PRICE $7.99 JAN.

1 1, 2016
 JA NUARY 11, 2016

5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Amy Davidson on extreme weather;
lightsabers; after “Downton”; David Bowie;
James Surowiecki on taxing corporations.

Katherine zoepf 22 SISTERS IN LAW

Saudi Arabia’s first female attorneys.
Simon rich 28 DAY OF JUDGMENT

NICK Paumgarten 30 THE WALL DANCER

A rock-climbing prodigy.
TAD Friend 36 THE MOGUL OF THE MIDDLE
A studio head tries to reinvent Hollywood.
BEN Lerner 50 THE CUSTODIANS
The Whitney’s conservation methods.

FICTION
ANNE Carson 60 “1 = 1”

THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
THOMAS Mallon 63 The rise of the radical right.
BOOKS
69 Briefly Noted
MUSICAL EVENTS
ALEX Ross 70 Igor Levit and Evgeny Kissin.

POEMS
Frank x. Gaspar 27 “Quahogs”
Jane VanDenburgh 56 “When Grace at the Bliss Café Calls”

marcellus hall COVER

“The Great Thaw”

DRAWINGS Kim Warp, Farley Katz, Will McPhail, Benjamin Schwartz, Liana Finck, Charlie Hankin,
Edward Steed, Joe Dator, Paul Noth, William Haefeli, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Tom Chitty, David
Borchart, Tom Toro, Barbara Smaller, David Sipress, Jack Ziegler SPOTS Pablo Amargo

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 1

 CONTRIBUTORS
Katherine Zoepf (“SISTERS IN LAW,” P. 22) is a fellow at New America. Her first
book, “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are
Transforming the Arab World,” comes out this month. Reporting for this piece
was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Sarah Larson (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 20) is a roving cultural correspondent
for newyorker.com. Her recent interview with Aziz Ansari can be heard on
Episode 11 of “The New Yorker Radio Hour.”

Tad Friend (“THE MOGUL OF THE MIDDLE,” P. 36) has been a staf writer since 1998.
He is the author of “Lost in Mongolia” and “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family,
and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor,” a memoir.

Ben Lerner (“THE CUSTODIANS,” P. 50) is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow. His monograph,
“The Hatred of Poetry,” will be out this summer.

Jane Vandenburgh (POEM, P. 56), a novelist, is the author of five books, including
“A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century: A Memoir.”

Nick Paumgarten (“THE WALL DANCER,” P. 30) has been writing for The New Yorker
since 2000.

Anne Carson (FICTION, P. 60) will publish “Float,” a collection of performance

pieces and other writings, later this year.

thomas Mallon (A CRITIC AT LARGE, P. 63) is a novelist, an essayist, and a critic.

He is the author of, most recently, “Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years.”

Simon Rich (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 28) has written several works of fiction,
including “Spoiled Brats,” a collection of stories.

marcellus Hall (COVER), an illustrator and a musician, lives in New York.

NEWYORKER.COM
Everything in the magazine, and more
than fifteen original stories a day.

ALSO:

POETRY: Jane Vandenburgh and PODCASTS: On the monthly Fiction

Frank X. Gaspar read their poems.
THE FRONT ROW: Notes on movies, by
Richard Brody.
VIDEO: Ashima Shiraishi, the teen-age
champion rock climber, on overcoming
self-doubt and failure. Plus, the latest
episode of “Shorts & Murmurs.”
ELEMENTS: Our blog covering the
worlds of science and technology.
Podcast, Rivka Galchen reads Isaac
Bashevis Singer’s story “The Cafeteria”
and discusses it with Deborah Treisman.
On Politics and More, George Packer
speaks with Omer Mahdi, an Iraqi
translator and refugee who is now a
doctor in Indiana.
HUMOR: Benjamin Schwartz draws
a Daily Cartoon on the news. Plus,
Andy Borowitz and the Shouts &
Murmurs blog.

SUBSCRIBERS: Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the
App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by location and device.)

2 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016

 THE MAIL
THE MAN ON THE RIVER
The piece by Ben McGrath was a beau-
tiful remembrance of Dicky Conant,
who made it his life’s work to navigate
a long-distance canoe using a road atlas
and river maps (“The Wayfarer,” De-
cember 14th). Everyone Conant met
was captivated by his personality and
impressed by his courage. My brother
Peter was a part of Catfish Yacht Club,
mentioned in the story, through which
the Conant brothers and their friends
explored the Nauraushaun Brook in a
small boat. The excitement of those
childhood summer adventures stuck
with the boys. My brother joined the
Coast Guard, Chris Kelly carries his
membership card to this day, and Dicky
continued to seek pleasure along the
river. As he wrote, “The experience it-
self is the reward.”
Nancy Wieting
Chicago, Ill.
If even only part of what Conant
claims he did was true, he lived a life
that won’t be replicated and quite pos-
sibly was never lived before. When I
met him, I knew that he was spe-
cial. McGrath’s insight into his psy-
che helps me to partly understand how
he was able to cope with the mental
demands of his journeys. I know that
there is convincing evidence that
Conant is no longer alive, but I choose
to think that he got too much recog-
nition and just stepped away; he’s of
on another part of the trek. He is still
out there, on behalf of me and every
other rat in the race, those of us who
live as much as we can but not as much
as we could. Sometimes when I am
cold and wet or hot and uncomfort-
able on one of my own excursions—
Dick would laugh at my stolen over-
nighters and short fishing trips—I think
about him and what he did.
Robert E. Cooper
Demopolis, Ala.
I talked to McGrath in the course of
his reporting on my brother Dicky. By
most standards he was an ordinary
man—even though he would argue
that “there are no men like me”—but
what he accomplished from his canoe
was quite extraordinary. He was a man
who had his flaws, as we all do, but he
did touch a great many people in a very
positive way. Maybe that is his legacy.
His was a story that deserved to be
told, and I am grateful that McGrath
was able to write it. What warms my
heart the most is that the article shows
the soul of the man and recognizes that
which was good.
Joseph Conant
Peachtree City, Ga.
1
TROUBLED REFUGE
I commend Rachel Aviv for telling
the story of Nelson Kargbo, a refugee
from Sierra Leone who got tangled up
in the United States’ deportation sys-
tem (“The Refugee Dilemma,” De-
cember 7th). Nelson’s devastating tra-
jectory reflects a complex and violent
pattern of deportation that began with
the passage of the Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibil-
ity Act of 1996 and has intensified
since the September 11th attacks. I
spent a year researching deportation
as a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar
in Mexico, and I can attest to the dam-
aging efects of U.S. immigration pol-
icies in America and beyond. Record-
high deportations from the U.S. dis-
mantle the lives of deportees and their
families. As with the experience of
Kargbo, the aftermath of detention and
deportation is invisible to most policy-
makers and members of the public. Until
there is political will to reform Amer-
ican immigration laws, millions of peo-
ple will continue to be caught in a sys-
tem that is startlingly unjust.
Deborah A. Boehm
Reno, Nev.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail
to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be
edited for length and clarity, and may be pub-
lished in any medium. We regret that owing to
the volume of correspondence we cannot reply
to every letter or return letters.
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 3
J A N UA RY W E D N E S DAY • T H U R S DAY • F R I DAY • S AT U R DAY • S U N DAY • M O N DAY • T U E S DAY
2016 6TH 7TH 8TH 9TH 10TH 11TH 12TH

The Public Theatre takes its art-for-all mission seriously, and, since 2005, its “Under the Radar” festival
has been an essential showcase of the avant-garde. Programmed by Mark Russell and Meiyin Wang, it NIGHT LIFE | THE THEATRE
has welcomed artists from places as far-flung (and free-expression-averse) as Belarus; this year’s festival, movies | DANCE | art
Jan. 6-17, features companies from Chile, Japan, and Rwanda. But you don’t always need to look abroad to
classical music
find perception-altering voices. The South Asian trans performance duo DarkMatter was formed by two
New Yorkers, Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian. In “#ItGetsBitter” (at Joe’s Pub, Jan. 12-14), they ABOVE & BEYOND
offer a cheeky radical-queer critique of the gay-rights movement, employing spoken word, fractured FOOD & DRINK
nursery rhymes, and fluorescent lipstick: an urgent, funny dispatch from the margins.
p h oto g r a p h by Z a n e Z h o u

Rock and Pop
Musicians and night-club proprietors
lead complicated lives; it’s advisable
to check in advance to confirm
engagements.
Classic Album Sundays:
Carole King
“Nobody appreciates the impact of
Carole King’s ‘Tapestry,’ least of all
Carole King,” Martin Scorsese recently
quipped to Lin-Manuel Miranda and
others at the New Museum. Colleen
Murphy, founder of this charming
record club and one of the more
than twenty-five million people who
own the record, might have smirked
with the director had she overheard.
Murphy started Classic Album Sun-
days in London in 2010, gathering
friends and fellow sound obsessives
to listen to beloved albums in their
entirety, distraction-free and over a
professional sound system—and it
wasn’t long before the former New
Yorker launched additional branches,
including one in Brooklyn. The next
installment will revisit King’s 1971
folk-pop masterwork across five
cities this January, in anticipation of
the record’s forty-fifth anniversary.
“Tapestry” is still worth every one
of the forty-four minutes attendees
will devote to it: King stripped adult
contemporary to its bare elements
of affecting concepts and seamless
melodies so well that “It’s Too
Late” will escape cliché for as long
as couples really do try to make it.
Good Room’s fusty décor is just cozy
enough for this listening party; the
d.j. Ron Like Hell will press Play.
(98 Meserole Ave., Greenpoint.
718-349-2373. Jan. 10 at 4.)
D.J. Mustard
Let’s tackle the most pressing issues
first: he was born Dijon McFarlane,
and he owns at least one diamond
pendant styled after a Heinz bottle.
But this prolific producer and d.j. gets
more accolades for his ubiquitous,
pop-dominating sound pack than he
does for his awesome stage name.
Mustard stumbled into success
alongside his rapping partner YG
and his fellow producer and vocalist
Ty Dolla $ign: the trio bridged the
hyphy bounce of California’s Bay
Area with melodies just as galvanic
as any Swedish mega-producer’s to
crystallize a sound that would fuel
night-club sets and high-school
dances across America. Just sample
Omarion’s inescapable “Post to Be”
or Kid Ink and Dej Loaf’s haunting
6 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
NIGHT IFE
“Be Real” for a primer on what he
does best. Mustard played hits before
he made them, and specializes in the
sounds of summer—if the unsea-
sonable mildness holds, you might
hit Output’s rooftop for one of its
treasured slushies. (74 Wythe Ave.,
Brooklyn. outputclub.com. Jan. 8.)
Federation Sound
Spanish Town is a storied land in the
parish of St. Catherine in Jamaica.
Grace Jones was born there, and so was
Chronixx, the twenty-three-year-old
reggae revivalist who eulogizes the
neighborhood on his latest record,
“Spanish Town Rocking.” The record’s
downbeat guitar and idle patois
harmonies recall Bunny Wailer and
Dennis Brown’s sweetest songs, and
conjure a sanguine alternate music
time line where the hardened reggae
offshoot dancehall never swept the
eighties. The prolific New York d.j.s
Max Glazer and Kenny Meez, known
collectively as Federation Sound,
premièred the record this December
during their regular slot on Red Bull’s
RBMA Radio, and it’s just the kind
of thick and hazy roots music they
bring to the Delancey on Thursdays,
cover free. “Strictly roots and culture
play ’pon I station,” Chronixx declares,
and the Federation selectors will
follow suit, spinning an all-vinyl set
of reggae classics. Beware the Wray
& Nephew specials if you’ve never
sampled the Jamaican rum. (168
Delancey St. 212-254-9920. Jan. 7.)
Honduras
These Brooklyn rockers dish out
rattling punk that’s easy to love:
quick-hit, warmly juvenile guitar licks
and jangling drums that stomp up
from underneath. The lead singer,
Patrick Phillips, performs with a
nihilistic edge that updates the Sex
Pistols well, but the guitarist Tyson
Moore will cite originators like the
Saints and the Heartbreakers if
you ask him about influences. The
best moments of the band’s début,
“Rituals,” drag Phillips’s vocals out
front, and fast: “Barricades” cracks
open with eight counts of galloping
snares, dives through some crashing
waves of guitar, and then clears the
room again for Phillips to casually
warn, “Don’t look me in the eye.” It’s
beach punk by city kids, an age-old
inversion lapped up by critics and
fans alike, even if the band drove
upstate to lay the songs down.
(Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston
St. 212-260-4700. Jan. 9.)
Alan Licht
This experimental guitarist and music
writer (his exquisite coffee-table book,
“Sound Art,” traces the convergence of
music and the visual arts) is celebrating
the release of a genial new album called
“Currents.” The record’s eight acoustic
guitar instrumentals are subtle and
highly accessible, employing drones,
altered tunings, and a forceful delivery
that evokes guitar masters like John
Fahey and Richard Thompson. Like
those of his progenitors, Licht’s best
songs achieve a rare combination of
exhilaration and peace. Opening will
be the Americana-tinged balladeer
Zachary Cale and the enchanting
harpist Mary Lattimore. (Union
Pool, 484 Union Ave., Brooklyn.
718-609-0484. Jan. 6.)
Cass McCombs
This month, the folk guitarist and
songwriter McCombs shared a mas-
sive compilations album, “A Folk Set
Apart: Rarities, B-Sides, and Space
Junk, Etc.,” on Domino. He’s spent
the past decade or so wandering
between California and New York,
seeking inspiration for slow-marching,
melancholy rumination: “Empty
houses and family plots / so why’s my
stomach all in knots?” he wonders into
his chest on 2011’s “Saturday Song.”
This latest batch of tunes delivers
on its promise—five are previously
unreleased; the rest are ephemeral
one-offs. The songs stick because
they’re so lived in: McCombs has
been loyal to the road long enough to
pull off the 2009 B-side “Minimum
Wage,” a loafer anthem about living
with no chores or phones. If you plan
to attend this headlining gig, buy
some merch. (Bowery Ballroom, 6
Delancey St. 212-260-4700. Jan. 7.)
3 of just a bassist and a drummer, has
Jazz and Standards
George Cables
It can take decades for a journeyman
musician to evolve into, and subse-
quently be regarded as, a near-master:
consider the case of the estimable
pianist Cables. He’s joined here
by the same compatriots—Essiet
Essiet, on bass, and Victor Lewis,
on drums—who were heard on his
most recent album, the celebratory
“In Good Company.” (Village Van-
guard, 178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th
St. 212-255-4037. Jan. 5-10.)
Barbara Carroll
It’s been a long strange trip for this
pianist and singer. Seventy or so
years ago, she was playing bebop
on Fifty-second Street; today, she’s
one of the high priestesses of clas-
sic cabaret, serving up standards
burnished bright by way of her
marvellous musicianship and noble
presence as a sophisticated survivor.
(Birdland, 315 W. 44th St. 212-581-
3080. Jan. 9.)
Al Foster’s Birthday Bash
He may never achieve the name rec-
ognition of such fellow-percussionists
as Art Blakey or Max Roach, yet
Foster was the man that the likes
of Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins,
and Joe Henderson called upon
when they needed a telepathically
responsive drummer to churn up
the action from behind. The ex-
plosive rhythm-maker celebrates
his seventy-third birthday at the
helm of a solid quartet. (Smoke,
2751 Broadway, between 105th and
106th Sts. 212-864-6662. Jan. 8-10.)
Ali Jackson
Best recognized for his work with
the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra,
the confident and adaptable drummer
Jackson leads a five-piece ensemble
in a tribute to the classic quintets
of a sweeping range of jazz icons,
including Louis Armstrong, Art
Blakey, Miles Davis, and the epochal
duo of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie
Parker. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th
St. 212-576-2232. Jan. 7-10.)
Nicholas Payton
His bands have gotten considerably
more compact, and he’s assigned
himself plenty more to do, but it
all seems to be working for the
multitasking Payton, a swaggering
trumpeter who now, in the company
also taken to playing keyboards and
singing. (Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola,
Broadway at 60th St. 212-258-9595.
Jan. 7.)
Ken Vandermark
Becoming a MacArthur Fellow, in 1999,
didn’t noticeably change the game
plan for this far-seeing saxophonist
and clarinet player; he still makes
Chicago his home and remains as
committed to the jazz avant-garde
as he has been since his emergence,
in the early nineties. His New York
residency finds collaborative space
for such questing players as Joe
Morris, Ikue Mori, and Joe McPhee.
(The Stone, E. 2nd St. & Ave. C.
212-473-0043. Jan. 5-10.)
 the
HATRE
Openings and Previews
Noises Off
The Roundabout revives Michael Frayn’s backstage
farce from 1982, with a cast including Andrea
Martin, Tracee Chimo, Campbell Scott, Jeremy
Shamos, and Megan Hilty. Jeremy Herrin directs.
In previews. (American Airlines Theatre, 227
W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300.)

Our Mother’s Brief Affair

Lynne Meadow directs Richard Greenberg’s play
for Manhattan Theatre Club, starring Linda Lavin
as an ailing mother who reveals a shocking secret
to her children. In previews. (Samuel J. Friedman,
261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200.)

Skeleton Crew
In the final chapter of Dominique Morisseau’s
In Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s tragedy, a woman asks her father’s servant to kill her fiancé. “Detroit” trilogy, directed by Ruben Santiago-
Hudson, the workers at an auto plant face the
threat of foreclosure. In previews. (Atlantic
Stage 2, at 330 W. 16th St. 866-811-4111.)
jacobean chic 3
Red Bull Theatre kicks of its season of scandal with “The Changeling.” Now Playing
The Color Purple
In this musical version of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel,
centuries before it was an ill-advised soft drink, Red Bull was a theatre in Cynthia Erivo plays Celie, a poor, obscure, and
blighted black woman living in the South in the
Shakespeare’s England, a lesser-known competitor to the Globe. Starting around 1606, it early twentieth century. More or less sold of as
was the home of Queen Anne’s Men, whose raucous spectators, sometimes provoked by an adolescent to Mister (Isaiah Johnson), Celie
what they saw onstage, often wound up in court for brawling. (Picture a Jacobean CBGB.) has no defenders, and thus no love, until Shug
Avery (Jennifer Hudson), an itinerant blues singer,
The Puritans banned all theatre in 1642, but didn’t quite succeed: the place was frequently appears. It takes a director with John Doyle’s vi-
raided for illegally hosting “drolls,” or comic sketches. The playhouse oicially reopened sionary capabilities to dispense with the “Mamba’s
after the Restoration, but it was torn down within the decade. Oh, well. Daughters” aspect of Celie’s story and, instead,
exercise empathy, critical distance, and an openness
Fittingly, this hotbed of transgression has a namesake Of Broadway. Since 2003, Red to lives and cultures other than his own. By not
Bull Theatre has devoted itself to stylish mountings of the classics, with a nose for the falling prey to the story’s periodic sentimentality,
perverse. The company’s ostensible mission is to stage plays with “heightened language”—a Doyle has created a theatrical world that’s fresh,
vital, and unexpected, and Erivo is central to his
draw for actors—but, under the artistic direction of Jesse Berger, its sleek, runway-ready work: her Celie is not a noble survivor but a
productions specialize in those old standbys sex and violence, typically culminating in a stubborn, intelligent force, who is well aware of
cascade of blood. Naturally, Jacobean drama plays to the company’s strengths: it has staged her own wit and wariness. (Reviewed in our issue
of 1/4/16.) (Jacobs, 242 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.)
punky renditions of “The Revenger’s Tragedy,” in 2005 (poison!); “The Witch of Edmonton,”
in 2011 (black magic!); and, last spring, “ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” (incest!). But the troupe Fiddler on the Roof
also tackles modern classics, notably Jean Genet’s “The Maids,” in 2012, featuring the superb Danny Burstein is one of the best character actors
we have, a performer of depth and ease, but he’s
stage actresses Jeanine Serralles and Ana Reeder. As usual, it all looked smashing. not a star, and a star is what’s required to put this
Perhaps redundantly, Red Bull is calling its new lineup a “season of scandal,” show over. Based on Sholem Aleichem’s great
beginning with Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 1622 tragedy, “The stories about shtetl life in Russia, this classic
adaptation works on many levels, thanks to Jerry
Changeling,” playing at the Lucille Lortel through Jan. 24. (The season continues, Bock’s music, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics, and Joseph
in April, with Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s gossip-minded comedy “The School for Stein’s excellent book. Tevye (Burstein) prays
Scandal.”) In Berger’s staging of “The Changeling,” Sara Topham plays the unhappily that his five daughters will find happiness in a
changing world, but how do you allow for that
betrothed Beatrice, who asks her father’s loathsome servant De Flores (Manoel Felciano) when the old ways must be smashed for them to
to dispatch her fiancé, freeing her up to marry Alsemero (Christian Coulson). His price do so? Jessica Hecht plays Tevye’s wife, Golde,
for doing the deed, he informs her: “thy virginity.” Arson, lunacy, and murder have the and she’s as good as Burstein, but she, too, lacks
the lustre to make Bartlett Sher’s production
day. It would make Queen Anne’s Men proud. as special as it should be. (Broadway Theatre,
—Michael Schulman Broadway at 53rd St. 212-239-6200.)

