with the intention of taking the com- ing that he might release embarrassing children. As the relationship unravelled,
pany private—a move that would allow information about Singer partying and she and Bush had argued bitterly, and at
Elliott to install new management and performing a rendition of “Singin’ in the times violently. Bush acknowledged the
potentially sell to a competitor. In an Rain” in a public fountain during the episodes; they represented his lowest,
open letter, Elliott wrote, “The fact re- 2006 World Cup in Germany. most shameful moments. He had since
mains that Athenahealth as a public com- This unsettling story was on Bush’s made amends with Selden, and the two
pany has not made the changes neces- mind a few days later when he received had a close relationship, co-parenting
sary to enable it to grow as it should and an urgent call from Athena’s communi- their children and celebrating holidays
to create the kind of value its sharehold- cations department, which had been together as a family. Selden told me that
ers deserve.” contacted by a reporter at the Daily Mail, the incidents occurred during “the most
During the previous seven months, in London. The reporter had somehow trying and difficult time of both of our
the #MeToo movement had catalyzed obtained the documents from Bush’s lives” and, to her mind, were now “water
changes in the business world, includ- 2006 divorce, which included allegations under the bridge.” She said that she felt
ing the resignation or firing of dozens of verbal and physical abuse from Bush’s Elliott was responsible for unearthing
of high-profile men accused of work- first wife, Sarah Selden. The divorce pa- the divorce file and helping to publicize
place misconduct. In the chaotic days pers were public, but accessible only by it. “You want Jonathan out as a C.E.O.
immediately following Elliott’s take- physically visiting a courthouse in Bos- and you can’t find enough on him in the
over offer, several former Athena em- ton and requesting the paper file; they workplace, which is the only thing that
ployees reported that they had been had been sitting there, available to any- should be relevant, so you dig this out—
contacted by a journalist at a national
newspaper, who said that she was in-
vestigating the company culture. When
a member of Athena’s corporate com-
munications team contacted the re-
porter, she said that the article had
been prompted by a number of unso-
licited tips.
When Bush learned about the jour-
nalist’s inquiries, he was reminded of
stories he had heard from other C.E.O.s
targeted by Singer. Klaus Kleinfeld,
the head of Arconic, had had an espe-
cially harrowing experience. In 2016,
Elliott, which was invested in Arconic,
campaigned vigorously to have Klein-
feld removed. Kleinfeld and others
close to him alleged that Elliott had
deployed private investigators to in-
timidate them. In January of 2017, at
the height of the dispute over the com-
pany, Kleinfeld learned that two men
claiming to work for the Berkeley Re-
search Group had been knocking on
his neighbors’ doors in Westchester “Now we’re leaving the hall of stuff we stole from other cultures
County, New York. The investigators and entering the hall of stuff we paid too much for.”

• •
something that had nothing to do with
work, and plaster it all over the tabloids?”
Selden said. “I felt like our family was
used for financial gain, so Elliott could
get a better stock price and restructure
the company the way they wanted to re-
structure it. We were a pawn.” (Elliott
denies providing the documents to the
Daily Mail.)
More articles appeared in the days
that followed. On May 71st, the New
York Post reported that a female Athena
employee had filed a complaint in 2009
accusing Bush of making sexually sug-
gestive remarks at work. The woman
who made the complaint told the paper
that “it was a complicated situation,”
noting that she admired Bush. She
added, “He’s a good man, a good leader,
it’s a great company.” On June 7rd, an
article in Bloomberg reported that Bush
had shown up at a health-care confer-
ence in 2017 dressed as the title charac-
ter of the movie “Talladega Nights: The
Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” a racecar driver,
54 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
and, during the performance, had lewdly
joked that he wanted to “jump down
on” a female staff member. He then
paused and said, “Uh, but obviously that’s
totally inappropriate and would never
happen or be said on a microphone.”
To Bush, the fact that the articles were
published in the midst of Singer’s take-
over attempt didn’t seem coincidental.
Hedge funds, especially activist hedge
funds, are established users of private-
investigation services. Sometimes sim-
ply paying an investigator to go through
publicly available information can yield
valuable leverage in an investment. The
hedge-fund investor Daniel Loeb, of
Third Point, exposed misrepresentations
on the résumé of Scott Thompson, the
C.E.O. of Yahoo, who subsequently re-
signed. But some private-investigation
firms or consultants will do much more
for a well-paying client. “There are thou-
sands of tiny shops out there, run by for-
mer C.I.A. operatives, MI6 guys, former
Mossad people, or people on the fringes,
who bring the tactics that they learned
in the intelligence service to the inves-
tigative and corporate world,” the head
of a boutique investigation firm told me.
“Smaller players who will do whatever
it takes.”
Elliott executives told me that the
firm can’t comment on the door-knock-
ing allegations in the Kleinfeld case. The
company did acknowledge, however, that
it has made changes in its use of out-
side consultants, and that it used to give
greater latitude to third-party firms con-
ducting research on its behalf. Now all
third-party researchers are required to
adhere to strict rules and their actions
must be cleared by Elliott’s legal depart-
ment. The fund said that these new pol-
icies were in place before its investment
in Athena, and it denied conducting sur-
veillance on Bush. It also denied that it
was the source of the media reports.
On June 6th, eleven days after the
first article appeared in the Daily Mail,
Bush resigned. A longtime Athena in-
vestor, who was an advocate of Bush’s,
told me that he believed Elliott was
behind the articles, and said, “Elliott
played extraordinarily dirty, in my opin-
ion, and created a situation that, regard-
less of what the facts were, the board
could never let him stay as C.E.O.” The
investor acknowledged that Bush was
far from perfect, and said that “there is
a role for activists to hold managements
accountable.” But the investor worried
that the focus on the bottom line would
undermine the innovative spirit that had
made Athena successful. “I just felt like
this was a company that should have
been given the right to invest in the fu-
ture,” the investor said.
The idea that companies exist solely
to serve the interests of shareholders—
rather than also to serve workers, cus-
tomers, and the larger community—has
been dominant in the business world in
the past thirty years. As the field of ac-
tivist investing becomes increasingly
crowded, many investors are going be-
yond their original mission of finding
ailing or mismanaged companies and
pushing them to improve. Instead, some
have been targeting larger, financially
prosperous companies, such as Procter &
Gamble, Apple, and PepsiCo. “Now
every company knows that they’re vul-
nerable, and there’s been a wave of fear
that’s taken over the public markets,”
Douglas Chia, the executive director of
the Governance Center at the business-
research group the Conference Board,
told me. Chia recently published a study
questioning whether the increase in ac-
tivist investing and other short-term
pressures is jeopardizing the health of
American businesses. “There are plenty
of companies that were performing fine,
and an activist came in and said, ‘You
have too much cash and we want some
of that cash.’ Or, ‘You’re performing well,
but we think you could perform even
better if we split up the company,’” Chia
said. Often, activists advocate for mea-
sures that drive up the stock price but
can have negative effects in the future,
such as the outsourcing of jobs, the elim-
ination of research and development,
and the borrowing of money to buy back
a company’s own stock.
The wisdom of these tactics has come
under increasing scrutiny. Some of the
most successful businesses to emerge in
recent decades have staved off short-term
pressures, forcing their investors to be pa-
tient with uncertainty and experimen-
tation.The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos,
wrote in an early investor letter that build-
ing something new “requires you to ex-
periment patiently, accept failures, plant
seeds, protect saplings.” After losing money
for years, Amazon is now one of the most
profitable companies in the world. The
founder of the bakery-café chain Panera
Bread, Ron Shaich, recently took his com-
pany private, and has said that he never
could have built Panera if he’d had to con-
tend with the constant demands of pub-
lic shareholders. “How is a company going
to turn into the next Amazon, the next
Apple, if you don’t give them a chance to
let their business thesis develop?” Chia
said. “We’re killing things and not giving
them a chance to grow.”
Over time, this lack of long-term vi-
sion alters the economy—with profound
political implications. Businesses are the
engine of a country’s employment and
wealth creation; when they cater only to
stockholders, expenditures on employees’
behalf, whether for raises, job training, or
new facilities, come to be seen as a poor
use of funds. Eventually, this can result
in fewer secure jobs, widening inequality,
and political polarization. “You can’t have
a stable democracy that has not seen any
increase in wages for the vast majority of
working people for over thirty years, while
there’s a tremendous increase in compen-
sation and earnings for a small percent-
age of the country,” Martin Lipton, a
founding partner of Wachtell, Lipton,
Rosen & Katz, who has spent decades
working with companies targeted by cor-
porate raiders, told me. “That is destruc-
tive of democracy. It breeds populism.”
week after Bush left Athena, I met
A him for dinner at his home in Bos-
ton. He was padding around, barefoot
and unshaved, dressed in cargo pants and
a T-shirt. He looked weary. I’d called a
few days earlier to ask when he would
be available. He’d replied, “I happen to
be free for every single hour for the rest
of my fucking life.” We sat on a patio
rimmed with flowers in his back yard.
Soccer nets lay strewn across the lawn.
Bush spoke about his last day in the office,
when he had sobbed during his final ad-
dress to Athena’s employees. He had also
written a farewell letter. “I believe that
working for something larger than your-
self is the greatest thing a human can do.
A family, a cause, a company, a coun-
try—these things give shape and pur-
pose to an otherwise mechanical and
brief human existence,” the letter read.
“The downside about things that are
larger than ourselves, of course, is that we
who have the privilege of serving them
ourselves are fungible. It is the funda-
mental definition. You can’t have the grace
of the one without the other.” Athena
was likely to be imminently sold, either
to Elliott or to another bidder. Many of
Bush’s former employees, anxious about
the future, were looking for other jobs.
Bush told me that he planned to use
his free time to learn to fly a seaplane,
and to attend more of his kids’ sports
matches. Still, it was clear that he had
been deeply hurt by the battle with El-
liott. “It felt . . . dirty,” he said. He told
me that he missed being at the company
and regretted rushing to make layoffs
and other changes in an attempt to pla-
cate Singer’s fund. “I tried to find the
things that had merit and do the hell out
of them,” he said. “But to do it in reac-
tion in that way—on our heels, in a panic,
to do it in fear of them and what they’ll
say—is no way to build a company.”
We moved into the dining room,
where Bush’s housekeeper served a stew
of fresh Ipswich clams and pesto. When
I asked why he thought people were so
afraid of Elliott that they rarely pushed
back against the fund’s demands, Bush
said, “I think I’m a case study.” He poured
himself a glass of wine. “Can you think
of something that you wouldn’t want to
be the talk of the national media?”
Throughout our conversations, Bush
returned to a theme that consumed him.
He talked about how investors like
Singer—financiers who take the assets
built by others and manipulate them
like puzzle pieces to make money for
themselves—are affecting the country
on a grand scale. A healthy country, he
said, needs economic biodiversity, with
companies of different sizes chasing in-
novation, or embarking on long, hard
projects, without being punished. The
disproportionate power of the Wall
Street investor class, Bush felt, damp-
ened all that, and gradually made the
economy, and most of the people in it,
more fragile.
After dinner, Bush showed me his art
collection, which is displayed through-
out the house. It includes Andrew Wyeth’s
“Independence Day” and an oversized,
vivid portrait by Kehinde Wiley, who re-
cently painted the Smithsonian’s portrait
of President Obama. There were numer-
ous photographs and paintings by Cuban
artists: a framed photograph of Fidel
Castro shortly after the Cuban Revolu-
tion; a picture of a majestic building in
Havana that had once housed a wealthy
family, now in terminal decay. “I’m ob-
sessed with Fidel,” Bush mused. “All he
did was harvest what was already there,
until everyone was starving to death.”
He pointed to a sculptural piece by
the Cuban artist Juan Roberto Diago,
who had fastened together slabs from
old automobiles, representing the way
that people in his native country were
forced to continually repurpose things
in the absence of actual creation. It was,
Bush said, just a “joining of scars. There’s
nothing being built fresh. Things are
just being reshuffled.” 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 55
 PROFILES

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Alex Katz’s life in art.
BY CALVIN TOMKINS

A
lex Katz is on fire. He said so
himself, when I visited his stu-
dio one day this spring. “One
thing after another is coming up,” the
ninety-year-old said, flashing a wide
smile that transformed his usual expres-
sion of slight gloom. His proposal to
place a series of cutout sculptures of his
wife, Ada, on the median of New York’s
Park Avenue had been accepted by the
city, and he had been commissioned to
enhance the interior of a subway sta-
tion. “I told them a couple of little mo-
saics in the subway isn’t going to change
anything, what you need is an environ-
ment—and they went for it,” he said.
Nineteen five-foot-high paintings, trans-
ferred to glass by artisans and embed-
ded in the walls, are now turning the F
train’s Fifty-seventh Street station into
a playground for Katz’s boldly colorful,
high-intensity art. “I wanted the paint-
ings done on porcelain,” Katz told me,
“but the guy said, ‘Porcelain only lasts
twenty-five years. This will last forever.’”
Paintings for several upcoming ex-
hibitions, including a major survey show
at the Lotte Museum, in Seoul, were
stacked against the walls of Katz’s stu-
dio on West Broadway. The most re-
cent were from two new series, which
he referred to as “Calvin Klein Girls”
and “Coca-Cola Girls.” Katz had seen
a video for Calvin Klein underwear while
riding in a taxicab, and it had led to a
dozen or so very large oil paintings of
nubile young women (and a few of young
men) in skimpy black underwear. The
backgrounds are uniformly dark blue,
but the paintings are bathed in light,
which emanates from suavely painted
areas of bare skin. The Coca-Cola girls
are in white one-piece bathing suits, Katz next to a portrait of his wife, Ada. Since they met, in the fall of 1957, Katz has
56 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
painted Ada more than two hundred times. “She’s a classic American beauty,” he says. “She’s also a European beauty.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GILLIAN LAUB
against red backgrounds. “That’s Coca-
Cola red, from the company’s outdoor
signs in the fifties,” Katz explained. “You
know, the blond girl in the red con-
vertible, laughing with unlimited hap-
piness. It’s a romance image, and for me
it has to do with Rembrandt’s ‘The Po-
lish Rider.’ I could never understand
that painting, but my mother and Frank
O’Hara both flipped over it, so I real-
ized I was missing something. They saw
it as a romantic figure, riding from the
Black Sea to the Baltic.”
Katz is on easy terms with art his-
tory, all the way back to Thutmose’s ex-
quisite portrait bust of Queen Nefertiti,
circa 1340 B.C., which he’s visited in the
Neues Museum, in Berlin. He cites
Thutmose as one of his favorite artists,
right up there with Goya, Manet, and
Matisse. In the nineteen-fifties, when
most of the serious art being done was
abstract, Katz outraged scores of artists
and formalist critics by inventing new
ways to paint the human figure. He has
always had his own direction, which has
not been the direction of mainstream
art in any of the last seven decades. In
a Katz painting, style—the way it’s
painted—is the primary element. His
confident, crisply articulated technique
makes us see the world the way he sees
it, clear and up close, with all but the
most essential details pared away. Even
today, Katz’s style is too stripped down
for some people, who think it looks easy.
“My work is like pablum to them,” he
tells me. “You know, pretty girls, flow-
ers, you can’t be serious. I refuse to make
sincere art. Sincere art is art that relies
on subject matter to carry it. An hon-
est painter is one who doesn’t paint very
well. And it shows!” (Another wide grin.)
Katz, as critics have increasingly come
to realize, is a very good painter.
“He’s like a master class in painterly
virtues,” the artist David Salle, whose
admiration for Katz’s work has led to a
lasting friendship between them, told
me recently. “A few years ago, I was at
the Art Institute of Chicago, where they
have a painting by Alex from the late
sixties,” he said. “There are two boys in
the foreground, with a view to the bay
stretching out behind them. The com-
position is incredibly complex—with
wonderfully fitted-together shapes, col-
ors, tones, and value patterns, executed
with effortless perfection. It’s an unsung
masterpiece. As I was looking at the
Katz, I turned my head to the left and
saw in the adjacent room a wall of paint-
ings by Gerhard Richter, and Richter’s
just collapsed.” Paintings by Richter sell
for tens of millions of dollars at auction.
Katz’s highest auction price, achieved at
a Sotheby’s sale in May, is nine hundred
and fifty thousand dollars.
Katz hasn’t had a major survey exhi-
bition in New York since the Whitney
Museum gave him a retrospective, in
1986. “I never fit in,” he told me. “I’m not
a Pop artist, and people can’t see my work
as realistic, either.” The Museum of Mod-
ern Art owns several of Katz’s best paint-
ings, but it hasn’t given him a show. Katz’s
dealers—he was with Fischbach for about
ten years, Marlborough for thirty, and
Pace for ten—have had no trouble sell-
ing his work, and in recent years more
and more European museums have been
showing and buying it, but the art world
does not consider him a major contem-
porary artist, in the same league as Jas-
per Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy
Twombly, and others of his generation.
Gavin Brown, whose gallery Katz joined
in 2011, believes he can change that. A
cutting-edge, risk-prone dealer who
launched the careers of Peter Doig, Eliz-
abeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and
Chris Ofili, Brown is determined to get
Katz into the pantheon. “Alex is in top
mental and physical condition, and he’s
applying seventy-five years of eye, hand,
and brain experience to this craft,” Brown
said to me this past spring. “He is also
making astounding paintings—paint-
ings that astound him. I think my job is
to push him up in people’s eyes to the
premier league.”