8 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY OWEN FREEMAN


Now Playing
The Big Short
Years before the financial crisis of
2008, early rumblings are detected
by Michael Burry (Christian Bale),
whose investment skills are in sharp
contrast to his social unease. Unlike
most of his peers, he spies the cracks
in the housing market and wagers
that, before too long, it will all come
tumbling down. Word of his gamble
inspires a few more players to take
the plunge, including a miserable
hedge-fund manager (Steve Carell), a
pair of greenhorns from out of town
(John Magaro and Finn Wittrock),
and our sly narrator (Ryan Gosling),
who works at Deutsche Bank. These
are just some of the unlovely figures
who pace back and forth through
Adam McKay’s new film, based
on the nonfiction book by Michael
Lewis. The movie pops and fizzes
with invention, and even takes time
out, now and then, to educate—
screeching to a halt and summoning
a celebrity (Selena Gomez, say, or
Margot Robbie) to steer us through
the economic verbiage. Everything
you always wanted to know about
credit default swaps but were afraid
to ask: it’s all here. So winning are
these tactics, and so cheerfully head-
long is the mood, that we’re hardly
aware of rooting for a bunch of
utter cynics who are poised to make
tens of millions of dollars from the
misfortunes of others.—Anthony Lane
(Reviewed in our issue of 12/14/15.)
(In wide release.)
Carol
One day in the nineteen-fifties, Carol
Aird (Cate Blanchett), a wife and
mother, is shopping for Christmas
presents at a department store in
Manhattan. She comes across a
salesgirl, Therese Belivet (Rooney
Mara), and they fall in love, right
there. Todd Haynes’s film then
follows the women as they meet
for lunch, hang out at Carol’s home,
embark on an aimless journey, and
go to bed—conscious, all the while,
of what they are risking, flouting,
or leaving behind. Therese has a
boyfriend (Jake Lacy), and Carol
has a husband (Kyle Chandler) and a
child, although the maternal instinct
gets short dramatic shrift. That feels
true to Patricia Highsmith, whose
1952 novel, “The Price of Salt,” is
the foundation of the film. The fine
screenplay is by Phyllis Nagy, who
drains away the sourness of the book;
what remains is a production of clean
and frictionless beauty, down to the
MOVIES
last, strokable inch of clothing and
skin. Yet Haynes and his stars, for
all their stylish restraint, know that
elegance alone will not suffice. Inside
the showcase is a storm of feeling.
With Sarah Paulson, as Carol’s best
friend.—A.L. (11/23/15) (In limited
release.)
The Connection
Shirley Clarke’s first feature is based
on a play by Jack Gelber, about a
group of junkies—including a quartet
of jazz musicians—who are waiting in
a run-down New York loft for their
heroin dealer. She turns the story
into a disturbing and self-accusing
meta-movie, making two of the char-
acters into documentary filmmakers
and presenting the film as an edited
version of the footage they shot.
What the filmmakers show, above
all, is the music itself. The quartet
of musicians, led by the pianist and
composer Freddie Redd and the
caustic-toned post-bop saxophonist
Jackie McLean, perform brilliantly
on-camera as they dramatize both
the agonized wait and the needed
high. At the core of the movie is
the question of why modern jazz
seemed inseparable from drugs;
whether the music’s fusion of fury
and intricacy, of intellectual com-
plexity and daring self-revelation,
of spiritual insight and streetwise
experience—all arising from the
distinctive pathos of black-American
life—is bound to self-destructive
abnegation, and whether, if it’s true
of jazz, it’s true of modern art at
large. The empathetic engagement
of documentary filmmakers in the
lives of their subjects seems, here,
like the closest thing to an aesthetic
suicide pact.—Richard Brody (Museum
of Arts and Design; Jan. 8.)
45 Years
The talent and charisma of Charlotte
Rampling and Tom Courtenay aren’t
deployed but milked in the writer and
director Andrew Haigh’s portentous
drama of a marriage in crisis. They
play Kate and Geoff Mercer, a re-
fined and hearty bourgeois couple
in rural England who are about to
celebrate their forty-fifth wedding
anniversary. A week before the party,
Geoff gets a letter from the Swiss
authorities about a former girlfriend
named Katya, who died there in
an accident in 1962. But Kate soon
learns that Geoff—whom she hadn’t
met at that time—has been keeping
the details of that relationship, and
the depth of his commitment to the
deceased, a secret from her. The story
of sudden and corrosive distrust
appears simple and straightforward,
but Haigh seems to have built it
backward, delivering only enough
information to lead relentlessly to
its foreordained conclusion. His
airtight script is matched by sluggish
direction that leaves Rampling and
Courtenay with little to do but look
earnest and troubled. Haigh makes his
intentions so obvious—and makes his
actors display them so blatantly—that
all imagination is foreclosed.—R.B.
(In limited release.)
The Hateful Eight
The action in Quentin Tarantino’s
new film (his eighth, as the credits
declare) unfolds in snowy Wyoming,
where a stagecoach carrying a bounty
hunter (Kurt Russell) and his lucra-
tive catch (Jennifer Jason Leigh)
picks up two more passengers—a
sheriff-in-waiting (Walton Goggins)
and, by an odd coincidence, another
bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson).
They head to a saloon called Minnie’s
Haberdashery, where further folks are
lined up like suspects. Tarantino has
thus gathered all the ingredients of
a whodunit, and, as usual, he takes
his time, patiently stirring the plot
like stew. Rather than dish it out,
however, he blows it up, unable to
resist the blandishments of extreme
bloodshed. Such is the climax that
all his movies seek, and trusting
fans will relish the eagerness with
which the new work accelerates into
carnage. That was true of Jacobean
tragedies, too, but in those we sensed
the intolerable burden of moral risk,
whereas the characters here are
dispatched with a snickering glee,
and little seems to hang on their
demise. (The honorable exception is
Leigh, who commands the movie.)
With Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum,
and—with the scent of “Reservoir
Dogs” still clinging to them—Michael
Madsen and Tim Roth. Music by
Ennio Morricone.—A.L. (1/4/16)
(In wide release.)
Hell’s Hinges
This stark, brutal Western, from
1916, co-directed by and starring
William S. Hart, presents a raw,
violent, thoroughly demythologized
Wild West. The rudimentary plot
brings together an inept preacher,
who carries the Gospel to the rough
outpost called Hell’s Hinges, and the
town’s toughest gunman (Hart), whose
better instincts are awakened by his
love for the preacher’s sister. The
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
first shot of the hardscrabble town,
showing a mob swarming through
clouds of dust to witness a brawl,
sets the tone for this grim view of
frontier life. Hart’s spangled coat
is more expressive than his blank,
stoic face; the landscape of forbid-
ding hills and scattered sagebrush
is equally void and featureless; and
there’s no sheriff or federal troops
to quell the chaos. The images are
as direct and bare as the characters’
emotions, and the harsh drama
builds to a mad, apocalyptic climax
of crime and revenge. Silent.—R.B.
(MOMA; Jan. 7.)
In the Heart of the Sea
The new Ron Howard film tells a tale
that lay behind “Moby-Dick”—the final
voyage of a whaling vessel named the
Essex. It departs from Nantucket in
1820 under the command of George
Pollard (Benjamin Walker), the scion
of a wealthy family, a novice com-
pared to his first mate, Owen Chase
(Chris Hemsworth). Friction arises
between them, especially after the
captain’s inexperience takes his crew
into a furious storm. Rumors of rich
pickings, and of a vast white whale,
then lure the ship into the wastes
of the Pacific, where the creature
awaits—no idle legend, it turns out,
but a real beast, or as real as the C.G.I.
can make it. The sketchiness of the
effects, indeed, is a sorry surprise;
waves and townscapes, as well as
whales, feel insubstantial and thin.
One scene, where a boy descends into
the clammy red pit of a whale’s head,
exerts a genuine grip, but even then
Howard cuts it short. (Imagine what
David Cronenberg would have made
of it.) The boy survives the Essex’s
voyage, grows up traumatized, and
as an adult—played by the splendid
Brendan Gleeson—recounts the fate
of the Essex to Herman Melville
(Ben Whishaw). That framing device
seems more solid and emotionally
grounded than anything that happens
at sea.—A.L. (12/21 & 28/15) (In
wide release.)
Joy
Painful personal overtones resonate in
David O. Russell’s boisterous comic
view—based on a true story—of an
entrepreneur’s conflict-riddled rise
to success. Jennifer Lawrence stars
as a divorced young mother on
Long Island who’s in a rut. Smart,
creative, and handy, she works at an
airport counter and copes with her
divorced parents (Virginia Madsen
and Robert De Niro), her father’s new
9
girlfriend (Isabella Rossellini), her
bitter half-sister (Elisabeth Röhm),
her ex-husband (Édgar Ramirez), and
her supportive but ailing grandmother
(Diane Ladd). Overwhelmed by a
Cinderella-like burden of chores, Joy
designs a new kind of mop, finds
an investor, and is thrust into the
predatory world of attorneys and
executives. Russell, who wrote the
script and co-wrote the story with
Annie Mumolo, captures the magical
moment when Joy’s private inspiration
finds public expression; the movie’s
best scene features Bradley Cooper,
as a TV executive who shows Joy the
ropes. The core of the film is Joy’s
mastery of the killer instinct, her
deft plotting of bold confrontations.
Russell’s portrait of Joy stints on
intimacy, but her self-realization in
response to crises is thrilling. With
Dascha Polanco, as Joy’s best friend
and savior.—R.B. (In wide release.)
Macbeth
The Scottish play bewitches once
again; Justin Kurzel is hardly the
first movie director to be lured into
its mists. This new adaptation stars
Michael Fassbender, at his moodiest
and most hard-bitten, as the title
character, with Marion Cotillard as his
wife. The film begins and ends on the
battlefield, as if that were Macbeth’s
natural hunting ground; everything
in between has the quality of a bad
and agonizing dream. (Could Lady
In Corneliu Porumboiu’s “The Treasure,” opening Jan. 8, a hunt for a hidden inheritance in a suburb of Bucharest sheds light on Romanian history and politics.
10 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
Macbeth, perhaps, be sleepwalking
through the whole thing?) King
Duncan (David Thewlis) is knifed
not in a castle but in a tent, and
Shakespeare’s verse is muttered,
spat, and moaned without a gleam of
rhetorical flourish. Nothing, in short,
speaks of grandeur in this depleted
land, and there’s something crazed,
and almost ridiculous, about fighting
and killing for the chance to govern
it. Fassbender seems more at ease
with a blade in his hand than with
a mouthful of poetry, while Sean
Harris makes a vehement Macduff.
Kurzel adds children throughout,
to great effect: one to the trio of
witches, and one—a corpse—to the
opening scene, lamented by Macbeth.
The movie brims, quite rightly, with
blood and flame; the screen, by the
close, is a terrible sea of red.—A.L.
(12/7/15) (In limited release.)
The Mark of Zorro
Douglas Fairbanks’s first great
acrobatic epic, from 1920, set the
standard for zesty swashbucklers. As
Spanish California’s masked avenger,
with a foppish cover identity and a
propensity for swooping down on his
enemies out of nowhere, he is Robin
Hood, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and
Batman rolled into one. He didn’t
need a molded bodysuit or special
effects to give the audience a charge:
he did it with comic showmanship
and physical exuberance. In Zorro’s
bouts with the evil governor and his
minions, Fairbanks accents the “play”
in swordplay, and never merely runs
when he can gambol; he leads bad
guys on a merry chase. And if he’s
extravagantly cunning as Zorro, he’s
furtively cunning as the dandified
Don Diego, especially when he acts
the fool by courting the beautiful
Lolita (Marguerite de la Motte)
with parlor tricks. Directed by Fred
Niblo; the solid cast includes Noah
Beery and Robert McKim.—Michael
Sragow (MOMA; Jan. 10.)
The Revenant
In the eighteen-twenties, a band of
fur hunters is attacked by American
Indians in the wooded wilds around
the Missouri River. A few survivors
start the long journey back to camp,
first by boat (where the air of
twitching vulnerability recalls that of
“Apocalypse Now”) and then on foot.
One of them, Hugh Glass (Leonardo
DiCaprio), is mauled by a bear and
left for dead. Alone, he continues
his pilgrimage—eating raw meat
and fish, tumbling through rapids,
and, for want of accommodation,
sleeping inside a dead horse. The
sequence of hardships is so extreme
and so unrelenting as to verge on
the comical, but DiCaprio tamps
down any hint of levity, as does
the director, Alejandro González
Iñárritu. Though Iñárritu’s eye is as
restless as it was in his last movie,
“Birdman,” the mood is chastened,
and the merry-go-round has made
way for a punishing regime. We are
given gestures toward a plot: Glass
is devoted to his son, Hawk (Forrest
Goodluck), and beset by a growling
nemesis (Tom Hardy), who is almost
as bearish as the bear. Such figures
only compound the bitter mood,
while a more promising character, a
youth by the name of Bridger (played
by the excellent Will Poulter), falls
away. The cinematography, often
radiant, and as crisp as ice, is by
Emmanuel Lubezki.—A.L. (1/4/16)
(In wide release.)
Sisters
This hectic and sentimental comedy,
though built on a firm foundation of
experience and pain, is a sad waste of
sparkling talent. Tina Fey and Amy
Poehler star as the fortyish Ellis sisters.
The elder, Kate (Fey), a cosmetician,
is the free-spirited single mother
of a teen-age girl, Haley (Madison
Davenport); the younger, Maura
(Poehler), a childless and recently
divorced nurse, is compassionate to
a fault. When their parents (Dianne
Wiest and James Brolin) sell the
family home in Orlando, the Ellis
sisters rush there to clear out the
room that they shared throughout
childhood. Once they’re back in their
home town, their old friends turn up,
along with memories, frustrations,
and grudges. Maura needs to cut
COURTESY ADI MARINECI/42 KM FILM
loose, Kate needs to calm down, and
both seek to fulfill their needs by
throwing a wild party in the empty
house. The belabored raunchiness of
the humor is further burdened with
facile psychologizing. There are solid
subjects at hand—adults’ seemingly
unending adolescence, the burden of
solitude in middle age, the unspoken
demands of family ties—but they
remain undeveloped. Directed by
Jason Moore.—R.B. (In wide release.)
Son of Saul
The first feature film by László Nemes
confronts a subject that many people
would prefer not to think about, let
alone to cast in dramatic form. In death
camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau,
the Sonderkommando were teams
of prisoners who were forced to
deal with other prisoners as they
arrived—herding them into the gas
chambers, sorting through their
discarded clothes, and ferrying their
bodies to the furnaces. A movie that
staged all this in detail would not be
watchable, or even defensible; what
Nemes does, therefore, is to focus
on one such assistant, a Hungarian
Jew named Saul Ausländer (Géza
Röhrig), whom we see in almost
every shot. The film shows not the
horror of the events around him but
his reaction to them; his dark stare
does the work on our behalf. There
is a plot here—two separate plots, in
fact, which might be thought excessive,
although they crystallize the fervor
and the despair of the inmates. First,
there is an uprising and a breakout,
DANCE
Daniil Simkin’s INTENSIO
The Russian star’s new venture is a
small contemporary-ballet ensemble—
or “art project,” as Simkin describes
it—in which he and a handful of
colleagues perform works by cho-
reographers with whom he has an
aesthetic affinity. It’s also something
of a family affair: an interactive video
for one of the pieces was designed
by Simkin’s father, who shares his
son’s interest in immersive computer
graphics and technology. The danc-
ers, with one exception, hail from
Simkin’s home company, American
Ballet Theatre. (It’s an excellent
group that includes the luminous
Isabella Boylston and Calvin Royal.)
The dances, by Alexander Ekman,
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Jorma Elo,
against formidable odds. Second,
Saul recognizes, among the dead, his
own son, and much of the movie is
driven by his quest for a rabbi to say
the mourner’s Kaddish for the child.
Somehow, Nemes finds a balance: his
exhausting movie pays its respects
but also burns with rage.—A.L. (In
limited release.)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
The director J. J. Abrams infuses the
latest installment of George Lucas’s
intergalactic franchise with the spirit
of Steven Spielberg in this awestruck,
warmhearted, and good-humored
action spectacle. It’s centered on
the search for Luke Skywalker by
the organized Resistance to the evil
dominion of the First Order. That
oppressive successor to the Empire
wants to extinguish the last of the Jedi,
whose help the Resistance fighters
need. Abrams recruits a remarkable
new posse of actors—including Oscar
Isaac, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley,
and Adam Driver—to play a batch
of new characters, yet for all their
flair and presence they have little
acting to do (though Driver shines
in his moment of theatrical excess).
Abrams, who co-wrote the script with
Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt,
stage-manages some breathlessly
clever plotting, but he also plays
every gesture and every gag, every
sigh and every whoop to the balcony,
and he milks decades of nostalgia with
the stagy entrances of Carrie Fisher,
Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill.
Some of the grandest moments can
and Gregory Dolbashian, may not be
particularly profound, but they have
a hip, stylish, modern edge. (Joyce
Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St.
212-242-0800. Jan. 5-10.)
“Big Dance: Short Form”
After twenty-five years at the juncture
between experimental theatre, dance,
and performance art, Big Dance
Theatre treats itself to a bit of a
retrospective, with an evening of short
works. The vignettes and sketches
are drawn from disparate sources:
the diaries of a seventeenth-century
English dance master, the Alpine
children’s book “Heidi.” What binds
all of the various ingredients together
is sharp timing, wit, and a captivating
clarity of execution. (The Kitchen,
be seen coming around the corner,
the colossal battles and colorful
catastrophes feel anticlimactic, and
the meticulously designed futuristic
weaponry and outfits never rise to
symbolic significance. Despite the
copious servings of tragic threats and
good feelings, the production sinks
under the weight of its emotional
calculation.—R.B. (In wide release.)
The Treasure
In his earlier films, such as “Police,
Adjective,” Corneliu Porumboiu showed
contemporary Romanians excavating
the country’s troubled history by means
of language. In this mordant caper, he
shows them doing so by means of
shovels. Negoescu, an unemployed
publisher and a member of Bucharest’s
struggling middle class, asks his
neighbor Costi, a low-level housing
official, for money to rent a metal
detector. Negoescu wants to scan family
property in the suburbs; he suspects
that his great-grandfather buried
valuables there at the time of the
Communist takeover in the nineteen-
forties. Costi puts up the money, the
pair decide to split what they find, and
they head to the site with Cornel, the
detector’s cantankerous owner and
operator; under his guidance, they start
digging. Stories of nineteenth-century
political upheavals adorn Negoescu’s
family lore, and the property itself,
with its multiple layers of modification
and renovation, tells tales of historical
crises. Filming with long, ironically
balanced takes, Porumboiu delivers an
ingeniously intricate goofball comedy
512 W. 19th St. 212-255-5793. Jan.
6-9. Through Jan. 16.)
Noche Flamenca / “Antigona”
Soledad Barrio, the star of this New
York-based flamenco troupe, takes
the role of Sophocles’ Antigone,
in an adaptation by her husband,
Martín Santangelo, that turns the
Greek drama into a kind of flamenco
opera. A dance ensemble plays the
chorus; Antigone’s tormentor, Creon,
is embodied by the singer Manuel
Gago. The amalgam of flamenco and
Greek drama is surprisingly effective.
(West Park Presbyterian Church, 165
W. 86th St. 212-868-4444. Jan. 6-9
and Jan. 11-12. Through Jan. 23.)
American Realness
It can be something of an in-crowd
echo chamber—last year, the self-pity
quotient was disturbingly high—but
this festival is New York’s foremost
sampler of boundary-pushing perfor-
mance that shares borders with dance.
Amid more than a dozen productions
at Abrons Arts Center, MOMA
PS1, and Gibney Dance Center, the
premières include “Dead, Disappears,”
a solo by the dogged Heather Kravas,
inspired by Richard Serra’s 1967 work
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
that evokes heroes of legend while
bringing sociological abstractions
to mucky life. In Romanian.—R.B.
(Film Society of Lincoln Center and
IFC Center.)
Youth
Most of the new Paolo Sorrentino
film is set in a peaceable spa, where
Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine), a
famous British composer, is taking it
easy. He has largely given up work,
whereas his old friend Mick Boyle
(Harvey Keitel)—a movie director,
trailed by a screenwriter and other
hangers-on—is still entrapped in
the coils of creative endeavor. Also
present are Miss Universe (Madalina
Diana Ghenea), a discontented
film star (Paul Dano), and a lackey
from Buckingham Palace who begs
Fred to fulfill a royal request (Alex
Macqueen). Sorrentino circles these
various figures with his usual suavity,
compiling a collective meditation
on the woes of old age and the
frustrations of art. The result feels
both sumptuous and aimless, as if
we were leafing idly through an album
of delectable sights—of sounds, too,
as when Fred gathers the natural
noises of a valley into a tone poem
of his own imagining. Three women
lend the film fire: Rachel Weisz, as
Fred’s grievance-driven daughter;
Jane Fonda, as an indestructible
diva; and Paloma Faith, as a pop
star in a funny pastiche of a music
video—the energetic hot spot of the
film.—A.L. (12/7/15) (In limited
release.)
“Verb List”; “Culture Administration
& Trembling,” a collection of self-
described “medicine dances” created
and assembled by Antonija Livingstone,
Jennifer Lacey, Dominique Pétrin,
and Stephen Thompson; and “Durch
Nacht und Nebel,” in which the veteran
wild woman Yvonne Meier pointedly
displays her Venus of Willendorf
figure. (americanrealness.com. Jan.
7-12. Through Jan. 17.)
COIL 2016
P.S. 122’s annual performance festival
presents the première of “Panopticon,”
by the choreographer and video
artist Jillian Peña. Alluding to the
circular architectural design of the
same name—used in prisons and
made famous by Foucault in his book
“Discipline & Punish”—it’s a duet of
multiplied images, a philosophical
Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope. Among
the dance-centric offerings is also a
welcome reprise of David Neumann’s
“I Understand Everything Better.”
At once intensely personal and as
theatrically stylized as Noh or Kabuki
theatre, it’s an original and affecting
meditation on death and nature.
(Various locations. 212-352-3101.
Jan. 6-12. Through Jan. 17.)
11
 Museums and Libraries
Metropolitan Museum
“Korea: 100 Years of
Collecting at the Met”
For too long, the art of the so-called
hermit kingdom was neglected in the
West in favor of art from China and
Japan; indeed, many of the Met’s early
Korean acquisitions were initially
miscatalogued as Japanese, including
a charming chrysanthemum-dotted
tea bowl on view here. It took years
ART before the museum began collecting
Korean art in earnest, notably the ex-
quisite celadon ceramics of the Goryeo
dynasty (918-1392): vases painted with
cranes and lotus flowers and small oil
bottles splashed with a red underglaze.
Museums Short List Liturgical art works are less numerous,
Metropolitan Museum but no less beautiful. Two charming
“Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s gilt-bronze statues from the eighth
Drawings from the Collection of century depict a standing Buddha; in
Ricky Jay.” Opens Jan. 8.
a faded but still impressive painting
Museum of Modern Art from the thirteenth century, he sits
“Jackson Pollock: A Collection flanked by bodhisattvas, circles of
Survey, 1934–1954.”
Through March 13. gold radiating from his enlightened
head. Through March 27.
MOMA PS1
3 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Her new
“Greater New York.”
Through March 7.
Galleries—Uptown
Guggenheim Museum
Roger Mayne
“Photo-Poetics: An Anthology.”
Through March 23. London was still reeling from the
Second World War when Mayne, who
Whitney Museum
died in 2014, began photographing its
“Rachel Rose: Everything and
More.” Through Feb. 7. working-class neighborhoods, in the
late nineteen-fifties. His pictures of
Brooklyn Museum
children at play amid rubble-strewn
“Agitprop!” Through Aug. 7.
lots and graffiti-covered walls are
Frick Collection portraits of resilience. Helen Levitt
“Andrea del Sarto: The is an obvious precedent, and Mayne
Renaissance Workshop in
Action.” Through Jan. 10. shared her love of youthful sponta-
neity and her feel for the social life
Studio Museum in Harlem
of the street. He kept his distance
“A Constellation.”
Through March 6. from strolling businessmen in their
suits, but nudged closer to gaggles of
galleries Short List slick-haired teddy boys, even when
Uptown
one put up a hand to hold him off.
Jane Freilicher
De Nagy Mayne wasn’t discouraged; he just
724 Fifth Ave., at 57th St. stepped back and found a better
212-262-5050. angle. Through Jan. 23. (Gitterman,
Through Jan. 23. 41 E. 57th St. 212-734-0868.)
Zak Kitnick 3 In a video projection inspired by the
Boone
745 Fifth Ave., at 57th St. Galleries—Chelsea
212-752-2929. Monica Baer
Opens Jan. 8. How can this be the first New York
Chelsea solo exhibition of this wonderful
Tauba Auerbach German painter, who has shown
Cooper in Europe since the early nineties?
534 W. 21st St. 212-255-1105. Here she shares intoxicating works
Opens Jan. 9.
about intoxication, in two styles. The
Coco Fusco first series is large and black, with
Gray drifting swatches of white or pastel
508 W. 26th St. 212-399-2636.
Opens Jan. 9. impasto, shards of broken mirror, and
ghostly renderings of liquor labels.
Downtown
“Order” The second, larger and pale, situates
Essex Street realist images of liquor bottles at the
114 Eldridge St. 917-263-1001. bottoms of luminous pastel washes,
Through Jan. 31. with inconspicuous sketches of silly
“A Wasteland” faces. The paintings are lovely, droll,
Lomex and altogether transporting. Welcome
134 Bowery. 917-667-8541. to Manhattan, Monica! Through Jan.
Through Jan. 24. 16. (Greene Naftali, 508 W. 26th St.
212-463-7770.)
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
Though they now live on Long
Island, this husband-and-wife team
12 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
are Russia’s most renowned living
artists; in 1988, before they began
collaborating, Ilya won acclaim for his
slapstick-utopian installations—alle-
gories of Soviet life—the best known
of which is “The Man Who Flew
Into Space from His Apartment.”
But the two new painting series in
this exhibition are uneven. “The
Two Times” pairs pseudo-Poussin
pastorals with desaturated scenes of
Soviet youth to intentionally schlocky
effect. Better is “Six Paintings About
the Temporary Loss of Eyesight,” in
which ambiguous scenes of a beached
boat or a bourgeois living room are
overlaid with hundreds of irregularly
spaced polka dots, as if to lay a veil
across memory. Through Jan. 23.
(Pace, 510 W. 25th St. 212-255-4044.)
Deborah Kass
You might know the veteran New
York artist from her new public
sculpture, a bright-yellow “OY” or
“YO,” depending on your vantage
point, which was installed recently
paintings scramble the boundary
between invention and appropria-
tion to unsettling effect. Snippets
of text (song lyrics, book titles)
appear with allusions to recent
art history: Jackson Pollock drips,
Jasper Johns stencils, Bruce Nauman
neon—parodies of market-friendly
vapidity. (An Ellsworth Kellyesque
piece quotes Katy Perry, “We’ll be
young forever.”) There may be one
too many layers of irony here, but
Kass deserves credit for attempting
critique. Through Jan. 23. (Kasmin,
515 W. 27th St. 212-563-4474.)
Sharon Lockhart
Milena, the Polish teen-ager at the
center of Lockhart’s new work, is
an intriguing cipher. In a triptych
of photographs, she poses behind
a dining table, ducks away, then
peeks out at us, shy and charming.
final sequence of Truffaut’s “The 400
Blows,” the same girl is seen running
through the Polish countryside to an
empty beach, where she turns away
from the sea to face the camera with
a look that melts from satisfaction
into disappointment. It’s poignant,
but Lockhart’s investment in Milena
doesn’t fully pay off in this rigorously
pared-down installation. There’s more
mystery, nuance, and substance in
an adjacent room full of the artist’s
rephotographed family snapshots.
Through Jan. 23. (Gladstone, 515
W. 24th St. 212-206-9300.)
James Welling
Continuing the layered abstraction
and vivid color seen in his recent
photographs of Philip Johnson’s Glass
House, Welling meshes images of ar-
chitecture and landscape with portraits
of dancers, in his incandescent new
series, “Choreograph.” The pictures
involve digital manipulation, but the
results look like old-school, in-camera
multiple exposures: ecstatic jumbles
of bodies, trees, windows, and walls
overlaid with pools of neon-bright
color. A ghostly, faux-solarized effect
recalls Man Ray, but a closer affinity
is the Joshua Light Show’s pulsing
psychedelia, giving the work a rock-
and-roll energy that’s relieved by the
occasional balletic swoon. Through
Jan. 16. (Zwirner, 519 W. 19th St.
212-517-8677.)
Ray Yoshida
Little by little, show by show, the
seriously wacky, surreal Chicagoan art
that emerged in the nineteen-sixties
wears down the snooty resistance of
New York tastes. Born in Hawaii,
Yoshida (1930-2009) was an avuncular
figure for the artists he taught at the
Art Institute, before they banded
together as the Hairy Who. This
show, consisting mostly of works made
circa 1968-1974, features drawings in
felt-tip pen of neat, lurkingly animate
piles of rock shapes and womb-like
theatrical spaces, reminiscent of
the great outsider Martin Ramirez.
The muted colors amaze. Yoshida’s
browns can seem to entrap reds that
are screaming to get out. Through
Jan. 30. (Nolan, 527 W. 29th St.
212-925-6190.)
3
Galleries—Downtown
Guo Fengyi
The self-taught Chinese artist, who
died in 2010, began making art in
her late forties after being sidelined
from factory work by severe arthritis.
On vertical scrolls and scroll-like
lengths of rice paper or cloth, some
nearly fourteen feet tall, bundled
lines in colored inks build heraldic
or pod-like forms. The imagery is
partially figurative but abstract over
all; its rhythmic execution suggests
occult gods and rites. Works can go
goofy, with cute faces, or fearsome,
with shapes like exposed viscera,
but their swirling energies beggar
interpretation. They are gorgeous.
They overwhelm. Through Jan. 31.
(Edlin, 212 Bowery, at Spring St.
212-206-9723.)
Robert Smithson
In the early sixties, before Smithson
headed west to construct his famous
“Spiral Jetty” in the Great Salt Lake,
the twenty-something artist made Pop
collages and drawings whose imagery
interlaced comics and soft-core porn.
Bad news: they’re terrible. Buxom babes
and beefcake boys, at times decked
out in gas masks and feathered war
bonnets, float amid doodled lightning
bolts, ringing appropriated movie stills
or geometric arrangements (which
are the only taste here of the artist’s
brilliant later work). The show’s ideal
viewer is the Smithson obsessive,
who will see just how radically his
non-sites and earthworks ruptured
not only the history of sculpture but
his own juvenilia. Through Jan. 10.
(Cohan, 291 Grand St. 212-714-9500.)
 cASical
MUSIC

Opera
Metropolitan Opera
Franco Zeffirelli’s masterly production
of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” now deep
into its fourth decade, continues to
cast an irresistible spell. Bryan Hymel,
the rapidly rising tenor from New
Orleans with a voice of heroic stature,
takes the role of Rodolfo, leading a
cast that also includes Maria Agresta,
Susanna Phillips, and Quinn Kelsey;
Dan Ettinger conducts. (Jan. 6 at
7:30 and Jan. 9 at 8.) • Jeremy Sams’s
production of Johann Strauss II’s
Lauren Worsham and John Kelly star in David T. Little’s devastating opera “Dog Days,” at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center. “Die Fledermaus” maximizes the
operetta’s Viennese milieu by setting
the action on New Year’s Eve, 1899.
But the forced fun that marred the
fully committed production’s première, in 2013, has
given way to a lighter, more confident
The Prototype Festival redefines contemporary opera. touch from Susanna Phillips, Paulo
Szot, Toby Spence, Lucy Crowe,
and the delightful Susan Graham
amidst the general uncertainty of New York’s operatic scene, the Prototype (who sports a spiky white wig as
the Russian prince Orlofsky). Betsy
Festival, an annual explosion of youthful energy spearheaded by Beth Morrison Projects and Wolfe and Christopher Fitzgerald,
the experimental theatre space HERE, has built a clearly defined profile: brash, socially engaged, in the speaking roles of Ida and
and substantially post-classical. This year’s lineup of seven productions, ofered Jan. 6-17 at a Frosch, bring plenty of dizzy, con-
tagious energy to the show; James
variety of progressive venues, acknowledges the expanding ambitions of the singer-songwriter Levine. (Jan. 7 at 7:30. This is the
community with such shows as “Sága,” a plaintive theatrical song cycle presented by the Belgian final performance.) • Georges Bizet’s
indie band Dez Mona and the period-instrument ensemble Baroque Orchestration X (at splendorous Orientalist fantasy from
1863, “Les Pêcheurs de Perles”
National Sawdust). But three shows from classical composers are the most boldly innovative: (“The Pearl Fishers”)—in which the
each partakes of the dark, dystopian mood that saturates popular culture, and the news cycle. composer first showed the kind of
The hardy souls who travelled to Montclair, New Jersey, in 2012 to see the first performances talent that would propel “Carmen”
to renown only a few years later—is
of David T. Little’s “Dog Days” know that those attending the New York première of the show being presented at the Met for the
(at N.Y.U.’s Skirball Center) will get a chance to experience the power of a modern classic. first time in a century, in a production
The fantastic original cast (including the Tony-nominated soprano Lauren Worsham) has by Penny Woolcock. The radiant
Diana Damrau is the Hindu princess
reconvened to relay the shattering story, about an ordinary American family facing starvation Leïla, with Matthew Polenzani and
and moral collapse in the midst of an unspecified apocalypse. The trenchant but elegantly Mariusz Kwiecień as the old friends
phrased libretto is by Royce Vavrek—the indie Hofmannsthal—who has also collaborated with who each desire her; Gianandrea
Noseda, always a potent presence on
the eclectic young composer Du Yun for “Angel’s Bone,” a world-première work (at the 3LD Art the Met’s podium, conducts. (Jan. 8 and
& Technology Center) which uses a fablelike tale of angels coming down to earth as a metaphor Jan. 12 at 7:30.) • In “Anna Bolena,”
for the real-life problem of human traicking. There’s a distinguished import as well, from the Donizetti’s fanciful take on Tudor
history, Henry VIII entraps his
gifted Irish team of the composer Donnacha Dennehy, whose vibrantly post-minimalist music second wife with a former lover in
has a kinship with Little’s, and the playwright Enda Walsh (“Once”): “The Last Hotel,” a grim order to have her executed. Earlier
parable about assisted suicide, in its U.S. première (at St. Ann’s Warehouse). Might next year’s this season, Sondra Radvanovsky
gave a towering performance as the
festival include a comedy? wronged queen; Ildar Abdrazakov
—Russell Platt sang the king with thuggish authority;

ILLUSTRATION BY JOOHEE YOON THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 13

and Jamie Barton was in sumptuous voice as his
new paramour, Giovanna (Jane) Seymour. They
all return, with Stephen Costello taking the role
of Anna’s onetime lover Percy; Marco Armiliato.
(Jan. 9 at 1. This is the final performance.) • At
its best, the vast golden city that Franco Zeffirelli
built for Puccini’s Chinese fairy tale “Turandot”
provides a gilt frame for the bold lyrical style of
the composer’s final and most ambitious opera.
This season, a clutch of big-name dramatic so-
pranos alternates in the punishing title role of
the ice princess with a penchant for executing
her suitors. Christine Goerke began the run;
now the company turns to another powerhouse
singer of Wagner and Strauss, the illustrious
Nina Stemme, who leads a cast including Anita
Hartig and Marco Berti, all under the baton of
Paolo Carignani. (Jan. 11 at 7:30.) (Metropolitan
Opera House. 212-362-6000.)
3 Alexander Gavrylyuk) and the Fifth Symphony.
Orchestras and Choruses
New York Philharmonic
Eric Owens, the superlative American bass-
baritone, is enjoying a rich season residency with
the Philharmonic. The reigning Alberich at the
Met, he takes on another great Wagnerian part, that
of Wotan, in a concert version of the final scene
from Act III of “Die Walküre” (which features
the soprano Heidi Melton, in her Philharmonic
début, singing the role of Brünnhilde). Alan Gilbert
leads the program, which preludes the scene with
Sibelius’s appropriately mythic tone poem “En
Saga,” a selection of Strauss lieder sung by Owens
(including “Cäcilie”), and Wagner’s “Ride of the
Valkyries.” (David Geffen Hall. 212-875-5656. Jan.
7 and Jan. 12 at 7:30 and Jan. 8-9 at 8. Note: The
quite different Saturday-matinée program, on Jan.
9 at 2, presents several of the orchestra’s principal
strings playing Grieg’s String Quartet, followed
by a performance of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony,
conducted by Gilbert.)
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
Cincinnati’s orchestra, long a major ensemble,
has been led by such august maestros as Leopold
Stokowski and Fritz Reiner. Louis Langrée, well
known to New Yorkers as the music director of
Mostly Mozart, is bringing his lithe and propulsive
style to the orchestra these days; he leads them at
David Geffen Hall in an all-Tchaikovsky program
that begins with the Piano Concerto No. 1 in
B-Flat Minor (with the exceptional young pianist
(212-721-6500. Jan. 6 at 8.)
Artek: “A Medici Wedding”
Gwendolyn Toth’s honored early-music group
marks its thirtieth anniversary with a concert
that brings sixty-two players and singers (veterans
of such ensembles as Piffaro and Pomerium)
together for six “intermedii,” a set of musical
“spectacles” written in 1589 by several composers
(including Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini) for the
Florentine wedding of Ferdinando I de’ Medici
and Christine de Lorraine. (Church of St. Jean
Baptiste, Lexington Ave. at 76th St. gemsny.
org. Jan. 9 at 8.)
Recitals
Bargemusic: Johnny Gandelsman
Once a year or so, Gandelsman, one of the vio-
linists of the cutting-edge string quartet Brooklyn
Rider and a Curtis-trained phenom, brings his
extraordinary musicianship and intrepid spirit to
bear on Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo
Violin. His latest engagements are at the floating
chamber-music series, part of a week that begins
with a recital by the celebrated fiddler Mark
O’Connor and his wife, Maggie. (Fulton Ferry
Landing, Brooklyn. bargemusic.org. Jan. 8 at 8;
Jan. 9 at 8 and Jan. 10 at 4.)
Gloria Cheng: “Montage”
Cheng, a pianist to be reckoned with in Los
Angeles and a distinguished new-music champion,
takes leave of the Left Coast for a recital at (Le)
Poisson Rouge which features solo works by such
major film composers as John Williams, Michael
Giacchino, Randy Newman, and Alexandre
Desplat. (158 Bleecker St. lpr.com. Jan. 10 at 8.)
Park Avenue Armory: Lisette Oropesa
Dazzling vocal pyrotechnics are par for the course
for lyric coloratura sopranos, but Oropesa is also
the rare singer who possesses a voice that can
easily fill an auditorium as vast as the Metro-
politan Opera’s. This week, she performs in the
decidedly more intimate space of the Armory’s
Board of Officers Room, offering a recital of
Spanish and German art songs accompanied by
the pianist John Churchwell. (Park Ave. at 66th
St. 212-933-5812. Jan. 12-13 at 7:30.)

Three Kings Day Parade
For many New Yorkers, the holiday
season doesn’t end with the calendar
year. El Día de los Reyes, or Three
Kings Day, gives children one last
grab at gifts on the twelfth day of
Christmas, marking the Biblical
adoration of Jesus by the Three
Wise Men. The thirty-ninth annual
Three Kings Day Parade in East
Harlem invites families to join a
morning procession through the
neighborhood, starting on the cor-
ner of 106th Street and Lexington
Avenue and ending at 115th Street
at Park Avenue. Attractions include
live camels, colorful puppets, musical
performances from local bands, and
traditional Puerto Rican food. El
Museo del Barrio hosts the parade,
and offers free admission throughout
the day. (elmuseo.org. Jan. 6 at 11.)
Lovesick Expo
Burlesque dancers, eccentric facial
hair, pounds and pounds of sequins—
the sixth annual installment of this
travelling expo showcases the wiliest
trends in nontraditional weddings,
shying away from the typical ball-
room fare and giving new dimension
and scope to a potentially arduous
planning process. In partnership
with the world’s largest alternative
wedding resource, Offbeat Bride,
Lovesick gathers more than thirty-five
independent wedding venders and
planners, who want to outfit your
big day with winking attractions
like screen-print stations, custom
ice-cream flavors, and flowers grown
specifically for the occasion. Those
inclined will find live performances,
free food and drinks, giveaways, sur-
prises, and—the organizers stress—a
“gay-friendly, guy-friendly, unicorn-
friendly, actually-super-fun” atmo-
sphere. (Red Hook Labs, 133 Imlay
St., Brooklyn. lovesickexpo.com.
Jan. 9 at 11.)
Readings and Talks
“White Room”
Last September, the Los Angeles
Review of Books published Juliana
Spahr and Stephanie Young’s “The
Program Era and the Mainly White
Room,” which utilized data analysis
and anecdotal evidence to underscore
a perceived whiteness that has per-
above
meated the literary community. Its
title toys with the imagery associated
with poetry readings, which take
place in rooms with white walls and
almost entirely white inhabitants.
Much of Spahr’s work examines
subjects this broad—9/11, Occupy
Wall Street, her years spent living
in Hawaii—and “White Room”
succeeds at framing a vast topic
through its most concrete elements:
the article examines the M.F.A.
and Ph.D. markets, in an attempt
to answer the “constant question”
it poses. The writers Tisa Bryant,
Christopher Stackhouse, and others
will read from the text, and offer
their own proposals. (Poetry Project,
131 E. 10th St. 212-674-0910.
Jan. 6 at 8.)
Michael Ian Black
The celebrated standup comedian
and Times best-selling author
has turned his wickedly deadpan
brand of humor on himself in his
midlife memoir, “Navel Gazing.”
Black receives a medical diagnosis
that forces him to reckon with his
age, examining his family history
beyond
and sharing funny anecdotes that
elicit as many winces as they do
laughs. Black will read from his
latest novel and answer questions
from the audience. (BookCourt, 163
Court Street, Brooklyn. 718-875-3677.
Jan. 8 at 7.)
Francesca Capone
Capone enjoys both visual art and
experimental literature as mediums.
Her “Writing in Threads” exhibit,
shown last fall at the 99¢ gallery,
explored the intersections between
writing and weaving. The accompa-
nying book, published by Printed
Matter, invites fifteen writers to
interpret Capone’s own weavings,
created during her residency at the
Anni and Josef Albers Foundation.
She will read selections from “Writing
in Threads” and discuss the physical
forms of the written word with the
photographer Erica Baum, who takes
the printed page as her subject of
choice, and looks forward to 2016
showings at the Guggenheim and
the Metropolitan Museum. (Zinc
Bar, 82 W. 3rd St. 212-477-9462.
Jan. 9 at 4:30.)

14 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016

 FOOD &
DRINK
BAR TAB the carnegie club
156 W. 56th St. (212-957-9676)
This elegant two-story cigar lounge
Tables for Two has the aura of a friendly den of
iniquity: leather couches, red striped
babu ji wallpaper, stone fireplace, polite
patrons, huge ashtrays, cottony clouds
175 Avenue B (212-951-1082) of smoke floating by like weather
systems. On Sinatra Saturdays, Steven
the hindi term “babu ji” can be an honorific for a male village elder; in Alphabet Maglio and the Stan Rubin Orchestra
perform impeccable standards to
City it’s the animating spirit behind the liveliest dinner party on the block. The new a spiffy crowd drinking single-malt
Indian restaurant from Jessi Singh and his wife, Jennifer, is loud and boisterous, what Scotch and puffing cigars to their
with the clanging of stainless-steel plates, the flatware in constant rotation, and the heart’s content. “There ain’t no nicer
laughter of high-spirited patrons (the forty-five-minute wait is softened with a discount witch than you,” Maglio sang on a
voucher for a bar down the street). The black-and-white dining room is full of quirky recent evening, pointing at a woman
touches: diner-bright lighting, Bollywood musicals projected in a high corner, a walking by. Maglio, a fifty-seven-year-
taxidermied peacock atop a bodega refrigerator full of craft beers. old New Jerseyite, has Sinatra’s easy
charm, during and between songs.
Singh hails from Chandigarh by way of Australia, where he honed his playful style. “As Dean Martin used to say, you can’t
His dishes wear bold garnishes—brightly colored flowers, shredded beets—like edible buy happiness, but you can pour it,”
fascinators. One Friday night, two diners opted for the superb chef ’s menu, made up of he told the audience. By the bar, an
street snacks followed by the day’s selection of curries, which, on any given night, might ex-prizefighter with a lighter flame
include lamb, chicken, or a raw scallop, plus daal, rice, and naan. Singh started with gol like a torch smoked, snapped, and
gappa, a hollow crispy-fried puri, filled with tamarind, dates, and yogurt. He said, “One bite, grooved. “Ring-a-ding-ding, you’re
please!” and they obliged, though one woman lost her tiny green sprout. Her companion so lovely,” Maglio sang. Offstage, he
explained his career path. “Before I
said, “You know, that’s a trend in China,” referring to the fashion of plastic headbands with started singing, I had an aluminum-
a single green shoot that took that country by storm this year. Next he brought them crispy awning company,” he said. At thirty-
croquettes of hung yogurt—the Indian version of Greek yogurt, strained and thick—with five, he began secretly taking singing
a zingy fuchsia-colored beetroot-ginger sauce and an edible orchid too pretty to eat. One of lessons; after eight years, he told his
Singh’s neatest tricks was his “Colonel Tso’s” cauliflower, lightly fried and served piping hot wife. “I don’t miss the awning business
in a tomato-chili sauce. This imitation isn’t flattery, it’s superiority. at all,” he said. For an encore, he sang
The aggressively casual atmosphere encourages inter-table socializing. On another “That’s Life.” In the back, three waiters
danced. Maglio wound up to the big
night, as a gentleman in a trucker hat signed his check, he eyed his neighbors’ massive finish. A waiter in a white tux twirled
tandoori tiger prawns. “Do you want some?” they ofered. “Make sure you get some of a waitress in a black dress and pearls,
the sauce.” He used his fingers to dip the fatty flesh into a cinnamon-pineapple chutney, then dipped her low. “I’m gonna
wildly sweet and hot. The “unauthentic butter chicken” was a sleeper hit. It sounded bland roll myself up in a big ball and die!”
enough to avoid yet tasted anything but, with a fiery curry of milk, ginger, garlic, tomato, Maglio sang. “My, my.”
fenugreek, and garam masala. The vegetarian coconut-milk curry contained cubes of —Sarah Larson
squash roasted to such a perfect consistency you might think it was meat. Desserts were
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL KRALL

all dairy-based palate soothers, like a standout kulfi—a nutty, sweet Popsicle of pistachio
and cardamom ice cream—and gulab jamun, cheese dumplings. They tasted like the oiliest
doughnuts you’ve ever had, and came topped with gold leaf and a flower that nobody ate.
—Silvia Killingsworth

Open daily for dinner. Entrées $14-$25.

PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM MEBANE THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 15

 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
THE NEXT GREAT FAMINE
S even hundred years ago this month, people across north-
ern Europe saw a comet in the sky and feared the worst.
They were already running out of food. It had rained too
much in 1315—sometimes every day for weeks at a stretch.
Wheat, barley, and oats rotted in the fields, and it was too
wet to make hay. Then, after an unusually cold winter, the
rains started again, and the 1316 harvest failed, too. Grapes
in vineyards were covered with a fuzzy mildew, and, one ob-
server wrote, “there was no wine in the whole kingdom of
France.” There wasn’t much bread, either. The historian Wil-
liam Chester Jordan, in his book “The Great Famine,” re-
counts how Parisians first put to the wheel and then exiled a
group of bakers whom they accused of bolstering their loaves
with waste. Across the Continent, there was also a severe
shortage of salt—used to make cheese and to preserve food—
since there was not enough sun to dry the salt pans on the
Baltic and North Sea coasts. In 1317, the rains came again.
Storms washed away not only newly planted grain—which
was already scarce, because farmers had begun eating their
seed corn to survive—but also topsoil and dikes. Sheep and
cattle, standing in cold, muddy pastures, began dying of
infection. People died, too, from malnutrition and illness.
In some regions of Europe, the Great
Famine of 1315-17 killed a tenth of the
population, shattering social norms and
local economies. Villages were abandoned,
religious houses were dispersed, and minor
feudal lords pawned their land to who-
ever could pay. Peasants and the urban
poor were left to fend for themselves.
And yet the Great Famine is not as well
known as it might be; William Rosen,
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
the author of “The Third Horseman,”
calls it “the famine history forgot.” In
part, this is because of what followed it:
the Black Death, which reached Europe
in 1347 and killed a third of the popu-
lation; and the Hundred Years’ War, which
was fought between 1337 and 1453, and
was as brutal a slog as it sounds. Those
catastrophes, though, were visited on a population that had
been left physically weak and divided by the famine, which,
in turn, increased the damage they did. If nothing else, the
hard times of seven centuries ago demonstrate that hunger
has both moral and political costs.
Another reason the Great Famine has been passed over is
that its origins seemed so prosaic, compared with the dynas-
tic struggles of the time. It’s a story about the weather. The
famine, as Rosen notes, occurred almost precisely at the di-
viding point between what is known as the Medieval Warm
Period (M.W.P.), which was three centuries of fairly mild
weather in Europe, and the Little Ice Age, which lasted until
about 1850. But even just half a century ago some historians
treated the rain as incidental to the famine. For them, the
problem was that Europe’s population had grown too quickly,
and the peasants irresponsibly farmed land so marginal that
the slightest disruption could be disastrous. The famine was
a Malthusian issue, as those historians saw it, or one of agri-
cultural practices, not primarily a climate-related disaster.
More recently, politicians who think that worrying about
climate change is a waste of time have pointed to this period
as proof that there is nothing strange about things getting a
little warmer every now and then. The
M.W.P. is a particular obsession of Sen-
ator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, the
chairman of the Environment and Pub-
lic Works Committee, who has said that
scientists have ignored it in their attempt
to perpetrate the “hoax” of climate change.
One problem with that position is that,
while parts of Europe were warmer during
the M.W.P., the world as a whole was
not. For this reason, some scientists pre-
fer to call it the Medieval Climatic
Anomaly. And today, it appears, the world
as a whole is warmer.
One of the most important insights
of recent studies is that, when the
climate changes, it can do so swiftly
and relentlessly. It is possible, in a human
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 17
lifetime, to see sea levels rise and ice shelves break away, and,
when they do, nothing about what happens next can be taken
for granted. The climate record is full of sudden disasters.
Studies have also clarified some of the mechanisms of the
relationship between climate and shorter-term weather; a
2010 report on the M.W.P., published in the journal Climate
Dynamics, looked at the connections between the rain in
Europe, the temperature of the Indo-Pacific warm pool, and
the flood levels of the Nile. The Great Famine looks like a
fourteenth-century example of what we now call extreme
weather. We are also learning how, in our own time, chang-
ing ocean temperatures can cause shifts in El Niño, the name
given to a collection of weather patterns that originate in the
Pacific and stretch across the globe; a “Godzilla El Niño” is
credited for the oddly warm weather in the Northeast this
winter. We have built cities and economies on assumptions
about the seasons that may prove unstable. The best models
we have now project that, as a consequence of climate change,
the frequency of extreme-weather events, from superstorms
to droughts, will increase sharply.
A particularly alarming prospect is the sustained failure
of the South Asian monsoon. The food supply for more than
a billion people relies on the rains of the monsoon season.
Models suggest that, in the next century, monsoons will
become more and more erratic and extreme. A failed mon-
soon can mean that the rain hasn’t come, or that it has come
in the wrong place for the wrong amount of time. In recent
years, India has experienced droughts but also floods, like the
one that wreaked havoc in Chennai in December. Last year,
in a report on possible monsoon failures, The Economist noted
that “immense cloudbursts in Uttarakhand killed over 6,000
people in 2013.” And India’s polluted, particle-heavy air can
make the rain fall harder.
At the outset of the Great Famine, when peasants first took
the measure of their ruined fields, many of them thought that
they were alone—that the disaster was confined to their area.
Soon, though, as travellers returned or hungry armies passed
through, and when the peasants themselves went to market,
and saw how steeply prices were rising, they learned the ex-
tent of it. “The whole world was troubled,” a chronicler in
Salzburg wrote. Many peasants took to the road, joining a mi-
gration to cities, only to die there and be buried in mass graves.
In Paris, priests led barefoot worshippers in processions meant
to show contrition. Seven hundred years later, scientists armed
with climate models met with politicians in the same city.
They didn’t need to watch for signs and wonder, as in the days
of the comet of 1315-16. They knew what was coming.
—Amy Davidson

FITNESS DEPT. workout before, in 2012, for Disney’s
SABERS UP animated film “Brave.”)
Lamb made sure the twenty or so
exercisers had the right equipment: one
yoga mat; two Frisbee-shaped “gliding
disks,” for sliding along the floor (these,
she said, were “a nod to the ice planet”);
one toy lightsaber. A latecomer with a
watched all the movies within, like, a
week.” She had not yet seen the new
film when she designed the workout,
but “ran to the theatre” as soon as it
came out, she said. “I changed some
of the names of the exercises after I
saw it.”
Lisa Hufcut, the director of P.R. for

A t New York Sports Clubs’ Chel-

sea branch one recent Tuesday,
employees were rushing to remove
toy lightsabers from their plastic pack-
aging. Amira Lamb, an exercise in-
structor, took her place in a brightly
lit mirrored studio and explained that
instead of her usual cardio-kickbox-
ing class she would be leading a “Star
Wars” workout, which she’d designed
at the behest of Disney and Lucasfilm.
Lamb, who is petite and has dark
eyes, had her crinkly hair pulled back
with two clips. She has a devoted fol-
lowing and is beloved by her mostly
female students for her distinctive
playlists and her eicient full-body
approach.
Many regulars seemed confused
about the new workout, which was called
Awaken Your Inner Force. One young
woman said that she wasn’t really a “Star
Wars” fan.
“It’s still cardio,” Lamb explained.
(She had designed a movie-themed
18 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
tattoo on his calf ran in. “I need a sword!”
he cried.
An electronic dance remix of the
“Star Wars” theme started. Imitating
Lamb, the class began with wide-legged
plié squats, lightsabers held aloft. When
they pulled the lightsabers down in
front of their faces, the toys unexpect-
edly lit up and emitted tinkly battle
sounds. “Oh!” Lamb said. Smiles spread
around the room, in recognition of the
universal truth that it’s really fun to
wave around a long stick.
The names of the rapid cardio sets,
each lasting about sixty or ninety sec-
onds, were written on the mirror in blue
and red marker. They included Light-
saber Leaps, Skywalker Press, Jedi Jacks,
Padawan Pushups, and “Help Me, Obi-
Wan!” A few were variations of Lamb’s
usual exercises. (The Chewbacca Chop,
in a non-“Star Wars” context, is the
Wood Chop.)
“I’m still kind of new to this whole
‘Star Wars’ thing,” Lamb admitted. “I
the company that owns N.Y.S.C., said
that the partnership is ideal, because
Disney “is looking for a way to incor-
porate their brand into the fitness de-
mographic.” She added, “We’re seeing
people come in who may not be regu-
lar exercisers, but who love ‘Star Wars.’ ”
In the studio, Lamb led the group
into Lunge Like Luke. The exercisers
assumed the lunge position, lightsabers
held high, then brought their back
knees forward while lowering their sa-
bers, and reassumed the lunge, light-
sabers lifted, as fast as they could.
Between exercises, the class did plié
squats, guided by breathing. “I think
of the Force like Chi,” Lamb told them.
The music transitioned into a remix
of “Starships,” by Nicki Minaj. The group
dropped the lightsabers on the floor and
jump-squatted over them to perform
Lightsaber Leaps. For the Skywalker
Press, the participants assumed a down-
ward-dog position, moved into a plank,
brought the left leg forward, returned
to a downward dog, and then repeated
the sequence with the right leg.
Lightsabers clattered against each
other, and one knocked over a water
bottle. Even the regulars had trouble
keeping up with Lamb. The playlist was
punctuated by sound bites from the
“Star Wars” movies, such as R2D2 beep-
ing and Leia calling out, “Help me,
Obi-Wan Kenobi!” The class divided
into two groups and faced of, in an ap-
proximation of the dark and light sides
of the Force. Lamb said, “At some point,
switching to the dark side is allowed!”
By Saber Push/Combat Burpees,
many in the class were breathing heav-
ily. The exercise involved jumping with
both arms in the air, rolling along the
floor, then standing and jumping again.
To motivate the huing stragglers,
Lamb said, “If you feel like you’re dying,
just think about the breath. The breath
is the Force.”
The class ended with a cooldown
move called Yoda Flow, which Lamb
said was inspired by Tai Chi. After-
ward, a regular named Katherine Huala
pronounced the new workout much
harder than the usual cardio kickbox-
ing. She is a “Star Wars” fan, but doesn’t
love the more recent prequels. “Too
much C.G.I.,” she said.
—Cora Frazier
1 birth than on wealth: “The divides be-
THIS CHANGING WORLD
FINAL CURTAIN
S o farewell, “Downton Abbey.” The
sixth and final season of the series
just began on PBS’s “Masterpiece,” pro-
viding resolution to its viewers’ most
pressing concerns. Will Lady Mary re-
marry? Will Anna be able to have a baby?
Will the accelerating demise of the Brit-
ish aristocracy—precipitated by the in-
dustrial revolution, hastened by the First
World War, and decisively signalled by
the election of Britain’s first Labour-led
government, in 1923—consign the
Granthams and their household to the
rubbish heap of history, where they right-
fully belong?
Last month, Jim Carter, who plays
Mr. Carson, the butler, and Phyllis
Logan, who plays Mrs. Hughes, the
housekeeper, met for breakfast at the
Lambs Club. “Initially, the idea was that
the series started in 1912, when the world
of the big estates were in their pomp,”
Carter said. “The second season was to
show the war, when things changed and
the workforce was decimated. People
lost their respect for the traditional ways
that things were done. Then the third
season was to be the decline. But the
success of the show overtook it—and
we realized the success was due to the
relationships rather than the social mi-
lieu, so we slowed down the march of
history and concentrated more on the
relationships.” Even while showing a
time of great change, Carter observed,
“Downton” seemed to ofer modern au-
diences a world of certainties. “But today
is an era of massive uncertainty,” he said.
“You’ve got supine governments who
give no moral leadership. The idea of
leadership is to bomb people.”
Logan gave precise orders for the
making of her tea—“Several teabags,
and a jug of cold milk,” she said, as if in-
structing a neophyte kitchen maid—
while Carter ordered bacon. “Not so
crispy that it disintegrates when you look
at it—I want it to put up a bit of a fight,”
he told the waiter. Today’s social divi-
sions, Carter observed, are based less on
tween the haves and the have-nots are
grotesque, and here we are, sitting right
in the temple of consumerism.”
“And people are still sitting in the
street, begging,” Logan said.
“Logically, it must implode, because
the have-nots are going to outnumber
the haves, and they are going to come
looking for them,” Carter said. “They
are swarming through Europe now. We
are looking at a mass migration like the
Second World War, and it is agony to
see people with nothing living in camps
next to civilized European cities.”
“And then there’s global warming,”
Logan said. “We can’t keep draining the
world’s resources as we have done.”
“Here we are in New York—there
must be a state law that says that you
can’t be more than five feet from food
at any point, and half the world is starv-
ing,” Carter added.
“I think we’ll all become insecti-
vores,” Logan said. “Seriously. I’ve eaten
insects—they are very tasty. It was in
Africa. They were cooked up with a bit
of salt and chili—delicious. I could quite
happily live on insects.”
Carter raised his eyebrows and warned,
“Now you are going to get all kinds of
weirdos posting you creepy crawlies.”
Carter’s bacon and Logan’s eggs
arrived. “I said soft, not raw,” she mut-
tered, as the waiter departed.
Season Five saw the long-anticipated
proposal of marriage from Mr. Carson
Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan
to Mrs. Hughes; the couple is the object
of numerous tribute videos on YouTube.
“It moved at the rate of a glacier, didn’t
it?” Carter said, with afection. Logan
agreed: “A snail on Prozac.” In one forth-
coming episode, Mr. Carson is seen cast-
ing a last look around his bedroom. “It
is like a cell, with very few personal pos-
sessions; and for forty or more years that
has been my life, and we are saying good-
bye to it,” Carter said. The scene serves
as a metaphor for the social transition
the series has chronicled, he added.
Post-“Downton,” Logan expects to
take a break. “I am hanging fire until the
right thing grabs me,” she said. Carter is
devoting his energies to a charity called
WandAid. “It’s like Band Aid, but with
magic,” he said. He’s already done magic
in refugee camps in Calais, he explained,
and reeled of skills not called upon at
Downton: “I used to be a good tightrope
walker, good juggler. Unicyclist. Stilt
walker.” He’s also making a documentary
about Lonnie Donegan, the pioneering
British pop musician. “The success of
‘Downton’ means diferent things to all
of us, I suppose,” Carter concluded. “We
are all at diferent stages of our careers.”
“Well, most of our career is behind
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 19
us,” Logan remarked, sipping her tea.
Carter chuckled, and had a last bite
of bacon. “We have got a lovely future
behind us,” he said.
—Rebecca Mead
1 splendor—video magic, blue wigs, black
THERE BUT NOT THERE
GROUND CONTROL
H enry Hey met David Bowie in
2012, when the producer Tony
Visconti asked him to play some key-
board parts on Bowie’s album “The Next
Day.” It went well. “I was told that David
asked for me back,” Hey said recently.
“I think we had a good rapport. ” Hey,
now the music director of the Bowie-
driven musical “Lazarus,” at New York
Theatre Workshop, was sitting on a
chaise longue in the theatre’s basement,
an hour before curtain, surrounded by
wilted bouquets, prop gin bottles, and
bags of inflated balloons. He wore black.
Hey has curtains of wiry dark hair and
a kind face. He described getting a call
from Bowie’s people. “They said, ‘Can
we meet and talk about something?’ ”
He laughed. “And I signed some paper
that said I wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Lazarus,” a sequel of sorts to the
1976 movie “The Man Who Fell to
Earth,” with old and new songs by Bowie,
a book by Bowie and Enda Walsh, and
direction by Ivo van Hove, is a kind of
“Space Oddity” in reverse. Its Major
“New Year’s resolution—stay this good-looking!”
Tom is Thomas Newton (Michael C.
Hall), an alien stranded on our planet,
who drinks gin, eats Twinkies, and sings,
pining for home, staggering around amid
secondary characters and van Hovean
balloons, milk blood, a rocket ship drawn
in masking tape. The show has con-
founded critics and audiences since it
opened, in November, but its songs—
sailors fighting in the dance hall, chil-
dren immune to your consultations—
are familiar. So is the feeling that Bowie
is there but not there. The movie ver-
sion featured Bowie but not his songs;
“Lazarus” has the songs but not the man.
Hey leads the seven-piece house band,
which he assembled. It performs at the
back of the stage. Its drummer, Brian
Delaney, has played with the New York
Dolls. Hey said, “I didn’t want a typical
Broadway band. I wanted a rock band.
There’s a scene in a bar, and the band
sounds like it’s a drunken bar band. It
needs to sound like that.” Brynn Wil-
liams, who plays Teenage Girl 3, skipped
by, wearing earbuds and singing. “I
needed a special guitarist to play all this
fiery stuf, these solos,” Hey said. Chris
McQueen, a placid lavender-haired man,
walked by. “I’m talking about you!” Hey
told him. “I talked to David, and we said,
‘It really needs two guitars.’ ” The gui-
tarist J. J. Appleton “plays the strummy
parts.” The pop-and-jazz veteran Fima
Ephron plays bass. Hornwise, Hey and
Bowie wanted “dirty, greasy.” “So instead
of trumpets, or high horns, just sax and
trombone” (Lucas Dodd, Karl Lyden).
Hey’s arrangements can be unex-
pected. “David had a vision about how
the script would work with certain songs,”
Hey said. “ ‘This Is Not America’ is quite
a departure from the ‘Falcon and the
Snowman’ version. David said, ‘It should
be something strange.’ I adapted it to
this misty sound. It should be mysteri-
ous, because here we have Sophia sing-
ing it.” Sophia Anne Caruso, fourteen,
plays Girl, an otherworldly blond waif
who appears in Newton’s house. “Life
on Mars,” a potential showstopper sung
by Caruso, was arranged with restraint.
“I did not want it to feel that all of a
sudden we’ve turned a corner and it’s
become Broadway,” Hey said.
Cristin Milioti, as Newton’s love-
crazed assistant, sings “Changes” quietly,
then thrashingly. “It needs to fit her char-
acter,” Hey said. “She’s truly unhinged.
David and I sat down—he was at the
piano—and went through it section by
section: start slow and pastoral, then he
suggested swing. ”
“Heroes,” the finale, “really got trans-
formed,” Hey said. “David wasn’t sure it
should be there. It’s this giant trium-
phant rock anthem. That’s not the spirit
of that scene.” The scene involves Hall,
Caruso, and the masking-tape rocket
ship. “I sent David a demo, and that
finally sealed it for him. It’s very under-
stated and melancholy. At no point does
it ever arc up into this triumph. At most
it only has a little lift in it.”
Appleton arrived, carrying a guitar
case. “Am I late?” he said.
“You’re not late, but you should go
onstage,” Hey said.
Upstairs, the band played a couple of
songs. “Let’s play ‘Love Is Lost,’ ” Hey
said. Two actors, Milioti and Michael
Esper, noodled around onstage. A dra-
matic rock windup. “Welcome to our
show!” Esper yelled to the empty house.
Then: propulsive drumming; a snaky,
determined guitar; haunted-house key-
boards. Esper and Milioti shadowboxed.
Michael C. Hall entered stage left. He
looked at the boxers and smiled. Next,
an old friend: “All the Young Dudes.”
It was loose, dirty, greasy—anthemic,
warmhearted sleaze à la Mott the Hoo-
ple. Milioti danced; Esper sang the lyr-
ics about TV and T. Rex. Hall looked
on, then crossed the stage and flipped
through his character’s Bowie albums.
—Sarah Larson
 THE FINANCIAL PAGE
WHY FIRMS ARE FLEEING
T he biggest corporate deal of 2015 was also, in the view
of many, the shadiest: Pfizer’s $160-billion merger with
the Irish drug company Allergan. It’s a “tax inversion”—Pfizer
will in efect be reconstituting itself as an Irish company, in
order to lower its taxes—and that’s why so many people found
it so ofensive. Hillary Clinton said that ending inversions
wasn’t just about fairness but about “patriotism”; Donald Trump
called the deal “disgusting.” It’s got to make you wonder when
even Trump finds your moneymaking schemes repugnant.
Meanwhile, the inversion train seems only to be picking up
speed. Such deals were once exceedingly rare—according to
the Congressional Research Service, there was just one in the
nineteen-eighties—but there have been more than fifty in the
past decade, most since 2009. Although
in the past couple of years both the Trea-
sury Department and the I.R.S. have is-
sued new rules designed to make inver-
sions more diicult, the trend continued
apace in 2015. It’s a predictable, if dis-
maying response both to the current U.S.
tax code and to the changing nature of
big corporations.
Two features of American tax policy
make inversions attractive: a relatively
high corporate tax rate and what’s called
a worldwide tax system—American cor-
porations have to pay that tax rate on all
their global income. That makes the U.S.
unusual; every other country in the G-8,
and eighty per cent of the countries in
the O.E.C.D. (the club of industrialized
democracies), has adopted some form of
what’s known as a territorial tax system, in which companies
largely pay taxes only on the income they earn in a country.
To be sure, the U.S. system has an important provision
called deferral—American companies don’t have to pay taxes
on their foreign profits until they bring them back to the U.S.
But that just means they hold their money overseas rather
than bring it home; American companies are estimated to be
keeping more than two trillion dollars abroad. This so-called
“lockout efect” means that companies invest less in the U.S.
and distribute less cash to shareholders. In some ways, we’ve
ended up with the worst of both worlds. Since so much of
what companies earn remains abroad and untaxable, we raise
only a small amount of revenue from our global system. At
the same time, the fact that those foreign earnings are in exile
encourages inversions, so companies can get access to all that
locked-up cash and a lower tax rate thereafter.
One answer to this problem, endorsed by Bernie Sanders,
MIGUEL GALLARDO
is simply to do away with deferral—make corporations pay
taxes on their foreign profits as soon as they’re earned. This
would increase tax revenue in the short term. But it would
make inversions all the more alluring and, in the long run,
would likely reduce the number of new companies incorpo-
rating themselves in the U.S.
A more plausible alternative is to follow the lead of coun-
tries like Germany and Japan and adopt a hybrid territorial sys-
tem. Although the details are complicated, you’d start with the
“territorial” principle that profits would be taxed where they’re
earned. But since any territorial system is vulnerable to tax-avoid-
ance schemes—like shifting income abroad to make it look as
if profits were being earned abroad—you’d also need tough
anti-abuse provisions, like taxing at least a fixed percentage of
foreign earnings and limiting companies’ ability to channel in-
come to subsidiaries in low-tax countries. And, as part of any
such change, companies should be required to pay taxes on all
the cash they’re currently holding abroad. In theory, such a sys-
tem could keep companies (and more of their workers) at home
and bring foreign earnings back, without putting a real dent in
U.S. tax revenue. This strategy also has some bipartisan appeal;
versions of this type of reform have been
ofered by both the Obama Administra-
tion and Republicans in Congress.
But why give corporations any sort
of tax break at all? The reality is that
America’s global taxation system is a leg-
acy of a bygone era. In the past, the fact
that our tax system was “worldwide”
mattered less, both because the U.S. was
such a huge part of the world economy
and because being incorporated in the
U.S. made companies more appealing
to stockholders. But those advantages
are diminishing. Investing abroad is
more attractive and easier than ever
before, and capital is more mobile. “As
the economic diferences between the
United States and other countries nar-
row,” a 2015 study of tax systems con-
cluded, “the ability of the United States to sustain US tax
exceptionalism will also decline.”
And then companies are far less tied to their country of
origin than they once were. Look at Pfizer. Its C.E.O. was
born in Scotland and raised in Rhodesia. More than sixty per
cent of its revenue comes from overseas, and most of its em-
ployees work abroad as well. It’s hard to know what makes a
company like that genuinely “American.” True, many U.S.
companies, including big pharma, have drawn heavily on gov-
ernment-funded research, but foreign companies have been
able to profit from that research just as easily—without the
extra taxes.
Corporations certainly play the patriotism card when it suits
their purposes. But their real loyalty is to the bottom line. And
while Congress could take measures to curb inversions in the
short run—Hillary Clinton, for instance, has proposed a steep
“exit tax” on any company that inverts—those measures merely
postpone a necessary reckoning. The world economy has
changed. The U.S. tax system needs to change, too.
—James Surowiecki
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 21
 pastries and stufed grape leaves across
LETTER FROM JEDDAH a black butcher-block table. The call to
afternoon prayer had sounded several