n one of my visits to his studio,

“Dan, you forgot to put on your out-of-office.”
O Katz let me watch him paint. When
I arrived, at ten o’clock on a Sunday morn-
ing, he was waiting on the sidewalk to
let me in and bring me up in the eleva-
tor. The building has five floors, and
when Katz and Ada moved into it, in 1968,
every floor was occupied illegally by an
artist. (The law against living in indus-
trial lofts was eased for artists in his
neighborhood in 1971.) Ada came out
from the kitchen, calm and smiling and
still beautiful, and considerably smaller
than she appears in the many paintings
her husband has made of her. They live
in the front half of the loft, a large, im-
personal space with high ceilings, not
much furniture, and a few treasures that
he’s bought at auction—a small figure
painting by Marsden Hartley, a wom-
an’s head by Francis Picabia, a de Koo-
ning drawing that’s “better than any-
thing they have at the Modern.”
Katz’s studio is in back, a single big
room bisected at one point by a divid-
ing wall. The blank canvas that he was
planning to work on was ten feet high
and fourteen feet wide. Katz, who is
lean, wiry, agile, and flawlessly bald, had
prepared the two colors he was going
to use, black and ultramarine blue, in
aluminum pie plates, with a third plate
for the thinning medium.This was going
to be a night painting, he explained, a
landscape, something he had glimpsed
through the rear window of his car when
he was driving in the Pennsylvania coun-
tryside just before nightfall. “It doesn’t
happen very often that you see some-
thing and know you have to paint it,”
he said. He’d made a small sketch that
evening, in oil on Masonite, and later,
in the studio, he did a six-foot-by-eight-
foot warmup painting, which was
propped against a column to the left of
the big canvas.
Moving deliberately, Katz climbed
five steps to the top of a creaky wheeled
platform and started applying ultrama-
rine to the upper-right section of the
canvas, using a housepainter’s six-inch-
wide brush. The paint went on easily, in
smooth, unhurried strokes, back and forth
and diagonally. One of his rules is “no
noodling,” which means no fussy brush-
work. He came down, moved the plat-
form a few feet to the left, and climbed
up again to do the next part. Every now
and then he paused to consult the smaller
sketch, which he had with him on the
platform, or the warmup canvas. He kept
going back over the painted areas, to ad-
just the tone. “I’m not sure the blue is
right,” he said, at one point. “We’ll see
when the black comes into play.” It took
him about half an hour to finish the sky.
Occasionally, between trips up and down
the steps, he paused to wipe up drops of
paint that had fallen beyond the brown
paper he’d laid on the studio’s faded but
immaculate linoleum floor.
When he switched to black, for the
lower half of the painting, he didn’t need
the platform. The black was lustrous,
somewhere between glossy and matte.
He worked upward from the bottom
until the only strip of bare canvas was
a narrow, uneven gap between the two
colors. Still using a big brush, but paint-
ing more slowly, he began to fill in that
space. Barely discernible shapes and
outlines emerged in a few places: tree
branches against the night sky. There
was a sense of movement and distance.
Katz was painting wet into wet, and not
making mistakes.
He stepped away from the canvas,
about ten feet back. “Looks pretty good,”
he said, after a minute or so. He got back
up on the platform and worked for an-
other twenty minutes, making deft
finishing touches with a smaller brush.
An hour and ten minutes after he’d
started, he backed off, took another long
look, and said, “It’s perfect.”
asked Katz whether it was true that
Imoney.
his father used to dive off bridges for
“Not for money—for the hell
of it,” he said. “My father was a he-man.
On our block in Queens, they got up a
petition not to sell houses to Negroes.
Twenty-three families signed it, but my
father wouldn’t sign. ‘First they say that,
and then they ban Jews,’ he said. Some
high-school kids came and threw rocks
at the house, so what does the he-man
do? Call the cops? No. He opened the
door and charged them. He tackled the
biggest guy, the fullback. ‘I roughed him
up a little,’ he told us, which meant he
didn’t hurt him.” Katz’s parents, Isaac
and Sima, had met in Russia before they
emigrated, separately, to New York, Sima
in 1918 and Isaac a few years later. She
was an actress, a star in the Yiddish the-
atre on the Lower East Side—her stage
name was Ella Marion. Isaac worked
for Sima’s brother in the wholesale-coffee
business. He dressed well, rode a mo-
torcycle, and cared about style and high
culture—“an apprentice aristocrat,” as
Katz described him. When he found
out that Sima was living in Brooklyn,
Katz said, “he looked her up and knocked
her up, and that was it.”
Katz was born in 1927. A year later,
the family moved from Brooklyn to
St. Albans, in Queens, a mixed neigh-
borhood of English, Irish, German, and
Italian households with one other Jew-
ish family, across the street. Bernard,
Katz’s younger brother, was born there
in 1932. The boys grew up largely on
their own. “I did whatever I wanted,”
Alex remembers. “If it was wrong, they
didn’t punish me—they just said don’t
do it again.” His mother, who knew six
languages, had him reciting Edgar Allen
Poe when he was four. As a child, he
read a lot—fiction, poetry, the Book of
Knowledge—and he drew all the time.
He covered the stairwell wall with crayon
drawings; his parents were surprised,
but not angry, and the drawings stayed.
When he was in second grade, he
won the top prize in a citywide draw-
ing contest for public-school children.
The principal of his grade school urged
him to go to the High School of Music
and Art, in Manhattan, but Isaac and
Sima didn’t want him travelling that far
on the subway. He went instead to the
Woodrow Wilson Vocational High
School, in Queens, because “you could
do art half the day there.” For the next
three years, he studied industrial design
and learned classical drawing techniques
by copying antique plaster casts. His
ambition was to be a commercial artist.
He played a lot of basketball, made the
track team, and became a very good so-
cial dancer and a snazzy dresser, with
seven zoot suits in his closet.
The year Katz turned sixteen, a truck
ran into his father’s car when it was
stopped at a red light, and killed him.
The two boys were almost completely
on their own after that. “I think Alex
was closer to our father than I was,”
Bernie Katz remembers, but both of
them had been somewhat intimidated
by Isaac. Two weeks before the acci-
dent, Alex had seen an ad for life in-
surance in the back of a comic book,
he recalled, and on an impulse he had
sent in the initial payment (twenty-five
cents) on a policy for his father. “We
got a payout of ten thousand dollars,”
he said. “It was all the money we had
then. My mother said I was born under
a lucky moon.”
Katz joined the Navy at eighteen, to
avoid being drafted. It was 1945, and the
war was nearly over. He shipped out on
a converted luxury liner that went to
Marseilles, then back to North Amer-
ica, through the Panama Canal, and
across the Pacific to Honolulu and Tokyo.
Released from service in 1946, he took
the entrance exam to Cooper Union, the
city’s full-tuition-scholarship school of
art and architecture, and got in easily.
“When he went to Cooper, he had to
get up at 7 a.m. and take a bus and a
subway, and right then I knew he was
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 59
going to make it,” Bernie said. The teach-
ing was doctrinaire modernism—Cub-
ism, Bauhaus design, and the inexora-
ble triumph of abstract art—none of
which impressed Katz. He’d decided to
be a fine artist, but he had no use for the
fixed positions of modernist dogma, and
he was never tempted by abstraction.
The technical side of art, the craft of
painting and drawing, was what appealed
to him. He developed a personal style
that he describes as “very fashionable at
Cooper,” with borrowings from Paul
Klee, Pierre Bonnard, and (especially)
Henri Matisse. “But then I started paint-
ing outdoors, and I just ditched all that.”
What took him outdoors was a
summer scholarship to the Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture, in
Maine, which he attended in the sum-
mer of 1949, right after he graduated.
Jean Cohen, his girlfriend at the time,
an abstract painter and a fellow-stu-
dent at Cooper Union, went too. The
teaching at Skowhegan was more tra-
ditional than at Cooper Union. Stu-
dents went out in trucks every morn-
ing to paint the Maine landscape. Katz
had never done direct painting—look-
ing at something and painting it on the
spot, with no preliminary sketches. “It
was like feeling lust for the first time,”
he wrote in “Invented Symbols,” an in-
formal autobiography that he published
in 2012. He told me, “You’re working
from inside your head, not thinking,
just doing it.” He also discovered Maine
light, which struck him as richer and
darker than the light in Impressionist
paintings. Katz and Cohen got mar-
ried in 1950, and went back to Skow-
hegan that summer. “Jean was very
pretty, and intellectually serious,” Katz
said. “We were married for six years,
but it was more like being roommates.”
In 1954, after spending three summers
in rented houses nearby, Katz, Cohen,
and Cohen’s painter friend Lois Dodd
bought a house together outside the
town of Lincolnville, on the seacoast
near Camden. It came with twenty
acres of land, and cost twelve hundred
dollars. Katz and Cohen were divorced
two years later, and Katz became the
sole owner in 1963. The house has been
his summer home for sixty-four years.
From the time he graduated from
Cooper Union, Katz had known that
he wanted to be a figurative painter. He
60 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
saw no reason there couldn’t be new
forms of representational art that were
as powerful and contemporary as Ab-
stract Expressionism, and he was pretty
sure he could find them. Katz was wildly
competitive. “At Cooper, I went from
someone who was basically incompe-
tent to being the best painter in the
school,” he told me. His idol was Ma-
tisse. “I couldn’t believe a human being
could paint that well,” he said. Katz
wanted to do what sounded deceptively
simple: “To paint what’s in front of you.”
By choosing to represent the world he
knew, Katz said, and to do so in ways
that he was inventing, “I completely
alienated myself from traditional mod-
ern art and from traditional realistic
painting, and also from the avant-garde.”
It took him ten years to find his way.
Living in cheap downtown lofts, sup-
porting himself by working for a frame-
maker three days a week, he experi-
mented with small paintings—New
York street scenes, Maine landscapes,
still-lifes, and figure paintings adapted
from amateur family photographs. He
wanted to paint in an open style, like
Jackson Pollock, with no fixed outlines
or contained forms, “but I didn’t know
how to do it,” he said. “I destroyed a
thousand paintings, just tore them up
and threw them in the fireplace.” In the
mid-fifties, he switched to small cut-
paper collages that were clearly influ-
enced by Matisse’s late work. For a
three-month period in 1957, his self-
confidence faltered. “I kept making
paintings, and they were good, but they
were boring,” he said. “It was the only
time in my life when a thing like that
happened.” What pulled him out of it Katz’s New York studio, on West Broadway,
was deciding to paint what he called
“specific” portraits, recognizable images One of his earliest paintings of her, done
of real people—a decision that coin- soon after they met and now owned by
cided with meeting Ada Del Moro. the Colby College Museum of Art, in
That was in the fall of 1957, at the Maine, is called “Ada in Black Sweater.”
opening of Katz’s two-person show at She stands facing us, arms folded, a dark-
the artist-run Tanager Gallery, on Tenth haired young woman with wide-set dark
Street. “A whole bunch of us went out eyes and a full mouth, against a white
to have coffee afterward,” Katz said. background. Katz has included just
“Ada had a tan, and a great smile, and enough detail to make her recognizable.
she was with this guy who looked like She keeps her distance, self-contained
Robert Taylor—fantastic-looking guy. and inscrutable. They were married in
But he didn’t put her coat on—I did.” February, 1958. “Ours was like an ar-
Katz called the next day, and invited her ranged marriage, because our families
to a Billie Holiday concert. Poised, beau- were so similar,” Katz told me. “We’re
tiful, and highly intelligent, Ada was a Jewish off the boat, and they’re Italian
research biologist at Sloan Kettering. off the boat. On Sunday afternoons,
where his recent work includes a series he calls “Coca-Cola Girls” (on the right), inspired by advertising signs from the fifties.
both families listened to opera on the
radio. No one ever voted for a Repub-
lican. But Ada is only liberal in poli-
tics—aside from that she’s a snob. Ada
never makes a social mistake, but I make
them all the time.”
“Ada gave him a complex human
presence that I don’t think I had seen
before in his work,” Katz’s friend San-
ford Schwartz, the writer and critic,
told me. Katz has painted her more
than two hundred times, and she is the
subject of countless drawings and prints.
When a show called “Alex Katz Paints
Ada” opened at the Jewish Museum,
in 2006, Ada granted a brief and guarded
interview to the Times’ T magazine. “I
was sitting with my hands in my lap,”
she said, “and this guy that I was in-
terested in was looking at my eyes, my
ears, my shoulders. The whole thing
was just very sensual. And I didn’t think
I could handle it. But then it became
just this thing that he did. I was sitting
and he was painting, and that was it.”
I asked Katz what it was about Ada
that made her such an irresistible sub-
ject. “She’s got perfect gestures,” he said.
“And she’s a classic American beauty—
full lips, a short nose, and wide eyes.
She’s also a European beauty. When I
started to paint Ada, I was influenced
by Picasso’s Dora Maar. Dora Maar
had better eyes than Ada, but Ada had
a better neck and shoulders, and a much
better body.”
Ada gave up her scientific career and
stopped working when Vincent, their
only child, was born, in 1960. It is un-
kind but tempting to think that her real
life since then has been on canvas, per-
sonifying every stage in Katz’s long ca-
reer. With “Ada Ada” (1959) and “The
Black Dress”(1960), he introduced paint-
ings with more than one image of the
same subject—two Adas in the first,
and, in the second, six, each one subtly
different, all wearing the same emblem
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 61

“Wait, people! Let’s not rush into a bad deal.”
• •
of New York chic. (Like most of her
clothes at the time, the dress was made
by her mother.) “The Red Smile,” which
sets Ada’s tightly cropped profile and
shoulder-length dark hair against a
background of cadmium red, marks
Katz’s move into much larger paintings;
the canvas is six and a half feet high by
nine and a half feet wide. His main in-
fluences at this point were television
ads, movie closeups, Japanese prints (by
Utamaro, in particular), and billboards.
He had decided that the way to “get
the same velocity as de Kooning” was
to go for flat, simplified images and re-
ally big scale. “There was no figurative
painting with that kind of scale and
muscle,” he told me. “The field was wide
open, and I just stepped in.”
Katz had found a way to paint por-
traits that he described, in a 1961 state-
ment, as “brand-new & terrific.” Ignor-
ing character and mood, he offered the
pure sensation of outward appearance—
not who the people were, but how they
appeared at a specific moment. “I can’t
62 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
think of anything more exciting than
the surface of things,” he later told an
interviewer. He painted everyone this
way, not just Ada, and in the mid-sixties
he started painting groups of people in
social situations. “The Cocktail Party”
shows a gathering of eleven smartly
dressed people (including Ada) in a New
York loft. In “Lawn Party,” thirteen
guests mingle convivially outside a shin-
gled golden-brown country house. The
clothes, the gestures, the hair styles, are
all specific to the era, but the painting’s
immersion in a perpetual now—what
Katz called “quick things passing”—
keeps it from looking dated. Although
Katz was friendly with Fairfield Porter,
Jane Freilicher, and other traditional re-
alists of the period, his work was never
realistic. The faces of his subjects are
smooth and unblemished, almost ge-
neric, and the background details, when
they exist, are minimal. His paint sur-
faces became thinner and smoother in
the nineteen-sixties, with few visible
brush marks (and no noodling). To re-
solve the compositional problems of
people in groups, he moved away from
direct painting. He taught himself the
Renaissance technique of pinning a full-
sized brown-paper “cartoon” to the can-
vas, and forcing (“pouncing”) dry pig-
ment through pinholes to establish the
outlines. He still does this with large
paintings. Katz will use any available
means, including obsolete techniques,
to get brand-new and terrific effects.
There have always been people who
disliked his work. The Times critic Hil-
ton Kramer, despite his frequent praise,
questioned its “emotional vacancy” and
“air of untroubled sociability.” Robert
Hughes, in Time, called Katz the Nor-
man Rockwell of the intelligentsia,
which was odd—the art-world intel-
lectuals who wrote for October and the
academic quarterlies consistently ig-
nored him. Others found the paintings
not just cool but cold, or took issue with
their increasingly monumental size.
Katz’s work had started to get attention
in the late fifties. For a brief period he
felt he was “on the bubble,” as he said,
meaning ahead of just about everyone
else. A 1959 solo show at the Tanager
Gallery, which featured his portraits
with flat backgrounds, had been a finan-
cial failure but a critical success. At the
opening, de Kooning, whom Katz knew
only slightly, came over to tell him that
he liked the paintings. (“He said I
shouldn’t let people knock me out of
my position.”) Rauschenberg and Johns
took him to dinner, and Rauschenberg
posed for a Katz portrait—a double
image of the artist, seated. Katz saw
Rauschenberg and Johns socially a few
times after that. Their work impressed
him, but Katz thought he was a better
artist. “He has this intense drive and
competitiveness,” Vincent Katz, who
grew up to be a poet and a writer, told
me. “He sees what everybody else is
doing, and his goal is to be on top.”
When Pop art made its sensational
début, Katz’s paintings, with their bold
areas of color and closeup aggressive-
ness, seemed at first to be related to it,
but there was no real connection—pop-
ular culture has never been his subject.
Katz was not included in the game-
changing 1962 “New Realists” show at
the Sidney Janis Gallery, or in Henry
Geldzahler’s “New York Painting and
Sculpture” show at the Met, in 1969. Leo
Castelli, who showed Rauschenberg,
Johns, Frank Stella, and several of the
Pop artists, visited Katz’s studio, but didn’t
take him on. When Katz saw Roy
Lichtenstein’s new paintings at the Cas-
telli Gallery, he said to himself, “ ‘Alex,
you’re no longer on the bubble.’ It was
absolutely clear to me.” Lichtenstein’s
comic-strip images and blown-up com-
mercial ads made Pop a household term.
Right behind Pop came minimal art and
conceptual art, and appropriation and
performance and video and the myriad
varieties of postmodernism, none of
which had much, or anything, to do with
the craft-based work that Katz was doing.
“Minimalism was excluding things, but
my work was compression,” he told me
one day. As for conceptual art, it was
“mostly philosophical ideas, and it comes
from universities. A lot of artists don’t
master their craft until they’re thirty-five,
but you can be a first-class conceptual
artist when you’re eighteen.”
Being off the bubble was “a bit of a
shock,” Katz admitted, but it didn’t slow
him down. He had no doubts about
his work, and there were always peo-
ple who believed in him. In the fifties
and later, he had been close to Frank
O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery,
and other New York poets. “They liked
my paintings and I liked their poetry,”
he said. O’Hara reviewed Katz’s work
favorably in ARTnews and elsewhere,
and bought two of his paintings in 1960.
“I think Katz is one of the most inter-
esting painters in America,” O’Hara
wrote. “He has the stubbornness of the
‘great American tradition’ in the dom-
inating face of European influences.”
O’Hara was in Katz’s studio at four
o’clock one morning, telling him what
to do, Katz recalled. “I said, ‘Listen,
Frank, I know how good I am,’ and he
said, ‘Don’t get porky with me. You’re
the one who’s going to have to hang
near Matisse.’” Katz’s career might have
taken a different path if O’Hara, who
became an assistant curator at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art in 1960, hadn’t
died in 1966—he was hit by a beach
buggy one night on Fire Island.
Katz’s real mentor in those days was
Edwin Denby, the poet and dance critic.
“Edwin was like my graduate school,”
Katz said. “Through Edwin, I got in-
volved with modern dance.” Denby and
the filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt are im-
mortalized in one of the cutout-metal
sculptural portraits that Katz started
doing in the late fifties; they sit on fold-
ing chairs in his West Broadway loft,
facing one another, deep in a discus-
sion, so convincing that for a moment
I thought they were real. Denby intro-
duced Katz to the choreographer Paul
Taylor, and for three decades Katz de-
signed sets and costumes for Taylor’s
dance company. They had a falling-out
at one point, over a Katz set design that
Taylor disliked, but they eventually rec-
onciled, and collaborated on one more
dance. Fallings-out are not uncommon
with Katz. He says exactly what he
thinks, on every occasion, and his opin-
ions can be abrasive.
he immense night landscape was
T still on the long wall in Katz’s stu-
dio a week after he painted it. “This one
turned out to be a real winner,” he told
me. “Several people have been in to see
it.” One of them was Richard Arm-
strong, the director of the Guggenheim
Museum. “I could feel the wind com-
ing through it,” Armstrong told me.
“That’s a hard thing to do.” The ultra-
marine night sky and the black foliage
looked more clearly defined this time.
“It’s drying,” Katz explained. “The thing
I’m most proud of is my finish—the
finish on the painting. After three
months, the shine goes away, but the
surface keeps changing. Oil paint moves,
unlike acrylic. In five years, it’s much
richer, and you can see into the black.
It took me years to get to this finish.”
In the days before he started the paint-
ing, he explained, his longtime studio
assistant, the painter Juan Gomez, had
prepared the canvas by applying five
undercoats—three coats of gesso and
two coats of lead white. “And under that
are two coats of rabbit-skin glue on the
canvas,” he said. “The light goes into it,
and comes back out.”
I asked him how often he did a paint-
ing as big as this one. “About once a
year,” he said. There was one in his last
show at Gavin Brown’s, a seven-foot-by-
fourteen-foot landscape called “Field 1,”
with hints of brown foliage in an ex-
panse of pale-yellow paint. (“The one
with nothing in it,” Katz said.) At this
late stage in his career, after a lifetime
of figurative painting, he is engaged in
a strange dance with abstraction. For
the past three years, he’s been painting
shadows on grass—six large versions
were on view earlier this year, in a solo
show at the Richard Gray Gallery, in
Chicago. The shadows are green and
the grass is mostly yellow, and for some
reason that seems just right. “The grass
paintings are really hard,” he told me.
“People liked them, but I didn’t get what
I wanted.” He planned to try again this
summer, in Maine.
atz’s mid-career retrospective at the
K Whitney Museum, in 1986, a selec-
tion of works from three decades, was
widely and favorably reviewed. “The
paintings look easy, the way Fred As-
taire made dancing look easy and Cole
Porter made words and music sound
easy, but don’t let’s be fooled,” John Rus-
sell wrote in the Times. “When it comes
to art that conceals art, Katz is right in
there with those two great exemplars.”
Seeing so much of his work together re-
vealed something else, though: an unex-
pected range of emotion and complex-
ity. Ada, without relinquishing her
sphinxlike self-possession, could be many
different people—a film star in “Blue
Umbrella 2,” a seductress in “Upside
Down Ada,” a chic suburban wife and
mother in “Ada and Vincent in the Car,”
a Valkyrie in “The Red Smile.” Friends
and strangers, children, Katz himself, in
a few searching self-portraits, are play-
ers in a social panorama that runs deeper
than the flat surfaces and primary col-
ors would suggest. “He has made in paint-
ing what John Updike and John Cheever
did in literature—a choral portrait of a
certain America,” the New Museum’s
artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni,
said recently. A vein of humor hovers
beneath the surface, and sometimes
breaks through. In “Moose Horn State
Park,” a fully antlered bull moose turns
to look at us over its right shoulder—“Just
like Betty Grable,” Katz suggests.
In spite of the good reviews, though,
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 63
the Whitney show did little to boost
his reputation or his sales, and the art
world’s tepid reaction made Katz more
competitive than ever. “I wanted to move
to a place in art that was unstable and
terrifying,” he said. After many years of
concentrating on the human figure, he
began painting what he described as
“environmental landscapes”—landscapes
so large that they enveloped the viewer.
(“You could be inside them,” as he put
it.) He also began a series of night paint-
ings—cityscapes, black buildings with
a few lighted windows, and seascapes
and forests, precursors of the one I had
watched him paint, all caught at the
moment before last light fades to black.
Many of Katz’s best paintings capture
the light and the atmosphere of a specific
time of day—none more hauntingly
than his 1982 image of an adolescent
girl, alone, in “Tracy on the Raft at 7:30.”
His night paintings probed the outer
limits of visible light.
Into the nineties and beyond, Katz
found fresh subjects to explore: light
falling through trees, or on fields of flow-
ers; dancers and performers whose per-
sonal style or way of moving caught his
eye. The European market for his work
expanded dramatically in the late eight-
ies. Younger artists, riding a new wave
of figure painting by German and Amer-
ican neo-expressionists (Sigmar Polke,
A. R. Penck, Julian Schnabel, David
Salle), discovered Katz’s work and rec-
ognized him as an ally. As the painter
Jacqueline Humphries wrote to me re-
cently, “I see in Alex’s work so much of
what I love in Manet: immediacy, gran-
deur, plus the keen, urbane and candid
assessment of subject.” Shara Hughes,
an artist who is in her mid-thirties, said,
“He does it right. At first, I thought he
was boring, until I realized how hard it
is to be that simple. Now I look at it all
the time.” I asked Katz if it felt like he
was back on the bubble. “Yeah,” he said.
“I think I bounced twice. Matisse did
that with his late cutouts, but Picasso
didn’t. Listen, one bubble is miraculous.”
A possible excuse for not taking
Katz’s work seriously is that he has such
a good time making it. Recognizing no
taboos, he is free to experiment with
whatever catches his interest. He has
even had a fling with high-end fash-
ion. Eternity only exists in the present
moment, Katz decided, and fashion
64 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
offered a direct line to the now. In the
early nineteen-eighties, he did a num-
ber of paintings of fashion models wear-
ing clothes by Norma Kamali, and this
led, in 1984, to a twenty-two-foot-long
painting called “Eleuthera,” of four fe-
male couples in Kamali bathing suits.
“I wanted to make a composition of
people touching—how different girls
touch each other,” he explained. “They’re
sisters, jocks, lesbians, what have you,
and they all touch differently.” Fashion
and art used to be considered incom-
patible, because fashion was decorative
and art, supposedly, was not. Katz has
no quarrel with decoration; it’s an as-
pect of art, he says, and only suspect
when it becomes the main aspect.
When I asked him if he considered
himself a good decorator, he said, “I’m
fair. I think my paintings are a little too
aggressive to be good decoration.” What
about Warhol’s?, I inquired. “Warhol
is an illustrator, basically,” he replied.
“None of his paintings hold up as paint-
ings. In terms of image-making the guy
is fantastic, and as a decorator he’s up
there with Twombly.” It’s sometimes
difficult to follow Katz’s line of thought,
which moves unpredictably. Jackson
Pollock, he said, “is the epitome of good
decorative painting.” Francis Bacon “is
perfect for a house, but Franz Kline is
not housebroken—too much energy.”
I brought up David Hockney, the Brit-
ish-born figurative innovator whose
career, like Katz’s, has been consistently
outside the mainstream. “Hockney’s
an illustrator, but he learned to paint
in the end,” Katz said. “My hat is off
to him.”
he house in Maine is three miles
T inland from the pleasant coastal
town of Lincolnville. It hasn’t changed
at all—aside from a new electric stove
in the kitchen and modern plumbing—
since Katz, Jean Cohen, and Lois Dodd
pooled their resources to buy it, in 1954.
The rooms are small and cramped, the
ceilings are low. My wife and I drove up
from New York in June. There was no
place to park—the front yard and a small
space across the street were occupied by
Katz’s three automobiles: a 1975 Cadil-
lac Eldorado that his brother Bernie had
sold him, secondhand, in the early nine-
teen-eighties, a dingy Oldsmobile, and
a BMW that was temporarily out of
commission. The Katzes had arrived a
day earlier, by charter plane and taxi. Ada,
who was moving with difficulty because
of a bruised hip, came along as Katz took
us on a short walk through the woods
to his studio. We passed the cottage where
their son, Vincent, and his Brazilian-born
wife, Vivien, stay when they’re there.
(Vincent and Vivien have two children,
twin boys just entering college.) The stu-
dio was built twenty years ago to replace
Katz’s original one, in a beautiful old
barn adjoining the house; the barn wasn’t
big enough for his increasingly large
paintings, and on hot days it was stifling.
Designed to Katz’s specifications by a
Japanese architect, the new studio is a
big, airy room, fifty feet long by thirty
feet wide, with a high ceiling and un-
painted wood beams. Through one win-
dow you can see a freshwater lake where
Katz swims every day. “It’s too small for
motorboats, which is great,” he said.
Ada, who has a way of being there
and not there, went off to sit by herself
on a bench outside. She had made it
clear from the beginning that she did
not want to be interviewed. (“I’m not
part of this,” she said.) “I think some-
times she’s really bored,” Katz admit-
ted. “I’m a little difficult, because I do
what I want to do. I spend most of the
summer painting, and she’s not partic-
ularly social, so a lot of the time she’s
by herself. She reads a lot. When Vin-
cent’s here everything’s O.K., but Vin-
cent isn’t here that much, and I’m not
going to stop painting to entertain her.”
Has she ever complained about that?, I
asked him. “No,” he said. He likes to
tell about the time when, at one of his
openings, a person asked, “Is that the
artist?” and someone else said, “It must
be, he’s standing with Ada.”
Two dozen stretched canvases in var-
ious sizes were lined up against the wall
of the pristine studio, ready for use. The
only painting in the room was propped
on a table against the back wall—a nine-
inch-by-twelve-inch image, dark-green
forms on a yellow background, that held
the eye from across the room. “I had a
real piece of luck this morning,” Katz
said, as we moved toward it. “I was going
swimming, but on the way I saw some-
thing, and decided to go inside and paint
it instead. It’s the thing I’ve been after
for three years. ‘Bingo,’ I said. ‘It looks
like shadows on grass to me.’ I don’t
even know yet if it’ll be horizontal or
vertical, but I got the tonal thing, the
tonal range.” He was going to do three
more small versions on Masonite right
away, he said, before starting a big can-
vas. Katz, who turned ninety-one in
July, keeps in shape with a daily regi-
men of swimming and rigorous exer-
cises. “I used to do two hundred sit-ups,
three hundred pushups, and a hundred
chins,” he said. (His chinning bar was
in the doorway to a small studio kitchen.) “Good boy!”
“I can’t do as many now.” He paints
seven days a week. “I never remember
a time when he wasn’t working,” Vin-
• •
cent told me.
We walked out to the road so that again,” Ada said, resignedly, as we passed Katz’s friends, touch one another with
Katz could show us a house he’d bought a metal cutout portrait of her on the varying degrees of intimacy. This paint-
recently. He’d heard that the owner had lawn. Sharon Corwin, the director, took ing was donated by Paul J. Schupf. A
sold it, but the contract wasn’t signed, us first on a tour of the museum’s mod- private investor who became an avid
so Katz offered fifty per cent more than ern-and-contemporary collection. Many collector of Katz’s work in 1970 or so,
the purchase price, sight unseen, and the of its key works were donated by the Schupf put up half the funding for the
owner agreed. It was one of a number Alex Katz Foundation, which buys works wing that bears his name, and he has
of neighboring properties that Katz has by lesser-known artists and gives them donated several other important paint-
bought, partly to preserve his and Ada’s to museums that promise to keep them ings to it, but he and Katz no longer
privacy, but also because he thinks he on view. Alex does the buying—there speak to each other. (Personal animos-
might eventually turn his land into a is no board of directors—and decides ities—heightened by what Schupf con-
place for young artists to come and work. where the works will go. “Nothing to siders Katz’s insufficient gratitude and
Local real estate is still relatively cheap. MoMA, or places that would just stick overinflated sense of entitlement—ended
“The farming has always been terrible,” them in the closet,” he explained. “I like the friendship.) There were terrific paint-
Katz said. “We live in a rural slum.” to buy from artists who’re having a hard ings from the nineteen-fifties to the
Dinner that night was at the Whale’s time in their twenties, because I remem- present in the wing’s three large spaces.
Tooth, in Lincolnville. The restaurant ber what that meant to my confidence The exhibition struck me as a compel-
overlooks a meagre strip of beach, which as an artist.” Since he lives frugally and ling argument for the great, revelatory
is a good deal less meagre in several Katz doesn’t play the horses, this appears to New York retrospective that Katz wants
paintings. Ada was more animated than be one of his few extravagances. and deserves—and should have while
she’d been earlier. When Katz was going The Katz exhibition, in the Paul J. he’s still around, but probably won’t.
on about his aggressive style in art, she Schupf Wing, changes periodically. The Katz wastes no time in being bitter. “He
said, “I’m going to be very aggressive standout painting for me was “Canoe, ” knows who he is,” Gavin Brown had
and say it’s time to eat.” They’d had their a 1974 image of a faux-birch-bark canoe told me. “As he said the other day, ‘I’m
sixtieth wedding anniversary on Febru- and its watery reflection. The painting alive, and in my studio every day, and
ary 1st. “We almost missed it,” Katz said. is twelve feet long, about as big as a real people buy my paintings. I just want to
The next day, the four of us drove to canoe. The scale, the color, the light, the keep throwing the dice against the wall.’”
the Colby College Museum of Art, in buttery surface, the virtuoso paint han- Before leaving the gallery, my wife
Waterville, which has a wing devoted dling that doesn’t call attention to it- asked Katz to identify a dark-haired
to Katz. The museum owns more than self—everything about it is top-level woman in a group of cutout paintings
nine hundred of his works, including Katz. Another landmark is the thirty- called “Wedding.” “That’s Ada,” he said.
prints and drawings, a great many of foot-long “Pas de Deux,” in which five “But it doesn’t look like Ada!”
them donated by the artist. “There I am male-female couples, most of whom are Katz, with a big grin: “Nothing does.” 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 65
 FICTION