SISTERS IN LAW
minutes earlier, and the restaurant, in
accordance with law, had locked its doors
and dimmed the lights. The “family
Saudi women are beginning to know their rights. section”—the secluded area for women
that restaurants serving both genders
BY KATHERINE ZOEPF must provide, where female diners who
cover their faces can eat comfortably—
was quiet. Except for a waiter, we had
the place to ourselves. Ferak is slight,
with a lilting voice and a round, be-
spectacled face framed by a tightly
wound black shayla. Head scarves, which
Saudi women typically wear unfastened,
have a way of slipping of, and Ferak
fidgeted with hers as she described her
conversation with the principal, repeat-
edly tugging it back down into its proper
position.
The principal was amazed to learn
that Saudi plaintifs can request closed
court proceedings. She began pepper-
ing Ferak with legal questions, many
of them about how to advise teachers
who were in abusive marriages, or whose
ex-husbands wouldn’t allow their chil-
dren to visit. The principal was in her
early fifties, which meant that, as a
school administrator, she was among
the best-educated Saudi women of her
generation. Well into the nineteen-
eighties, according to UNESCO, fewer
than half of Saudi girls between the
ages of six and eleven had received any
education outside the home. But, Ferak
said, it quickly became clear that the
woman knew little about the funda-
mental principles of Saudi law.

I n September, 2014, Mohra Ferak,

twenty-two years old and in her final
year at Dar Al-Hekma University, in
the Saudi port city of Jeddah, was asked
for advice by a woman who had heard
that she was studying law. The woman
was the principal of a primary school
for girls, and she told Ferak that she had
grown frustrated by her inability to help
children in her charge who had been
raped; over the years, there had been
many such cases among her students.
Regardless of whether the perpetrator
was a relative or the family driver, the
victim’s parents invariably declined to
press charges. A Saudi family’s honor
rests, to a considerable degree, on its
The guardianship system gives a woman a legal status resembling that of a minor.
22 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
ability to protect the virginity of its
daughters. Parents, fearing ruined mar-
riage prospects, chose silence, which
meant that men who had raped girls as
young as eight went unpunished, and
might act again. And for some of the
girls, the principal added, the secrecy
only amplified the trauma. She asked
Ferak if there was anything that she, as
principal, could do to help them.
“I told her, ‘You can go to court and
ask the judge to make the proceedings
private and save the girl’s reputation,’ ”
Ferak recalled one recent afternoon. We
were sitting in a modish Lebanese
restaurant near the Jeddah corniche,
sharing plates of tricornered spinach
Ferak had been a middling student
during her first three years at Dar Al-
Hekma, an all-female university. A
week after talking with the principal,
she went to Olga Nartova, who chairs
the law department, and described the
conversation. Nartova, a thirty-six-year-
old trade-law specialist from Moscow,
had previously found Ferak to be bright
but unmotivated, like many girls from
well-of families. But Ferak spoke about
women’s rights with a seriousness of
purpose that Nartova had never seen
in any student at Dar Al-Hekma.
“It completely transformed Mohra,”
she said. One of the principal’s stories,
concerning a young girl at her school
who was the target of persistent sex-
ual abuse by one of her brothers, had
ILLUSTRATION BY EIKO OJALA
particularly incensed Ferak, Nartova
recalled: “The principal, she called the
mother in and said, ‘Do you know what
your son is doing?’ And the mother
said, ‘Yes, well, better that he do it to
her than that he do it to a stranger.’ So
the principal asked Mohra what to do.
She reports to the police? She reports
to the court? What?”
With Nartova’s encouragement,
Ferak began planning a series of free
public lectures at the university, aimed
at women and delivered by distin-
guished legal scholars and lawyers. The
presentations were designed to provide
basic information about Saudi wom-
en’s legal rights.“Since I was very young,
and started noticing how women are
treated in this country, I’ve had this
feeling about women,” Ferak said. “I
don’t like anyone to underestimate us.”
But women’s rights aren’t a subject of
mainstream public discussion in the
kingdom, and she wondered whether
anyone besides the principal would at-
tend. She also worried about how the
experts would react to being approached
by a student.
Ferak compiled a list of topics that
she felt were of particular importance
to local women, and she began con-
tacting lawyers. The first lecture in the
series, which Ferak called Hawa’a’s
Rights (Hawa’a is the Arabic version
of the name Eve), was publicized on
Twitter and took place on the evening
of April 15th. Several dozen attendees
learned about crimes perpetrated
against women on social media, a topic
of special concern in a country where
single people of opposite sexes cannot
spend time together without risking
arrest, and where pressure on women
to cover their faces in public can be so
intense that the most innocent head
shot can serve as a tool of blackmail.
The second Hawa’a’s Rights lecture,
on April 26th, addressed personal-sta-
tus law, the category of Saudi law that
governs marriage, divorce, guardian-
ship, and inheritance. The lecturer,
Bayan Mahmoud Zahran—a thirty-
year-old Jeddah attorney who, in Jan-
uary, 2014, became the first Saudi
woman to open a law firm—was sched-
uled to begin speaking at five o’clock,
launching an evening of discussion that
would run until nine. Late that after-
noon, Ferak arrived at the university
to find a long black line of abaya-clad
women waiting to be seated.
Institutions and businesses that serve
Saudi women are carefully guarded, so
as to prevent ikhtilat, illegal gender mix-
ing, and the only male employees of a
Saudi girls’ school or women’s college
are its security oicers, who are sta-
tioned at the checkpoint outside, in-
specting identification cards and keep-
ing watch for male intruders. The
security guards were overwhelmed by
the turnout for the second Hawa’a’s
Rights event. Ferak corralled several
friends, and they spent the half hour
beforehand rushing from classroom to
classroom, looking for extra chairs to
carry down to the space that had been
reserved. They filled the aisles and the
back of the room with additional seats,
straining the hall’s intended capacity of
a hundred and twenty.
“There were students, mothers, teach-
ers, lots of workers in shops—really,
every kind of woman, even doctors from
the university,” Ferak told me. “All of us
were just looking at each other, think-
ing, Is this even possible?” When Nar-
tova came out of her oice, a few min-
utes before Zahran’s talk, she saw women
struggling to find standing room in the
back and on the stairs, while others sat
on the floor by the dais. Ferak texted a
photo of the packed hall to her father,
who had shared her initial doubts about
interest in the lectures. He teasingly
texted back, “Are you trying to make
women fight with their husbands?”The
third Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, a practi-
cal introduction to Saudi labor law for
women just entering the workforce, at-
tracted a still larger crowd. The univer-
sity did not schedule a fourth event.
I n 2004, Saudi Arabia introduced
reforms allowing women’s colleges
and universities to ofer degree pro-
grams in law. The first female law stu-
dents graduated in 2008, but, for sev-
eral years after that, they were prohibited
from appearing in court. In 2013, law
licenses were granted to four women,
including Bayan Mahmoud Zahran.
Journalists and legal scholars in the
West wondered if a fresh contingent
of female attorneys would champion
women’s rights. But, of the dozens of
female lawyers and law graduates I
spoke with on a visit to Saudi Arabia
in early November, only two would
admit to any interest in expanding
rights for Saudi women. So far, the
greatest efect of the reforms seems to
be a growing awareness, among ordi-
nary Saudi women, of the legal rights
they do have, and an increasing will-
ingness to claim these rights, even by
seeking legal redress, if necessary.
The lawyers conceded that, by in-
ternational standards, these rights might
not look like much. According to Saudi
law, which is based on Sharia, a Saudi
woman’s testimony in court is, with few
exceptions, valued at half that of a man.
A homicide case, for example, normally
requires testimony from two male wit-
nesses; if only one is available, two fe-
male witnesses may be substituted for
the other. The guardianship system—
which requires an adult woman to get
permission from her guardian before
travelling overseas or seeking medical
care—gives Saudi women a legal sta-
tus that resembles that of a minor. In
fact, the male relative with responsi-
bility over a Saudi woman may be her
own adolescent son.
A Saudi woman cannot leave her
home without covering her hair and
putting on a floor-length abaya. She
cannot drive a car. Since 2013, women
have been allowed to ride bicycles, but
only in designated parks and recreation
areas, chaperoned by a close male rela-
tive. The marriages of Saudi women
are usually arranged, and it remains ex-
tremely diicult for women to obtain
divorces. Husbands, in contrast, may
marry up to three other women “on top
of them,” as the Arabic expression goes,
and in some cases may end a marriage
in the time it takes to repeat “I divorce
you” three times—or to type the so-
called triple divorce formula into a text
message.
In December, 2007, I arrived in
Saudi Arabia for the first time. Al-
though I had read thousands of pages
about Saudi laws and cultural con-
ventions, it was a shock to confront
the system as a lived reality. Abun-
dant resources go into maintaining
the women-only bank branches, gov-
ernment oices, shops, and other busi-
nesses that make up the infrastruc-
ture of gender segregation in the
kingdom. I remember feeling a pulse
of hope when I learned that Sarah, a
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 23
brainy, giggly seventeen-year-old I’d
met on my third day in the country,
on the women-only floor of a Riyadh
mall, was a first-year law student at
Prince Sultan University.
I stayed in Riyadh, the Saudi capi-
tal, for two months. During that time,
I spent many hours with Sarah and her
fellow law students, visiting them at
home in the evenings to toast marsh-
mallows and watch costume
dramas. (There was much
argument among the girls
about whether it was strictly
necessary to cover your eyes
during kissing scenes—or
scenes involving Colin Firth
on horseback, for example—
so as to avoid irreparable
harm to your modesty.) In
the mornings, I went to the
university to drink paper cups of Nes-
café with them between their law
classes. At the time, a woman could
not obtain a license to practice law, and
I’d supposed that this would be a sub-
ject of fierce discussion. But the girls
seemed unconcerned. It was their first
semester, and they were consumed by
their nostalgia for high school, and by
the increasing pace of weddings among
their friends. (For girls in conservative
Saudi circles, marrying soon after they
finish high school remains common.
Many women become grandmothers
while still in their thirties.)
Sarah and several other students ex-
pressed a cautious hope that women
might be allowed to apply for law li-
censes “by the time we graduate, if not
before.” But more first-year students told
me that they weren’t sure they’d seek
jobs, in law or anything else, after leav-
ing Prince Sultan. Many of them seemed
to be studying law in the same spirit of
intellectual curiosity that might lead an
American college student to major in
classics. When I asked why they’d cho-
sen the field, most said that it was be-
cause law programs for women were
new—it was exciting to be a pioneer.
Today, several thousand Saudi
women hold law degrees, and sixty-
seven are licensed to practice, accord-
ing to justice-ministry figures released
at the end of November. In 2011, when
Mohra Ferak entered the law depart-
ment at Dar Al-Hekma, her imme-
diate family was supportive, but others
24 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
were horrified. “People said, ‘Are you
serious?’ ” Ferak told me, recalling their
reactions. “They said, ‘You’re a fe-
male. You won’t go to court. You’ll
have nothing.’ ”
Two of the Jeddah firms where Ferak
has applied for jobs in recent months
indicated interest, but then told her
that they lacked the license from
the kingdom’s labor ministry which au-
thorizes a business to let
women work in its oice. The
labor ministry requires firms
that employ women to build
separate areas for female
workers, allowing them to
communicate with male col-
leagues without the risk of
being seen by them. In su-
permarkets, which have em-
ployed women since 2013,
low partitions suice, because semi-pub-
lic spaces are easily monitored by mem-
bers of the Committee for the Promo-
tion of Virtue and the Prevention of
Vice, the kingdom’s religious police.
But businesses that operate from en-
closed workplaces, such as oices, face
tougher regulations. One result of these
restrictions, Ferak explained, is that, at
present, only the largest Saudi law firms
employ women.
Despite her frustrations, Ferak
pointed out that women’s eforts to
gain more respect and influence in
Saudi public life have been progress-
ing rather quickly, considering the
country’s relative youth, and especially
considering the Arabian Peninsula’s
tribal, deeply traditional culture. Ferak
appeared to be echoing the “baby steps”
theory of social progress, often put forth
by Saudi leaders as a way of excusing
rights abuses or the rhetorical excesses
of government-backed clerics. It wasn’t
clear how sincerely she believed it. But
her optimism had returned, and when
the waiter passed our table she enlisted
his help in finding a functioning elec-
trical outlet so that she could charge
her mobile phone.
S audi Arabia’s first government-run
primary schools for girls opened
in the early nineteen-sixties, to fero-
cious opposition. Although atten-
dance was not compulsory, conserva-
tives viewed the mere existence of girls’
schools as an ofense against basic mo-
rality. In 1963, troops were sent to
quell protests at the opening of a girls’
school in Buraydah; the first year, the
only pupil was the daughter of the
headmistress.
Even now, it’s hard to overstate the
cultural bias against women assuming
more prominent public roles. For a
Saudi man with traditional values, the
names of the women in his family are
private, not to be spoken aloud. He
never refers to his female relatives in
public. Even between members of a
close-knit family, these matters can be
sensitive. In conservative Saudi circles,
a man is unlikely ever to see the face
of his brother’s wife or hear her voice.
In 2008, King Abdullah, who died last
January, appalled some of his subjects
when he announced that the Riyadh
University for Women would be re-
named Princess Nora bint Abdul Rah-
man University, in memory of a favor-
ite aunt. Despite his example, the
practice hasn’t caught on; the univer-
sity is the only major institution in the
country that bears a woman’s name.
Nevertheless, Ferak, like every other
female law graduate I spoke with,
wanted me to understand that individ-
ual Saudis and local traditions, not
Saudi laws, were the source of her strug-
gles. Saudi laws, she insisted, were “per-
fect” (a word that I heard at least half
a dozen times, from other women her
age, in reference to the Saudi legal sys-
tem). Saudi women’s woes were merely
the result of the laws’ misapplication.
The fact that I’d sought her out seemed
to surprise her, and to raise concerns
that foreigners might misunderstand.
Although Saudi men sometimes mis-
treated women, the solution lay not in
changing the system but in educating
women about their rights within the
existing structure.
P erhaps surprisingly in a country
notable for its strict rules, relatively
little of Saudi law is written down.
The legal system has been augmented,
during the eighty-three years since
the kingdom was founded, by royal de-
crees, many of which overlap, or even
contradict one another. This body of
law is interpreted by senior clerics, who
serve as judges, largely following the
Hanbali School, the strictest of the
four main schools of Sunni jurisprudence.
The notion of judicial precedent such ofenses as damaging the reputa- Gazette, an English-language newspa-
does not play a role in Saudi law, so tion of Saudi Arabia or its king; a charge per, lauded the squad’s ability to elim-
judges enjoy considerable freedom of of terrorism is frequently used to try inate “magic the same way the security
interpretation. not only jihadists but also bloggers and forces would defuse explosives.”) Last
Yet the system’s ambiguities also lawyers. spring, in Riyadh, ten government agen-
preserve the need for a monarch with The kingdom also executes an un- cies took part in a state-sponsored sor-
final authority, and this means that the usually high number of women, com- cery-awareness workshop.
personality, moods, and tastes of the pared with other countries that prac- These shifts are not necessarily ev-
head of state are felt in the lives of his tice the death penalty. This is typically eryday concerns for Saudi lawyers, but
subjects in ways that would be unimag- explained by the fact that so many non- they are felt at all levels of society. The
inable to citizens of a modern democ- violent crimes are punishable by death previous king had raised hope among
racy. Absolute power, Saudis say, has a under Saudi law. But some Saudi ac- Saudi women that they would soon be
way of trickling down, of turning or- tivists suggest that it is also because granted the right to drive, but the sub-
dinary policemen and public oicials the list of capital ofenses includes ject is no longer publicly discussed. The
into petty tyrants. Justice is often sit- several that are efectively “women’s young dissidents who emerged on
uational; the law is what a person in a crimes.” Women are charged with adul- Twitter in 2011, inspired by the Arab
position of power decides it is. If de- tery more often than men. In Novem- Spring, have fallen silent. Those who
vout Muslims openly question Islamic ber, in an adultery case, a married have avoided prison have “all become
teaching, they are vulnerable to accu- woman was sentenced to death by ston- ‘entrepreneurs,’ ” Fahad al-Fahad, a
sations of heresy, which is a capital ing; her unmarried male partner re- human-rights activist, told me, with
crime in Saudi Arabia. And the risks ceived a hundred lashes.International bitter emphasis on a buzzword that has
of questioning have grown in recent human-rights groups have expressed emerged as a clear favorite of the new
months. The current Saudi king, Sal- alarm at the growing number of for- Saudi leadership.
man, came to power following the death eign women, typically housemaids, fac- Although King Abdullah was criti-
of King Abdullah. Since then, accusa- ing trial for sorcery. Sorcery is consid- cized by international human-rights
tions of heresy and of apostasy—also ered such a grave concern that, in 2009, groups, he was assailed internally by
a capital crime in Saudi Arabia—have the Commission for the Promotion of conservatives for openly encouraging
increasingly been levelled against gov- Virtue and the Prevention of Vice cre- public discussion of social reform, par-
ernment critics. A few days after I left ated a specially trained unit to conduct ticularly in the area of women’s rights.
Jeddah, Ashraf Fayadh, a well-known witchcraft investigations. Saudi citi- Several activists told me that, under
local artist and poet, was sentenced to zens are encouraged to report suspected King Salman, this discussion has
death after a judge deemed some of witches and sorcerers anonymously, abruptly ceased. The public conversa-
his poems blasphemous. to a hotline. (A writer for the Saudi tion about progress, they say, has been
Little is known about a future Saudi
king before the death of his predeces-
sor. The succession may not be in doubt,
but it takes time before the man’s char-
acter can be felt through his exercise
of power. Sharia emphasizes obedience
to rulers. In Saudi Arabia, two Saudi
human-rights activists told me sepa-
rately, there is growing concern that all
Saudi law—indeed, everything King
Salman wishes—is, in a sense, Islamic
law, and is thus automatically beyond
question.
A sudden spike in the number of
executions this year has heightened the
general anxiety. On Salman’s third day
as king, he oversaw his first beheading,
of an alleged rapist. By early Novem-
ber, the kingdom had already carried
out more executions—at least a hun-
dred and fifty—than it had in any year
since 1995. In late November, two Saudi
newspapers reported that the state
would soon be executing at least fifty
more prisoners, all convicted of terror-
ism, which under Saudi law includes “Business isn’t great. We could only aford the smallest air dancer.”
forcibly redirected, and is now restricted
to technology and entrepreneurship—
an emphasis that, while not wholly rhe-
torical, seems gauged to impress for-
eign observers. Ten days after I left the
kingdom at the end of my most recent
visit, a human-rights activist gloomily
forwarded to me a Thomas Friedman
column, in the Times, rhapsodizing about
the Saudi crown prince’s interest in tech-
nology. Across the kingdom, the atmo-
sphere is newly cautious, and a young
law graduate who wishes to speak of
her growing awareness of injustice in
Saudi institutions knows that she must
express herself with enormous care.
S everal days after my conversation
with Ferak at the Lebanese restau-
rant, I set out to meet Bayan Mah-
moud Zahran, whose law firm has made
her the most famous female Saudi law-
yer in the world. I went down to the
lobby of my hotel. A large group of pil-
grims to Mecca, an hour’s drive to the
east, all wearing the seamless white
robes that identified them as being in
the state of ritual purity known as
Ihram, were checking in.
I tapped the Uber icon on my cell
phone and, after calling a car, searched
for the WhatsApp message I’d just re-
ceived from Zahran’s younger sister,
Nour, a recent law graduate. Nour had
ofered to join us, and was making ar-
rangements on behalf of Zahran, who
was busy with a case. Nearly all the
“Er, all right, but I’ve already written ‘Frankenstein.’ ”
women I met during my November
trip to Jeddah were heavy users of Uber
or its Dubai-based competitor, Careem.
The advent, in 2014, of car services
that can be requested through mobile
apps has given women a freedom of
movement that had seemed impossi-
ble just months earlier. The long, swel-
tering waits for drivers, which had been
a daily feature in the lives of educated,
middle-class Saudi women—whose
families didn’t restrict their movements
on principle—vanished, along with
driver drama, in all its various, much
discussed forms: drivers who spied and
reported to fathers and brothers; driv-
ers whose services had to be shared
with sisters; drivers who refused to stop
and ask for directions, despite the fact
that many Saudi streets are unmarked.
Saudis do not work in many service
jobs, including as Uber drivers. Oddly—
or perhaps conveniently, given Saudi
Arabia’s dependence on foreign labor—
the company of foreign workers of the
opposite sex, particularly those from
developing countries, is an unoicial
but widely tolerated exception to the
prohibition against gender mixing. A
Saudi woman may ride in an Uber car
driven by a man from Pakistan, and
a Saudi man may have his breakfast
served by a housemaid from the Phil-
ippines. But the same degree of prox-
imity with another Saudi, or a West-
erner—or, for that matter, a white-collar
worker from a developing country—of the
opposite gender would be unthinkable.
Zahran covers her face. As I waited
at the Japanese restaurant that Nour
had selected, I tried not to peer too ob-
trusively at the veiled women who stood
in the entryway. Saudis are accustomed
to judging a covered woman’s approx-
imate age, profession, and social back-
ground from the cut of her abaya and
the way she wears her head and face
coverings, but for foreigners the niqab
can lend a blind-date awkwardness to
public meetings, even with women well
known to them.
Zahran and her sister found me, and
a waiter led us to a table in the family
section. As he handed out menus in
the form of tablet computers, Zahran
uncovered her face. In 2004, she was a
student in the human-resources de-
partment at King Abdulaziz Univer-
sity, in Jeddah, when the university an-
nounced that it would be opening a
degree program in law for female stu-
dents. It was the first such program in
the kingdom, and Zahran immediately
switched her concentration to law.
“It took me five minutes to decide,”
she said. The fact that women couldn’t
obtain law licenses wasn’t a source of
anxiety for Zahran and her classmates,
but by 2008, when she graduated, the
justice ministry still hadn’t indicated
that it would begin licensing female
lawyers. Zahran began volunteering at
a new women’s shelter that her father,
a businessman, had founded as a gift
to the community. He considered var-
ious needy groups before deciding to
create a center where impoverished
widows and divorcées, of which there
are many in the kingdom, could live.
There turned out to be a number of
women at the shelter who needed un-
oicial legal advice. Although Zahran
couldn’t represent them in proceedings,
she began accompanying them to court,
telling judges that she was a supervi-
sor from the shelter. Zahran hadn’t
planned to specialize in personal-status
law, she said, but it was an opportunity
to use her skills. Many of the court vis-
its involved eforts by the women to
force the ex-husbands to hand over
their children’s government records—
passports, identification cards, and other
oicial paperwork.
Zahran’s firm is expanding, with a
half-dozen employees and a fledgling