66 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN FINKE

T
he first time Hal read Oliver’s
apology was when it came
down through the company
server to the in-boxes of every em-
ployee at the public-radio station where
they both worked—she for a decade
and Ollie for three.
His words were the usual ones, con-
veying sorrow at the thought of tread-
ing on anyone’s sense of dignity or self-
assurance. The remorse toward his staff
and others he may have injured through
“an excess of blindness.”
It torments me to know I’ve caused pain to
people who held me in esteem. In recent days
I’ve come to recognize that my position in it-
self created a power dynamic that led many
around me to feel silenced, invalidated, or re-
duced in spirit.
The apology struck Hal as both de-
fensive and pandering, suffering, as all
acts of public contrition do, from a con-
fusion over the intended audience. Also,
it sounded nothing like the Oliver Riff
she’d known (the Oliver who’d never
use an idiotic word like “invalidated”)—
first as a slightly too resonant voice she
had tracked and mixed in the studio,
then as a colleague and a confidant, and
finally, for a period of eight months, as
a lover. The second time she read the
apology was the next day, when it was
printed in the morning paper.
Miraculously, Oliver’s accuser re-
mained unnamed in the press, though
practically everyone at the station knew
her to be a twenty-six-year-old podcast
producer named Molly St. Clair. Hal
had met Molly when she was an intern,
two years earlier, assigned to “The Riff ”
as part of her rotation through each of
the station’s sixteen regular shows. At
that time, Hal had not expected to see
much of Molly except through the
soundproof plastic that divided the Tech
Center from the rest of the studio. Rarely
did reporters or producers enter this
grotto of oversized consoles and mod-
ule racks without first catching the eye
of a sound engineer and then being made
to stand at the ragged strip of electrical
tape marking the threshold, before, at
last, getting waved inside. Occasionally,
Hal wondered if such night-club-like
patrolling by the engineers of their turf
was a petulant reaction to their profes-
sion’s declining relevance in a world
where it was now possible to record, mix,
edit, and even master broadcast-quality
audio on a laptop. Still, the union had
fought hard to preserve Hal’s job cate-
gory, and she was used to working her
shift alone, undisturbed. So it was dis-
comfiting to discover Molly standing
beside her one day, holding two paper
cups. “This one’s black and that one’s
soy. They ran out of milk. Sorry.” Molly
scrunched up her face in cute regret.
“I don’t bring beverages in here,” Hal
said. “Could you take those outside?”
“Right. The equipment. Sorry.”
When she returned, Molly pulled up
a chair near Hal’s. “So this is where the
magic happens?”
Hal scanned Molly’s expression for
sarcasm but couldn’t detect any in her
green-flecked eyes and unplucked brows.
Her face was round, pretty in the Mid-
western way of the girls at the local col-
lege, though she was from California.
She wore a short-sleeved floral-print shirt
that looked as though she’d outgrown it.
Molly seemed both determined to
listen to “The Riff ” from Hal’s console
and remarkably interested in Hal’s job
duties, apparently fascinated by her sub-
tlest gestures: her fingers sliding down
the pot on a guest who had become an-
imated and loud; patching in an ISDN
line for a studio hookup. There were long
stretches of time when Hal didn’t do
anything but monitor the board. “So how
are you liking your time here so far?” she
asked Molly, to ease up on the intensity.
“It’s been really fun.”
“What have you enjoyed the most?”
“Oh, all of it—following the report-
ers, listening to the two-ways. Hon-
estly, it’s all been super fun.”
It would not have occurred to Hal
to use the word “fun” to describe her
job, or any job, however rewarding. A
word meant for things without conse-
quence or the possibility of failure.
When Hal got her start, some twenty-
five years earlier, there had been no in-
ternship programs and even a staff job
in radio was a low-rent setup. She’d got
her foothold doing night work for a
call-in show hosted by a Jesuit priest
who, with surprising regularity, wound
up talking his callers out of suicide. In
those days, local radio was still a refuge
for people who violated the rules of po-
lite conversation as a matter of princi-
ple. But over the past decade and a half
Hal had noted a change, a transforma-
tion whereby radio, and public radio
particularly, had become an attractive
career path drawing ambitious people
with family safety nets and almost psy-
chopathically charming personalities.
“I like your summer do,” Molly told
her a few weeks later, on a hot day when
Hal had arrived at work with a buzz cut.
By now Hal was well aware of Molly’s
admiration, both for her status as the
network’s only female sound engineer
and for her anti-beauty uniform of boots
and vintage aviator suits, which proba-
bly signalled to Molly that, like her, Hal
identified in some non-heteronormative
way. At forty-seven, Hal was still as lean-
muscled and narrow-hipped as she’d
been as an art-school dropout trying to
be taken seriously inside the grimy audio
chambers of the radio world. Her cov-
erall attire had the double virtue of mak-
ing her comfortable (the extra crotch
room was essential) and flattering her
elongated limbs. Shortening her name
from Haley-Ann (which she’d always
hated anyway) had a similar advantage.
And if her denim cyborg suits and gelled
hair, which she dyed often, led some
people to assume she was a lesbian, it
was an impression she neither encour-
aged nor dispelled. Only Oliver, who, at
sixty-five, was the oldest person at the
station, assumed nothing of the sort
about her, having lived long enough not
to confuse style with identity.
wo days before the penitential mass
T e-mail, Oliver had been placed on
indefinite leave. The latest rumor was
that another allegation had surfaced. But
this time the seal of anonymity was so
airtight not even Hal could guess who’d
lodged the complaint. She’d wanted to
contact Oliver, but fought the urge to
call or text, not wishing to add to the
pile-on, and also worrying that his cor-
respondence was being monitored by
his wife. Which probably accounted for
the dual pangs of relief and guilt she felt
when Oliver’s number popped up on
her phone while she was grocery shop-
ping at the Saturday farmers’ market.
“Hallie, what’s doing?” His voice
sounded ordinary, if slightly too con-
trolled, as though he’d taken a long breath
before dialling. And when she didn’t
answer right away he said, “Alarmed to
hear from the hunchback?”
Hal set the watercress she was hold-
ing back in its crate. “What happened—
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 67
took you a while to find my number,
Ollie?” Since they’d ended things, he
still occasionally called her up, just to
talk. But it had been some months since
he had.
“I understand if you feel you shouldn’t
be speaking to me. You wouldn’t be
the first.”
“I know how to hang up a phone.”
“That a promise that you won’t?”
Hal considered what to say. “Not
unless you’re about to tell me you’re
calling because you’re on Step Eight.”
When she heard the hearty bark of
his laugh, Hal felt the tension in her
arms and shoulders release. He said he’d
feel better if they spoke in person, and
the following morning, Sunday, they met
at a shoebox-size café in Chinatown.
“Thirty years on the mike and they
escort me out like a shoplifter at Saks,”
Oliver said, a disposable tablecloth be-
tween them. He looked paler than usual,
bleached out. He raked his longish hair
back across his oval forehead, which
tended several degrees northward with-
out going into outright baldness. “They
sent H.R. Stephanie to hover while I
packed up. I said, ‘What do you think
I’ll do—steal the pencil sharpener?’ She
says, ‘It’s policy to keep people from
taking or destroying evidence.’ Evi-
dence? What of? They hadn’t even told
me what that girl claims I did to her.”
This surprised Hal. “What about
that apology?”
“Eric’s advice.” Eric was Oliver’s
lawyer and racquetball partner. “He
said get ahead of the story. Don’t let a
lack of contrition keep the beast going.
The standard assy advice, but what did
I know? I was thinking about the leg-
acy, the show.”
Hal understood this to mean he’d
believed an apology would win him
back his job. “But aren’t you legally en-
titled to an explanation?” she said.
“It’s an embuscade, my dear. Under
the informal complaint process, specific
accusations are not required to be dis-
closed.” His voice took on the minc-
ing drone he used for reciting head-
lines on the air. “And only an accuser
can raise the complaint to the formal
level.” Oliver put his palms out and
grinned maniacally. “Josef K.! You’re
lookin’ at him, baby. And I should be
grateful they told me it was Molly. With
the other one it’s all strictly classified
68 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
like the 9/11 memo.” He looked at Hal
with a sheepish expression, and in a
stomach-churning instant she knew
why he’d taken her here, where no one
knew them.
“Good grief, Oliver. If you thought
it was me, why didn’t you just come
out with it?”
Oliver sat with his head lowered like
a scolded boy. He glanced up at her
but didn’t speak, presumably waiting
for her to confirm or deny.
“I’m a little speechless,” she said,
“that you think what we had was less
than mutual.”
“Of course I didn’t think that, Hal-
lie.” He gazed around the small restau-
rant, then trained his rheumy eyes on
her. “Shit, I don’t know what to think
anymore. I can’t trust my own memo-
ries. But I want you to know that if I
ever did anything or said anything—”
Hal had to cut him off. “You don’t
need to worry about me, Oliver.” She
meant it matter-of-factly, to reassure
him that she wasn’t among the ag-
grieved, but her tone had come out
sounding touchy, sour.
Oliver let himself sit up taller. “So
we’re good?”
“We’re fine.”
t was the second part of the apology
Iprovision
that had irritated Hal the most. The
about power and its alchem-
ical ability to transmute base human
behavior into the gold of institutional
sexism. To construe a misdeed against
one as a crime against half of human-
ity. It reminded her of St. Mary’s, where
she had gone to school until the eighth
grade, when her dad had finally got out
of paying child support by dropping
dead. Made her recall the nuns and
their chalk drawings of the Great Chain
of Being, that ladder of nature with
God at the top, His angels below, then
the Pope and the bishops and the mor-
tal sinners and other bottom-dwellers
like actors, pirates, reptiles, and rocks.
This primeval view of life as a hierar-
chy was what she’d fled by going to art
school, where she was taught that true
creators stood outside society’s assorted
chains. People who thought for them-
selves approached life not hierarchi-
cally but territorially, like ospreys or
rice farmers, tending to their unique
terrain. It wasn’t just her sense of self-
reliance that the new paradigm offended.
The line about a power dynamic only
served to cheapen actual remorse, Hal
thought, made the apology into a box
trick with a trapdoor, the power caveat
an escape hatch out of the basic de-
cencies we owe one another.
As if Oliver had such clout. Even if
he was moderately famous, he was only
part of the machinery of his own show.
When they’d been involved, she’d never
felt that the weight of his celebrity could
alter a single fact about her life. Not that
she hadn’t been moved by it, in her own
way. The first time they’d used his com-
plimentary tickets to see a play his wife
had no interest in attending, then gone
out for a beer, Hal had yakked for close
to an hour about her life, telling Oliver
things she normally kept to herself. For
instance, that her mother had not in-
formed her until she was twenty-four—a
full sixteen years after her father walked
out—that Hal was both adopted and
half Puerto Rican. And when she’d asked
her mother why she hadn’t told her, her
mother said that she didn’t want Hal to
think that her not being her father’s nat-
ural daughter was why he had aban-
doned the family. After that, her mother
said, she’d just forgotten.
Hal did not believe she was actively
trying to entertain Oliver with these sto-
ries, to score another amused, approv-
ing laugh, the way she’d heard his guests
do out of some Pavlovian impulse. But
when he asked her, “And how did you
feel about your mother’s attempt to
hold on to you in this way, not to have
you drift off in search of something
else, the way your father had?,” she stared
at him, stunned. The possibility that
her mother’s evasive looniness could
have had such a noble motive had never
crossed her mind. And maybe any de-
cent therapist (if she’d bothered with
therapy) might have made the same
connection, but spoken by Oliver—
in that James Taylor-y voice rusted
with a hint of the Bronx—the insight
sounded both true and important.
Later, when Hal considered why,
after having no reaction to Oliver for
years, she was suddenly susceptible to
his charms, she thought it was because
he’d been ready to find her interesting
in a way her ex-husband had not. Andy
was a fellow-artist, an Englishman who
thought that American thera-speak was
“a drag,” one of those national habits
which made Hal’s countrymen such
drippy company for the rest of the planet.
“You all build cathedrals to your feel-
ings,” he liked to say. “Castles in the
fucking air.” They’d approached their
marriage in the same way that they ap-
proached their art: not as a quest for
comfort or success but as “a passionate
experiment.” An experiment, as it hap-
pened, underwritten by her day job and
union benefits. Technically, it was Hal’s
affair with a younger friend of Andy’s
that precipitated their divorce, but she
believed that the infidelity was mutual—
that while Andy claimed to loathe the
bollocks of curatorial rationales, he had
proved adept at making meaning of his
past and his demons in a way that
gratified the art dealers and gallery own-
ers who’d courted him. By the time their
divorce was finalized, he was represented
by Marian Goodman and had upcom-
ing shows in London and Miami Beach.
It had never much helped her, Hal
knew, that she was attracted to men who
were both taller than her and excep- “ You’ve got about four books in you, but with any
tional in some patently acknowledge- luck we can shrink those down to essays.”
able way. Ollie’s celebrated talent as a
world-class listener suddenly seemed
like a minor miracle. Hal had adjusted
• •
the sound levels on his interviews count-
less times, listening to him ferry his side the bar, just blocks from where she’d guess as to what Raggedy Ann claims
guests from one self-revelation to an- told him her studio was. His sleepy-lid- I did to her?”
other, but when he trained the beam of ded eyes were crinkled in a grin. She pressed Pause on a scene of a
his attention on her that night she un- “No,” she said. dissolute Philip bent over a letter.
derstood for the first time what people He looked surprised. “No?” “I had the audacity to fondle her
meant when they confessed to her their “No.” ring. Not her hair, not her knee. Her
secret wish to be interviewed by Oliver Ollie shrugged, and their talk moved fucking jewelry!”
Riff. When Oliver got up to wait in line on to other topics. When she recalled “Oliver, where are you?”
at the rest rooms, Hal kept an eye on that moment later, she marvelled at “At home. Deborah’s at the lake
his tall, rangy figure. For a man of his how simple it was to draw the line with house. It was a copy of something I
years he’d kept the weight off. He had him. Make her limits known. Maybe thought I’d seen at the Smithsonian.
the posture of a green bean, which made she was already sensing the direction A Bauhaus design. I asked if I could
it possible to see the continuity with his things were moving and knew she’d get a closer look . . .”
younger self, the lanky wild-eyed trou- need something to hold on to for her- Hal knew the ring he meant. A
badour. Later, when she would encoun- self once it was over. cobalt-tinged chunker with a faux
ter the nearness of that body in her bed, pearl set in the center, held there by
its tealike smells and papyrus skin, and he second time Oliver called her, no visible prongs or bezels, like an ir-
find its embrace no less pleasant than
that of the tattooed Englishman whose
T three days after their Chinatown
breakfast, Hal was in bed watching
idescent clitoris.
“This was when?”
emulsion nudes of her still hung on her “The Crown” on her computer; it was “At lunch. Which, for the record,
walls, Hal would wonder, ironically and one of the free screeners she got in re- was Charlie’s idea. He’d come back
then not, whether a fling with a sexu- turn for her union dues of eight hun- from some executive retreat where they
ally meticulous man in his sixties could dred dollars a year. 9:28 P.M. was not tell you young people today are mean-
indeed be the kind of passionate exper- exactly late, but late enough to ask if ing-driven. They want a mentor, not
iment she was after. it was, which Oliver didn’t. just a boss. Make yourself available.”
“Can I see your paintings?” Ollie had “I finally extracted it from them, Hal. Charlie was their new C.E.O., who
asked when they were on the street out- Got it in writing. Would you hazard a had orchestrated an expensive employee
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 69
buyout so as to avoid the bad press of
layoffs at a public station. Hal doubted
it had taken much arm-twisting to make
Oliver share a meal with a young staffer.
Unquestionably something was being
left out. That something likely being
Oliver’s intention. He’d tested the water.
He’d failed.
“She couldn’t get it off, so she laid
her hand in front of me on the table.
But my eyesight, you know I’m blind.
I picked it up.”
“Her hand, you mean?”
“To look at the ring.”
“And she seemed fine with that?”
“All smiles. Chatted on about the
flea market where she found it. But
they’re all seething, these kids. They
smile and they seethe. They decide later
it’s a problem. She told Charlie and
Petra I was breathing too hard on it.
And now it’s being referred to as ‘the
hand-groping incident.’”
Hal heard herself laugh in shock.
The crime sounded like one a first grad-
er’s teacher might talk about in care-
ful tones at a parent conference.
“Go ahead and check the demograph-
ics of France in 1787,” Oliver resumed,
encouraged. “No worse than ours. The
king must die so that the country can live! ”
He sounded almost triumphant in his
despair. “They can’t impeach that Nazi
in the White House, so . . .”
“What are you saying, that you’re
paying for Adolf Twitler’s sins?”
“I’m saying—as a general rule—when
we pay, it isn’t for our sins. I asked my
youngest, Michael—he’s the only one
speaking to me at the moment. I said,
What are you all so angry about? He
tells me—listen to this—‘The hypoc-
risy of your generation.’ Hypocrisy! That’s
our great crime. My poor father would’ve
had a day. He used to say hypocrisy is
the tribute vice pays to virtue. But these
people, they feel they’re owed something.
They can’t understand how this world
can be such a stinking rotten place and
still insist on turning! They can’t fathom
why we don’t all just die of our moral
disease, kill ourselves and leave it all for
them to make unsullied again.”
hrough her headphones Hal had
T heard his voice go into the un-
seemly high registers only a handful of
times. She felt no satisfaction at Ollie’s
unravelling state, but there was some-
70 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
WHETHER THE GOAT IS A METAPHOR
We go on talking and digging a pit in the earth
to spit-roast kid,
since anyone working in a lively rhythm is not attached
to the story.
In saving her, he saves himself.
It’s getting late.
The story of the boy is that
by drinking water from a hoof he’s turned into a goat.
If we separate magic from life,
we get art. His sister, long story short,
gets thrown into a river with a stone around her neck.
His weeping stirs the neighbors with a silken net
to scoop her out. He turns three somersaults
of joy and lands on two feet as a boy again.
How, in heaven’s name, will dinner be served, and when?
Separate art from life, we get nothing.
We go on talking and digging.
I’ve got a million and ten things to do.
Of the multitude of things, it is emptiness
that’s necessary now, now that you’ve had time
to wash and dress. As a form
of enlightenment, the most unsuspecting guest
is your enemy in armor, or invisible,
who will clap you on the back
when you choke on a bone at the banquet.
—Jane Miller
thing transfixing about hearing the fine said, as if the thought had just come
instrument of that voice quiver like a to her, “why don’t you let me take you
broken spring. And who could say if his out to lunch? Company tab, obviously.”
delirious reasoning completely missed “When?” Hal said, confused.
the mark? Who knew what calculations “Tomorrow?”
tipped resentment into revolution?
A month earlier, before Molly had hey ate at a French pâtisserie eight
come forward with her grievance, Hal
had been soaping her empty lunch con-
T blocks from the office. Not a long
walk, necessarily, but longer than most
tainers in the newsroom kitchenette of the staff would permit themselves
when she’d been spotted by Petra, the to take for lunch. Across the wobbly
new V.P. of programming. pink table Hal sat listening to Petra
“Hal, right?” speak at a coffee-inflected pitch about
Hal froze mid-soap. Petra was a re- the board’s plans for capital improve-
cent hire from CNN, and a rare sight ments, building relationships with do-
beyond the executives’ floor. “That’s nors, new content that sought “greater
so smart,” Petra said, smiling at the engagement”—things that bore no re-
Foodsavers. “I wish I could pack my lation, in other words, to Hal’s own
lunches more often. After I’m done work. “Lots of interesting things com-
packing up the kids’, there’s, like, noth- ing down the pipe,” Petra enthused.
ing left. I end up wasting so much “Down the pike.”
money.” “What?”
“I just like it homemade,” Hal said,
so Petra wouldn’t think it was a mat-
“It’s actually ‘down the pike.’ ” Hal
knew she sounded like a pedant even
ter of indigence. before she closed her mouth. “It’s
“Totally. Absolutely. But hey,” Petra a Britishism: pike, as in a large road.”
 “I did not know that,” Petra said.
Having worked for a year in public
radio, Petra was presumably used to
this kind of nerddom. But Hal couldn’t
help feeling that if Oliver were the
one sitting across the table he’d be
genuinely amused, being a fun-fact
hoarder himself. “That’s why I like
these one-on-ones,” Petra said, lean-
ing in. “I want to know what we could
be doing better.”
Now that Hal sensed the conversa-
tion was not about budgets or layoffs,
she felt comfortable saying, “It’d be
nice to get two more U87s. I’ve made
the request twice.”
Petra jotted this down in her Mole-
skine. “We can look into that, but
are there other ways you feel you
haven’t been heard, by the previous
management?”
“I haven’t had a raise in a while.”
Petra blinked, but didn’t look dis-
mayed. “We’re actually doing a gender-
disparity review of salaries right now.”
“I brought it up with Gal last year,
and he said we were in the red from
the employee buyout.”
“I can’t speak for Gal, but I would
certainly support your asking again. I
did notice, though”—Petra moved a
piece of goat cheese with her fork—
“that two years ago you actually switched
to working the weekly shows, with
fewer hours, so that’s a slightly lower
pay grade.”
“I stayed at my old salary.”
“May I ask why the switch, though?
Was there anything at your previous
job at ‘The Riff ’ that affected your de-
sire to keep working there?”
Hal could feel the color rising all
the way up to her forehead. As far as
she knew, nobody had any suspicions
about her and Oliver. “I worked there
for eight years,” she said. “I felt like
making a change.”
Petra took this in. “We all need a
change from time to time.” She put away
her pad. “When I came on board here,
I made a commitment to supporting
other women. But I’ve learned it’s one
of those things that . . . go both ways.”
Hal stared at her. “Are you asking
other people this, or just me?”
“I can’t really answer that,” Petra
said in a happy, knowing way, as if she’d
been anticipating the question. “But I
wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t
making sure people felt safe and sup-
ported at work.” She put her company
credit card into the bill holder, a painted
papier-mâché box.
ver the next four weeks and up to
O the moment when she read Oli-
ver’s apology, Hal had revisited the con-
versation in her head, each time won-
dering whether Petra had been offering
her free career advice or—and this
seemed more plausible now—some
kind of trade.
Contrary to what most listeners be-
lieved, “The Riff ” did not air precisely
live. There was a lag time, a window
of fifty-five minutes, during which a
limited number of things from the
taped segments could be fixed: the
bleeping out of a curse word or an eth-
nically suspicious slur (“gyp you”), the
truncation of a Tourette’s-like string
of “you know”s which sometimes over-
came the nervous. Editing out Oliver’s
condolences to the author of a mem-
oir about a road trip with his Parkin-
son’s-addled father once he was in-
formed that the father was still quite
alive. His repeated references to “slaves”
and “slave culture” while speaking with
a historian who very obviously kept re-
phrasing his questions so as to refer to
“enslaved people.”
It was up to the young producers to
keep Oliver from making these errors
to begin with, to write out all the proper
references and pronunciations on the
elaborate rundown sheet
that Oliver would sight-
read, like the jazz pianist
he’d been in his youth, some-
times only minutes before
a guest appeared in the stu-
dio. Hal admired this about
him, this genius for impro-
visation, an ear and a mind
that could pick up the tail
of a phrase and swing with
it, almost randomly, until
suddenly you understood that what he
was doing was uncovering some bur-
ied shape, the inner logic of a life or a
career, before retreating and letting the
guest, like a soloist, reveal himself. It
had been a pleasure, for a while, to lend
her talents in some way to his.
But then, about two months after
their affair had ended, Hal discovered
she no longer had the heart for the
job. Tate, the engineer who replaced
her, had his own approach, and Hal
did not think it was her place to in-
struct him, for instance, in how to shave
off a half second before a follow-up to
make Oliver seem quicker on the up-
take, how to reduce his gurgle of awk-
ward laughter when the accuracy of
his knowledge was challenged. In the
two years since she’d left the show, Ol-
iver’s age was showing more on the
air. And though she recognized her
own guilt about it as a form of vanity,
Hal could not help but connect the
beginning of Oliver’s downfall with
her own defection.
hen he called again, Hal was
W in her art studio, cleaning her
brushes. On humid summer evenings,
while it was still light, she could see
the weather out of her tall windows at
its proper Midwestern scale, watch a
storm cell converge and hang above
the city, its pale vapors settling into an
anvil cloud. She rubbed the soapy ends
of the brushes on her palm, ignoring
the phone’s canine persistence. But sev-
eral hours later, on the rainy street, she
managed to convince herself that an-
swering was more endurable than going
through Oliver’s voice mails. She’d never
heard him weep before, and wondered
if he was doing so now as he went on
about how lucky he’d been to have en-
joyed the career he’d had—a great ca-
reer, an exceptional career. For a ner-
vous second Hal thought
he might break into Sina-
tra. Then he asked if Hal
had ever told anyone about
the two of them.
In the downpour, her
voice sounded strange to
her as she shouted into the
phone, “I’m not the sloppy
one, Oliver!” Ducking un-
der an awning, she asked
him if he had forgotten
forking a tomato right off her plate
when the staff had gone out for din-
ner. She’d been mortified. Did he re-
ally think anyone would be impressed
if she flapped her gums about their re-
lationship? Maybe, she said, if he’d been
more discreet, Petra wouldn’t have come
around quizzing her about why she’d
left “The Riff.”
Oliver kept quiet. After she was
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 71
through, his voice was cool when he
said, “When did you say she took you
to lunch?”
Hal hesitated. “I don’t remember.”
“I think you do.”
“It might have been the day you had
that land-mine documentarian on,” she
said. In the ensuing silence, she could
hear him doing the mental math.
“So before Molly?”
“I have to go, Oliver.”
“Wait! Not yet. Listen: when the
transmitters were down after the flood,
it took them five months to fix that
second one.”
Had she heard him right? Had he
finally cracked? “What are we talking
about here?”
“The storms we had five years ago.
Don’t tell me you forgot all about this?”
“You mean the FM transmitter, the
one that was wrecked really bad?”
“Like hell it was! Management did
everything they could to make sure the
work order on it went as slowly as pos-
sible. We could only transmit on the
one frequency, if you recall. Told the
listeners the reason we had to cut their
beloved classical-music program was to
get all the news shows on the air: fulfill
our ‘duty to inform.’ Great for the pledge
drives, too—‘We need your help more
than ever at this pressing time!’”
“I’m fairly sure ‘The Riff ’ was more
popular than classical, Ollie.”
“You know how sensitive some peo-
ple get if we try to take away their
Debussy? They write in threatening to
cancel their subscriptions. Like any-
one needs their twelve bucks a month
when three other shows would love
the slots and have mortgage-lender
sponsors queuing up for the breaks.
But the optics. We got a public man-
date. Can’t just yank a beloved show
off the air.”
“Oliver, I’m agreeing to listen to you,
but not if you keep insisting you had
nothing to do with what happened.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “They’ve
been after me since before the buyout.
Ought to have heard Charlie, that turd:
‘Oliver, this isn’t something we want
to do, it’s something we have to.’ And
all along they’ve been fishing. Petra,
that Iago, going around with her hook
and bait.”
“Or maybe just doing due diligence.”
“Come on. You don’t really believe that.
72 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
It’s stitchwork. Intelligence-gathering.
They come to you weeks before that
little chippie comes up with her story
of how I despoiled her virginal hand?
Might as well use the current while it’s
going for you, eh?”
“You’ll never know what the whole
truth is,” Hal said.
“Oh, sure. But I know how this game
is played. And so do you, or you wouldn’t
have told me.”
al had wanted to put an end to
H the conversation, but she’d also
meant what she said: that no one could
know the full truth. For Molly, who
had probably never encountered any-
thing but support and encouragement
from her parents and professors, some
part of the truth was that she really be-
lieved a well-known and very busy older
person had nothing better to do than
assist her on her path to achievement.
And the truth for Oliver was that a
protégée like Molly might be impressed
enough with his stature and intellect
to tolerate, if not welcome, his warm
breath on her hands. But, besides these
more obvious truths, weren’t there oth-
ers? Another truth, for instance, was
that since Oliver’s last five-year con-
tract had been renewed there’d been
pitches for four new shows, three of
them podcasts. No one knew for cer-
tain how much Oliver earned, but, given
his thirty-year tenure and frequent cit-
ing by donors as a major reason for con-
tributions, his salary was believed to fall
between two hundred and seventy and
three hundred and fifty thousand dol-
lars—budget enough to staff at least
one new program, if not two, with
change left over for musical scoring.
Thanks to the network’s operating
deficits and historic tightfistedness, only
one of the four proposed shows had
been approved, a whizzy economics ex-
plainer titled “Ways & Means,” which
had already logged half a million down-
loads, most of them among the eigh-
teen-to-forty-fives. “Ways & Means”
was, coincidentally, the podcast where
Molly St. Clair, after a stint in the news-
room, had recently been promoted to
full-time producer. An analogous truth
was that, despite Oliver’s durable pop-
ularity among longtime listeners who
still sent in checks and received umbrel-
las, his numbers were slipping. Whether
out of loyalty or technophobic inertia,
the fifty-to-sixty-five-and-overs could
still be counted on as a captive audience
inside their vehicles, while the eighteen-
to-forty-fives refused to be prisoners of
locality and preferred to have their cul-
tural sustenance delivered to their phones
by someone as endearingly neurotic as
they believed themselves to be. Some-
one such as, say, Marc Maron.
What had made her sympathize with
Oliver was the same thing, Hal knew,
that made her out of synch with anyone
who’d been encouraged to see the world
in terms of ever-increasing degrees of
power, instead of lessening degrees of
freedom. Oliver’s tragedy, she thought,
was that he did not know he had lost
his freedom long ago. That if a man
could look at his paycheck and then gaze
out through studio glass at those work-
ing under him and still believe he was
permitted to partake of their jokes, their
gripes and shared coquetry, then some-
thing was seriously not connecting.
When Hal got back to her apart-
ment, she opened her computer and
checked the network schedules. It was
true: even after the second transmitter
had been restored, the classical program-
ming had never fully returned to the air.
What’s more, the threatened apocalypse
of cancelled subscriptions had not ma-
terialized. Likewise, the listener com-
ments from Oliver’s first days off the air
were filled with the predictable clam-
oring. Oliver was referred to, across mul-
tiple threads, as a national treasure. A
reckless decision! The station had shot
itself in the foot and deserved to bleed.
But, as the weeks without Oliver wore
on, some of the commentators had to
admit that Charul, the entertainment
reporter who’d been filling in, was doing
a pretty great job. And, if she lacked Ol-
iver’s depth of knowledge, she made up
for it with a fresh bantering style and
an inquisitiveness that was wonder-filled
instead of all-knowing.
“ I spoke to Eric,” Oliver said when
he called back that evening. “He
says if we draw up a statement that
says you were approached, it could put
the reasons for the termination into
question.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Others might speak up, too. Peo-
ple at the station respect you.”
 “Oliver, seventy per cent of that sta-
tion doesn’t know my name. I could
lose my job.”
“You’re union, they wouldn’t dare
fire you. You’ve had a flawless record
for ten years. Hal, if you won’t say any-
thing, who will?”
“You aren’t ever going back on the
air, Ollie,” she almost shouted. “It’s not
gonna happen, O.K.?”
“You don’t think I know that? I’m
not counting on anything turning
around for me, but this is bigger than
me. What sort of world are we living
in if it’s become easier to burn down a
man’s life than to tell him, ‘Sorry, your
time is up’?”
She could feel his voice rattle in her
chest cavity, like it had the first time
she’d heard it, like something heavy
and bronze sounding the clear note of
her own feelings.
“All right.”
“All right?”
“I’ll give you a statement.”
“Hal—thank you. You’re doing the
honest thing.”
“I have a condition . . .”
“Sure, anything.”
“I want to see Molly’s statement.
You said you had it.”
He paused. “I’ll have to talk to Eric.”
“Just have it ready, all right. I’m put-
ting my livelihood on the line for this.”
“Of course.”
stitutionally painful to Hal. She said
she’d gone off Twitter (“too toxic”) and
Instagram, off of everything, ever since
journalists had started calling her up,
asking if she was “that” Molly. An edi-
tor at a prestigious magazine had pro-
posed that she write a cover story on
the movement, if it included her com-
ing out as Riff ’s accuser. “It’s like some
kind of bidding war for your virginity,”
Molly complained.
Hal was taken aback by her seem-
ing willingness to discuss the expedi-
ency of her victimhood. “That must be
hard,” Hal said, unsure if her tone was
of deep empathy or deep irony.
Molly acknowledged that it was
hard. “And I know there are people
who would, like, own it. Who think
it’s a cop-out that I’m not using my
name. But the part they don’t get is
that’s exactly what I didn’t want to do
in the first place. I didn’t want to talk
to him about my personal life, my pri-
vate life, and he just kept bringing it
up. I don’t see why this should be some
kind of price of entry, you know? To
get anyone to take an interest.”
Hal felt it only fair to return, or
forestall, Molly’s honesty with her own.
“I think you should know, Oliver was
a friend of mine. Is a friend. I’m sure
he would have appreciated hearing
your point of view, if you’d actually,
like, told him.”
Molly blinked at her, possibly recal-
ibrating everything she knew about Hal.
“What was I supposed to do, say,
Please stop talking about your marital
issues with me, Oliver? Please stop ask-
ing me about who I go out with?”
“Maybe the problem,” Hal said,“was
your own politeness . . .”
“I was trying to be professional.
This place is so self-congratulatory
and polite it’s like a fucking coral reef.”
Molly’s voice was starting to sound
shaky and clotted. “You can’t brush
up against a single thing without feel-
ing like the whole structure is going
to fall apart! Tell me again why that’s
my problem.”
he office of Oliver’s lawyer was not
T in a glass-walled high-rise, as she
expected, but in a six-story walkup above
an Italian furniture store. The lawyer,
Eric, might have been Oliver’s age but
seemed younger, in a merino sweater
with a zippered neck, while Oliver had
come in an actual suit and tie.
“Good to see you, Hal,” Oliver said,