QUAHOGS
It was for the wind as much as anything.
It was for the tidal flats, for the miles of bars
and the freezing runs between them,
blued and darkened in the withering gusts.
For the buckets, for the long-tined rakes.
For our skin burning and the bones
beneath, all their ache. For the bent backs,
for the huddle toward warmth beneath
our incapable layers, how we beat
ourselves with our arms. The breath
we blew, the narrow steam that spun away.
How we searched their tell-draggle marks.
Then the feel of them as we furrowed. Then it
was surgery and force together. Like stones.
Opal or pearl or plain rock, ugly except
they were beautiful, their whorls and
purple stains. The bucket’s wire cutting
with their weight. For the sky blazing, its
sinking orange fire. For the sky’s black streaks
with night rising, winter-sudden. Back,
shoreward, home, the tide creeping like a wolf.
For the little stove warming, its own orange fire.
The old pot, the steam, the air in savor,
the close room, the precious butter, the
blue fingers throbbing, our bodies in all
the customs of weariness, the supper,
succulent of the freezing dark sea come up,
and hunger, its own happiness, its own
domain immeasurable. It was for the hunger.
—Frank X. Gaspar
corporate department, which Nour justice ministry announced that in the
joined after receiving her degree. But past twelve months there had been a
women with personal-status cases make forty-eight-per-cent increase in cases
up the majority of her client base. The of khula, divorces initiated by women.
judicial system puts women at a dis- A Saudi newspaper reported that such
advantage, she said.“Women generally divorces now make up a “staggering”
are more emotional, and they can’t get 4.2 per cent of the total. Most women
their rights because they’re so emo- are unsuccessful in their eforts, and
tional, and they just cry,” she told me. those who do succeed must, at a min-
She seemed to suggest that the main imum, repay their dowries to their for-
obstacle was not the legal system but mer husbands; sometimes they must
a tendency of women clients to become also repay the men for money spent on
overwrought. Female lawyers can help, them during their marriages.
she said, because they can “understand Yet in this privacy-obsessed society,
the emotion and translate it into some- with its weak traditions of individual
thing valid for the court.” rights, many Saudi women still strug-
gle to obtain legal information. As far
ended, Ferak continues to receive
messages suggesting new topics and
asking when to expect another event.
Sometimes, Ferak said, her correspon-
dents plead with her not to give up,
telling her that the lectures changed
their outlook—even the arc of their
lives. During her last year at Dar Al-
Hekma, Ferak found a new purpose
in her studies, and her grades rose
sharply. She told Olga Nartova, “I re-
alized why I was studying law.” She
hopes to continue the Hawa’a’s Rights
lectures, but has not found a venue.
Intrigued by the Western understand-
ing of human rights, she has begun to
explore graduate programs abroad,
where she might study the subject.
On the afternoon of the first Ha-
wa’a’s Rights lecture, Salwa al-Khawari,
a teacher at a girls’ school, was head-
ing home when her friend Nour men-
tioned the event. On learning that the
subject of discussion would be wom-
en’s rights within the Saudi judicial
system, Khawari rearranged her eve-
ning in order to attend, and later ral-
lied friends to go to the subsequent
discussions. She told me that it had
never occurred to her that Saudi women
had any legal rights, and she had re-
sented the way that the legal system
treated women. “I always thought that
the flaw lay in the laws,” she told me.
Now, like Ferak and many other law-
yers I spoke with, she expressed new
confidence in the justice of Saudi law.
“Our laws concerning women’s rights
are among the best in the world,”
she said.
The real problem, she added, was
lack of access to information. After
the lecture series, Khawari began read-
ing all she could about women’s rights
in Islam, and sharing what she learned
with her twelve- and thirteen-year-
old students. Last spring, she gave up
her teaching job to study full time to-
ward a master’s degree in social work,
with a concentration in human rights.
Since then, she said, some of her for-
mer students have initiated discus-
sions of women’s legal rights with older
women in their families and among

S ome of the lawyers I met said that

women increasingly insist on being
represented when inheritances are di-
vided. In early October, at the end of
the Islamic calendar year, the Saudi
as any of the lawyers I interviewed
were aware, the Hawa’a’s Rights ini-
tiative has been the only organized at-
tempt to educate Saudi women about
the law. Eight months after the series
their neighbors, and they have asked
Khawari to help them assemble leaflets
on the subject. Khawari said, “They
tell me they want to do something for
Saudi society.” 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 27

SHOUTS & MURMURS
DAY OF JUDGMENT
BY SIMON RICH
T he Messiah floated gently down
Eighth Avenue, His arms spread
wide, as if to hug mankind. Traic
stopped and people gawked, their eyes
and iPhones pointed toward the heav-
ens. All who gazed upon Him knew
at once why He was here: Earth was
saved and all their pain was ending.
His throne came to a stop above
Times Square, beside the giant Sony
screen. He was fifty feet tall and beau-
tifully proportioned, with golden skin
and eyes like polished sapphires. A pair
of cherubs sat on his shoulders, play-
ing silver trumpets. Their song was so
beautiful that it moved people to tears.
“I am the Messiah,” the deity an-
nounced, as if there were any ques-
tion. “And I have come to bring you all
salvation.”
Some reporters had assembled on
the street. The Messiah smiled down
on them indulgently.
“Feel free to ask me what you wish,”
He said. “Chris Matthews, you can go
first.”
“Thank you,” the news anchor said.
He was trying his best to remain com-
posed, but his cheeks were damp with
tears. “What, exactly, do you mean by
‘salvation’?” he asked.
“All sufering will cease,” the Messiah
answered. “And Earth shall be turned
into a heaven.”
28 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
The crowd cheered wildly. Strang-
ers embraced. The elderly danced like
children.
“Anderson Cooper, you go next. You’ve
had your hand up the longest.”
“Thank you,” the correspondent said.
“I was wondering what this means for
the world’s poor?”
“Deliverance,” the Messiah said. “The
poor shall eat, the lame shall walk, and
all wars shall be ended! ” The cheering
grew so loud that the Messiah had to
shout to be heard. “O.K., who’s next?
How about you, Al Roker?”
The cheering stopped.
“What’s wrong?” the Messiah asked.
The cherubs whispered something into
His ear.
“Oh,” He said, turning pale. “I’m
sorry. I meant Al Sharpton.” He cleared
His throat and forced a smile. “Go
ahead, sir! ”
Al Sharpton glared up at Him, his
arms folded tightly across his chest.
“You were going to ask me something?”
the Messiah pressed on. “Go ahead, ask
away.”
“O.K.,” Al Sharpton said. “I guess
my question is: Why did you confuse
me with Al Roker?”
“Look, I’m sorry about that,” the Mes-
siah said. “It’s just that you’re both named
Al, and you’re both on TV.”
Sharpton raised an eyebrow.
“Are you sure it’s not because we’re
both African-American?”
“It’s not that! ” the Messiah said. “I’m
just really bad with faces. Ask anyone.”
“If you’re so bad with faces, how
come you recognized Chris Matthews?”
Sharpton asked. “Why didn’t you con-
fuse him with Chris Hayes?”
The crowd murmured in agreement
as the cherubs exchanged a worried
glance.
“Look, this is crazy,” the Messiah said.
“It was an honest mistake. I’m the Mes-
siah—I love all mankind! I’m not racist,
O.K.? I’m not racist! ”
The cherubs tugged on His robe,
but the Messiah kept defending Him-
self and making everything worse.
“You’re both named Al! You’re both on
TV! I’m not racist! ”
Anderson Cooper thrust his micro-
phone toward the heavens.
“Messiah, do you think you ought
to apologize to Mr. Sharpton?”
“Apologize for what? Confusing two
people who are both named Al and both
on TV ?”
“Do you regret your comments?”
Chris Matthews asked. He’d moved
on from the salvation story and was
now focussed on the race angle.
“Guys, this is crazy! ” the Messiah
said, his face contorted in a pained grin.
“I have black friends. I’m a fan of black
culture! ”
At this point, the cherubs were try-
ing to physically close His mouth.
“I love Kanye West! ”
Times Square fell silent. The cher-
ubs buried their faces in their hands.
“O.K.,” the Messiah murmured. “Let’s
just stop for the day. I’ll come back tomor-
row, and we’ll try again. Or something.
Sound good ?”
No one responded.
The cherubs, their cheeks redder
than usual, played a few rushed notes
on their trumpets. Then they grabbed
the Messiah’s elbows and dragged Him
awkwardly up to Heaven.
T he Messiah paced back and forth
on His cloud, scrolling though
tweets on His iPad.
“This is ridiculous,” He said. “I’m
VICTOR KERLOW
trending on Twitter. And, look at this,
look at Google. ”
The cherubs dutifully hovered over
His screen.
 “If you type ‘Messiah’ into the search
box, the first thing that comes up is ‘Mes-
siah racist.’ Not ‘Messiah salvation’ or
‘Messiah to end death.’ ‘Messiah racist! ’ ”
He forced a laugh. “This is crazy! ”
He nudged one of the cherubs in the
ribs, sending him tumbling across the
sky. “You guys think this is crazy, right?”
The cherubs shared a long, silent
look. Eventually, the one called Sorath
cleared his throat.
“Oh, sweet and noble Messiah,”
he said, in a honeyed voice. “The thing
is . . . Al Sharpton and Al Roker look
nothing alike. Al Sharpton has a mus-
tache, and Al Roker doesn’t. Also,
Sharpton has hair and Roker is com-
pletely bald.”
“It’s true,” Zophiel, the other cherub,
said.
“They’re exactly the same age. I looked
it up on Wikipedia! ”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“So you’re telling me you’ve never made
a mistake like that? You’ve never confused
two black guys before?”
“No,” Sorath said.
“Not even once?”
“No.”
“Also,” Zophiel said, “I wasn’t sure
what the best time to bring this up was,
but you shouldn’t say ‘lame.’ The term
is ‘diferently-abled.’ ”
“Seriously?”
“That’s the accepted term.”
The Messiah threw up His arms in
frustration.
“How am I supposed to keep these things
straight when they keep changing the
terms?” He caught His breath and
smoothed the folds of His robe. “O.K.,”
He said. “Let’s fly back down. We’re doing
my plan. ”
Sorath and Zophiel hesitated.
“What is it now?”
“We just don’t think it’s a very wise
strategy,” Sorath said.
“It’s going to be fine,” the Messiah
said. “Come on. Grab your trumpets and
follow me.”
T he cherubs were shocked by the
size of the crowd. Everyone was
covering the story now, from Al Ja-
zeera to TMZ.
“Start playing,”the Messiah whispered.
The cherubs sighed and reluctantly
launched into “Gold Digger.” There
was light booing from the crowd as the
Messiah did some hip-hop-inflected
head moves.
“I’m not a racist,” the Messiah said.
“But you don’t have to take my word
for it. Instead, I ask you to take the word
of . . . the Reverend Martin Luther
King, Jr.! ”
The crowd watched in astonish-
ment as the Reverend descended from
Heaven, his golden halo gleaming. His
aura was bright and radiant, but his ex-
pression was distinctly strained.
“O.K., Martin,” the Messiah said.
“Tell them.”
“Tell them what?” the Reverend
asked.
“That I’m not a racist! ”
The Reverend averted his eyes.
“What’s wrong?” the Messiah de-
manded.
“To be honest,” King said, “this
whole situation makes me extremely
uncomfortable.”
“You can go back to Heaven in two
seconds,” the Messiah promised. “Just
tell them, really quickly, how we hang out
and everything.”
“But we don’t hang out.”
“What about that time we played golf ?”
“We never played golf.”
“Sure we did! Remember? You told me
all those crazy stories about growing up
in Michigan?”
“Michigan?” the Reverend squinted
at the Messiah. “Are you sure you’re
not thinking of Malcolm X?”
The cherubs hung their heads. One
of them took out a flask and started
drinking.
“O.K., I know that was bad,” the Mes-
siah said. “That was bad. But answer me
this: How can I be racist when I don’t
even have a race myself ? I’m not a hu-
man—I’m an angel! ”
“You’re clearly white,” Chris Mat-
thews said.
“I don’t identify as white.”
“Do you identify as black?”
“I actually am part black! ” the Mes-
siah said. “I did that thing, that genetic-
testing thing that you do through the mail.
I’m mostly angel, but part of me is black.
I’m almost two per cent black.”
The crowd booed.
“Martin and Malcolm both start with
an ‘M ’! ” the Messiah shouted, as King
and Sharpton exchanged a weary look.
“And they’re from the same era! And they
both did race stuf! ”
Al Sharpton raised an eyebrow.
“ ‘Race stuf ’?”
The Messiah buried His head in
His hands and groaned. When He
finally looked up, there were tears in
His eyes.
“O.K.,” he whispered. “I admit it. I
never realized this before, but, I guess, the
truth is, I’m a little bit . . . racist.”
“I’m sorry,” Martin Luther King, Jr.,
said. “We couldn’t hear that. You’re a
little bit what?”
“A little bit racist! ” the Messiah said.
He began to weep, and His tears rained
down on Broadway, dousing the crowd.
The cherubs stroked His back with
their tiny, chubby fingers.
“What should I do?” the Messiah cried.
“How do I make things right?”
“You can meet with black leaders,”
Al Sharpton said. “And start a dia-
logue.”
“O.K.,” the Messiah said. And He
followed Sharpton north, to Harlem.
A few days later, the Messiah ap-
peared on “The Rachel Maddow
Show.” His apology was eloquent and
obviously genuine.
“I came to save mankind,” He said.
“But, in the end, mankind saved me.”
“Where do you go from here?” Mad-
dow asked.
“I’m taking an educational trip to Af-
rica,” He said, “to improve my under-
standing of diversity.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “I think
we’re out of time.” She pressed on her
earpiece.
“Oh, right. But, first, one more
question: Are you still going to bring
salvation to mankind?”
“I’m not really focussed on my career
right now,” the Messiah said. “My
goal is just to resolve my personal is-
sues. I obviously have a lot of hatred
inside me, which I was completely un-
aware of. Hopefully, though, with the
help of therapy, I can unpack my white
privilege and inspire others to do the
same.”
“So when will you return?”
The Messiah thought for a moment.
“I’ll return when all our hearts are
fully purged of racism. When we see a
man’s face and no longer notice the color
of his skin.”
“And how long will that take?”
The Messiah shrugged. “We’ll see.” 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 29

THE SPORTING SCENE
THE WALL DANCER
Ashima Shiraishi’s route to the top.
BY NICK PAUMGARTEN
T he mother and father of Ashima
Shiraishi, a fourteen-year-old New
Yorker who has been called the most tal-
ented rock climber in the world, met in
fashion school, in Tokyo, in the early sev-
enties. Hisatoshi Shiraishi, the father,
was from the southern island of Shikoku,
and Tsuya Otake, the mother, was from
Fukushima, where her family had a gar-
Her body assumes a seemingly infinite variety of forms, each of a diferent utility.
30 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
ment factory. After graduating, they trav-
elled together to Europe and, captivated
by the punk scene in London, settled
there for a while. Upon their return to
Japan, Hisatoshi, who went by the nick-
name Poppo, took up the study of Butoh,
an avant-garde dance form. After a cou-
ple of years, Tsuya flew to New York on
a tourist visa and sent word that the city
was more exciting than Tokyo or Lon-
don. Poppo followed. This was 1978.
Tsuya was right—New York was very
exciting.
After a week, Poppo found a stage:
the fountain in Washington Square Park.
Most days, he danced there in the shal-
low pool. When winter came, he began
performing both inside and outside night
clubs downtown: the Mudd Club, Pyr-
amid, Danceteria. By the mid-eighties,
he was a minor celebrity in the East Vil-
lage arts scene, known for his intense
brand of street theatre. Naked save for a
loincloth, and spray-painted gold from
head to toe, he danced sometimes with
a burning dummy, amid fires he’d set on
the sidewalk, or he surfed atop passing
taxis, or he stood still for twenty min-
utes, barefoot, on a block of ice. He
founded a troupe, called Poppo and the
Go-Go Boys, which had as many as
twenty dancers, most of them women,
and they performed at downtown the-
atres—La MaMa, the Kitchen, the
Joyce—and toured overseas. Videos of a
few of these performances have survived
into the YouTube age. In them, Poppo
is limber and lean—a ghoul in gold or
white paint. The Times described his
movements onstage as those of “a pow-
erful, slightly wry priest.” Spin noted his
ability to discern gods in the neighbor-
hood trash and pronounced him “strong
on punk ethics.” Meanwhile, Tsuya, who
was working as a saleswoman at a Japa-
nese clothing store in the East Village,
paid the rent.
Eventually, Poppo and Tsuya got mar-
ried. Tsuya had a green card. For more
than ten years, they tried to have a child,
availing themselves of every method they
could aford. When Tsuya turned fifty,
they were ready to give up, but their doc-
tor urged them to try once more. “It was
our last chance,”Tsuya said. In June, 2001,
a daughter was born: Ashima. “She was
a miracle baby,” Tsuya said.
Tsuya recalls that even in the hospi-
tal nursery Ashima ceaselessly moved
her hands, arms, and legs: “All the time,
not stop. I couldn’t believe it. I think she
has monkey DNA.” Tsuya has a sardonic
sense of humor, and a husky laugh. She
and Poppo both struggle with English,
despite having lived in New York City
for nearly forty years.
Their aspirations for Ashima were
lofty and vague. “When Ashima was
PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC
born, I have an idea for her,” Tsuya said.
“She grow up, create things, and make
people happy. It came true. Now kids
want to be like Ashima.”
Climbing was not originally a part of
the plan. They hardly knew that it ex-
isted. The real miracle may be that a lit-
tle girl from the unmountainous island
of Manhattan, born to insular, artistic
immigrants who had never tied a figure-
eight knot, became, by the age of four-
teen, possibly the best female rock climber
ever—a Gretzky of the granite. Ungrudg-
ingly admired by seasoned dirtbags and
muscular young rock rats, she is, even
though still young, perhaps the first fe-
male climber whose accomplishments
may transcend gender, and the first rock
climber who could become a household
name. There have been articles and photo
spreads in newspapers and sports mag-
azines, films and countless YouTube clips,
an appearance on Time ’s list of Ameri-
ca’s most influential teen-agers, and, of
course, a TED talk. (She’s no Tony Rob-
bins, but she held her own.) Amid all
this, she still lives with her parents in a
rent-controlled loft on West Twenty-sixth
Street and trains five days a week, under
the eye of her father, who, many years ago,
gave up Butoh to coach and guide her.
E very ascent combines, to varying
degrees, elements of technical skill,
physical strength, imagination, concen-
tration, and tolerance for risk. Climbers
are stronger in some elements than in
others and so favor certain disciplines.
The various approaches depend in large
part on the extent and the manner of
“protection”—the cams, nuts, bolts, and
pitons that support the rope, and the
climber attached to it. Sport climbing
takes place on routes, either in gyms or
outdoors, that have fixed protection; you
hook your rope into existing bolts. “Trad”
(traditional) involves climbing outdoors
and putting in your own protection as
you go. Free soloing is climbing without
protection. You fall, you die.
Bouldering consists of short routes,
or “problems,” of no higher than twenty
feet or so, on freestanding boulders and
accessible overhangs or in climbing
gyms. Boulderers eschew protection—
you fall, you ache. Bouldering, the Pata-
gonia founder and rock-climbing pio-
neer Yvon Chouinard once said, is
“instant sufering.”
Bouldering was for years just a way to
goof of or train between big ascents.
Starting in the fifties, John Gill, a math-
ematician and gymnast from Georgia,
made bouldering a discipline unto itself.
There was little glory to be found in
standing atop a twenty-foot rock, so it
was all about how you got there: means
over end. This is where the idea arose of
boulders as problems. Gill advocated style,
power, and grace, and considered boul-
dering to be a variation on gymnastics,
as well as a form both of personal expres-
sion and of moving meditation. He was
the first to use gymnastics chalk (now
commonplace) to keep the hands dry.
Ashima excels at sport climbing and
bouldering. She is a gym-era child who
nevertheless climbs outside whenever she
can. That’s where you make a name for
yourself. Still, she claims to have no in-
terest in the big walls of Yosemite, to say
nothing of serious mountaineering. “I’m
not really into Alpine,” she told me. “I
don’t like the cold. I don’t like ice or snow.”
She prefers the pocked syenite humps of
the Hueco Tanks, near El Paso—a boul-
dering Mecca. (She spent the Thanks-
giving weekend there, with her father and
some older climbing friends.) For her, a
climb is a puzzle, not an expedition.
In terms of pure talent—climbers
speak of “strength”—she is near the top,
but she is not too keen on taking risks.
Anyway, her parents won’t allow it. She
has small, powerful fingers, a light but
sinewy frame, and a seemingly efortless
yet peerlessly precise technique. All this
enables her to find holds in nearly im-
perceptible chinks in the rock. A rock
climber’s key attribute is a high strength-
to-weight ratio, but the ability to create
leverage, with subtle geometric variations
in body positioning, is the force multi-
plier. A civilian might think crudely of
climbing as something like ascending a
ladder—all reach and pull—but watch-
ing Ashima adjust the attitude of her
hips, shoulders, or heels as she tries to
move from one improbable hold to an-
other gives the impression that the human
body can arrange itself in an infinite num-
ber of forms, each of slightly diferent
utility.
She has an uncanny muscle memory,
so that once she finds the right position
for the problem she nails it. This econ-
omy of motion, both innate and learned,
is, at the highest levels, an esoteric art.
You can see how her father’s aptitude for
corporal ingenuity and control, from
Butoh, translates into hers for dancing
on the wall. Her competence, power, and
grace may inspire comparisons to Roger
Federer or Misty Copeland, but her de-
liberate and unhurried realignments bring
to mind a mantis.
In both sport climbing and boulder-
ing, there are certain somewhat objec-
tive standards against which climbers
can measure themselves. One is compe-
tition, on artificial climbing walls. In Au-
gust, Ashima won gold medals in boul-
dering and sport climbing in the world
championships, in Arco, Italy, in the
fifteen-and-under bracket. She is not al-
lowed to compete against adults in sanc-
tioned competitions until she turns eigh-
teen, but when she has competed against
them in other contests she has beaten
them. In Arco, she was the only climber,
of any age, to top out (i.e., reach the top)
on the four bouldering problems—three
of them on the first try.
She and her parents have their eyes
on the 2020 Olympics, to be held in
Japan. The host country can add several
sporting events to the usual complement,
and it appears that climbing may be one
of them. The Olympics are a proven
mechanism for monetizing obscure gifts.
This would be Ashima’s best chance to
get on a Wheaties box.
Another standard is the rating regi-
men. Sport and trad climbs are given a
degree of diiculty, according to the Yo-
semite Decimal System: 1 is a walk on
flat land, and 5 is a vertical climb, or close
to it. So actual climbs are rated 5.0 through
5.15, with additional subcategories of “a”
through “d.” The hardest routes at the
moment are 5.15c—there are just two.
(The system is open-ended, so it’s only a
matter of time before someone pioneers
a 5.16a.) In northeast Spain, last March,
when Ashima was thirteen, she became
the first woman, and the youngest per-
son of either sex, ever to “send” (complete)
a 5.15. It is a route called Open Your
Mind Direct, which was recently up-
graded from a 5.14d to a 5.15a, owing to
a handhold’s having broken of. She spent
just four days “projecting” the route—that
is, studying and solving all the problems
on it by trial and error. The men who had
done it before had spent weeks, if not
months. Obviously, the rating system is
also subjective, but for Ashima this feat
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 31
was an annunciation. If she could send a
5.15 during spring break from eighth
grade, what more could she do?
Bouldering has a similar rating sys-
tem, with a scale of V1 to V15. Ashima
is the second woman to have sent more
than one V14. (She beat her predeces-
sor in a competition last year.) In a no-
table session this fall, an hour north of
the city, in a wooded area that climbers
call the Master Bedroom, Ashima ticked
of a series of diicult problems: a V11
called Reckless, a V12 called Wetness to
Fatness, and a V14 called Nuclear War,
which, in the nine years since it was first
climbed, had turned back all attempts
until hers. She announced her perfor-
mance on Instagram: “V11, V12 and
V14 in a DAY! HOLY CRAP!!!!!” On
Thanksgiving, she posted a photo from
Texas on Instagram: “I shocked myself
by getting the first female ascent of the
legendary razor blade climb, Terre de
Sienne (V14)!” (Also Federer-like is her
way of blending frank amazement at her
own capabilities with an air of humility
and ease.)
The photo from the Master Bedroom
showed a film crew standing beneath her
as she dangled, almost parallel to the
ground, from a sun-dappled gneiss over-
hang.They were from the climbing-video
company Big Up Productions, which has
made several films of Ashima. Big Up’s
founder, Josh Lowell, who was shooting
her that day, told me, “I’ve been to that
spot with a bunch of talented pro climb-
ers over the years and never seen anyone
have a day like that before. She has a
chance to completely change the game
of climbing in the next few years.”
T he first time I saw Ashima Shirai-
shi climb was at the Clifs, a vast
gym in Long Island City. It was a school
holiday, and she had taken the E train
from Manhattan with her father. She
trains mainly at the Clifs or at Brook-
lyn Boulders, a smaller gym that opened
six years ago in an old Daily News ga-
rage not far from the Gowanus Canal.
Despite how young and girlish her voice
had sounded on the phone, I was sur-
prised by how small she is. She is just
over five feet, with broad shoulders, long
arms, and neat bangs. Her face, at rest,
has a melancholy air, but a ready smile
lights it up. She shrugs a lot and doesn’t
talk much. She often stands like a dancer,
with one toe pointed out, hip a-jut. She
does not look muscular, but once she’s
on the wall the muscles in her shoulders
and back seem to spring out of nowhere.
She’s metamorphic.
She ducked into the locker room and
came out a few moments later wearing
a yellow North Face tank top and knee-
length cotton climbing Capris in a
flax-colored Bijinga pattern. Her father
buys fabric in the garment district, and
her mother makes her clothes on a sew-
ing machine at home. He also cuts Ashi-
ma’s hair and chooses her outfits for com-
petitions. He had on plaid cotton pants,
a gray T-shirt, and running shoes. He is
short and compact, with spiked hair dyed
partly yellow. He often looks down at
the floor when you talk to him. He
smokes Parliaments out of a silver case.
He carries a brown felt dufel with his
Ashima stuf: shoes, chalk, flip-flops,
thermos, snack bars, hairbrush, cream. A
competitor’s mother once asked him
whether he ever had any interest in climb-
ing himself, and he replied, “I don’t have
time. I must clean Ashima’s shoes.”
They went upstairs and found a quiet
place where there were a few stationary
bikes. Poppo lowered the seat on one,
and Ashima sat down. Standing behind
her, he combed out her hair. He rubbed
cream into the hair by her temples and
combed that, too, then rested the little
jar of cream on the rear wheel of an el-
liptical machine. She stared straight ahead.
Her feet were bare. They are long, with
big toes like thumbs. He put her hair in
a ponytail.
This was a ritual they perform before
every training session or competition;
they have a knack for finding the calm
corners of busy gyms. Then came a brief
warmup. They faced each other and went
wordlessly through a series of stretches.
She followed his lead, not quite giving
it her all. They went from one end of the
body to the other: ankles, legs, shoulders,
arms, fingers, wrists, neck. They kneaded
their own fingertips and then their fore-
arms and triceps. He slugged himself a
few times on the thighs and chest with
a fist, and she halfheartedly did so, too.
They finished with a sumo squat and a
leap into the air, and then she sat on a
mat and jammed her feet into a pair of
climbing shoes.
The gym teemed with climbers of all
ages and sizes and shapes, and as Ashi-
ma walked among them some did dou-
ble takes, others played it cool, and a few
ofered up congratulations, for the world
championships. She warmed up with a
series of quick short climbs: bouldering
routes, each a bit more diicult than the
one before and yet easy for her, a wiz
amid the rifraf.
After a while, she tried some longer
routes, to work on her endurance. For
these, she stepped into a harness, and
her father belayed her from below, with
a twenty-metre rope. As she climbed,
she clipped the rope into a series of car-
abiners attached to the wall. The climbs
increased in diiculty. She and her fa-
ther studied the routes. What little they
said to each other was in Japanese. (She
says that she is better in English and
doesn’t write Japanese very well.) Her
father often gives her tactical advice—
what climbers call beta—especially after
she falls. “Then he suggests a diferent
way,” Ashima told me. “And sometimes
it’ll be bad beta. I’m, like, ‘You try it!’ ”
She worked her way up a route that
had a series of overhangs. She was al-
most upside down, gripping a handhold
the size of a loaf of bread. She reached
into her bag of chalk, shook each arm,
and then was suddenly hanging by two
hands, legs dangling, from a grip the size
of a dinner roll. No panic.
Two middle-aged climbers, a man
and a woman, watched from below. “I’m
going to project that,” the man said. “But
it’ll take me months.”
The woman said, “She’s hanging on
freaking slopers”—that is, Ashima was
resting straight-armed on rounded holds
that seemed to ofer no real purchase.
“The pulleys in her fingers are well
developed,” he said. “She’s like a chim-
panzee. Her fingers are steel.”
When Ashima was done, she started
right in on another route. “Most people
would need a thirty-minute rest after
that,” the man said. “This one is the hard-
est they got in this gym. This is insane.”
He watched her edge up over a ledge.
After a few minutes, she reached the top
and then drifted down, on her father’s
belay. For a while, she sat on a mat with
her shoes of, looking almost bored.
A s it happens, the man had been
around when Ashima first got
started. “She had the ugliest set of shoes,”
he recalled. “She was, like, seven. She
used to come up to us and tell us moves.”
This was at Rat Rock, a hump of schist
about a hundred and fifty feet wide and
not quite ten yards high, near the south-
ern end of Central Park. Oicially, it’s
called Umpire Rock, owing to the ball
fields nearby, but its denizens have given
it a more honest name. By global boul-
dering standards, Rat Rock ain’t much,
but it is the indisputable hub of outdoor
climbing activity in the city, with a sur-
prising number of tricky bouldering prob-
lems on its north and east sides, and a
revolving cast of characters who congre-
gate there to take them on.
When Ashima was little, her parents
often brought her to that part of the
Park, to visit a playground nearby. One
day, when she was six, she ran over to
Rat Rock, intending to slide
down the gentle scarp on
the south side. She noticed
people climbing, and scam-
pered up an easy pitch. The
sensei of Rat Rock, an old
Japanese gardener named
Yukihiko Ikumori, known
to all as Yuki, noticed her.
Yuki had devised new ways
of attacking almost every prominent
problem there, including Death by Dizzy
and Tweaky Shit, and he often helped
newcomers learn them. He began to
work with Ashima. “I have to translate
our climbs to the hands of a six-year-
old,” he told a friend named Vadim Mar-
covallo, who had started climbing at Rat
Rock in 1981. According to Marcovallo,
Ashima would follow Yuki around, doing
everything he’d do.
“Then her father stepped in,” Mar-
covallo recalled. “He wouldn’t allow Yuki
to show her anything anymore. And so
Yuki wouldn’t even look at her, because
the father was there.” Marcovallo recalled
that in those early years, once Ashima
showed promise, she often wanted to
run around in the playground with other
kids her age, or even hang out with a
crew of high-school students who did
parkour tricks on a diferent part of the
rock. “But her father always insisted she
climb, climb, climb,” Marcovallo said. “I
actually remember him saying it: ‘Climb!’
And there was lots of tears and drama.
Our hearts went out to her. We all won-
dered, How is this going to play out?”
As Marcovallo recalled, Ashima’s aunt
persuaded her father to relent and let her
run around a bit in the playground—and
then Ashima started to want to climb
on her own. “She started to crush it,”
Marcovallo said. “She’d do the Polish
Traverse”—a horizontal route on the
rock’s north wall—“like nobody’s busi-
ness. I remember when she was trying
some diicult problem on the west side
of the rock. When she didn’t do it, she’d
cry.” Tears, still, but now over wanting
to climb well, rather than not at all. Some
of the Rat Rock regulars worried that,
as one put it, “there’s a Svengali thing
going on here.” But they started to see
the results. “And look at her now!” one
said. “Maybe that’s what it takes.” (Ashi-
ma and her father deny that there was
ever tension between them or with Yuki.
In general, Ashima is dismissive of any
Svengali talk. “I climb for
myself,” she told me.) Mar-
covallo also remembers the
day that he and some oth-
ers were idly talking about
climbing shoes and Ashima
exclaimed, “I’m sponsored!”
(She now has endorsement
deals with Clif Bar, The
North Face, Petzl, and Evolv.)
When Ashima was seven, Poppo
began taking her around to climbing
gyms in the area. In White Plains, they
found a coach named Obe Carrion, a
muscular Puerto Rican from Allentown,
Pennsylvania, who had been a national
champion. Carrion was going to teach
her some real technique, and perhaps
serve as a bufer between Ashima and
her father. Not long afterward, she won
the nationals for the first time. Carrion
worked with her for almost four years,
but eventually, amid tension with Poppo,
he quit and moved West. “It was a bit
too much for me,” Carrion recalled. “It
wasn’t good for me to focus all my en-
ergy on one child.”
The first film of Ashima, “Rock Lit-
tle Angel: Dreaming Rat,” was shot by
family friends, when she was eight, at
Rat Rock. In some respects, it is less a
proclamation of talent than a medita-
tion on precocity. It features the eerie
music of Nocturnal Emissions, an En-
glish sound-art collective, which had
served as the accompaniment for some
of Poppo’s Butoh performances. Rat Rock
comes of as a strange, wild place, and
Ashima as a mystical nymph. Sometimes
you get the sense that she isn’t so much
an athlete as an art project.
T hough still a girl, and very much
under the sway of her father, Ashi-
ma is shrewd about her career and oddly
self-suicient where business is con-
cerned. She has had no professional rep-
resentation of any kind. She handles her
own press. When she has had to sign
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 33
contracts, her parents review them, but
because they don’t read English very well,
she said, “they have no idea what’s going
on.” Just before Christmas, however, she
met with RXR Sports, the agency that
represents the free soloist Alex Honnold
and many other climbers, to discuss the
possibility of her becoming a client.
As with gymnastics and figure skating,
there are many cases of climbing prodi-
gies, especially girls, who are phenoms at
twelve and done by twenty. “They don’t
want to be pawns anymore,” Josh Lowell,
the Big Up filmmaker, said. Priorities, and
bodies, change. Tori Allen, who grew up
in Benin, was known for the stufed ani-
mal she kept clipped to her harness, as a
nod to a childhood spent climbing trees
with a pet monkey. She was a professional
by the age of twelve, an X Games cham-
pion at fourteen. She attracted endorse-
ments, and hype, to the point where peo-
ple on the climbing scene began to resent
her. (They called her climbing’s Anna
Kournikova.) She quit competitive climb-
ing in favor of pole-vaulting, which got her
a scholarship at Florida State. “Now I climb
for fun, not for grades, medals, or maga-
zines,” Allen, who is twenty-seven, told me.
“I know a lot of climbers still climbing now
who were at their peak ten years ago.They’re
living six to a condo in Boulder, training
to go get fourth place. Some of them have
college degrees. What motivates them?
When are they going to give it up?”
Ashima seems to view climbing as a
venue for accomplishment rather than
as a ground for adventure. “Climbing
used to be for the misfits who couldn’t
catch a ball or the small kids like me who
got cut from the baseball team,” Lowell
said. “Now it’s for élite athletes. They’re
trying to perform a perfect ten.” It’s a
particularly unromantic strain of rock
ratting; the wild allure—wandering the
continent, living out of a car—has been
bred out of it. Or perhaps, for Ashima,
it’s just down the road.
T he Shiraishis’ loft is in the garment
district, five flights up in an old sew-
ing factory. The elevator is ancient and
balky, and so the family walk up and
down. The apartment is two thousand
square feet: seven hundred and fifty dol-
lars a month. Ashima and her mother
sleep on bunk beds in a back bedroom
otherwise occupied by Poppo’s archives
of videotapes, records, books, and press
34 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
clippings. Ashima sleeps on the bottom
bunk. Poppo’s bed is out in the main
space, in a corner. One part of the loft is
a kind of playpen, a fenced-of area clut-
tered with Ashima’s old toys and art work.
Ashima’s favorite book is Haruki Muraka-
mi’s “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His
Years of Pilgrimage.” Her favorite movie
is “Breakfast at Tifany’s.” (“I love Au-
drey Hepburn.”) But she doesn’t really
have time for movies. She likes to watch
the Knicks when she can.
Her mother has a bob and dresses in
painter’s pants and long jackets. She is
in her mid-sixties. She has never tried
to climb. “I’m not athletic anything,” she
says. “I make the pants.” Ashima’s par-
ents are very attuned to her weight. In
October, she was eighty-two pounds.
“She’s too skinny,” Poppo told me. “It’s
too light. Needs more food. Six months
ago, she was a hundred pounds.” This
swing seems extreme, as does the atten-
tion to weight generally, but the concern
is pure physics—the strength-to-weight
question. Ashima is trying to optimize.
Her parents were trying to get her to eat
more. “Professional climbers keep giving
her advice,” Poppo said. “Gluten-free. But
not enough calories. My wife said, be-
fore world championships, ‘Skinny bet-
ter than fat.’ But yesterday I told her, ‘You
take a little bit more food.’ ” He had a
number in mind. “She’s a little bit chubby
at ninety. She needs eighty-eight.” By
Christmas, when she went to Japan on
a bouldering trip, she was eighty-eight.
Of greater concern to them is sleep.
Ashima often gets just five or six hours.
She arrives home from climbing at eight-
thirty in the evening, showers and eats,
and then starts in on her schoolwork,
which she insists on finishing. She’s often
up well past midnight. “We say, ‘Don’t do
homework!’ ” Tsuya said. When I asked
her if Ashima got straight A’s, she said,
“Yes. Well, sometimes she gets A-plus.”
Ashima is a freshman at Rudolf
Steiner, a private school on the Upper
East Side. It’s a Waldorf school—pro-
gressive, tactile, artsy—where kids make
their own books and tools. The high
school is in a town house a block south
of Michael Bloomberg’s. Ashima started
at Steiner when she was three and had
Dena Malon as her main teacher in
grades one through eight. This year,
Malon is on a sabbatical, in part to clear
her mind after eight years with the same
group of kids and to prepare for the next
group. “It’s my aim to let go of them,”
Malon said. Ashima is one of the more
diicult ones to let go of: “She works
harder than anyone I know. I’ve never
met anyone like her.” Ashima has friends
there but hardly has time to hang out
with them outside of school.
Ashima intends to leave Steiner after
this year for the Professional Children’s
School, a midtown high school that gives
its students, many of them actors, mod-
els, or musicians, a chance to have flex-
ible schedules. “Normal people can go,
too,” Ashima told me.
E arlier this fall, Ashima flew to Bos-
ton with her parents to compete in
the Heist, an annual all-female compe-
tition at a climbing gym in Watertown.
(At most competitions, the women com-
pete, and then the men. At the Heist,
the women are the main and only event.)
The Shiraishis were staying at a Best
Western nearby, with a Japanese film
crew from Fuji TV that had been fol-
lowing them around for almost a year
for a series about Ashima, called “The
Spider Girl,” which was big in Japan.
This was the third Heist. Everyone
involved seemed to speak wistfully of the
year before, when Ashima competed for
the first time against top grownup pro-
fessional climbers. She had beat both
Alex Puccio, the nine-time national boul-
dering champion, and Delaney Miller,
one of the country’s best climbers. Nei-
ther was back this year. The most nota-
ble competition was Meagan Martin, a
powerful twenty-four-year-old climber
known for her appearances on “Ameri-
can Ninja Warrior.”
The qualifying round stretched into
the afternoon. Dozens of girls and young
women in shorts and leggings crawled all
over the walls or reclined on the heavily
padded floors. Squalls of encouragement
sprang up here and there, as putative
competitors egged each other on. This
was not the edgy green-eyed atmosphere
of the gymnastics academy or the
figure-skating rink. Ashima and Poppo
wandered around, scouting the more
diicult problems. Little crowds gath-
ered to watch her nail each one. The
gym’s head route setter, a coach named
Shane Messer, watched her on the hard-
est, and he said that she was the only
one in the gym capable of completing
it. “There’s still a diference between the
men and the women, but the girls are
getting really close,” he said. “Ashima is
stronger than, let’s say, all but twenty
dudes in the world.”
There were six women in the finals,
which were held in the evening. The
climbers mustered in an empty section
of the gym, away from their parents or
their coaches. The organizer had rigged
a giant white sheet over the champion-
ship course—it hid two bouldering prob-
lems and a sport-climbing route. The “Unicorns do exist!”
gym filled with several hundred specta-
tors, most of them practitioners or par- • •
ents attuned to the sport’s nuances. After
a while, amid loud music and colored
lights, the finalists were introduced, the twelve points, featured an awkward move port me, I don’t want to let them down.”
curtain fell away, and the competitors from one facet to another, via a tricky Now her father looked on helplessly as
got fifteen minutes to stalk the base of corner, and onto an overhang. The first Ashima worked her way through the
the wall, studying the routes. They moved climber couldn’t get past it and earned crux, face to the wall. She was using toe-
in a cluster, gesturing at invisible hand- eight points. Among the first five, only holds that didn’t seem to exist. For a mo-
holds, as though reaching for fireflies, one, a local climber named Bimini Horst- ment, she was caught in the corner, reach-
and even occasionally shared their im- mann, got through, by facing away from ing up toward the ledge, and then
pressions and tactical notions with one the wall, and only on her third attempt. suddenly the implausible was made to
another. Ashima ran over to her father The crowd went nuts. She topped out and seem routine. I thought of a phrase that
and retrieved a pair of binoculars. She leaped of. “That’s my girl!” her mother a champion climber named Sasha Di-
peered up at the higher reaches of the yelled. The next climber, Meagan Mar- Giulian had mentioned to me, about cer-
roped route. He watched from the back tin, the ninja, got stuck in the corner and tain climbers having “a voice on the wall.”
of the gym, taut with an unappeasable gave the crowd a “You kidding me?” gri- Ashima’s was distinctive, purposeful, fluid.
urge to share beta. mace. She came of, after a pair of nines. “She make new beta very fast,” her
When the competition began, the Ashima, as the top qualifier, went last. father said. “That make her very special
climbers went one at a time. Each had She, too, got hung up in the corner sec- person.”
five minutes—if a competitor was still tion, and, to everyone’s surprise, fell in Amid cheers and screams, she swung
on the wall when the time expired, she her first attempt. She re-chalked and like a lemur onto the last two holds, hang-
could keep going until she fell.The climb- studied the wall. Problems, problems. ing for a second from the top one, then
ers, as they awaited their turn, sat side One of the setters said to another, “What she waved to the crowd, jumped down,
by side in a row of chairs facing away if Bimini does her boulder and Ashima and gave a smile of told-you-so and
from the wall and were forbidden to turn doesn’t?” The prospect seemed to con- amazes-me-too. She returned to her seat.
around, lest they glean intel from their cern and astound them. “What? What?” one of the scorers
rivals’ attempts. Each time the one climb- I’d heard that Ashima sometimes had gasped. “I don’t understand how that just
ing made a hard move, the crowd hooted of days or, at least, that she sometimes happened.” Neither did the woman who’d
and cheered, and the others could only started slow in qualifying rounds, per- set the route. Ashima had devised an un-
guess at what had occurred. Ashima haps because of pressure. One day, while foreseen solution. 
stared calmly ahead. talking about Serena Williams and her
The climbers earned points as they as- upset loss in the semifinals of the U.S.
cended from hold to hold. The first prob- Open, Ashima said, “Sometimes I feel newyorker.com
lem, about twenty feet high and worth like she might feel. The people who sup- Video: Ashima Shiraishi on why she climbs.

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 35

A dam Fogelson, the chairman of
Hollywood’s newest studio, lis-
tened to a pitch for a film called “Un-
manned” with an encouraging smile.
Hollywood pitches are jolly, elaborately
courteous afairs. So on this sunny after-
noon the filmmakers—two producers,
the director, and the star, Keanu Reeves,
whose black suit and black T-shirt and
black beard gave him the look of a styl-
ish sexton—had cheerfully trekked over
the hill to STX Entertainment’s oices
in Burbank, and STX’s executives had
cheerfully welcomed them with a bot-
tomless supply of bottled water.
Chris Morgan, one of the producers,
explained that “Unmanned,” an action
film about a global war set in 2033, was
really “ ‘Saving Private Ryan’ five min-
utes in the future.” Reeves would play
Bellam, a discredited soldier who must
go behind enemy lines in Hong Kong
to rescue his younger brother, Royce. The
film’s hook was that every soldier has an
“ape”—a robot sidekick that accompa-
nies him into battle and mimics his hab-
its. To find Royce, Bellam would have to
forge an unlikely bond with Royce’s ape.
As in almost every Hollywood film about
a dystopian future, humanity would out-
fox and outfeel the machines.
Fogelson’s face was a mask of amena-
bility. At forty-eight, he is neither young
nor old, neither tall nor short, neither
trendy nor mainstream. Pleasantly hand- ANNALS OF HOLLYWOOD
some and immensely competitive, he

THE MOGUL OF
strives to remain imperturbable and, as
he likes to say, “laser focussed.” Yet he’s

THE MIDDLE
a hugger, grateful for any true sincerity
or passion in a town dedicated to fab-
ricating both. Though he’d never vol-
unteer this in a meeting, his strongest As the movie business founders,
motivation is his fear of dying without Adam Fogelson tries to reinvent the system.
leaving some monument behind. (As a
boy, he burst into tears whenever he BY TAD FRIEND
passed a cemetery.) His supporters ad-
mire his humor and his contradictions;
his detractors find him arrogant. In a
sense, he embodies the movie business
he hopes to dominate: calculating, im-
pulsive, hard-nosed, and hopeful.
Morgan rolled a five-minute “sizzle
reel,” essentially a trailer for an unmade
film. Made by the prospective director,
Tim Webber, who was the visual-efects
supervisor on “Gravity” and “Avatar,”
it comprised bits from twenty-three
films, as well as from commercials for
video games. Reeves’s voice-over—“War In a market sufused with pricey superhero films, Fogelson is betting on stories on a human scale.
36 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
But he says, “If you ask, ‘Can we make something great once or twice a year that violates a rational business model?,’ the answer is no!”
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANGIE SMITH