Sshe’heher
hadn’t seen much of Molly since
internship on “The Riff,” but
d run into her two weeks back, when
they’d walked out of different eleva-
tors into the lobby at the same time.
Molly looked thinner, her curly hair
pulled back tightly with a bandanna
and the planes of her face shiny with
early-summer sweat. They chatted
about the podcast’s new season. Molly
had been staying past midnight every
night putting the episodes together. In
baggy pants and a man’s button-down,
she looked frumpier than necessary,
Hal thought, though maybe she’d al-
ways looked like this and Hal hadn’t
been paying attention.
“So how’re you doing otherwise?”
Hal finally said, trying to appear con-
cerned, but not too.
“Honestly, I’m just trying to move
on,” Molly said. That Molly could still
confide in her so easily was almost con-
standing up and sitting again. Eric gave
her a firm handshake and said, “We’re
glad you could come,” with the ami-
cable solemnity of a funeral director.
She gave him a nod and a look that
said clearly enough: Let’s get this over
with. Eric gave her a copy of the doc-
ument she’d be signing. “I’ve already
read this,” she said after a glance. She’d
had Oliver e-mail it to her, made the
necessary changes, which Eric obvi-
ously knew. “I’d like to read the other
report now.”
There were four pages, though most
of what constituted the actual accusa-
tion was buried deep in legalistic
ass-covering.
A special committee of the Network Board
had retained a third party to conduct an in-
dependent investigation to determine what
management may or may not have known
about other allegations of this kind.
She read on. Allegations did not
rise to the level of infractions but were
“flags that were raised about question-
able conduct.”
Mr. Riff invited the female staff member
to lunch to discuss her career and future with
the Network.
The staff member stated that only half
the conversation was devoted to professional
topics and the remainder was spent discuss-
ing personal information. The staff member
stated that Mr. Riff repeatedly asked ques-
tions about her life outside work. The em-
ployee later said she was not comfortable with
this line of conversation.
Mr. Riff made occasional comments of a
sexual nature, for instance after the staff mem-
ber complained that her boyfriend frequently
made plans to meet with her, only to cancel at
the last minute because he was still playing
poker with his buddies, a habit she worried was
sliding into addiction. Mr. Riff remarked that
he couldn’t fathom why someone would choose
playing poker over going to bed with the staff
member.
An unnecessary remark, Hal con-
ceded, but also, she thought, not in-
consistent with Oliver’s sense of humor.
It’s not your job to lift anyone’s self-esteem,
she would have said to him if he’d
confided it to her.
Mr. Riff overshared at dinner and held the
employee’s gaze for an extended period.
God help us all if “overshare” was
now a word with enough legitimacy
to be entered into a legal document,
she thought.
74 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
Mr. Riff had expensed various dinners for
which the business purpose appeared ques-
tionable.
This, Hal knew, was the network’s way
of sharpening its knives. Everything
he’d ever charged would now be called
into doubt.
Mr. Riff repeatedly invited the staff mem-
ber to plays and art openings for which the
station received complimentary tickets. The
staff member declined these invitations.
Mr. Riff showed the staff member a silver
bracelet he’d bought on a trip to Peru and
asked her to try it on for him.
Hal felt her pulse speeding up as
she read. She did not remember see-
ing Molly wearing this bracelet, and in
any case would probably not have no-
ticed. But she did remember the vaca-
tion referred to: Oliver’s trip to Peru
with his wife just before Deborah
started chemo. The trip was a respite
before the treatments and a chance for
Ollie and Deborah to give their mar-
riage another run. Hal and Oliver had
decided to end things then, maturely.
He’d sailed off and returned three weeks
later, bearing a gift—a fine pair of tur-
quoise-encrusted leather sandals for
Hal. Her walking shoes.
The staff member said she could not ac-
cept the gift of the bracelet, but Mr. Riff in-
sisted she take it.
Hal let her eyes skid along the surface
of the words while she struggled to
keep the question from showing on
her face. Had Oliver picked up Mol-
ly’s bracelet at the same shop where
he’d got her sandals?
Several days later the staff member tried
to pay Mr. Riff back for the gift, but he laughed
and said it wasn’t worth troubling herself over.
How easily she could picture Oliver
abasing himself before this girl by
talking about that little out-of-the-
way shop, how he’d known the owner
for thirty years since his days as a for-
eign correspondent. In his mind, the
gift would be his way of letting Molly
know how hip to the world he still
was, how connected, despite his years,
how enduringly cool.
The staff member said she felt vulnerable
in these interactions because she lacked ca-
reer experience or journalistic work to lean
back on.
Hal took a long breath. Her eyes
were having trouble focussing on in-
dividual sentences. It was hard, in the
rowdy cascade of her thoughts, to put
a finger on what had been so weird
about the statement on first reading—
not the accusations themselves, which
Hal agreed “did not rise to the level.”
But now, staring at the arrangement
of paragraphs on the white of the page,
she could see what was missing. “Where
are the dates?” she said, looking up.
What appeared as separate inci-
dents in the report had in fact been
laid out as a time line. The dates must
have been all on the left, a column
that could be redacted without draw-
ing notice.
She saw Eric exchange glances with
Oliver.
Why had she assumed that his
lunches with Molly had started after
she and Ollie were through? Not, for
instance, while Molly was still an in-
tern. Her intern.
She had no right to her tawdry cu-
riosity, or to her righteousness. This
she knew.
“Hallie, it wasn’t like that,” she heard
him say faintly from his end of the
table.
Hubris, the nuns had taught her,
was the gateway through which all the
other sins entered the soul.
“It wasn’t like you and me . . .”
She agreed with him about this: it
wasn’t your sins you paid for. All sins
spoke only with the voice of their
mother: pride. Hal was surprised now
to find how much of her upbringing
had stayed with her all along. A man
of his vanity, who could spend the night
with her and feel he had satisfied her.
How could it not make him believe
he was entitled to more? She put the
pen down.
“Hallie, just a second now.”
She knew what it would seem to
him: a scorned woman’s retribution. It
pained her that she cared what he
thought at all, but she could not be
the one to underwrite this vanity. She
heard him speak her name again, but
his voice was small and far off now, as
though she’d already started taking off
her headphones. 
THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
Sana Krasikov reads “Ways and Means.”

What gives “Little Women” its lasting power?
t is doubtful whether any novel has
Ifemale
been more important to America’s
writers than Louisa May Al-
cott’s “Little Women,” the story of the
four March sisters living in genteel
poverty in Massachusetts in the eigh-
teen-sixties. The eldest is Meg, beau-
tiful, maternal, and mild. She is six-
teen when the book opens. Then comes
When a publisher asked Louisa May Alcott to write a “girls’ story,” she wrote about the only girls she knew, her sisters.
ILLUSTRATION BY MAIRA KALMAN
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
LADIES’ CHOICE
BY JOAN ACOCELLA
Meg’s opposite, fifteen-year-old Jo:
bookish and boyish, loud and wild. Jo
writes plays that the girls perform,
with false mustaches and paper swords,
in the parlor. Next comes Beth, thir-
teen: recessive, unswervingly kind, and
doomed to die young. She collects
cast-off dolls—dolls with no arms,
dolls with their stuffing coming out—
and nurses them in her doll hospital.
Finally, there is Amy, who is vain and
selfish but, at twelve, also the baby of
the family, and cute, so everybody loves
her anyway. The girls’ father is away
from home, serving as a chaplain in
the Civil War. Their mother, whom
they call Marmee, is with them, and
the girls are always nuzzling up to her
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 75
chair in order to draw on her bottom-
less fund of loving counsel. Next door
live a rich old man and his orphaned
grandson, Laurie, who, when he is
home from his Swiss boarding school,
lurks behind the curtains to get a look
at what the March sisters are up to.
Jo catches him spying on them, and
befriends him. He soon falls in love
with her.
These characters are not glamorous,
and the events are mostly not of great
moment. We witness one
death, and it is a solemn
matter, but otherwise the
book is pretty much a busi-
ness of how the cat had kit-
tens and somebody went
skating and fell through
the ice. Yet “Little Women,”
published in 1868-69, was a
smash hit. Its first part, in
an initial printing of two
thousand copies, sold out in
two weeks. Then, while the publisher
rushed to produce more copies of that,
he gave Alcott the go-ahead to write
a second, concluding part. It, too, was
promptly grabbed up. Since then, “Lit-
tle Women” has never been out of print.
Unsurprisingly, it has been most pop-
ular with women. “I read ‘Little Women’
a thousand times,” Cynthia Ozick has
written. Many others have recorded
how much the book meant to them:
Nora and Delia Ephron, Barbara King-
solver, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Mary
Gordon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Stephenie
Meyer. As this list shows, the influence
travels from the highbrow to the mid-
dlebrow to the lowbrow. And it ex-
tends far beyond our shores. Doris Les-
sing, Margaret Atwood, and A. S. Byatt
have all paid tribute.
The book’s fans didn’t merely like
it; it gave them a life, they said. Si-
mone de Beauvoir, as a child, used to
make up “Little Women” games that
she played with her sister. Beauvoir
always took the role of Jo. “I was able
to tell myself that I too was like her,”
she recalled. “I too would be superior
and find my place.” Susan Sontag, in
an interview, said she would never
have become a writer without the ex-
ample of Jo March. Ursula Le Guin
said that Alcott’s Jo, “as close as a sis-
ter and as common as grass,” made
writing seem like something even a
76 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
girl could do. Writers also used “Lit-
tle Women” to turn their characters
into writers. In Elena Ferrante’s “My
Brilliant Friend,” the two child hero-
ines have a shared copy of “Little
Women” that finally crumbles from
overuse. One becomes a famous writer,
inspired, in part, by the other’s child-
hood writing.
Long before she wrote “Little
Women,” Alcott (1832-88) swore never
to marry, a decision that was no doubt
rooted in her observa-
tions of her parents’
union. Her father, Bron-
son Alcott (1795-1888),
was an intellectual, or, in
any case, a man who had
thoughts, a member of
New England’s Tran-
scendental Club and a
friend of its other mem-
bers—Emerson,Thoreau.
Bronson saw himself as
a philosopher, but he is remembered
primarily as a pioneer of “progressive
education.” He believed in self-expres-
sion and fresh air rather than times
tables. But the schools and communi-
ties that he established quickly failed.
His most famous project was Fruit-
lands, a utopian community that he
founded with a friend in the town of
Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843. This
was to be a new Eden, one that es-
chewed the sins that got humankind
kicked out of the old one. The com-
munards would till the soil without
exploiting animal labor. Needless to
say, they ate no animals, but they were
vegetarians of a special kind: they ate
only vegetables that grew upward, never
those, like potatoes, which grew down-
ward. They had no contact with alco-
hol, or even with milk. (It belonged to
the cows.) They took only cold baths,
never warm.
Understandably, people did not line
up to join Fruitlands. The community
folded after seven months. And that
stands as a symbol for most of Bron-
son Alcott’s projects. His ideas were
interesting as ideas, but, in action, they
came to little. Nor did he have any
luck translating them into writing.
Even his loyal friend Emerson said
that when Bronson tried to put his
ideas into words he became helpless.
And so Bronson, when he was still in
his forties, basically gave up trying to
make a living. “I have as yet no clear
call to any work beyond myself,” as he
put it. Now and then, he staged a So-
cratic “conversation,” or question-and-
answer session, with an audience, and
occasionally he was paid for this, but
for the most part his household, con-
sisting of his energetic wife, Abba, and
his four daughters, the models for the
March girls, had to fend for them-
selves. Sometimes—did he notice?—
they were grievously poor, resorting
to bread and water for dinner and ac-
cepting charity from relatives and
friends. (Emerson was a steady donor.)
By the time Louisa, the second-old-
est girl, was in her mid-twenties, the
family had moved more than thirty
times. Eventually, Louisa decided that
she might be able to help by writing
stories for the popular press, and she
soon discovered that the stories that
sold most easily were thrillers. Only
in 1950, when an enterprising scholar,
Madeleine B. Stern, published the
first comprehensive biography of Al-
cott, did the world discover that the
author of “Little Women,” with its
kittens and muffins, had once made
a living producing “Pauline’s Passion
and Punishment,” “The Abbot’s Ghost
or Maurice Treherne’s Temptation,”
and similar material, under a pen
name, for various weeklies.
Soon, however, a publisher, Thomas
Niles, sensed something about Louisa.
Or maybe he just saw a market oppor-
tunity. If there were tales written specifi-
cally for boys—adventure tales—why
shouldn’t there also be stories about
girls’ concerns, written for them? Girls
liked reading more than boys did. (This
is still true.) So Niles suggested to Lou-
isa that she write a “girls’ story.” She
thought this was a stupid idea. “Never
liked girls, or knew many, except my
sisters,” she wrote in her journal. But
her family was terribly strapped, so
what she did was write a novel about
the few girls she knew, her sisters, and
her life with them.
ou can get the whole story from
Y a new book, “Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy:
The Story of ‘Little Women’ and Why
It Still Matters” (Norton), by Anne
Boyd Rioux, an English professor at
the University of New Orleans. This
is a sort of collection of “Little Women”
topics: the circumstances that brought
Louisa to write the book and the diffi-
cult family on which the loving March
family is based. It describes the book’s
thunderous success: its hundred-and-
more editions, its translation into fifty-
odd languages (reportedly, it is still the
second most popular book among Jap-
anese girls), its sequels, its spinoffs—
the Hallmark cards, the Madame Al-
exander dolls—and, above all, its
fabulous sales. Rioux can’t give us a
firm count, because in the early days
the book was extensively pirated, and
then it went into the public domain,
but she estimates that ten million cop-
ies have been sold, and that’s not in-
cluding abridged editions. Perhaps wor-
ried about how a “girls’ story” would
fare in the marketplace, the publisher
persuaded Alcott to take a royalty, of
6.6 per cent, rather than a flat fee, which
she might well have preferred. In con-
sequence, the book and its sequels sup-
ported her and her relatives, plus some
of her relatives’ relatives, for the rest
of their lives.
Rioux goes on from the book to the
plays and the movies. The first “Little
Women” play opened in New York, in
1912, and was a hit. It was soon fol-
lowed by two silent movies, in 1917 and
1918. (Both are lost.) Then came the
talkies, starting with George Cukor’s
1933 version, which cast Katharine Hep-
burn, hitherto mainly a stage actress,
as Jo and helped make her a movie star.
Between 1935 and 1950, there were
forty-eight radio dramatizations. To-
ward the end of that run came a sec-
ond famous movie, Mervyn LeRoy’s
1949 version, with June Allyson as Jo,
Elizabeth Taylor as Amy, Janet Leigh
as Meg, and Margaret O’Brien as Beth.
In the past few decades, the most im-
portant version has been Gillian Arm-
strong’s 1994 film, with Winona Ryder
as Jo, Kirsten Dunst as Amy, and, as
Marmee, Susan Sarandon, who had
been enshrined as a feminist icon by
“Thelma and Louise.” Recently, it was
announced that Greta Gerwig, who
had such success last year with “Lady
Bird,” her directorial début, is at work
on a new “Little Women” movie, with
Saoirse Ronan, the star of “Lady Bird,”
in the lead role. Ronan seems made to
be Jo. And those are just the big-screen
versions. By the time Rioux’s book went is a twenty-seven-chapter book being
to press, there had been twelve adap- squeezed into what is usually a movie
tations for American television, and of two to three hours.
plenty more elsewhere. In 1987, there Rioux apparently finished her book
was a forty-eight-episode anime ver- before she could see the most recent
sion in Japan. entry, a three-hour BBC miniseries
The chapter on the adaptations is directed by a newcomer, Vanessa Cas-
a lot of fun. First, it teaches you the will. This version’s Jo—Maya Hawke,
problems that face filmmakers adapt- who had had little acting experience
ing famous novels. In “Little Women” but was blessed with good genes (her
movies, the actors are almost always parents are Uma Thurman and Ethan
too old, because the directors need ex- Hawke)—manages to be Jo-like with-
perienced people to play these inter- out being unsexy. Most moving, be-
esting youngsters. June Allyson was cause the roles are so hard to play, are
thirty-one when she played the fifteen- two other characters. Annes Elwy’s
year-old Jo. Then, partly because the freckle-faced Beth seems to carry her
actors are worried that they are too old, death within her, like an unborn child,
they accentuate everything to death. from the moment we see her. The mov-
In the Cukor “Little Women,” Kath- ie’s other great standout is Emily Wat-
arine Hepburn sometimes looks as son, whose features have sometimes
though she were going to jump off the seemed too childlike for the roles she
screen and sock you in the face, so eager has played. Here, as Marmee, she is
is she to convince you that she is a perfect, both a girl and a mother, her
tomboy. Amy’s vanity is almost always waist a little thicker, her face redder,
overdone, never more so than by the than what we saw in “Breaking the
teen actress Elizabeth Taylor, with a Waves,” in which, at twenty-eight, she
set of blond ringlets that look like a became a star. Caswill can’t take her
brace of kielbasas. Poor, sickly Beth is eyes off her, and she gives her an amaz-
almost always sentimentalized; Mar- ing scene that is not in the book. When
mee is often a bore. Whole hunks of one of her daughters gives birth—to
the plot may be left out, because this twins—Marmee is the midwife. At the
“After this, I’m going to hop on the mommy blogs and make
sure we aren’t the only ones with a four-year-old who won’t come
out of his room until he has his tracksuit on and his
parents create a high-five tunnel and play the Chicago Bulls’
1996 N.B.A. Finals entrance music.”
end of the ordeal, you can read in Wat-
son’s sweaty, exhausted face everything
that Alcott hinted at but did not say
about how her own mother was left to
do everything. Another of Caswill’s ad-
ditions is a series of dazzling scenes from
nature—light-dappled rivers, fat, furry
bees circling pink flowers—that could
turn you into a Transcendentalist.
lcott never swerved in her deci-
A sion not to marry. “I’d rather be a
free spinster and paddle my own canoe,”
as she put it. And yet she concluded
the first volume of “Little Women” with
a betrothal. Meg is proposed to by Lau-
rie’s tutor, John Pratt, a good man, and
she accepts. Jo, who takes the same po-
sition as her creator on the subject of
marriage—never!—is scandalized. How
could Meg have done such a stupid
and heartless thing, and created a breach
in the March household? “I just wish
I could marry Meg myself, and keep
her safe in the family,” she says. The
first volume ends with the family ad-
journing to the parlor, where they all
sit and gaze sentimentally at the newly
promised couple—all of them, that is,
except Jo, who is thinking that maybe
something will go wrong and they’ll
break up. Now the curtain falls on the
March girls, Alcott writes: “Whether
it ever rises again, depends upon the
reception given the first act of the do-
mestic drama called Little Women.”
This sounds, now, as though she is
teasing her readers, knowing full well
that she will shortly receive
huge bags of mail demand-
ing that she get going on
Part 2. In any case, that’s
what happened, and the
letter writers wanted to
know one thing above all:
Whom did the girls marry?
Meg is taken, but what
about Amy and Beth? Most
important, what about Jo?
Clearly, Jo had to marry
Laurie. Everyone was crazy about her,
so she had to be given the best, and
wasn’t Laurie the best? He was hand-
some; he was rich; he spoke French;
he loved her. In the final scene of Part 1,
as everyone is cooing over Meg and
John, Laurie, leaning over Jo’s chair,
“smiled with his friendliest aspect, and
nodded at her in the long glass which
78 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
reflected them both.” They’re next,
obviously.
Not so fast, Alcott wrote in a letter
to a friend: “Jo should have remained
a literary spinster but so many enthu-
siastic young ladies wrote to me clam-
orously demanding that she should
marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t
dare refuse & out of perversity went
& made a funny match for her.” Lau-
rie, as Alcott has been telling us be-
tween the lines from the beginning, is
a twit. Yes, he is handsome, and rich,
but he is not a serious person. He does
not, like Jo, think hard about things
and fight his way through them in
darkness.
So Jo does what she has long known
she would have to do. She tells Laurie
that she can’t love him otherwise than
as a friend. She breaks his heart, inso-
far as a heart like his can be broken.
Then, perhaps to relieve herself of guilt,
she takes to thinking that Beth, her fa-
vorite sister, is in love with him. Beth
has told Jo she has a secret, which she
cannot tell her just yet. That must be
the secret! That Beth loves Laurie! The
thing for Jo to do, then, is to get out
of the way. So she takes a job as gov-
erness to two children of one of her
mother’s friends, who runs a boarding
house in New York City.
On her second day there, she is doing
her needlework when she hears some-
one singing in the next room. She pulls
aside the curtain and discovers a man
named Friedrich Bhaer, who, we are
told, was a distinguished
professor in his native Ger-
many but is now a tutor of
German, poor, and getting
on in years (forty). He is
stout; his hair sticks out
ever y which way. His
clothes are rumpled. He
and Jo become friends, but
there is a bump in their
road. Jo, like her creator,
writes lurid tales for the
newspaper in order to make money.
Bhaer sees some of this writing. “He
did not say to himself, ‘It is none of my
business,’” Alcott writes. He remem-
bered that Jo was young and poor, and
“he moved to help her with an impulse
as quick and natural as that which
would prompt him to put out his hand
to save a baby from a puddle.” He tells
her that it is wrong to write such trash.
Jo has great respect for Professor Bhaer.
She listens to what he has to say, goes
back to her room, and consigns all her
upcoming stories to the fire.
Soon, Jo gets the news that Beth is
seriously ill. This was Beth’s secret: not
that she was in love with Laurie but
that she was dying. Jo rushes home and
nurses her sister for the short time that
remains to her. Beth dies without much
protest, whereupon the book sinks for
a while into a rather boring peaceful-
ness. The world of the Marches be-
comes gentle, kind—beige, as it were—
as if nothing could bring back the hour
of real happiness, so we’re all just going
to get used to half measures. Amy is
in Europe, where Laurie tracks her
down, and the two fall quietly in love,
or in like. They marry in Paris. Jo, at
home with her parents, tries to con-
tent herself by doing the household
chores that were once Beth’s. She has
nothing else.
Then the novel starts to build to-
ward one of the most satisfying love
scenes in our literature. Professor Bhaer
suddenly arrives at the March house.
He tells Jo that he has been offered a
good teaching job in the West, and that
he has come to say goodbye. But, strange
to say, this formerly untidy man now
seems quite soigné, in a new suit and
with his hair smoothed down. “Dear
old fellow!” Jo says to herself. “He
couldn’t have got himself up with more
care if he’d been going a-wooing”—
whereupon, oh, my God, she suddenly
realizes what’s going on. For two weeks,
Bhaer calls on her every day. Then,
abruptly, he vanishes. One day, two
days, three days pass. Jo starts to go
crazy. Finally, she runs to town to look
for him. It turns out that Bhaer had
come in order to find out whether or
not Jo was promised to Laurie, and he
overheard something that gave him the
impression that she was. Now he finds
her in some rough part of town—ware-
houses, counting houses—where, as
even he can figure out, she is search-
ing for him. “I feel to know the strong-
minded lady who goes so bravely under
many horse noses,” he says to her. I
don’t know if this is how German-
Americans spoke English in the eigh-
teen-sixties, but the two innocents even-
tually make themselves understood. Jo
weeps; Bhaer weeps; the sky weeps.
Great sheets of rain come down on
them. They stand there in the road,
completely drenched, looking into each
other’s eyes. “Ah,” Bhaer says. “Thou
gifest me such hope and courage, and
I haf nothing to give back but a full
heart and these empty hands.” “Not
empty now,” Jo says, and she puts her
hands in his. We then see what we have
never seen before in this book, and
won’t see again: a serious kiss between
a man and a woman.
avishing as this is, it still disap-
R pointed many of Alcott’s contem-
poraries, because Jo didn’t marry Lau-
rie. And it has disappointed many of
our contemporaries, too, because why
did Jo, our hero, have to marry at all,
not to speak of marrying a man who
told her to stop writing? The problem
is made worse by the fact that Alcott
herself appeared to vacillate. It seems
unlikely that anyone would honor her
claim that she came up with a “funny
match” for Jo in order to spite the fans
who were demanding a marriage plot.
But this may actually have been the
case, because she goes back and forth
about matrimony. On one page, Mar-
mee, the font of all wisdom, tells Meg
and Jo that to be loved by a good man
is the best thing that can happen to a
woman, but, a few sentences later, Mar-
mee says that it is better to be happy
old maids than unhappy wives. Which
did Alcott believe? Was she just fool-
ing around? If so, she left a lot of con-
fused feminists in her wake. Even more
displeased were the queer theorists. In
an 1883 interview, Alcott said, “I am
more than half-persuaded that I am a
man’s soul, put by some freak of na-
ture into a woman’s body . . . because
I have fallen in love in my life with so
many pretty girls and never once the
least bit with a man.” Hmm. And so
we are not surprised that she herself
did not marry, but then why did she
have to force a husband on her most
Louisa-like character, and one who
had expressed similar sentiments? (“I
can’t get over my disappointment in
not being a boy,” Jo says, in the novel’s
first scene.) In recent “Little Women”
scholarship, all this bewilderment was
compounded by postmodern critics’
emphasis on ambivalence, on conflict,
on the dark truths lurking in what had
once seemed clean, honest books.
Rioux tries to make everything O.K.
by saying that, if Jo married, at least
she didn’t make a would-be romantic
match, the kind that women have been
historically bamboozled by, but a “com-
panionate union.” Elizabeth Lennox
Keyser, a children’s-literature scholar, Your Anniversary
has offered a more negative view: “See- Immortalized
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Both interpretations assume that Jo,
by marrying someone old and fat—a
foreigner, too!—doesn’t so much take
a husband as find a nice person to
room with. I think that the situation
is exactly the opposite, and that a “di-
minished” girl does not go running
through the town, under so many horse
noses, to find a booby prize. The heav-
ens do not burst open when Meg says
yes to John, or Amy to Laurie, but
only when Jo and Bhaer, these two
souls with no money or beauty or luck,
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by dozens of composers in the nine-
teenth century. Alcott does not tell us
which version Bhaer is singing. All we
know is that he is speaking of some
lost paradise—such as, for example, the
Eden that Bronson Alcott tried to em-
ulate at Fruitlands. Goethe was an idol
of the members of the Transcendental
Club, including Ralph Waldo Emer-
son, and Emerson, generous as ever,
had given Louisa the run of his library
when she was in her teens. There she
found a translation of a book, “Goethe’s
Correspondence with a Child,” a col-
lection of enraptured letters to the re-
vered master from a young admirer,
Bettina von Arnim. Louisa decided
that she, likewise, would write a
“heart-journal.” She would take the
part of Bettina, and her correspondent
would be Emerson, whom she adored.
Years later, in her diary, she recalled, “I
wrote letters to him, but never sent
them; sat in the tall cherry-tree at mid-
night, singing to the moon till the owls
scared me to bed; left wild flowers on
the doorstep of my ‘Master,’ and sang
Mignon’s song under his window in
very bad German.”
When Bhaer arrives to visit the
Marches, Jo asks him to sing “Kennst
Du das Land” again. The first line, Al-
cott writes, was once Bhaer’s favorite,
because, before, “das Land” to him
meant Germany, his homeland. “But
now,” Alcott writes, “he seemed to dwell,
with peculiar warmth, and melody, upon
the words ‘There, there, might I go
with thee / O, my beloved, go’ and one
listener was so thrilled by the tender
invitation that she longed to say that
she did know the land,” and was ready
to start packing. These, I believe, are
the fragments still floating in the air
of “Little Women” after the combus-
tion that, in Alcott’s brain, produced
Professor Bhaer, a lover for her most
cherished character. He is not a “funny
match.” He, together with Beth, is a
sort of angel, like the souls in the Di-
vine Comedy, beings who turn to us
and say exactly who they are and what
they stand for.
Behind these two angelic beings
stands another, this one not a literary
character but a real person: Bronson
Alcott. It is hard to like Bronson, be-
cause he took so little care of his fam-
ily. For a long time, Louisa appears to
80 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
have despised him, or at least regarded
him with considerable irony. She once
wrote to him that her goal in her work
was to prove that “though an Alcott
I can support myself.” It would be hard
to find an English-language work of
fiction more autobiographical than
“Little Women.” For almost every per-
son in Louisa’s immediate family, there
is a corresponding character, an im-
portant one, in this book. The one ex-
ception is Bronson. Father March
comes home from the war, stumbles
into the back room, and thereafter
mostly stays offstage, reading books.
Occasionally, he wanders in and says
something or other. Then he wanders
back out. In one sense, we could say
that Louisa erased him—a sort of re-
venge, perhaps. In another sense, this
may just be an erasure of her feelings
about him: she didn’t want to talk
about it.
Yet, while Bronson was more or less
written out of the book, the ideals to
which he held so stubbornly inform
every page. Bronson’s obsession was
with the transcendence of the material
world, with seeing through appearances
to a moral and spiritual truth. He took
this passion to extremes, and that is
what made him eccentric, not to speak
of irresponsible. But that is also the
cast of mind that, with the addition of
common sense and humor and an at-
tachment to regular things—life, fam-
ily, dinner—makes Alcott’s most ad-
mirable characters admirable.
In addition to supplying the book’s
moral architecture, Bronson provided,
by his neglect, the need for its creation.
Louisa’s one wish, as an adult, was to
make her mother’s life comfortable.
With “Little Women” she did it, and
then, with the work’s two sequels—“Lit-
tle Men” (1891) and “Jo’s Boys” (1886),
both having to do with a school that
Jo and Bhaer eventually establish—she
did it some more. When she was in
the middle of a book, she wrote “in a
vortex,” as she put it, often remaining
at her desk for fourteen hours a day.
“Little Women” was written in less
than six months. “Her health is by no
means yet restored,” Bronson wrote
philosophically in his journal in 1869,
soon after the book’s publication. But
it didn’t bother him that she had just
about killed herself to write it. In the
words of his excellent biographer, John
Matteson, Bronson regarded a physi-
cal person as “a lapsed soul, a debased
descendant of pure being.” A soul did
not need to go to bed. A soul could
work fourteen hours a day.
ouisa eventually developed chronic
L health problems, and her exhaus-
tion showed in her work. “Little Men”
is occasionally touching. You cry, and
you wish you hadn’t, because the book
also feels like “The Three Bears,” with
the plumped-up beds all in a row. As
for “Jo’s Boys,” it is actually a chore to
read. Alcott tries to whip up some ex-
citement—there is a shipwreck, an ex-
plosion in a mine—but you can sense
how bored she is, and how much she
wants to go upstairs and take a nap.
In time, Louisa seems to have for-
given her father. At the age of fifty-
five, she went to visit him at the con-
valescent home where he was then
living (at her expense, no doubt). Kneel-
ing at his bedside, she said, “Father,
here is your Louy. What are you think-
ing of as you lie here so happily?” “I
am going up,” he said. “Come with me.”
She obliged him. Three days after their
conversation, Bronson breathed his last.
But Louisa never knew of it; she was
in a coma, after a stroke, and died two
days after him.
Of some novelists it is said that they
had only one book in them, or only
one outstanding book. Such novels
tend to have certain things in com-
mon. They are frequently autobiograph-
ical: Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Home-
ward, Angel,” Sybille Bedford’s “A
Legacy,” Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows
in Brooklyn.” And they often have a
force or a charisma, an ability to get
under your skin and stay there, that
other books, even many better-written
books, don’t have. Some people com-
plain that university syllabuses don’t
accord “Little Women” the status of
“Huckleberry Finn,” which they see as
its male counterpart. But no piece of
literature is the counterpart of “Little
Women.” The book is not so much a
novel, in the Henry James sense of the
term, as a sort of wad of themes and
scenes and cultural wishes. It is more
like the Mahabharata or the Old Tes-
tament than it is like a novel. And that
makes it an extraordinary novel. 