• •
is pain . . . you hurt them, they hurt you”—
created a mournful mood, and the edit-
ing was propulsive: shots of Royce’s ape
flicking a lighter the way Royce did, in-
tercut with battle scenes and closeups of
Reeves and other actors looking weary
and defiant.
Pitch meetings, rife with sucking up
and bogus fervor, are among Fogelson’s
least favorite executive tasks. When the
lights came on after the sizzle reel, he
said, “I was thinking, Please, God, don’t
let me have to fake enthusiasm—and
that was the best version of that kind of
thing I have ever seen! I love the wish
fulfillment, the idea that, even after tech-
nology takes over, a human brain and a
human soul still matter.”
“This is about brothers,” Webber said.
“It’s about people!” Reeves rubbed his
palms as if starting a fire.
Fogelson suspects that filmmakers
will agree with any opinion he ofers in
order to get a green light, so he lets them
describe the film they really intend to
make, then trusts his gut about whether
it sounds commercial. Choosing which
movies to make is the crux of his job, the
hundred-million-dollar decision. When
he was eight, his father, the head of mar-
keting at Columbia Pictures, told him,
38 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
“You need a clear good guy and a clear
bad guy, and the audience needs to know
what it’s rooting for.” “Unmanned”
satisfied that injunction. But one of Fo-
gelson’s own rules is “Only make a film
you already know how to sell.” Having
come up as a marketer at Universal Pic-
tures, which he ran from 2009 to 2013,
Fogelson believes that seventy-five per
cent of a movie’s success is due to its
marketing and its marketability. One
of his biggest bombs at Universal—a
hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar blood-
bath—was “47 Ronin,” which starred
Reeves, regrettably, as a samurai warrior.
Nonetheless, Fogelson believed he could
sell Reeves here by positioning him as
the kind of reluctant hero that he had
played in “The Matrix.”
“What do you think you can make
it for?” Fogelson asked. The line pro-
ducer answered, “We haven’t done an
absolute budget. And for the battle por-
tions we still have to find a preëxisting,
slightly tropical Asian-feel locale that
looks not exactly bombed-out. But . . .
fifty, sixty?” Fogelson glanced at his
No. 2, Oren Aviv, who narrowed his eyes.
The script called for “the largest naval
armada gathered since the Second World
War,” among other showstoppers, which
would run well above sixty million dollars.
“Unmanned” was going to have to
change to fit STX’s model—the origin
story that explained to investors how the
company would reinvent the Hollywood
formula. The six major studios, besieged
by entertainment options that don’t re-
quire people to get of the couch, have
bet that the future lies in films that are
too huge to ignore. Although they make
low-budget films for targeted audiences
(teen girls, say, or horror fans), they focus
most of their energies on movies that cost
more than three hundred million dollars
to make and market. Such films are pred-
icated not on the chancy appeal of indi-
vidual actors but on “I.P.”—intellectual
property, in the form of characters and
stories that the audience already knows
from books or comics or video games.
These blockbusters are intended to
appeal to everyone, everywhere—but they
leave many people cold. STX’s founder
and C.E.O., Bob Simonds, told me,
“There’s a huge vacuum there. And that
vacuum is the place you can tell human
stories—what I think of as movies.” What
had vanished were the kind of character-
driven, John Hughes-level films that suck
you in on a rainy Saturday morning. So
STX was betting on the enduring appeal
of movie stars. But they had to be play-
ing the kinds of role that had made them
stars. Russell Crowe in “Robin Hood”?
Yes. Russell Crowe in “The Water Di-
viner”? No. And the movies had to be
sensibly priced, by current standards: be-
tween twenty and eighty million dollars.
STX’s internal data showed that such
star-showcase films, within that budget
range, were profitable thirty per cent more
often than the average Hollywood film.
So the studio planned to make a lot of
them. By 2017, STX expects to release
between twelve and fifteen movies a year,
as many as some of the major studios.
Though the studio presents itself as
the shiny new disrupter, with a lean org
chart and business cards printed in En-
glish and Mandarin, it’s fuelled by an
ancient motivation: proving the other
guys wrong. Bob Simonds is a shrewd,
preppy fireball who dated Jennifer Beals
at Yale, graduated summa cum laude,
then made his name as the producer of
such Adam Sandler comedies as “Happy
Gilmore” and “The Waterboy.” He was
ofered two studio chairmanships but
never a job running the parent company.
“Studio chairman sounds so much big- two sides that are fighting are sort of Axis he began the job, his daughter Willa re-
ger than it is,” Simonds said. “Somebody and Allies, but it’s not specified who the minded him, “The good part about being
gives you the keys to the car—but you Axis are, so any country with a movie the- fired is you got to chase after a diferent
can’t fucking take it of-roading.” atre can be on the side of the Allies.” dream. Just like a movie.”
In the fall of 2014, he handed his Fogelson said, “I love—I hate—but I The downside to being a studio chief
own keys to Adam Fogelson, who also love the idea of the U.S. and China as is that everyone hates and fears you, be-
has something to prove: he had left Uni- partners in the next world war!” The cause you say no so much more often
versal, the year before, because he was Chinese market is the world’s second- than yes—and because your yeses come
fired, and he felt that his ouster was un- largest, and growing more than fifty per with so many provisos. Also, you rarely
fair. Simonds told me—as Fogelson sat cent a year. So the meeting ended in hugs get to hold the crystal ball long. Con-
nearby, frowning responsibly but not and high hopes. “That was an awesome glomerates prefer firing a studio’s leader
demurring—that “Adam led that stu- reel!” Fogelson said in the hallway after- for picking the wrong films to reassess-
dio to the three most profitable years in ward, high-fiving with Aviv. “This never ing the whole business. Fogelson has an
its history, and he’s still sufering from happens, where we want to get it done opportune temperament for the job, be-
watching the success built on his back.” today!” Aviv said. “Usually, it ends with cause he firmly believes that the world
In 2015, Universal accounted for a ‘Fucking great—we’ll call you!’—and will love what he loves, once he gets its
whopping twenty-two per cent of the then that’s it.” attention. Stacey Snider, the co-chairman
industry’s domestic box-oice, largely of Twentieth Century Fox, told me that,
from films that Fogelson green-lit. “Bob
and Adam are the chip-on-the-shoulder
guys,” one agent said. “Their brand is
A dam Fogelson’s childhood dream,
along with playing on the P.G.A.
Tour, was to be a studio chief. It’s a sweet
when she worked with him at Univer-
sal, “if the tracking said we open a movie
at ten to twenty”—million dollars—“I’m
‘We were right, and you should have deal. You get paid eight million to up- thinking ten, and Adam is thinking
listened.’ ” ward of fifteen million dollars a year to twenty. I used to say to him, ‘I don’t be-
With Simonds’s checkbook, Fogel- decide what the entire world will clamor lieve you’re Jewish, because you’re too
son was going to demonstrate that you to see in two years. You are not a house- optimistic.’ ” Yet his optimism is tem-
could build a studio without theme parks hold name, but you determine who the pered by distrust of anything highbrow
and television networks to help you mar- household names will be. When Fogel- or oversubtle. The producer and record
ket your films, and without anything like son joined STX, he took a salary a quar- mogul Russell Simmons said, “Adam’s
the two or three thousand people most ter the size of his compensation at Uni- not interested in movies where they all
studios employ. He was going to pick versal—but he also received equity that, talk too much, that Sundance shit of
the right films, spend less to make them, in success, will be worth many times that. jerking of on the screen.” Fogelson’s fa-
spend just as much to market them, and And he got the chance to reinvent at vorite films include “One Flew Over the
win back audiences who’d forsworn the least a system, and possibly himself. As Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Kramer vs. Kramer,”
moviegoing habit. He was going to save
the industry. And he didn’t expect much
thanks. “The studios all hate us, all six
of them,” he told me. “They hate us be-
cause they don’t want to have to go to
New York and explain to their bosses
how we’re making fifteen movies a year
with only seventy employees.”
In the “Unmanned” meeting, Keanu
Reeves suggested that they could build up
a flashback scene where Royce visits his
brother in the hospital after rescuing him
in a firefight. “I’m on morphine, I’m fucked
up, he should have let me die, maybe he
gives me a little fucking Teddy bear, be-
cause our relationship has that thing”—
he banged his fists together. He stood and
began to pace, talking the story through.
He became Bellam, tagging along behind
Royce’s ape in Hong Kong, limping, he-
roic, then became Royce’s ape, looking
back coldly: “C’mon, keep up!” Fogelson
and Aviv smiled at each other. Reeves was
into the project, not just the paycheck.
“And from a worldwide marketing per- “ Yeah, I could walk all the way to Egypt. Or you could
spective,” Chris Morgan concluded, “the just free them yourself using magic.”
but also “National Lampoon’s Ani-
mal House” and “National Lampoon’s
Vacation.”
At most studios, prospective films are
vetted by a green-light committee. Mar-
keting and distribution weigh in on
whether they can sell and disseminate
the film, and then, after totting up ex-
pected costs and examining “comps”—
the receipts of comparable films—the
executives build a spreadsheet showing
a range of outcomes. Then the chairman
decides whether the film seems likely to
help the studio hit the target margin
(fifteen per cent, say) that its parent com-
pany set for the year.
Fogelson looks at comps, too, but then
he applies a three-part test. First, can the
film be great? (By “great,” he means “dis-
tinguished within its genre.” When he
green-lit “The Boy,” a horror film that
STX will release this month, he hoped
merely that it could be “a great blend of
two beloved subgenres of horror: the
spooky doll, and the house haunted by
a fucked-up child.”) Then, Do we know
how to sell it? And, Can we make much
more in success than we lose in failure?
Modest profit doesn’t suice. STX is
now filming “The Foreigner,” which stars
Jackie Chan as a former assassin who
comes out of retirement to hunt the
I.R.A. terrorists who blew up his daugh-
ter. Fogelson was confident that he could
sell it, and that it was a “free play”—that
it would earn enough in China alone to
recoup its costs. The low-risk strategy
would be to bring in a pliable unknown
to direct. “We could have got a three-
hundred-thousand-dollar director,” he
said. “But we worked hard to get a Mar-
tin Campbell to give it a chance to be
great.” Campbell, the director of “Casino
Royale” and “GoldenEye,” got paid about
two million dollars, which means that
STX spent an extra $1.7 million to play
the greatness lottery.
However, Fogelson noted, “If you ask,
‘Can we make something great once or
twice a year that violates a rational busi-
ness model?,’ the answer is no! It’s not a
painting—it’s tens and tens of millions
of dollars. Also, none of our movies are
being made with the idea that they have
to turn out great. Because eighty per cent
of movies don’t.” When I mentioned a
number of superb films that failed at the
box oice, and asked whether better mar-
keting could have saved them, Fogelson
40 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
said he wouldn’t have made them in the
first place. He’d have scotched “Blade
Runner,” because “darkness and sci-fi is
really hard”; “Fight Club,” because
“watching people beat the shit out of
each other is a tough ask”; and “The
Shawshank Redemption,” much as he
loved it, because the obvious sell—an in-
nocent man trying to escape from
prison—was a huge spoiler.
Fogelson is well suited to an age in
which studios spend less making films
than they do marketing them around the
world—and in which films and their
marketing are increasingly synonymous.
After Fox rejected Seth MacFarlane’s
idea for a film about a foulmouthed Teddy
bear, Fogelson made it into a half-billion-
dollar worldwide smash for Universal.
“In early 2012,” he said, “if you asked a
roomful of people ‘What’s “Ted”?,’ some
might have said, ‘A conference,’ and some,
‘My uncle,’ and most would have no idea.
Four months later, all around the world,
a giant portion of people would have
said, ‘A movie about a magical bear who
comes to life.’ You’ve gone from a non-
existent concept to a distant cousin of
Coca-Cola in four months. That is an
exciting, terrifying, magical truth.” The
terrifying part is how hard that success
is to repeat: “Ted 2,” last summer, made
less than half as much.
T he history of the movie business is
a soaring ascent followed by a long
swoon. In 1927, when America had a
third of its current population and movie
tickets cost twenty-five cents, the stu-
dios enjoyed box-oice revenues of seven
hundred and eighty million dollars.
That’s $10.6 billion in today’s money—
nearly three hundred million dollars
more than the studios took in in 2014.
In those days, each studio owned its own
theatres and distributed as many as two
hundred films a year, knowing that peo-
ple would show up for whatever was
playing. Last year, the studios released
only a hundred and seventy-eight films
in total, and they had to carefully and
expensively market each one—to peo-
ple who stayed home anyway.
The average teen-ager, the movie-
goer of the future, sees six films a year
in the theatre. Movie theatres are no
longer where we go for stories about
who we are. That’s become television’s
job. We go to the movies now for the
same reasons that Romans went to the
Colosseum: to laugh, to scream, and to
cheer. Comedy, horror, and triumphs of
the human spirit still play better in the-
atres than at home. What plays best of
all, of course, is a spaceship going
kablooey all over the screen. Extrava-
gant computer-generated imagery is the
hallmark of blockbusters that are care-
fully formulated to avoid being “execu-
tion dependent” or “review sensitive”—
to avoid needing to be good. One studio
head told me, “Movies may not have
gotten better over the years, but they’ve
gotten more satisfying. A generation
ago, execs made movies that they wanted
to see. ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ was a really
good movie, but it’s not satisfying to a
global audience. Whereas the ‘Harry
Potter’ series and the ‘Lord of the Rings’
trilogy weren’t great movies, but they
were very satisfying.” The director Billy
Ray traced the phenomenon to the eco-
nomic collapse of 2008, and to the de-
cline of the DVD market. “That’s when
corporate timidity gave way to terror,”
he said. “Studio people actually said to
me, ‘Don’t bring me anything that’s good,
because I’ll be tempted to buy it, and
I can’t.’ ”
The studios’ turn to spectacle to
transfix a restless audience is not new.
When TV became popular, in the nine-
teen-fifties, the studios responded with
such CinemaScope behemoths as “The
Robe” and “Beneath the 12-Mile Reef.”
(Billy Wilder suggested that the wide-
screen technology might be best suited
for filming “the love story of two dachs-
hunds.”) What is novel is the studios’
heavy reliance on the string of sequels
known as a franchise. Shawn Levy, the
director of the “Night at the Museum”
series, said, “We have projects at six stu-
dios, and ninety per cent of their atten-
tion goes to the ones that are superhero
or obviously franchisable. And every sin-
gle first meeting I have on a movie, in
the past two years, is not about the movie
itself but about the franchise it would be
starting.” Twenty-nine sequels and re-
boots came out last year, many of them
further illuminations of a comic-book
universe. One senior studio executive
told me, “As a moviegoer, I don’t like see-
ing all these sequels and franchises. But
we have to do justice by the sharehold-
ers, and from a marketing perspective it’s
a lot easier: ‘Star Wars’—Gee, I wonder
what that’s about?” Getting any movie
right is hard, so why not make one that
can bring in five hundred million dollars?
The blockbuster game is a fantastic
business to be in when it works, which
is why conglomerates keep buying stu-
dios. But it’s getting steadily less fantas-
tic, which is why conglomerates keep
selling them. A studio head told me,
“The hundred-million-dollar Roland
Emmerich movie that does five hundred
million worldwide—every year, our profit
on it goes down.” Making less and less
of a product with declining margins is
probably not a recipe for long-term suc- “Say your prayers, liturgies, tefillah, daily salat, sacred mantra, ritual
cess. And competition is everywhere. incantation, or the secular affirmation of your choice, varmint!”
One longtime film executive predicted,
“With Google, Verizon, A.T. &T., Com- • •
cast, Hulu, YouTube, Facebook, Ama-
zon, and Netflix getting into original
content, studios won’t be able to com- Roth told me. “But the problem with survives in the long term. The subtext
pete with digital distribution. Within living in the mid-range is you gotta have of every conversation I have, nowadays,
three years, Paramount won’t be in exis- taste.” Revolution débuted with “Tom- is the good old days.”
tence, Sony will disappear, Fox will buy cats,” a conspicuous turkey, and later re-
Warner Bros., and you’ll have Fox, Dis-
ney, and Universal left.”
Yet the studio executives I spoke with
leased the infamous “Gigli.” The studio
died in 2007. “Frankly,” Roth said, “we
didn’t make enough good movies.”
E very studio head is ceaselessly peti-
tioned by filmmakers who appeal
to his humanity, hoping he’ll be so in-
don’t seem to fear being supplanted. One And taste isn’t enough. “At Univer- spired by their talent that he’ll bet the
noted coolly, “Despite its current vola- sal, Adam found breakout winners in the studio on it. The ones who listen don’t
tility, this is the most stable business in mid-budget category, and I’ll bet that he stick around long. In this climate, Adam
the history of the United States. The six can find them for STX,” Fox’s Stacey Fogelson’s warmth and buried anger, his
studios that are here today have been Snider told me. “But the challenges STX habit of taking deals personally, are un-
here since the beginning, early in the last faces are absolute. There are very few re- usual. “Adam has a soul,” Billy Ray said.
century. That’s a function of some seri- lease dates when they won’t be facing the “I wouldn’t say it’s singular in this in-
ous impediments to getting into the busi- big behemoths from the studios. What dustry, but it doesn’t take long to call
ness.” Hollywood has proved so resistant makes movies uniquely cinematic is re- roll.” Like most studios, STX doesn’t
to disruption because relationships with ally compelling I.P.—and their movies grant final cut to directors, or allow them
talent, a feel for disparate audience seg- won’t have that. And because STX’s mov- to approve trailers and marketing ma-
ments, and a knack for providing global ies won’t have big special efects, either, terials, but Fogelson solicits their com-
satisfaction aren’t things that a startup they’ll be domestic in their appeal, not pliance. “It’s not making widgets,” he
can easily replicate. global. If the domestic market is flat at said. “Our widgets have thoughts and
The bygone aspirants include Orion best, and STX can’t aford to make mov- feelings and, in a perfect world, want
and Hemdale and Artisan and Overture ies that play in China, it’s, like, Wa, to be widgetized by you again in the
and Morgan Creek and Relativity Media waaa”—she made the sad-trombone future.”
and a dozen others. The producer Joe sound. Pete Berg, the director of “Friday
Roth started Revolution Studios in 2000 One leading agent told me, “I think Night Lights” and “Hancock,” is devoted
with a billion dollars in financing and a STX is kidding itself with its business to Fogelson, who loyally defended him
remarkably advantageous deal with Sony. model, trying to disrupt the studios at after a film that he directed for Uni-
“Our assignment was to fill out a third the end of the studio age. Even if it can versal, “Battleship,” lost a hundred and
of Sony’s slate with mid-range movies,” develop a franchise, I don’t know how it fifteen million dollars. So, over a lunch
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 41
of short-rib sandwiches at STX’s oices
last spring, Berg ofered Fogelson first
dibs on an action film he hoped to pro-
duce, “Mile 22.”
The film’s story was slender: a female
C.I.A. agent (the mixed-martial-arts star
Ronda Rousey) and an Indonesian cop
(the Indonesian actor and fight chore-
ographer Iko Uwais) race to the Jakarta
airport to escape the country, battling
bad guys the whole way. Berg, together
with another producer and the film’s
director, emphasized the action, which
would be kinetic, brutal, and original—
though they also reassured Fogelson that
it would closely resemble what Uwais
had done in “The Raid 2,” a bloody blur
of serendipitous weaponry, including
chairs, hammers, broom handles, and a
griddle. Berg described it as “the new
wave of combat cinema.”
“Nice!” Fogelson said, warming to the
marketing possibilities. The other pro-
ducer said they’d found a good facilita-
tor in Jakarta, who’d supervised scenes
in the Michael Mann thriller “Black-
hat”—a spectacular dud. “We called all
the people who worked with him—”
Fogelson pounced: “And apologized?”
Berg added, “On behalf of all of
America?”
Fogelson cracked up. Then he said,
“We’ve got to talk about Silva”—the
third lead role. “And if it’s not Brad-
ley Cooper or Brad Pitt . . .” Everyone
laughed. Silva, described in the screen-
play as “a salty intelligence hack who’s
“Does your car have any idea why my car pulled it over?”
shoveled shit on four continents,” wasn’t
a superstar’s role. And, in any case, the
budget wouldn’t accommodate a super-
star; because Fogelson had released suc-
cessful microbudget films at Universal,
STX had begun considering less expen-
sive projects, and this one was budgeted
at just ten million dollars. Yet Fogelson’s
goal was to cast a star, or at least a legit-
imate name. “That tells the audience this
is a film, not a vanity exercise,” he told
me. “If Liev Schreiber wanted to do it,
we’d talk about the film in one way, the
ten-million-dollar version, and if Dwayne
Johnson or Mark Wahlberg wanted to
do it we’d talk about it in another—the
fifteen-to-eighteen-million version.”
With studied casualness, Berg re-
marked, “There’s a Will Smith play for
Silva—he’s a huge U.F.C. fan. It would
be sick!”
“Totally sick!” Fogelson agreed. They
both leaned back, imagining it. Then
Berg broached the key point: “What
would you pay Will Smith?”
“Two million dollars a week,” Fo-
gelson said, instantly. “Most he’s ever
gotten. A million a week is ‘Use me.’
Two million a week is ‘Wow, you really
love me!’ ”
Berg brightened. “I’m going to say,
‘Let me come to your house with Ronda
and explain why you should do it.’ ”
“Be heroic!” Fogelson suggested.
With that problem solved, or at least
deferred, he raised another one: Ronda
Rousey’s acting chops. He asked, with
no particular inflection, whether Berg
had seen her cameo in “Furious 7.”
“You’re concerned about her acting?”
Berg said. Fogelson nodded emphati-
cally. “I’m on that. I’m on that this after-
noon,” Berg said. Assessing Fogelson’s
expression, he continued, “I’ll set a din-
ner, and you’ll see how charming and
talented she is. She’s a lethal weapon—
and she’s beautiful.”
“Great!” Fogelson said. “Let’s make it
lunch.” A homebody, he’d almost always
rather be making dinner with his wife
and two young girls.
“Dinner’s better,” Berg said, with a
crooked smile.
“I’m excited for a lunch,” Fogelson said.
Afterward, Berg explained, “I have a
gym, and I train fighters. Rule No. 1 is
‘Don’t ever fall in love with your fighter.’
Rule No. 2 is ‘You always fall in love with
your fighter.’ Adam’s job is to maintain
a healthy distance—he might have to
say no to us, or shut the movie down.
My job is to make that impossible. So I
want it to be dinner, to have it be inti-
mate—to make him fall in love.”
T he conventional wisdom in Holly-
wood is that “you get killed in the
middle.” A fifty-million-dollar film costs
more to make than a genre film, and
nearly as much to market as a tentpole—
and, being neither for a sharply defined
group nor for everyone, it often can’t find
a suicient audience. “It’s such a weird
thing to say, but sometimes it’s better
to spend more than less,” Stacey Snider
said. “Production values and star power
are reasons for consumers to come to the
theatre.” In 2014, the studios released
seventy fewer star-showcase films than
they did in 2005. Though such films are
the ones that people tend to remem-
ber—“Michael Clayton,” “Argo,” “Amer-
ican Hustle,” “American Sniper”—each
studio’s annual slate includes only one
or two, as Oscar bait.
But for decades star showcases were
a Hollywood staple. In the eighties, Car-
olco, Miramax, and New Line all used
the “B-movie stars doing what they do
best” formula, as Disney did on such
films as “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”
( Jefrey Katzenberg, then at Disney, got
Bette Midler to accept only six hundred
thousand dollars for the film by remind-
ing her agent that her career was “in the
fucking toilet.”) The producer Lorenzo
di Bonaventura told me that when he
was an executive at Warner Bros., in the
nineties, “We were making lots of ‘Bat-
man’-scale movies, but Steven Seagal’s
deal was the most profitable one we had,
because his movies didn’t cost much,
played in every foreign market, and did
really well on TV.”
As Bob Simonds considered creating
a new studio, he was convinced that his-
tory was right and conventional wisdom
wrong. In 2011, he sat down with Bill
McGlashan, the managing partner of the
private-equity firm TPG Growth, to dis-
cuss the opportunity. McGlashan, whose
firm became STX’s largest shareholder,
told me, “You’ve got a billion unsatisfied
people in China and a billion more in
India desperate for content!” They would
sate the clamoring masses. Simonds com-
missioned a study of ten years’ worth of
twenty-to-eighty-million-dollar films fea-
turing a star in a signature role. Such films
proved to have an average profit margin
of twenty-four per cent—roughly double
the average studio return. Confirmed in
his own experience, Simonds laid the
groundwork for STX Entertainment (“S”
for Simonds, “T” for TPG Growth, and
“X” for secret project).
To call yourself a studio, you basically
need to do three things: finance movies,
distribute them, and market them. Stu-
dios have distribution deals that insure
that their big releases can play on at least
three thousand movie screens. So Si-
monds negotiated deals with the four
leading theatre chains. It took a year, but
he made sure that STX’s biggest releases
could open on three thousand screens—
and he got a revenue share equal to that
of the major studios. His leverage was
exhibitors’ desperation for a wider range
of movies. Gerry Lopez, who was then
the head of AMC Entertainment, Amer-
ica’s second-largest chain, explained that
he made the deal with STX because “we
need more movies. The studios are in
the sixteen-week-a-year business, so they
worry about sixteen Fridays. I worry about
fifty-two Fridays. And STX will bring
back a broader audience for the brain-
ier, more intricate movies—not just the
twenty-one-year-old who’s there for the
explosions.”
For a new studio, a war chest is crucial,
because costs mount hugely while income
trickles in. Studios lose money showing
films in theatres, because of the market-
ing costs; they make as much as seventy-
five per cent of their revenues later, with
home video and sales to television. Ideally,
you need $1.5 billion in funding, which
allows for fifty bombs in a row (though
you’d lose credibility long before that).
Simonds sought funding in China—
as all Hollywood has begun to do. It’s
home to both the money and the audi-
ence. In 1980, the international
market contributed less than
a quarter of studios’ box-oice
revenues; by 2018, the Chi-
nese market alone should ex-
ceed the North American mar-
ket. And Simonds was an old
China hand: the scion of an
Arizona water-rights fortune,
he once attempted to take over
the Chinese water industry.
He secured the Chinese pri-
vate-equity fund Hony Capital as his
third-largest shareholder—Simonds him-
self is the second-largest—and used that
coup to help amass $2.5 billion in cash
and credit lines.
Last April, an investment banker
named Donald Tang arranged for thirty
Chinese entrepreneurs to visit Fox, Sony,
and STX. They toured Hollywood in
the way that one might tour Detroit—
as a cautionary ruin. Tang explained,
“Your relationship with content will very
soon be more important than your rela-
tionship with other members of society.
As much as the Chinese would like to
tell the best stories in the world, every-
body knows Hollywood is still the king
of content—but with a backward, bro-
ken process.” After the tour, Huayi Broth-
ers, a Chinese film conglomerate, in-
vested in STX’s entire slate, putting up
a quarter of the studio’s production costs.
Tang said, “They saw how enthusiastic
STX’s employees were, and that they
were willing to take less in compensa-
tion for much more in incentives. They
didn’t see that at the traditional studios.”
The Chinese backing came with a
new set of expectations. Simonds had
considered buying a library of old films,
a standard startup strategy for provid-
ing a revenue stream to cover the films
that fail. Lionsgate, the only studio in
recent years to make a real run at the
majors, began by buying libraries, and
its backlist now brings in five hundred
million dollars a year. “I thought Mira-
max was the best library out there,” Si-
monds told me, “and buying it was a
layup.” It was for sale for a billion dol-
lars, and he believed he could secure it
for about half that. “I was shut down
not only by my board—which said,
‘What the fuck are you doing?’—but by
people in Hong Kong, who told me it
would be a terrible acquisition because
it confuses our story.” Libraries were yes-
terday; STX was supposed to
be tomorrow.
So, to begin, Simonds had
to rely on Adam Fogelson,
and his mastery of the third
realm of a studio’s domain:
marketing.
F ogelson knows early in
development what the sell
of a movie is, and he shapes
the film accordingly. He’s an
optician, swapping out the lenses in his
refractor and inquiring, “Clearer now?
Or now?,” until the image is crisp. When
STX was negotiating with the owners
of UglyDoll, a line of mischievous, mis-
shapen plush dolls, for the rights to make
an animated movie, Fogelson told his
staf that he could already see the tag-
line over “a cute-looking version of that
one-eyed character: ‘Beauty is in the eye
of the beholder.’ How do you not want
to see that? There are so many good and
easy ways to make you care about crea-
tures who know they’re not attractive.”
As a boy in Hidden Hills, in the San
Fernando Valley, Fogelson seemed im-
mune to this kind of self-doubt: omni-
competent at playing soccer, hitting a
golf ball, cooking duck à l’orange. In high
school, he was the president of his class,
then of the student body. His father, An-
drew, recalled, “Somebody told me, ‘He
truly is a magic boy!’ Had Adam heard
that, it would have shocked him. He was
convinced that he sucked and that he
would always suck. Forty years later, I still
think he sees himself as a little outside the
normal human flow.” Fogelson’s mother,
Susan, nicknamed him Raskolnikov.
Because Andrew Fogelson ran mar-
keting at Columbia, and later at Warner
Bros. and United Artists, his son learned
to see movies as a construct. “The first
time I spent real time with my father on
a set, on an unmemorable horror film
called ‘The New Kids,’ I watched them
lay tracks for the camera to dolly on—
and then I later saw the dailies of that
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 43
scene,” he recalled. “From that day for-
ward, some piece of me has never watched
a movie without thinking about where
the tracks are.”
In college, at Stanford, he adopted a
deeper and more authoritative voice to
broadcast basketball and baseball games.
He considered a career in sportscasting,
but shrank from so much travel. After
graduating, he tried writing screenplays,
including a “Big Chill”-style reunion
movie about quarter-lifers called “Round-
ing First.” The trailer moments came
easily, but he found that his interstitial
material—characters and dialogue and
so forth—was, essentially, “shit.”
So he took marketing jobs at Trimark
Pictures and then, in 1998, at Univer-
sal. He was determined to keep a certain
emotional distance: “I saw my dad get
fired numerous times, and I vowed I’d
never let the job define me.” At Univer-
sal, Fogelson became known for hom-
ing in on a film’s most salable element.
It was he who advocated the poster for
“American Pie,” with its suggestive photo
of an all-American boy and a pie with a
hole in it. “A lot of people in marketing
tests were turned of by the guy screw-
ing the pie,” he acknowledged. “But the
water-cooler conversation about it was
valuable.” An eleven-million-dollar teen
film became a four-picture franchise.
Universal, one of the smallest of the
major studios, was struggling, but Fogel-
son prospered. He became president of
marketing and distribution, and then, in
2009, the studio’s chairman. The night
of the announcement, he and his wife,
Hillary, attended the première of a Uni-
versal comedy, “Couples Retreat.” “After
the screening,” he said, “I remember look-
ing up and seeing a line of people com-
ing over to say hello. It looked five miles
long.” Hillary Fogelson said, “It was like
you were the new mob boss, and they all
wanted to kiss the ring. Most of it felt
very insincere.” “It wasn’t insincere,” Fo-
gelson said. “It was a practical reality.”
A week later, Fogelson had to intro-
duce himself to executives from Com-
cast, which was about to buy NBCUni-
versal from General Electric. They would
be the fifth owners he’d worked under
in eleven years. “Adam inherited a dam-
aged company,” one of his colleagues
said. Universal was last among the six
studios, with an 8.5-per-cent share of
the box oice. “And the new owner, Com-
44 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
cast, was skeptical of the film business.”
Given a mandate to build franchises,
Fogelson was immediately stuck with
“Battleship,” based on the Hasbro game.
The project was troubled, and it would
have cost the studio thirty million dol-
lars if he shut it down. Instead, he de-
cided that Universal had a chance to lose
less if he not only made the film but
added spectacular visual efects. The bud-
get, first pegged at a hundred and fifty
million dollars, ended up three years later
at two hundred and nine million—for a
noisy, cluttered bomb. Another would-be
franchise extravaganza, “Cowboys &
Aliens,” also failed to interest anyone in
seeing a sequel.
Given his slow start, Fogelson’s de-
meanor grated on some. “His tone and
confidence came across, to the Comcast
guys, as cocky,” one Universal exec said.
And his inexperience with the protocols
of production showed. Fogelson’s friend
Scott Stuber, a producer at the studio,
said, “I’m sure there were times when
Adam didn’t express ‘We can’t make your
movie’ as tactfully as he might have.”
At the end of 2011, Fogelson told his
team that he was no longer going to make
big-budget, non-sequel, non-I.P. films.
Instead, he made expensive sequels—an-
other “Bourne” film and another “Fast and
Furious”—and lots of mid-budget films.
“There was a concern there that that was
too conservative,” Fogelson told me. It
wasn’t. He approved fifty-three films at
Universal; of them, thirty-nine cost less
than eighty million dollars, and they grossed
$7.3 billion worldwide, for a return on in-
vestment of a hundred and fifty-three per
cent. He was particularly proud of “Brides-
maids,” “Lone Survivor,” and “Pitch Per-
fect,” movies with heart that proved a lot
of doubters wrong. Universal’s market share
rose to third, and Comcast extended his
contract a year ahead of schedule.
Fogelson was making nearly ten mil-
lion dollars a year, flying on the corpo-
rate jet, mixing with Barack Obama and
Barbra Streisand. Still, when I saw him
a few times during this period, he bore
the glassy aspect of a man trying to con-
vince himself that all is well. “Adam’s old
oice, in marketing, was a busy, happy
toy shop,” Allison Shearmur, a former
Universal executive, said. “The new one
was empty and corporate. I think he was
surprised at how little of his old self was
relevant to that job.”
In September of 2013, the C.E.O. of
NBCUniversal flew to Los Angeles and,
without much preamble, let Fogelson go;
a Comcast exec would now supervise
the studio. Hillary Fogelson said, “When
Adam called to tell me the news, I ab-
solutely thought he was fucking with
me.” Moments before the meeting, Fo-
gelson had called Steven Spielberg to
green-light “Jurassic World,” which be-
came the third-highest-grossing film of
all time. Scott Stuber said, “The firing
wasn’t about Adam. It was Comcast say-
ing, ‘We’ve had enough time to analyze
the division, and now we want to bring
in our guy.’ ”
Fogelson felt embarrassed and stung;
he hadn’t been able to keep his emotional
distance after all. He said, “Half the peo-
ple at my daughters’ school work in the
entertainment business, and they’re look-
ing at you as ‘the guy who just got fired.’ ”
He eventually decided that the real ques-
tion wasn’t why he’d got fired but “ ‘How
did I get that job in the first place?’ It re-
quires spending a significant part of your
day wondering ‘Who’s trying to kill me?’
and ‘Who do I need to kill?’ ” He sug-
gested to Hillary that they move to Boise,
Idaho, always highly ranked as a place
to retire to, and he’d teach marketing at
Boise State University. She told me, “I
said, ‘You’d weigh six hundred pounds,
because you’d just sit around and watch
sports.’ What became clear, over time,
was that Adam had unfinished business
here—he wanted to prove that his idea
about how to make and market films
was right.” These days, when Fogelson
shows visitors the view from his new
oice, atop the tallest building in Bur-
bank, he points southwest and notes, “I
can look right down on Universal.”
A few days after STX’s promising
first date with Keanu Reeves and
the “Unmanned” team, the filmmakers
got back to the studio with a precise
budget: it would cost just fifty-three mil-
lion dollars to go steady. Oren Aviv gave
Fogelson a blunt assessment: “Their
budget is absurd.” STX’s head of phys-
ical production, Ross Fanger, calculated
the true cost at twice that. He noted
that geographic savings could be had:
“We can shoot it in South Africa, which
is ten to fifteen per cent cheaper than
Budapest, which is thirty per cent
cheaper than Vancouver, which is twenty
per cent cheaper than L.A. Or Jakarta,
which is astronomically cheaper than
South Africa.” But STX didn’t necessar-
ily want to become known as Indone-
sian outsourcers.
Fogelson has a knack for making
Realpolitik seem reassuring. “We are
fully committed to your realizing your
vision at a price point that acknowledges
that this hasn’t been tried before” sounds
supportive, where the same message
shorn of ornament—“We’ll make your
ify project but only dirt cheap”—might
rankle. He’s a master of the non-note
note: “No one here is advocating this,
but what about . . . ?” If the filmmaker
resists, he’ll nod agreeably and say, “To-
tally understood, and wasn’t suggesting
it.” Often, in the end, his note gets taken.
With stars, sometimes the best man-
agement technique is delegation. When
Reeves phoned STX to object to the bean
counting, Aviv took the call as Fogelson
looked on. “No, Keanu, we love it! We
do love it,” Aviv insisted. “Believe me,
we’re excited. Listen, I hear your frustra-
tion—but the idea here is to come down
from the budget we have for the next
version of the script, and then move ahead
full speed.” He listened, nodding, then
said, brightly, “And if it all works on our
end you’re available to shoot in January,
as we discussed?” He wagged his head
playfully at Fogelson: “Well, there’s a
chance you’re available then? Great!”
After hanging up, Aviv explained,
“Keanu is arguing that there’s no point
in budgeting a script that’s not going to
be the final script anyway, and that we’re “But having less legroom puts you closer to your screen.”
losing all this momentum.”
“So they’re acknowledging that the • •
budget they gave us with great confi-
dence in that meeting was a complete
fantasy.” Fogelson’s neck and mock-throttling him. China, the government’s film board de-
“Absolutely,” Aviv said. “It’s how the He cackled, then picked up a putter and cided to count him as Chinese.
game is played.” made a few passes with it as he rattled of The Chinese market required con-
Fogelson thought that over. “To questions about “The Foreigner,” the stant attention. John Zhao, the founder
be fair, if they had come to us at the thriller that STX was making with Jackie of Hony Capital, told me, “STX’s films
beginning and said, ‘It’s an eighty-five- Chan. It was crucial that it meet all the will incorporate Eastern elements, and
million-dollar film,’ we’d have said no.” criteria for a Chinese co-production— then, if they’re a hit, we can roll out de-
“So they win!” which would qualify it for a much larger rivative products—television shows, user-
Fogelson shook his head serenely: slice of theatrical revenues from China. driven content, and so on.” To get for-
“We can always say no later.” One requirement is that a third of the lead eign films shown in China, however,
cast be Chinese; Simonds had been cha- you have to trim out anything remotely