BOOKS
THE SOUNDS OF MUSIC
Contemporary composition has become as fractured
as the art world—and that’s a good thing.
BY ALEX ROSS
hen the hip-hop artist Kendrick
W Lamar won the 2018 Pulitzer
Prize for Music, in April, reactions in
the classical-music world ranged from
panic to glee. Composers in the classi-
cal tradition have effectively monopo-
lized the prize since its inception, in 1943.
Not until 1997 did a nominal outsider—
the jazz trumpeter and composer Wyn-
ton Marsalis—receive a nod. Lamar’s
victory, for his moodily propulsive album
“damn.,” elicited some reactionary fum-
ing—one irate commenter said that his
tracks were “neurologically diver-
gent from music”—as well as enthu-
siastic assent from younger generations.
The thirty-one-year-old composer
Michael Gilbertson, who was a finalist
this year, told Slate, “I never thought my
ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD MCGUIRE
string quartet and an album by Ken-
drick Lamar would be in the same cat-
egory. This is no longer a narrow honor.”
Lamar’s win made me think about
the changing nature of “distinguished
musical composition,”to use the Pulitzer’s
crusty term. Circa 1950, this was under-
stood to mean writing a score for oth-
ers to perform, whether in the guise of
the dissonant hymns of Charles Ives or
the spacious Americana of Aaron Cop-
land. But that definition was always sus-
pect: it excluded jazz composers, whose
tradition combines notation and impro-
visation. In 1965, a jury tried to give a
Pulitzer to Duke Ellington, but the
board refused. Within classical compo-
sition, meanwhile, activity on the outer
edges had further blurred the job de-
scription. By the early fifties, Pierre
Schaefer and Pierre Henry were creat-
ing collages that incorporated record-
ings of train engines and other urban
sounds; Karlheinz Stockhausen was as-
sisting in the invention of synthesized
sound; John Cage was convening en-
sembles of radios. By century’s end, a
composer could be a performance art-
ist, a sound artist, a laptop conceptual-
ist, or an avant-garde d.j. Du Yun, Kate
Soper, and Ashley Fure, the Pulitzer
finalists in 2017—I served on the jury—
make use, variously, of punk-rock vo-
cals, instrumentally embroidered phil-
osophical lectures, and architectural
soundscapes. Such artists may lack the
popular currency of Lamar, but they are
not cloistered souls.
Writing overnight history is a per-
ilous task, but the British critic Tim
Rutherford-Johnson manages the
feat in “Music After the Fall: Modern
Composition and Culture Since 1989”
(University of California). In fewer than
three hundred pages of cogent prose,
Rutherford-Johnson catalogues the be-
wildering diversity of twenty-first-cen-
tury composed music, and, more im-
portant, makes interpretative sense of a
corpus that ranges from symphonies and
string quartets to improvisations on
smashed-up pianos found in the Aus-
tralian outback (Ross Bolleter’s “Secret
Sandhills”). By the end of the book, defi-
nitions seem more elusive than ever: to
compose is to work with sound, or with
silence, in a premeditated way, or not.
What, then, isn’t composition? Conver-
sations around the term often focus on
either erasing or redrawing the bound-
ary between the classical and the pop-
ular. Rutherford-Johnson makes us think
about other borders: between genres, be-
tween ideologies, between art and the
world. “Music After the Fall” is the best
extant map of our sonic shadowlands,
and it has changed how I listen.
first encountered Rutherford-John-
Icalled
son as the author of a new-music blog
the Rambler, which he started in
2003, when starting a blog was still a
novel thing to do. I became a devoted
reader after he compared the work of
Harrison Birtwistle to “granite in No-
vember rain”—a fine phrase for that rug-
ged, monumental music. “Music After
the Fall,” like the blog, addresses a vast
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 81

“Once koalas taste shark, they never go back to eucalyptus.”
• •
range of music, from the gnarliest ex-
perimentalism to the mellowest mini-
malism, and Rutherford-Johnson ap-
plies a critical intelligence that is at once
rigorous and generous. He has the fac-
ulty of “omniaudience”: he seems to have
heard and comprehended everything.
Rutherford-Johnson, who is forty-one,
is wise to commence his account in 1989,
rather than in 2000. Just as the cultural
twentieth century began late, with the
modernist convulsions of 1907-13 (Pi-
casso, Matisse, Stein, Pound, Schoen-
berg, Stravinsky), so it ended early, its
verities collapsing under the pressure of
political and economic tumult. The “fall”
in the title points most obviously to the
dismantling of the Berlin Wall, but it
has wider resonances. The rapid spread
of globalization, the triumph of unreg-
ulated free-market economics, the inva-
sive power of the Internet, and the de-
cline of liberal democracy have eroded
institutions that defined cultural activ-
ity throughout the twentieth century. I
was a college student in 1989, and the
world of that year now seems ancient.
Like my parents and grandparents, I grew
up reading print newspapers and mag-
azines, writing longhand or on a type-
writer, listening to records, mailing let-
ters, driving with maps. I have far less
82 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
in common with people twenty years
younger than I am. Virginia Woolf ’s fa-
mous birth date for modernity—“On or
about December 1910 human character
changed”—probably has a latter-day
counterpart, sometime in the nineties.
In composed music, the big news
was the retreat, and possible demise, of
modernism. After the Second World
War, prodigiously complex systems of
organizing music spread to all corners
of the globe: twelve-tone composition,
its serialist variants, chance operations,
and so on. The archetypal modern piece
was knotty and abstract, with angular
gestures and abrupt transitions. Tradi-
tional musical forms fell from fashion,
and direct emotional expression was
considered vulgar. The high priest of
the epoch was the late Pierre Boulez,
who declared that any composer who
had not absorbed Schoenberg’s twelve-
tone method was “useless.”
One of the sharpest critiques of the
modernist ethos came from the musi-
cologist Susan McClary, who, in a 1988
paper, “Terminal Prestige,” dissected
the “mystique of difficulty,” seeing mod-
ernism as a “reductio ad absurdum of
the nineteenth-century notion that
music ought to be an autonomous ac-
tivity, insulated from the contamina-
tion of the outside social world.” Behind
the defiant modernist façade she de-
tected a macho pose, an aversion to
“soft, sentimental, ‘feminine’ qualities.”
The modernist disdain for popularity
and commercial values masked an al-
ternative marketplace in which élite
artists competed for grants and profes-
sorships. All this could be seen as an
offshoot of a Cold War mentality in
which abstruse pursuits were propped
up with scientific-sounding language.
The seventies and eighties saw the
gradual return of tonally based com-
position, in the form of minimalism,
the New Simplicity, and the New
Romanticism. These developments
aligned with postmodern trends in other
art forms: the return of ornament in
architecture, of figuration in painting,
of episodic narrative in fiction. The
first work that Rutherford-Johnson dis-
cusses in his book is Steve Reich’s “Differ-
ent Trains,” from 1988, which incorpo-
rates a live string quartet and a digital
soundtrack of speaking voices, prere-
corded string tracks, and ambient sounds.
Its chugging motion and repetitive ges-
tures present an invitingly smooth sur-
face, even as the recorded material piv-
ots toward stories of the Holocaust. The
piece typifies the late-twentieth-century
return to fundamentals—what McClary
describes as “composing for people.”
Yet Rutherford-Johnson follows his
analysis of “Different Trains” with dis-
cussions of very different works from
the late eighties: Galina Ustvolskaya’s
Sixth Piano Sonata, in which the per-
former bashes out hyper-dissonant clus-
ter chords; Hildegard Westerkamp’s “Kits
Beach Soundwalk,” a montage of sounds
recorded near Vancouver, Canada; Merz-
bow’s “Brain Forest—For Acoustic Metal
Concrete,” an onslaught of electronic
noise; and Bright Sheng’s “H’un,” a
brooding orchestral memorial to victims
of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The
point is clear: Reich’s reaction to mod-
ernist complexity is merely one strand
of an intricate musical fabric.
Indeed, Rutherford-Johnson takes a
cool view of mainstream minimalism,
saying that it “speaks of and to America
in the 1990s: it is redeemed, technolog-
ically ascendant, media friendly, cul-
turally dehierarchized, and postmodern-
istically optimistic.” Such music appeals
to classical and pop-trained listeners in
equal measure—a characteristic that gave
Reich, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, and other
minimalist-leaning composers an audi-
ence far larger than the industry aver-
age. The most unexpected Billboard hit
of the early nineties was Nonesuch’s re-
cording of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony
No. 3, a hypnotically doleful immersion
in slow-moving tonal harmony, which
sold more than a million copies. By the
early years of the twenty-first century,
pop-inflected post-minimalism was the
dominant style among younger Amer-
icans. At a certain point, composers like
Nico Muhly and Caroline Shaw and
indie-pop groups like the National and
Arcade Fire often seemed to be speak-
ing the same half-bright, half-bitter-
sweet language.
Tonality had its comeback, to the
extent that it ever went away. At the
same time, modernism failed to expire,
despite the many obituaries that were
written for it. McClary acknowledged
as much in a 2015 essay, “The Lure
of the Sublime,” published in the an-
thology “Transformations of Musical
Modernism” (Cambridge University).
In it, she describes the emergence of a
“twenty-first-century version of mod-
ernism” that adopts a more openly sen-
suous language. McClary singles out
three operas on topics of doomed pas-
sion: Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Luci Mie
Traditrici” (1998), Kaija Saariaho’s
“L’Amour de Loin” (2000), and George
Benjamin’s “Written on Skin” (2012).
All three works have mesmerized large
audiences, even though they avoid ob-
vious tonal reference points. The ar-
rival of Saariaho’s opera at the Met, in
2016, was a particularly bracing sign of
modernist longevity. The piece begins
with low tendrils of sound, which gather
into immense, shuddering dissonances.
But the gradualness of the process—
the methodical accumulation of shim-
mering patterns over organ-like bass
tones—saturates the ears instead of
battering them. The music breathes
and moves like a living organism. As
McClary suggests, it imparts a human
dimension to the modernist sublime.
Other heirs of the modernist legacy
have refused to compromise, hunker-
ing down in dissonance and difficulty.
In the nineteen-eighties, the Brit-
ish-born, American-based composer
Brian Ferneyhough was named the
avatar of a New Complexity, and al-
though Ferneyhough never adopted
the term himself, it reflects the extreme
density of his music—a meticulous
chaos of piled-up rhythms, conflicting
melodic lines, and disintegrating forms.
Rutherford-Johnson captures the effect:
“The way Ferneyhough deliberately
overpacks his music with information,
starting and restarting it every few sec-
onds to create a perceptual overload,
thwarts the memory’s ability to create
a meaningful structure....Time after
time, what we have just heard is pushed
into the background by what follows
next.” This is a very contemporary ex-
perience, matching the from-all-sides
tempo of video games and social-media
threads. Small wonder that Ferneyhough
has been hugely influential among com-
posers who have come of age since 1989.
Much twentieth-century modernist
music sounded like—and actually was—
the outcome of a preordained process,
the working out of a utopian or a math-
ematical idea. Modernists of today,
whether of the sensuous or the spastic
type, are less concerned with method:
their music tends to have a tactile im-
mediacy. One compelling figure is the
Israeli-born composer Chaya Czer-
nowin, who studied with Ferneyhough
and has become a formidable teacher
herself. Rutherford-Johnson says of her
1999 opera, “Pnima,” that listeners can
feel the notes being played “as different
forms of abrasion and pressure”: “air
pushing against dilating lips,
bow hairs sliding against
strings, fingertips plucking
and sliding.” Although her
music is dark and unyielding,
and is written in the shadow
of trauma—“Pnima” is about
younger generations com-
ing to terms with the Holo-
caust—there is nothing dry
or cerebral about it. Czer-
nowin composes the nega-
tive beauty of disaster; it is the musical
equivalent of Picasso’s “Guernica” or
Anselm Kiefer’s “Margarethe.”
Modern classical music is bedevilled
by what might be called the Kandinsky
Problem. Modernist painters, writers,
and filmmakers had a far easier time
finding a wide audience than compos-
ers did. Kandinsky creates mob scenes
in museums; the mere appearance of
Schoenberg’s name on a concert pro-
gram can depress attendance. Although
composers do not deserve blame for this
state of affairs—conservative institu-
tions are fundamentally at fault, having
created a hostile atmosphere for new
music as far back as the mid-nineteenth
century—inscrutable program notes and
imperious attitudes did not ease the
standoff between artist and audience.
Millennial modernists tend to take a
different tack. Trevor Bača, one of Czer-
nowin’s American students, says of his
grittily evocative scores, “I write because
I feel an emotional compulsion to
write—to give form to fantastic or im-
possible colors and shapes as sound and
as pleasure—and, yet, when I write, I
am intensely aware of the fact that I am
setting up and taking apart a code....
I reject any dichotomy that pits the an-
alytic against the emotional.”
utherford-Johnson has no interest
R in constructing a new canon of
Great Men, or of Great Women, who
are carrying on the saga of heroic mu-
sical innovation. (The suffocating male-
ness of music history is at an end, even
if the news has yet to reach most big-
league orchestras and opera houses.) In-
stead, he presents a decentered, democ-
ratized scene, in which famous names
collide with figures who may be obscure
even to plugged-in fanatics. Reading his
book took me months, as I stopped to
search out Internet evidence of the likes
of Cynthia Zaven’s “Untuned
Piano Concerto with Delhi
Traffic Orchestra” (2006), in
which the composer impro-
vised raucously on the back
of a truck being driven around
New Delhi.
In Rutherford-Johnson’s
telling, composers are not se-
questered monks but attuned
social beings who react to cul-
tural pressures. The book is
organized around an array of such forces:
late-capitalist economics, the breakdown
of genres, sexual liberation, globaliza-
tion, the Internet, environmentalism,
the traumas of war and terror. Moving
from nation to nation and continent to
continent—the book includes not only
British, American, French, and Ger-
man composers but also Lebanese, Fil-
ipino, and Asian-Australian ones—
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 83
Rutherford-Johnson hosts a musical
version of the Venice Biennale. For a
theoretical frame, he adopts the cura-
tor and critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s no-
tion of “radicant” aesthetics—radicant
being the botanical term for organisms
with no single root, like ivy.
Attracted to conceptual extremes,
Rutherford-Johnson devotes many
pages to works that extend the radical
experiments of John Cage. A lot of the
pieces he describes consist mainly of
verbal instructions, and verge on being
exercises in meditation. Peter Ablinger
has written an assortment of composi-
tions that involve photographs hang-
ing on a gallery wall or chairs arranged
in various locations, such as a parking
lot or a beach. The music becomes, as
in Cage’s “4'33",” whatever one happens
to hear in the space. The score for Jen-
nifer Walshe’s “this is why people
o.d. on pills / and jump from the
golden gate bridge” begins with
the instruction “Learn to skateboard,
however primitively.” Performers are
asked to acquire the rudiments of the
sport and then to re-create the experi-
ence while playing whatever instrument
comes to hand.
What does any of this have to do
with distinguished musical composi-
tion? With that inevitable question, the
Kandinsky Problem resurfaces. In the
art world, instinctive antagonism to the
new, the weird, and the absurd is less
common. People think nothing of
queueing for hours in order to sit in a
chair opposite Marina Abramović or to
grope their way through a foggy tunnel
designed by Olafur Eliasson. Indeed,
composers can often find a more ap-
preciative audience if they reclassify their
music as an installation or as perfor-
mance art. Walshe is a fascinating in-
between case: her catalogue includes a
delightfully bewildering group of man-
ifestos, scores, art works, and recordings
that purport to document an Irish Da-
daist collective called grúpat. The col-
lective is entirely Walshe’s invention.
grúpat works have been presented
mainly at museums and galleries.
Outré tinkering can yield new kinds
of beauty. Such is the story of the in-
ternational composing collective known
as Wandelweiser, many of whose cre-
ations are so austere that they try the
patience of even hardcore vanguardists.
84 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
Manfred Werder’s “2003 (1)” asks a trio
of performers to make only two sounds
during a performance of indeterminate
length; the one extant recording lasts
seventy minutes. As Rutherford-Johnson
has written on his blog, such a score is
a “utopian extravagance,” but it clears
a space for a piece like Jürg Frey’s Third
String Quartet, a whispery procession
of frail, gorgeous chords. The music of
Wandelweiser seems to embody a phi-
losophy of passive resistance. In an in-
formation-overload culture, the most
revolutionary act might be to say as lit-
tle as possible, as quietly as possible, as
slowly as possible. ( John Cage’s “As
Slow As Possible” is currently receiving
a performance at a church in Germany;
it began in 2001 and is scheduled to
end in 2640.)
The twenty-first-century aesthetic
of quietude often overlaps with site-
specific and installation-like works,
which escape the concert hall and merge
with the environment. Rutherford-
Johnson explores the genre of the
“soundwalk,” in which a composer cu-
rates a journey through a particular
soundscape. Field recordings are a pop-
ular way to evoke places, especially those
endangered by environmental change.
Annea Lockwood has produced “sound
maps” of the Hudson, Danube, and
Housatonic rivers; Francisco López’s
“La Selva” is a transfixing seventy-min-
ute fabric of sounds from the Costa
Rican rain forest. A related genre is
what Rutherford-Johnson calls the
“journey form.” In 2016, the percus-
sionist Payton MacDonald performed
thirty works while taking a twenty-
five-hundred-mile bike trip from Mex-
ico to Canada, along the Continental
Divide. Such projects often have a po-
litical undertow. When we stop using
music as a noise-cancelling shield—
when we listen sensitively to the nat-
ural world—we register how much
damage we are doing.
“ M usic After the Fall” would be a
dull book if it satisfied every-
one, and not all of it persuaded me. Ruth-
erford-Johnson is inconsistent in how
he handles composers who have reverted
to some form of tonality. Some, such as
John Adams, are depicted as market-
oriented artists peddling nostalgic neo-
Romanticism. Others are praised for
undertaking “personal explorations of
the expressive and formal limits of mu-
sical materials.” It’s not clear how one
can decide from a distance what inner
urges motivate any given composer. Nor
is it necessarily the case that pure or im-
pure motives lead to better or worse
music. And Adams hardly fits the profile
of a pandering nostalgist; otherwise, he
would not have written “The Death of
Klinghoffer,” the most politically divi-
sive opera of recent decades. Ruther-
ford-Johnson is on firmer ground when
he observes that few artists fall into the
binary positions of “resisting or embrac-
ing the market.” On either side of the
enduring tonal-atonal divide, most com-
posers are, at best, eking out a living.
Rutherford-Johnson is correct in as-
serting that market forces have led to
an upsurge of euphonious, audience-
friendly scores. Still, there should be a
space for principled populism—works
that enter the arenas of opera, sym-
phonic music, film scores, and musical
theatre not to appease but to provoke.
An avant-garde piece that addresses
misogyny and rape culture is unlikely
to cause much dissent in an audience
of metropolitan connoisseurs. But when
Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 opera, “Breaking
the Waves,” a brutally expressive adap-
tation of the Lars von Trier film, places
such issues in front of a broader crowd,
the tension is palpable. The atmosphere
becomes all the more charged when
Mazzoli uses gestures out of Puccini,
Janáček, and Britten, in which women
have limited agency or hardly exist.
Another blurry area of Rutherford-
Johnson’s map—one that might require
another book—is the terrain where ex-
perimental composers cross paths with
the less popular denizens of popular
music. In his opening discussion of 1989-
era figures, one stands apart: Masami
Akita, who records under the name
Merzbow. Unlike the others, Akita never
received formal classical training, and
his enormous output takes the form
not of scores but of studio and live re-
cordings. Still, the decision to include
him makes intuitive sense. What Akita
shares with the notational composers
who dominate “Music After the Fall”
is his distance from the center: noise
music is, by its nature, an underground
culture. To many ears, Merzbow and
Chaya Czernowin may sound much
the same, despite the obvious differ-
ences in the composers’ backgrounds
and methods. They are Other Music—
to borrow the name of the beloved, now
departed East Village store that stocked
the kinds of releases you couldn’t find
at Tower Records.
But, if noise musicians belong in
Rutherford-Johnson’s narrative, so do
countless other contrary-minded artists.
The lineage of free jazz and “great black
music” that descends from Ornette
Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony
Braxton should have a prominent place.
The composer and multi-instrumentalist
Tyshawn Sorey, a deserving recipient
of a MacArthur Fellowship last year,
shows the vitality of that strand in the
younger generation. He writes in the
interstices of classical and jazz; his music
is both composed and improvised. Such
artists also refuse to play the problem-
atic role that white America tends to
assign black musicians: that of the
redemptive mass entertainer. The com-
poser-scholar George E. Lewis has
noted that the idea of a black avant-
garde—or, for that matter, of a black
classical composer—is often consid-
ered a contradiction in terms. The
awarding of the Pulitzer to Lamar was
widely hailed, but the choice of the
avant-garde-leaning Henry Threadgill,
two years earlier, was largely ignored.
The veneration of the musical canon
leads all too easily to a kind of highbrow
theme park that trades on nostalgia for
a half-mythical past. Yet tradition can
also foster a revolt against a quasi-
totalitarian popular culture that subjects
everyone to the same bundle of prod-
ucts. Rutherford-Johnson mentions
“something indefinable” in the Western
classical tradition that attracts creative
musicians from across the globe, even if
they end up rebelling against that tra-
dition. The more they reject the past,
the more they pay tribute to it. This
September, the New York Philharmonic
will give the première of Ashley Fure’s
“Filament,” for orchestra, instrumental
soloists, and singers. Some members of
the gala audience may squirm at Fure’s
fiercely bright chords and distorted, stat-
icky instrumental textures. When, at
the end of the program, they rise to
cheer “The Rite of Spring,” they should
remember that they are applauding
yesterday’s unlistenable noise. 
BRIEFLY NOTED
Insane, by Alisa Roth (Basic). America’s mass-incarceration
crisis is by now well known, but the overrepresentation of the
mentally ill among the prison population is less studied. This
essential exposé, which includes tragic case histories, tells of
legions of prisoners put in solitary confinement or subdued
with medication. In some jails, the mentally ill wear uniforms
of a different color from those of other inmates and talk to
therapists through tray slots in cell doors. In others, they are
subjected to dehumanizing abuse. At the heart of the prob-
lem, Roth notes, is the changing landscape of mental-health
care; she is wary, though, of the common assumption that
the closure of large psychiatric hospitals is to blame for the
current situation.
The Secret Life of Cows, by Rosamund Young (Penguin). “Cows
are individuals,” Young, an organic farmer of more than thirty
years, persuasively argues in this book of clever anecdotes. In
sections with titles like “Cows Make Good Decisions,” she
affectionately details veterinary crises, inter-bovine bonds, and
the quirks of Ditch-Hog, Charolais Charlotte, and other res-
idents of her family’s farm, in Worcestershire. She makes a
passionate case against high-yield farming and in favor of a
personalized approach, but, although many of her cattle are
bound for the dinner table, she does not address the question
of how to help livestock not only live but die with dignity.
The Reservoir Tapes, by Jon McGregor (Catapult). These terse,
gripping stories revolve around the disappearance of a thir-
teen-year-old girl in northern England—the same mystery
that anchored McGregor’s novel “Reservoir 13.” Where that
book offered a panorama of provincial life with neither a con-
ventional plot nor a true protagonist, these stories, which can
be read independently of the novel, relate brisk, character-driven
episodes. The gossipy claustrophobia of small-town existence
drives much of the action. McGregor’s penchant for experi-
mentation is on display once again. The first story is presented
as the transcript of an interview with the missing girl’s mother
in which her answers are redacted. The result is both funny
and disquieting, setting the tone for much of what follows.
The Story of a Marriage, by Geir Gulliksen, translated from the
Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin (Hogarth). In this philosoph-
ical domestic drama, a narrator named Jon attempts to re-
count the dissolution of his marriage from the imagined
perspective of his eventual ex-wife, Timmy. For nearly twenty
years, after leaving their previous partners, they shared “a
uniquely great and earth-shattering love”—or so they told
themselves. Then Timmy meets another man, and her bond
with Jon is instantly, irrevocably fractured, though it takes
months for them to realize it. Despite sometimes overin-
dulgent sex scenes and descriptions of the couple’s sophis-
ticated Scandinavian life style, the novel is painfully per-
suasive in its view of relationships—how arbitrarily we slip
into and out of them, and how we rely on love, or the illu-
sion of it, to mask existential boredom and despair.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 85

BOOKS
LOST ENDS
Yearning and enduring in the poems of Forrest Gander.
BY DAN CHIASSON
he title of Forrest Gander’s latest
T book of poems, “Be With” (New
Directions), is a blurted command well-
ing up from yearnings not quite ex-
pressible in language. Gander’s part-
ner of more than thirty years, the poet
C. D. Wright, died unexpectedly in
her sleep in 2016. Later that year, a new
volume by Wright, “ShallCross,” was
published posthumously, with a ded-
ication to Gander: “for Forrest / line,
lank and long, / be with.” Gander bor-
rows his title from that dedication,
which reads like a message from be-
yond the grave. This collection of el-
egies for Wright confirms receipt of
the message and returns it. Poetry often
The elegies in “Be With” chart the addled chronology of loss.
86 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
creates a supernatural-seeming rap-
port with the dead, but rarely has the
communication between worlds felt
so eerily reciprocal.
Gander, who teaches at Brown, is
the author of eleven books of poems
and two novels, plus multimedia col-
laborations and distinguished transla-
tions. In “Be With,” he is at once ad-
amant about the ineffability of grief
and committed to getting his inchoate
“grief-sounds” somehow into words.
The book’s sputtering, flinching style,
with its syntactical dead ends and
missed connections, feels like both an
accommodation to the necessity of
language and proof of its inadequacy.
“Beckoned” is a poem about finding
the words. The parallel structure of its
sentences suggests hasty bulletins de-
livered in a narrowing span of con-
sciousness. It begins abruptly, in the
middle of some story we haven’t read,
capturing the sudden, repeated shock
of Wright’s death:
At which point my grief-sounds ricocheted
outside of language.
Something like a drifting swarm of bees.
At which point in the tetric silence that
followed
I was swarmed by those bees and lost
consciousness.
At which point there was no way out for
me either.
The heavy silences between these sin-
gle-line stanzas suggest a blackout or
a seizure, something more dire than a
break for thought. Grief takes us back
to the same “point” in time, again and
again, even as the clock—and the book
itself—moves forward. Coming to in
this interstitial state, Gander finds him-
self suspended in a “semi-coma, dream-
ing I was awake,” where actions and
symbols share a single plane:
At which point I grew old and it was like
ripping open the beehive with my
hands again.
At which point I conceived a realm more
real than life.
At which point there was at least some
possibility.
Some possibility, in which I didn’t believe,
of being with her once more.
The distant future gets the past tense:
even the unknown trajectory of Gan-
der’s emotional life is described as fixed,
and finished. There’s nothing ahead for
him except grieving. The “possibility”
that he constructs contains both su-
preme hopefulness and self-cancelling
disbelief. “I outlived my life,” he writes.
The book’s title gives away its most
tragic insight. “Be with”: the phrase is
stripped of its object; the beloved has
been ripped from the world. Reciproc-
ity is suddenly broken, as though one
player in a game had walked off the
court mid-volley. “Who was ever only
themselves?” Gander asks in “Son,” a
ILLUSTRATION BY TOM BACHTELL
poem addressed to his and Wright’s
“one arterial child.” In “Epitaph,” an-
other jarring phrase substitutes for more
mellifluous expressions:
To write You
existed me
would not be merely
a deaf translation.
For there is no
sequel to the passage when
I saw—as you would
never again
be revealed—you see me
as I would never
again be revealed.
The line breaks scramble and reframe
the memory of when the two parties,
by seeing the other see, brought each
other into existence. Because “there is
no / sequel to the passage,” Gander is
compelled to continue revisiting it. Birth
and death are all there in that first
glance: “never again” conveys irrevoca-
ble loss. The line break in the second
instance—“never / again”—suggests
that, for the living, the full emotional
weight of eternity must “be revealed,”
and endured, again and again.
o write about profound loss, you
T step inside a genre, elegy, that
is full of haunting echoes. Gander’s
poems call to mind those Thomas
Hardy wrote after the sudden death
of his wife, Emma. Hardy’s verse skips
over his immediate, painful past to a
moment “when our day was fair,”
dwelling on the uncanny traces his
wife left behind in “a room on return-
ing thence.” Gander shares the inten-
sity of Hardy’s grief—his morose fix-
ation on moments squandered. The
poems in “Be With” recall the happy
parallel paths in life and in art that
he and Wright followed—always
within a holler of each other. After
Wright’s death, Gander’s memories
revolve around objects, landscapes,
work, and routines—symbols that be-
come nearly sentient in their embod-
iment of his pain:
The cabinet
door’s squeaky
dactylic remark:
Hap-pi-ness?
What Gander calls the “spectacular-
ization / of the trivial” occurs when the
everyday—an ordinary cabinet, a mun-
dane memory—“means just / what it
feels like / it means.” We teach our ob-
jects how to speak our language. This
poet’s cabinet even talks in meter.
“Be With” charts the addled chronol-
ogy of personal loss. The linear march
of time is scattered with vignettes from
Gander and Wright’s life together, often
out of order, often repeated. Early on,
she candled eggs for a poultry farm
while he played “frisbee on the green.”
One night, instead of making love
Wright takes a bath, her knees poking
up “through the soap bubbles,” while
Gander stargazes under the “Prawn
Nebula.” Loss is what makes these
memories visible; without it, what you
have is just another evening of slightly
divergent marital priorities. A more re-
cent, more painful memory captures
the contesting imperatives of finality
and delay:
“If you want
to throw in
some dirt,” the priest
addressed the widower
and his child generally
but did not
complete
the sentence.
The priest doesn’t finish the sentence,
but Gander must.
Meanwhile, the world proposes al-
ternative measurements of time and
loss. One day, Gander discovers that
“the spider / vibrating on its long legs
in the ceiling corner / over my desk
doesn’t exist now.” The spider’s work,
so deeply associated with writing po-
etry, has been cut short. In an inter-
view, Gander has said that one poem
in the collection, a loose translation of
the first ballad of St. John of the Cross,
was literally interrupted by Wright’s
death. This breach is honored in real
time: the poem suddenly veers off in
a personal direction. The book as a
whole replicates this effect: it is a self-
suturing wound, equal parts bridge
and void.
The fleeting moments that Gander
assembles seek an order that is not
merely chronological. He remembers
a question from Wright: “If it’s not all
juxtaposition, she asked, what is the
binding agent?” The most obvious an-
swer is language, though, as Gander
discovers, language often fails. “Creepy,”
he writes, “always to want to pin words
on ‘the emotional experience.’” Some-
times he gets rid of the binding agents
altogether, as in “Deadout,” a two-part
poem that arranges fourteen sentence
fragments into intelligible couplets,
then scrambles them into dreamlike
illogic. The result isn’t nonsense; it’s a
haunting near-sense made by foiling
cause and effect.
Gander has a degree in geology
and is the author, with John Kinsella,
of “Redstart,” a pioneering hybrid trea-
tise on ecopoetics, a movement in con-
temporary poetry that, according to
Gander, explores “the economy of in-
terrelationship between human and
non-human realms.” In the same way
that the vocabulary of faith might aid
a religious poet in a time of crisis,
Gander’s deep affinity for the natural
world provides a kind of solace. There
phenomena “rarely have discreet be-
ginnings or endings” and instead re-
veal “layers, duration, and transitions.”
The impulse to go very small or very
big, from the microscopic to the cos-
mic, is evident in the opening poem.
“You lug a bacterial swarm / in the
crook of your knee,” Gander writes,
while “through my guts / writhe hel-
minth parasites.”
The book’s final section is titled
“Littoral Zone”—the part of a body
of water, usually near the shore, where
enough light passes through for plants
to grow. My Google search tells me
that by the time sunlight reaches the
bottom of the littoral zone it is usu-
ally one per cent or less of its surface
strength. That’s about as much com-
fort as arrives in this harrowing, some-
times despairing book. But even in
near-darkness there’s light enough for
a new, strange kind of love poem:
. . . From
afar, do you see me now
briefly here in this phantasmic
standoff riding
pain’s whirlforms?
The phrase “phantasmic standoff ” is
lifted directly from “Redstart,” where
it refers not to humans but to strange
“nocturnal / pods,” surging in the dark
water. It was Nietzsche who defined
human beings as “hybrids of plants and
ghosts.” The comfort of the littoral is,
I take it, entirely figurative. 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018 87

ON TELEVISION
A DIFFERENT WORLD
“Random Acts of Flyness” and the black television renaissance.
BY EMILY NUSSBAUM
Terence Nance’s series is an avant-garde trip, liberated and raw.
“ R andom Acts of Flyness” begins
with the show’s host, Terence
Nance, an affable goofball with a
blown-dandelion Afro and a tooth gap,
biking through Brooklyn. “What up,
world!” he says, shooting video of him-
self. The iPhone view suggests a su-
per-casual project—maybe a friend’s
Kickstarter—with race-themed sketches,
which Nance begins to list: there will
be “a whole bunch of flyness for you
today,” he assures us, such as some
“blackface, that’s always dope,” a short
film, and something on “the sexual pro-
clivities of the black community.”
Immediately, however, glitches ap-
pear: the word “motherfucking” gets
bleeped, even though we’re watching
HBO. There are rainbow flares; Snap-
chat animal masks drifting up; myste-
88 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 27, 2018
rious bursts of applause. It’s odd. Then
a cop car arrives, sirens blaring. Nance
gets knocked over. When the camera
and the bike tip, we go straight down a
rabbit hole—horizontal events squashed
into a vertical frame—into Facebook
Live’s nightmare genre: an encounter
between a black person and the cops.
It’s spontaneous documentary footage,
evidence of trauma that will itself be-
come trauma, after it goes viral.
This skittering from one mood (and
one mode) to another is the show’s
guiding principle. In the final scenes
of the pilot, Nance is floating high
above the earth, like a combination of
the Road Runner and Kendrick Lamar
in “Alright.” He’s still narrating—a sur-
vivor who has slipped past both the
cops and the plot.
Even two episodes in, it’s clear that
“Random Acts of Flyness”—a collab-
oration between Nance and a group
of his friends, black artists working
out of Bed-Stuy, who include Jamund
Washington, Naima Ramos-Chap-
man, and Mariama Diallo—is one of
the funkier, wilder projects of the year.
The show is an avant-garde trip that
feels drenched with sincerity. It’s im-
perfect by design and unafraid to risk
seeming corny or pretentious (and,
once in a while, it tilts). It’s also part
of a culture-transforming burst of
African-American creativity—includ-
ing movies like “Moonlight,” “Get
Out,” and “Sorry to Bother You,” as
well as TV shows like Issa Rae’s “In-
secure,” on HBO, and Justin Simien’s
“Dear White People,” on Netflix—that
examines, often through experimental
means, black male vulnerability. These
projects share a desire to show African-
American men with their emotional
walls down, yearning or bruised, at risk
from systems that see their bodies only
as fuel or as fantasy.
Nance—whose independent film
“An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,”
about a girl who got away, was as emo
as it gets—queers that concept and
adds glitter. The first episode includes
an interview with a bisexual black man,
whose date with a woman is acted out
in Claymation; the second is domi-
nated by a dream musical about Peter
Pan, punctuated by montages of male
handshakes and hugs. Straight men
are just one shard in the kaleidoscope.
This distaste for binaries—this insis-
tence on poly-ness, multiplicity, lots of
options—extends to the format as well.
In Slate, the poet Maya Phillips de-
scribed Afro-Surrealism, the move-
ment named by Amiri Baraka, as a
dream-logic approach to black expe-
rience that transcends genre, and
Nance eagerly extends this idea to
memes and talk shows, documenta-
ries and video games, often pulling
back to let one medium frame the
other. (Toward the end of a caustic
infomercial for “White Thoughts,” a
friend’s iMessage pops up to critique
it as focussing too much on white peo-
ple. “You right,” Nance concedes, and
the sketch ends.) The pacing is manic,
as on Adult Swim, but “Random Acts”
is more hippie-dippie and D.I.Y.: we’re
ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD A. CHANCE
constantly alerted to the stitching, the
fingerprints in the clay, the weirdo in-
terpolations that leak through the
cracks. You get the feeling that if
Nance could edit smells into the show
he would.
t’s downright amazing that “Ran-
Iplace—and
dom Acts” is on television in the first
the show seems to get that,
frequently invoking the medium’s un-
canny qualities. One segment features
a supremely bizarre kiddie show: “EV-
ERYBODY DIES, your portal to the af-
terlife, Thursdays at 8:30 a.m., 7:30 Cen-
tral.” In it, the host, Ripa the Reaper,
ushers black kids to their deaths, play-
ing limbo with her scythe. The aes-
thetic is tawdry, like seventies public
access; but the true horror is that Ripa,
too, can’t escape this ugly spectacle.
“You might be running from the po-
lice,” she says—then tugs out her ear-
phone, and begins to chant, “You might
be running from a stranger who thinks
he’s the police. You might be playing
with a toy gun. You might be not sell-
ing cigarettes.” A familiar message blots
out the screen: “Please Stand By We
Are Experiencing Technical
Difficulties.”
“Random Acts of Flyness”—whose
name, appropriately, puns on phrases
incorporating “kindness” and “vio-
lence”—is full of sketches like this,
which magnify and bend the pain of
modern tragedies. But, for all its clear
interest in white-supremacist threat,
“Random Acts” is not a gloomy or heavy
show. It’s liberated and raw, eager to
bridge the gap between the ugly and
the beautiful. And, like “Monty Py-
thon” in its day, it lets a lot of energy
linger in the interstices: animated hands
pull on a sheep’s hooves, then a wolf ’s
paws; a glittering whirl evolves into the
words “HAVE YOU / EVER HAD / A
THOUGHT that / YOU / WISH / YOU
COULD / UN-HAVE?” Making sense is
not a priority. What is the meaning of
that bright-pink twerking ass, studded
with painted-on eyeballs, like some
outtake from “Laugh-In”? Does it help
that there’s a glowing rainbow right
behind it?
TV can’t help but respond to other
television—for its entire history, it’s
been an imitative, self-conscious me-
dium. A few years back, I had the dis-
tinct sensation that CBS’s “The Good
Wife” was speeding up its plot in re-
sponse to ABC’s “Scandal,” and that
“Scandal” was becoming blunter about
race in response to Fox’s “Empire.” For
too long, there were so few television
shows with black creators that each got
siloed as “the black show,” a pressure
that benefits no art. This year feels like
a meaningful inflection point. Shonda
Rhimes is leaving ABC for the free-
dom of Netflix, and Kenya Barris is ru-
mored to be doing the same; on FX,
“Atlanta” and “Pose” are thriving with
two very different visions of both black-
ness and television. There are finally
so many formal experiments that some
can succeed, some fail, some get frankly
weird—and viewers still have faith that
this boom won’t recede.
Under these conditions, black TV
feels less like a message and more like
a conversation. One of the best epi-
sodes of “Atlanta” was a simultane-
ously scathing and affectionate roast
of BET. Barris’s “black-ish” mimicked
and interrogated both “Good Times”
and “The Cosby Show.” On this sea-
son of “Insecure,” Issa Rae’s character,
Issa, watches a reboot of a nineties-
style comedy called “KEV ’YN,” in
which characters wear shirts that say
“Black Wives Matter.” It’s a laugh-
track sitcom whose tone doesn’t even
mildly resemble the moody L.A.-
aspirational cable vibe of “Insecure,”
but Issa is swamped with memories:
“L’il Chris, forty-five years old, still
hiding in cabinets!” she says, smiling,
revelling in nostalgia for these blunter,
ruder network comedy beats.
Scenes like this are not just black-
made parodies of black TV; they’re
representations of the black audience,
talking back. The excellent “Dear White
People” is a show with cinema-snob
appeal. (It’s also the rare Netflix series
whose seasons are the right length.) But
its college students don’t stick to art
films; they gather to whoop at warped
versions of “Scandal,” “Empire,” and
“Love & Hip Hop.” “When I got here,
these shows were my only frame of
reference for black Americans,” says
Rashid, an African exchange student. “I
was terrified.” “Terrified of black peo-
ple or that you’d be seen as one?” his
friend asks, skeptically. “Both!” he says.
“This country is a mind-fuck.”
Wait till Rashid catches “Random
Acts of Flyness.” The slogan of the
show is “Shift consciousness,” which is
another way to say, “Change the chan-
nel.” Some people might do just that.
But there is something to be said for
TV as Etch A Sketch: just shake and
try again. 

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 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Pia Guerra,
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THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“I’m in the air right now—let me call you back after I land.”
Louis Jobin, Dagsboro, Del.

“No, I can’t hold on.” “Please, I need time to decompose myself.”

Ed Walchak, Chicago, Ill. Don Greenwood, Vienna, Va.

“Actually, this is my first rodeo.”

Elizabeth Tevlin, Ottawa, Ont.
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