O ne July afternoon, Bob Simonds

veered into Fogelson’s oice and con-
sidered the stack of still unopened boxes
from his Universal days. “Are your balls in
there?” he asked, flinging his arm around
grined to learn that Chan was from Hong
Kong, which didn’t count. Fogelson said,
“Totally fair questions, totally valid, and
I’m sure we’ll be able to work it out.” And,
indeed, because Chan is a huge star in
problematic: after an outcry in the local
media, the makers of “Red Dawn,” a
2012 invasion thriller, digitally trans-
formed its villains from Chinese into
North Koreans. So last summer, when
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 45
Fogelson heard a screenwriter’s pitch
about an Italian-Chinese couple, he sug-
gested that they switch the backstories
of the couple’s parents: “What if the Chi-
nese mom had passed away, and the Ital-
ian dad had divorced?” When the writer
said, “Divorce is also a really big deal in
the Catholic Church,” Fogelson gently
replied, “But it doesn’t prevent a movie
from being made.”
Later that week, Fogelson drove his
Tesla to Beverly Hills to meet Jackie
Chan in his suite at the Montage Hotel
to discuss “The Foreigner.” Noting the
brutality of the story, Chan said, “We
need a happy ending. Otherwise the au-
dience leaves, and—” He stood and
shuled of, shoulders bowed.
“Otherwise, it’s not suicient reward
for the journey you’ve asked the audi-
ence to go on,” Fogelson agreed.
Chan then suggested that a female
character who got killed of in the script
be kept alive. “We save her for No. 2,”
Chan said. “Now the I.R.A. goes after
her—and that’s the story.” Fogelson
grinned and shook the actor’s hand.
Chan was just the kind of brand-
extension expert that Fogelson needed
to crack the Chinese market—and to at-
tract wayward American viewers. Tele-
vision has posed what might be called
the “Game of Thrones” problem: once
cinematic sex and violence, complete
with dragons, are available on your phone,
why pay a sitter and drive to a mall to
see them? Even as the studios seek to
distinguish their franchises from televi-
sion, they have begun to shape them ac-
cording to television’s dictates. A sequel
like last May’s “Avengers: Age of Ul-
tron,” from Marvel, is less a self-contained
film than a loose amalgam of ongoing
stories. The film lays track for two fu-
ture sequels and allots significant screen
time to each of the film’s fourteen main
characters so they can serve as calendar
reminders of forthcoming spinofs and
other ancillary products, including, of
course, TV shows. The film is essentially
a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar
episode of a television drama that airs
every few years.
To Fogelson, this Scheherazade sen-
sibility makes both financial and cre-
ative sense. Driving back to the oice
after meeting with Chan, he remarked,
“A few years ago, thinking about the se-
quel that way would be characterized as
46 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
a lazy, greedy bastardization of the cre-
ative process. If you said that now, you’d
be telling the entire world that they’re
wrong. Sequels have become a duty—a
form of storytelling that, thanks to great
television, audiences have grown accus-
tomed to. You can aspire to create six
two-hour movies that develop your con-
cept across multiple resolutions—which
makes movies easier to sell, and creates
a more predictable business model. Half
the films we’ll say yes to will have se-
quelable potential.”
A s STX began to roll films of its
production line, Fogelson used
every technique he knew to give each one
the shimmer of quality. “Unmanned” ’s
budget remained vexingly high, so he
ordered a rewrite that would preserve
“some of the eye candy of a world war”
but that would cost no more than eighty
million dollars. Meanwhile, his team
opened discussions with six Chinese firms
about co-producing the film and shar-
ing its costs.
Fogelson’s goal was to make films that
looked twice as expensive as they were,
so he was usually careful to budget for
enough spectacle to sell. For “The Free
State of Jones,” a Civil War epic starring
Matthew McConaughey, he added five
hundred thousand dollars to provide more
cameras and extras for the opening bat-
tle sequence, insuring “enough huge Civil
War action to justify the more intimate
movie that follows.” And he told Pete
Berg early on that “Mile 22” should have
a separate, two-million-dollar budget for
two set pieces “with fistfights in cars as
they fly around, to give it the look and
feel of a much bigger movie.”
The revenge drama “Secret in Their
Eyes,” starring Julia Roberts and Nicole
Kidman, exemplified the studio’s deli-
cate balance of grandeur and thrift. Ross
Fanger told me, “If a studio were mak-
ing ‘Secret in Their Eyes’ six years ago,
it would have paid the stars ten to fifteen
million each, plus three million for an
A-list director. We give them much less,
with participation in the back end, and
we shoot it in thirty-five days instead of
fifty-five, saving another five million—
so it ends up costing $19.4 million in-
stead of fifty million.” But, when Fogel-
son saw a cut of the movie, he worried
that he’d trimmed the shooting sched-
ule too severely, curtailing airiness and
scope. (In November, the film’s weak
début proved him right.)
STX kept budgets down by exploit-
ing an anomaly in the economics of
filmmaking: the bigger the studio, the
more it pays its talent. “It’s as if Walmart
were paying its venders a whole lot more
than mom-and-pop shops do,” a studio
C.F.O. told me. STX arranged to pay
Jennifer Lopez in the range of five hun-
dred thousand dollars to star in a com-
edy that Fogelson characterized as “a
little bit ‘Working Girl’ and a little bit
a bunch of great J. Lo movies from fifteen
years ago,” and Will Ferrell roughly the
same to star in a quirky, low-budget
comedy about the pornographer Russ
Meyer. They’d get much more if the
films became hits.
Squeezing budgets was easier than
meeting the star-in-a-wheelhouse-role
requirement. Pete Berg couldn’t persuade
Will Smith to play Silva in “Mile 22,”
so he found another way to be as heroic
as Fogelson had asked. After volunteer-
ing to direct the film himself, he got his
frequent collaborator Mark Wahlberg to
take the role. Wahlberg told me that Berg
won him over by situating the role in the
annals of cinematic history: “We talked
about this guy being like Marlon Brando
in ‘Apocalypse Now,’ one of the great,
great movie villains. But with a lot more
screen time.”
The script was “written up” for Wahl-
berg. In the original, Silva was a turn-
coat, who served as Ronda Rousey’s men-
tor before dying in the third act; in the
new version, constructed with a potential
franchise in mind, Silva was the star, a
complex man with a shot at redemption.
Not incidentally, these changes reduced
Rousey’s role: same fighting, less emot-
ing. Or, as Fogelson tactfully put it, hav-
ing avoided both dinner and lunch with
her, “It allows Ronda to do everything
she can and should do without having to
carry any undue acting weight.” The ne-
gotiations over Wahlberg’s contract were
protracted—so much so that his agent, and directed by Joel Edgerton, was about keting advantages; they have not only
Ari Emanuel, sent Fogelson two tortoises, a high-school loser named Gordo who plenty of spectacle to sell but plenty of
and Fogelson sent back a vat of molas- returns years later to mess with his high- ways to sell it. “If you’re one of Univer-
ses. In the end, STX paid Wahlberg flying former tormentor, Simon, and sal’s ‘Symphony Projects,’ ” Neal Moritz,
three-quarters of his top quote, plus a siz- his innocent wife, Robyn. As there were who produces the “Fast and Furious”
able share of the profits. Partly as a result only three real roles, casting would be films, said, “every tentacle of their em-
of that payment, the film’s budget tripled, crucial. Edgerton, who played support- pire is promoting you—at the theme
to thirty-five million dollars. On the other ing roles in “The Great Gatsby” and parks, on ‘The Voice,’ in Comcast Cable
hand, “Mile 22” became the kind of proj- “Zero Dark Thirty,” had the right, advertising, in being trailered onto their
ect that the studio was predicated on: a slightly menacing mien to play Gordo. other big movies.”
star showcase. Rebecca Hall, who appeared in the With “The Gift,” Fogelson had no
Yet STX’s original model was under Johnny Depp film “Transcendence,” spectacle to sell—only the film’s prem-
stress. In June, it had twenty-four proj- would make a sympathetic trophy wife. ise. “The movie’s original title was
ects in production or active development, For the linchpin role of Simon, the ‘Weirdo,’ which sounds indie, so we
and just six of them fit the star-showcase onetime bully who had gone on to an changed that,” he said. He didn’t want
template—and some of those fit only if executive career, Fogelson suggested people thinking the film was weird; he
you were generous. For instance, Fogel- Jason Bateman, best known as the be- wanted them thinking it was creepy.
son contended that Matthew McCon- leaguered but caring family man on “We did a campaign with fifty enter-
aughey’s role in “The Free State of Jones” “Arrested Development.” tainment bloggers and reporters, doing
was absolutely the actor’s signature brand: The film’s co-producer and financier, a deep dive into their social-media past
“a character fighting injustice, as in ‘Dal- Jason Blum, contended that Bateman to figure out what they needed or wanted,
las Buyers Club.’ ” He admitted, how- was too associated with comedy, and then sending them personalized gifts,
ever, that McConaughey—before the up- worried that marketing wouldn’t be able like a replacement mug for one they’d
tick in his fortunes known as “the to sell him as a bad guy. But, Fogelson broken, all signed ‘Your friend, Gordo.’
McConaissance”—had been typecast said, “the question of being haunted by A day later, a second box, containing a
playing smooth-talking sharpies. “So past mistakes is cleaner if you have Jason trailer for the movie, would arrive. That
some of it is brand extension,” he sug- than if you have a Tom Hardy. Jason is successfully got ‘creepy’ out there in the
gested, “some of it is making an edu- the best version of us. He’s not even discussion.”
cated bet on trajectory, and some of it ‘lovable but dangerous.’ He’s the class In the end, “The Gift” cost just five
is him being the face of a hugely suc- president.” million dollars to make and $27.5 mil-
cessful Lincoln campaign.” Major studios have pronounced mar- lion to market, so the studio would profit
To get projects under way, Fogelson
had to keep squeezing the definition of
a movie star. The producer Paul Brooks
is developing a romantic comedy at STX
called “The One That Got Away.” Brooks
said, “We want to make the actors
younger, make it more of a concept sell,
which would mean we’re casting some-
where between a star and a recognizable
face.” Fogelson’s gloss was that stardom
is contingent on budget. “Emma Wat-
son and Ansel Elgort in ‘The One That
Got Away’ are stars for the audience you’re
making the film for if it costs fifteen mil-
lion,” he said. “Emma Stone and Zac
Efron are stars in that film at thirty mil-
lion. And Jennifer Lawrence and any-
one, including me, can work at fifty mil-
lion.” This idea—that content and cost
define a star—was almost exactly the op-
posite of the model Bob Simonds had
pitched to his investors.

T he studio’s first release, “The Gift,”

had its début last summer, and in
the weeks beforehand Fogelson de-
clared that it showcased the studio’s
thesis and strengths. The film, written

• •
if it grossed twenty million dollars in
North America. “If the movie does fifteen,
it’s a bad outcome, and we lose three,”
Fogelson said. “If it does forty, we make
fifteen million. Am I willing to risk three
million to make fifteen? Yes.”
Together with Oren Aviv, Fogelson
spent hours staring at a scheduling
whiteboard, looking for the best week-
end to open it. They finally decided on
August 7th. It was late enough in the
summer that audiences might have
“spectacle fatigue.” And the chief com-
petition would be “Fantastic Four,” which
had poor word of mouth, and “Mission
Impossible: Rogue Nation,” in its sec-
ond week.
A week before the début, STX spent
more than three hundred thousand dol-
lars on a première for seven hundred
people in downtown Los Angeles. The
tracking showed that the film would
open at only seven million dollars, the
lowest end of Fogelson’s hopes. But he
seemed exhilarated to be on a red car-
48 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
pet again, with Escalades disgorging star-
lets and photographers clicking away.
Earlier that day, trying to dispel launch-
party jitters, Bob Simonds had told Fo-
gelson, “I’m going to wear a honeybee
outfit, with antenna, and just not explain
it.” He showed up in a navy suit, and the
two men hugged.
Inside the theatre, Fogelson stood
up front, his arms crossed protectively,
to introduce the film. (Earlier, he’d
joked that his pre-première routine
would be to “shower, shave, and vomit.”)
“Jason Blum is a friend who I worked
with in my prior . . . job,” he said. There
were knowing chuckles. “You can
laugh, it’s O.K.” He praised the film-
makers, promised that this was “the
first of what will be many, many, many
premières for STX Entertainment,”
and bolted ofstage. The film played
well, and by 11:30 P.M., at the party,
Fogelson was in a cheerful frame of
mind, drinking red wine and huddling
with his daughters. Jason Bateman
came over and threw an arm around
him: “I owe a lot of this to you, my
friend!”
“You were so great—you’re why the
movie works,” Fogelson said. “Who would
think you could be so evil?”
“Yeah, I give it room for a reverse, I
guess,” Bateman said, a little mystified,
unable to see himself, as Fogelson could,
as an element.
“The Gift” opened at nearly twelve
million dollars, and went on to gross
forty-four million. The film earned a “B”
from Cinemascore, which surveys audi-
ence members, and a ninety-three-per-
cent-positive rating from Rotten Toma-
toes, which tracks critics’ responses—so
it was perceived as both satisfying and
actually good. Fogelson felt quietly vin-
dicated. “For five million dollars,” he said,
“Jason Bateman, Joel Edgerton, and Re-
becca Hall are the most A-plus movie
stars in the world.”
B ob Simonds was pleased by the
success of “The Gift.” He was al-
most equally pleased by the failure of
“Secret in Their Eyes.” “I’d rather have
fifteen mediocre-performing movies
than five big hits,” he told me recently.
“We believe in tonnage, because this is
a landgrab. We’re using stars and brands
to cut through the fucking cat videos.”
The more films, the more attention, and
the more new divisions that mushroomed
of them. In September, Simonds an-
nounced the first: a digital division, led
by Kathy Savitt, who’d been the chief
marketing oicer at Yahoo.
“The movie side is not a loss leader,
exactly,” he said. “But it’s the flypaper
for other activities. Great storytellers
come to us for films, and we ultimately
channel them into streaming, digital,
television, games, virtual reality, the Chi-
nese arena.” He had closed a slate deal
with a major Chinese group that would
cover a further twenty per cent of STX’s
production costs, and nearly finalized
another deal, with one of the country’s
largest companies, to be its partner in a
television-streaming venture. “In China,
we’ll have the whole thing locked up,”
Simonds said. Chinese businessmen
trooping through STX’s oices became
so common that one afternoon, as Fogel-
son watched Simonds give another tour,
he said, “ ‘I love Chinese people.’ ” Then
he said, “Movie, movie?”—checking
whether his executives caught the ref-
erence to “I love black people.” The pres-
ident of production, Cathy Schulman,
cried, “ ‘Jerry Maguire’!”
Simonds told me, “My job is to get
us public on the Hong Kong exchange
as fast as possible, at a 16 or 17x mul-
tiple on earnings.” He continued, “If
I’ve got billions in capital, in a year I
can buy a lot of Hollywood divisions.
I don’t think anyone will want the Sony
library, but Sony TV? Fuck, yeah! And
I’d love to go after stuf like the Bond
rights and build it out across our plat-
forms, with licensing, records, brand-
ing, gaming.” Ideally, he calculated, “the
movie division will end up being about
twenty per cent of the business. We
never wanted to be Universal, we
wanted to be Comcast.”
The goal was to look enough like
a Hollywood studio to get a huge in-
fusion of money from Chinese inves-
tors, then use the money to cherry-pick
Hollywood’s assets en route to becom-
ing a global conglomerate. The story
Simonds originally told, about mak-
ing old-fashioned, human-scale sto-
ries, had given rise to its own sequel,
about ramifying digital exploitation.
Aiming at being a studio, today, is like
aiming at being a caterpillar. The end
game is metamorphosis.
F ogelson understands that Simonds
intends to turn his film division into
the headlamps of an entertainment jug-
gernaut. He understands that the more
successful he is the faster that happens,
and that in complete success films be-
come completely marginal. But his job
is to focus less on what shareholders want
now than on what audiences will want
in two years.
In June, Relativity Media, the lat-
est contender to become a major stu-
dio, began to founder. The filmmakers
of a Relativity project that was about
to go into production set a clandestine
meeting with Fogelson to see if he
would take it over. The script, by the
prolific screenwriter Allan Loeb, was
called “Out of This World”: a story
about a teen-age orphan named Gard-
ner who was born in space—his astro-
naut mother died in childbirth—and
grew up on Mars. Although his body
won’t be able to withstand Earth’s
heavier atmosphere, Gardner stows
away aboard a shuttle bound for Earth
to find out who his father is—and to
meet a tough-talking Facetime crush
nicknamed Tulsa.
Fogelson had concerns. Gary Old-
man, who would play the head of the
space program, was a terrific actor but
not a star, and neither was Asa Butterfield,
who would play Gardner. But he told
his team, “What interested me was the
‘Starman’ of it, that he’s a human alien
who grew up apart from the world, so
he sees everything fresh and clear. The
sell would be if we could show that vi-
sually, by making Gardner’s arms five per
cent longer.”
When the filmmakers came in, one
Thursday afternoon, Fogelson asked
what sort of story they hoped to tell.
Peter Chelsom, the director, said, “The
theme is isolation and connection am-
plified by the vastness of space.” He
added that the romance would be cen-
tral, evoking the hugely popular young-
adult film “The Fault in Our Stars”: “As
a nickname for this film, ‘The Fault in
Our Mars’ is perfect.”
“A great Romeo and Juliet story is
always good,” Fogelson said, “and so is
the idea that the world will beat you
down, but you have to keep your spirit
intact. My daughter, who is amazing
and bright and innocent, was bullied
the other day for the first time, and
because of those qualities she
will be bullied for the next
ten years. The better you are,
the more a target you are
going to be. The challenge
for Gardner, this honest, in-
nocent character—I think
that can resonate for young
people.” After asking the film-
makers whether the budget
could shrink from thirty-
seven million dollars—Abso-
lutely!, they said—he prom-
ised to get back to them very soon.
As they walked out, Allan Loeb said
to Fogelson, “That was beautiful, what
you said about your daughter. That’s why
we all do this, right?” “No,” Fogelson re-
plied, pleasantly, still fighting to distin-
guish STX from everyone else. “That’s
why we all do this.”
In the weeks that followed, Fogelson
agreed to make the film, with a new title:
“The Space Between Us,” which syn-
chronized the film’s premise and its mar-
keting plan. He also commissioned a pro-
duction rewrite, intended to cut five
million dollars from the budget, inten-
sify the romance, and give Gardner a pro-
fession-of-love speech to Tulsa that would
“make him someone any girl in the world
could really fall for”—and, not inciden-
tally, anchor the trailer. Gardner’s other-
worldliness, the other big sell, would be
achieved through a combination of act-
ing, camera angles, and short-armed shirts.
When Britt Robertson, the star of
“Tomorrowland,” was cast as Tulsa,
Fogelson was thrilled. He showed me
Robertson’s audition tape, a scene
where Tulsa lit up at being promised
a piano: she was vulnerable, intense,
and startlingly real. “Lots of people
can laugh on cue, or cry on cue, or
smile through tears on cue,” he said.
“Very, very few people can do it in a
way that embodies how the audience
feels—how I feel at least half of my
day.” He was talking himself into fall-
ing in love.
So often, though, the movie doesn’t
love you back. Immediately after the
pitch meeting, Fogelson had told me,
“The only thing that gave me pause was
that nothing was giving me pause. Be-
cause part of me is always looking for
a reason to say no. Every time you say
yes, you’re opening yourself up to the
possibility that people will laugh at you
and call you names and even-
tually fire you for your dumb
choices. I will read the script
one more time this weekend
before I decide, to make sure
I can see a trailer that fulfills
our wish to remember what
a wonderful place this Earth
can be, our wish to see a rain-
bow through the eyes of
someone who’s never seen one
before. I’ll want to recomfort
myself with trailer lines and
moments.” One scene in particular had
clung to Fogelson: Gardner, yearning
to leave his mark on Earth, writes “I
WUZ HERE” on a bathroom wall. As Fo-
gelson considered the image, he fell si-
lent, slipping away in his mind to con-
duct the rising feeling in darkened
theatres everywhere. He nodded: yes,
just possibly, yes. “With the right music
and the right setup and the right shot,
for the audience we’re aiming for, that
tugs at you.” 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 49
 ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
THE CUSTODIANS
How the Whitney is transforming the art of museum conservation.
I walk south on Manhattan’s High
Line toward the Whitney Museum
of American Art: international tour-
ists with their selfie sticks, sunbathers
on the wooden benches in various stages
of undress. The power of the High
Line—abandoned railway tracks re-
purposed as a popular park—is that it
feels at once triumphant and post-apoc-
alyptic. Grass grows over the rails, trees
among the trestles; it’s almost as if na-
ture had reclaimed the infrastructure
of a civilization wiped out by an un-
specified disaster. I feel as if I were wan-
dering through a composite, the rails
peeking through the C.G.I. And the
elevation itself is eerie, an acknowledg-
ment of rising seas.
The park now terminates in a great
ship: Renzo Piano’s nine-story Whit-
ney building, one of many architectural
nods to the largely vanished industries
on which the surrounding neighbor-
hood once depended. (Piano was born
into a family of Genoan builders; his
Astrup Fearnely Museum, on the water
in Oslo, resembles a giant glass sail.)
The Whitney was, in fact, erected with
flooding in mind. Hurricane Sandy
struck early in the construction process,
leading Piano to adjust the museum’s
design; the steel frame is built to bend,
not break, whenever the next storm ar-
rives. I can’t help thinking of it as the
Noah’s Ark of American Art. You are to
bring into the ark two of every kind of
painting, two works of every school. . . .
I enter through the museum’s glass
façade—the lobby is crowded, but the
lines move quickly—and take one of
the elevators to the fifth floor. The
walls of the elevator are panelled with
mirrors; half of the occupants are film-
ing their reflections as we ascend. I’ve
come to see a sculpture entitled “Cost
of Living (Aleyda),” by Josh Kline, one
of a series, for which Kline, who is
thirty-six, interviewed janitorial work-
ers and then used 3-D-printing tech-
50 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
BY BEN LERNER
nology to create sculptural assemblages
based on scans of their bodies. The
physical work consists of a janitor’s
cart, to which L.E.D. lights have been
taped, and on which are several ob-
jects, printed in plaster and cyanoac-
rylate: brushes, sponges, a bottle of
cleaning fluid. Also on the cart are
two 3-D prints of the digitally imaged
head of “Aleyda,” a housekeeper at the
Hotel on Rivington, along with a print
of her hand, enclosed in a plastic glove,
and of her foot, in a sock and shoe.
The surface of one of the heads shows
Aleyda’s face; the other has been re-
placed by the label from a bottle of
Stain-X. Her body is not only seg-
mented; it is becoming another clean-
ing product.
Standing before the sculpture, I
think of how it has long been fashion-
able in the art world to speak of “de-
materialization”: the dematerialization
of labor in our so-called information-
based economy, the dematerialization
of the art object in conceptual practice.
To confront the severed head and frag-
mented body of a janitor in a museum
space is a discomfiting reminder of the
undocumented (in more than one sense)
material labor from which such dis-
courses can help distract us. Somebody
is still making the hardware from which
you upload data to the cloud; some-
body is still scrubbing the toilets at the
museum that hosts your symposium
on Internet art.
More subtly, “Cost of Living” could
be said to pun on the museum as “cus-
todian” of art works. Kline’s 3-D ob-
jects are not intended to last. There is
what he calls a “resolution gap” be-
tween the digital files and current 3-D-
printing technology, meaning that
printers capable of matching the res-
olution of his scans don’t yet exist. At
a certain point—five years or fifty, it’s
hard to say—technology will improve,
enabling the scans to be realized in full
detail. But part of the conceptual con-
tent of the work is, will have been, the
process of switching out the objects
over time. Kline is reversing the tra-
ditional temporality of the “original”
art work: what comes first are copies;
the real work will arrive in the future.
None of this complexity is indicated
in the placard beside Kline’s sculpture
in the current show; the museum doesn’t
know how to represent it yet.
How does the museum determine
when to reprint the objects? And, once
you start replicating parts, when is the
work no longer the work? These and
other questions are the domain of the
Whitney’s replication committee, a
little-known but increasingly crucial
body within the museum. The com-
mittee is, as far as I know, the only one
of its kind. Founded in 2008, it is com-
posed of fourteen people—conserva-
tors, curators, archivists, a lawyer, and
a registrar. The committee convenes to
determine when a work of art, or a part
of a work of art, cannot be fixed or re-
stored in the traditional ways—when
and how it must, instead, be replicated.
These discussions result in recommen-
dations that afect the way art works
are maintained, classified, and described
in exhibitions.
As I leave the building, I find my-
self thinking of the ship of Theseus,
king of Athens. According to Plutarch,
the ship
was preserved by the Athenians down even
to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they
took away the old planks as they decayed,
putting in new and stronger timber in their
place, insomuch that this ship became a
standing example among the philosophers,
for the logical question of things that grow;
one side holding that the ship remained the
same, and the other contending that it was
not the same.
If it isn’t the same ship—if resto-
ration has crossed into replication—
which piece of timber was decisive? And
Josh Kline’s 3-D-printed objects, such as “Cost of Living (Aleyda),” above, are not intended to last. The sculpture stages a
confrontation between the culture of museum conservation and the culture of the disposable prototype.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC HELGAS THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 51
where does the identity of an art work
reside if it will be fully realized only in
the future, plank by printed plank?
A t the head of the replication com-
mittee is Carol Mancusi-Un-
garo, who also leads the Whitney’s con-
servation department. (It had no con-
servation department before her—why,
some wondered, would a museum of
recent American art need such a
thing?) In 1968, two years after the
Arno flooded Florence, Mancusi-
Ungaro was a first-year graduate stu-
dent in art history at N.Y.U. When
she saw a show at the Met featuring
damaged Florentine frescoes, her in-
terests turned from the study of peri-
ods and styles to the material fate of
art objects in time.
Mancusi-Ungaro left N.Y.U. with
a master’s degree and moved with her
then husband to New Haven, where
he was a medical student. A former
professor put her in touch with An-
“We’re quietly confident that it smells of cinnamon.”
drew Petryn, the chief conservator at
the Yale Art Gallery, who took her on
as an apprentice. (She still has no oi-
cial credential as a conservator.) For
five years, she was in the workshop
with Petryn almost every day. She sup-
plemented her apprenticeship with a
Yale course in organic chemistry to ad-
vance her understanding of paints and
solvents.
Petryn, who died in 2013, remains a
controversial figure in the field of con-
servation. In the nineteen-fifties and
sixties, he undertook the restoration of
Yale’s collection of early Italian paint-
ings. Or, rather, he undertook their
de-restoration: advocating a purism then
popular among some conservators, he
decided to remove previous restoration,
leaving, or aspiring to leave, only the
hand of the artist. And the hand of time:
what conservators call “losses”—lacu-
nae, expanses of bare wood—over-
whelmed the original images. By the
time Petryn retired, in the mid-eighties,
many considered the state of the Yale
collection to be a scandal. (The current
director of the Yale Art Gallery, Jock
Reynolds, has described Petryn’s tenure
as a time of “aggressive over-cleaning.”)
Attitudes in the field had shifted to-
ward a more aesthetically oriented ap-
proach, in which conservators disguise
losses, with the goal of enabling the
work to be experienced as a picture, not
just as an archeological artifact. In the
nineties, Yale sent some of its Italian
collection to the Getty Museum to be
re-restored, undoing what Petryn had
undone.
I asked Mancusi-Ungaro about Pet-
ryn during one of my first visits to the
Whitney conservation studios. “I un-
derstand the opposition to his work, but
I’m grateful for the rigor of his teach-
ing,” she told me. He tasked her with
making from scratch every black pig-
ment listed in “Il Libro dell’Arte,” a Re-
naissance treatise. “To make ‘vine black,’
I had to use young tendrils from grape-
vines,” she recalled. “I got them from
my Italian grandmother’s relatives. To
make ‘ivory black,’ I gathered some dis-
carded shards of ivory from a keyboard
factory in Ivoryton, Connecticut.”
The conservation department, on
the sixth floor of the new Whitney, oc-
cupies more than three thousand square
feet, about six times as much space as
in the old building. In the department’s
main studio, where Mancusi-Ungaro
and I talked, a wall of windows faces
north, ofering stunning views and
steady, difuse light of the kind paint-
ers have coveted for centuries. The space
is open and airy, despite giant fume
extractors that snake down from the
ceiling; they keep the air breathable
when conservators are working with
solvents. Mancusi-Ungaro showed me
a Rothko painting that was, she said,
“exhibiting some unexplained, incon-
sistent coloration.” Matt Skopek, a
painting conservator, was examining
the canvas with an infrared camera,
looking for evidence of damage and
traces of prior interventions. “It might
be that Rothko himself restored this,
and did a poor job,” Mancusi-Ungaro
explained. In that case, conservators
would improve on the artist’s attempt
to play conservator, protecting the art-
ist’s hand from the artist’s other hand,
so to speak. But they were also studying
other Rothkos to make sure they weren’t
misinterpreting his intentions. If the
inconsistent coloration was an aesthetic
decision, their priority would be to pre-
serve it, not undo it.
My attention was drawn away from
the Rothko by a painting I found vaguely
familiar. It was Barkley Hendricks’s
“Steve,” a full-length portrait of a man
wearing a white suit and mirrored sun-
glasses, in which the windows of Hen-
dricks’s studio—and, if you look closely,
part of Hendricks’s head—are reflected.
Mancusi-Ungaro reminded me that it
had been on a 2009 cover of Artforum,
which is probably why I recognized it.
But that cover had been cropped. In the
painting, there are yellow patches on
the glossy white suit, probably due, Sko-
pek told me, to a previous restorer’s ap-
plication of a glue that was originally
clear but had yellowed with time. Sko-
pek had been cleaning the surface with
a scalpel—“I work with the scalpels used
in eye surgery; they’re more precise”— “This is an opportunity to simplify your life—don’t blow it.”
and was preparing to reinforce an area
of the back of the canvas with acupunc- • •
ture needles, selected for their mixture
of strength and flexibility.
Talking about undoing previous and theorist Eugène- Emmanuel flatter color, or a subtle line drawn around
restoration led us back to Petryn. His Viollet-le-Duc—who, beginning in a restored area. The guiding ethos of
approach was part of a long history 1845, oversaw the restoration of Notre- conservators is “reversibility”—making
of “cleaning controversies,” as conser- Dame—represented the opposing sure that the future has the right to a
vators call them. (That Kline’s sculp- view. He advocated reconstructing lost diferent vision of the past.
tures involve cleaning products helps components of a building in order to
position them, perhaps unintention-
ally, in relation to the conservation
practices that his work subverts.) Such
“reëstablish it in a finished state, which
may in fact never have actually existed
at any given time.”
T ratteggio might work on a Renais-
sance fresco, but what is the equiv-
alent for an abstract painting, let alone
disputes are as old as Pliny, who These days, conservators tend to seek a work of conceptual art? How much
claimed that a painting by Aristides a middle ground between Ruskin’s po- time has to pass before its passage might
of Thebes was ruined by whoever tried sition, which risks fetishizing damage, be worth preserving? Medieval and
to clean it up for the Games of Apollo. and Viollet-le-Duc’s, which risks the Renaissance painters working within
These debates are fundamentally Disneyfication of the historical record. a guild system had firsthand knowl-
about temporality: should we cele- In certain instances, the conservator will edge of their pigments, what was likely
brate the patina of time or what’s be- protect an image’s over-all composi- to last and what wouldn’t. By the
neath it? tional efect while also seeking to ac- nineteen-fifties, American artists often
In “The Lamp of Memory,” written knowledge the newness, the falseness, of used cheap, mass-produced materials
in 1848, John Ruskin, a pioneer of what what she has done. Such strategies can that weren’t intended to endure—at
has been called the “anti-restoration be traced to Cesare Brandi, a twentieth- least, not across centuries. Postwar art-
movement,” argued that buildings and century Italian art historian and critic, ists didn’t go to the art-supply store,
objects must be left to decline, even who developed a method called tratteg- Mancusi-Ungaro has said; they went
die—that the “greatest glory of a build- gio, in which the restorer fills in lacu- to the hardware store.
ing . . . is in its Age.” He wrote that res- nae with a series of small lines. From a For many modern and contempo-
toration “means the most total destruc- distance, the lacunae recede, allowing rary artists, ephemerality is part of the
tion which a building can sufer: a the viewer to experience a pictorial unity; point. Dieter Roth, to take just one ex-
destruction out of which no remnants upon closer inspection, the addition de- ample, didn’t cover his canvases with
can be gathered: a destruction accom- clares a loss. Tratteggio is just one such yogurt for the sake of durability; they
panied with false description of the technique—alterations can also be sig- were built to biodegrade. Picasso and
thing destroyed.” The French architect nalled by a slightly recessed surface, a Braque told friends that they would
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 53

Carol Mancusi-Ungaro is the head of the replication committee. “We’re not trying to
influence the work,” she said. “We want the artist to be heard.”
rather let their canvases deteriorate
than have them varnished, which they
felt would ruin the subtle texturing of
the surfaces. For a long time, their pref-
erence was disregarded. (According to
the art historian John Richardson, a
postwar public raised on glossy repro-
ductions found the varnished look fa-
miliar; original paintings, he suggests,
were being “restored” to resemble their
color-plate copies.) Conceptual and
performance artists—in part as a pro-
test against the commodification of art
objects—sought to dispense with ma-
terial art works altogether (although
such happenings were then preserved
for the future through collectible doc-
umentation). “Art history only begins
after the death of the work,” Duchamp
54 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
once said; for him, to conserve was to
embalm.
In 1976, Mancusi-Ungaro moved to
Los Angeles, where she took a job at
the Getty Museum. “I don’t know why
they hired me, exactly,” she said. “This
was when the Getty was still in a villa
in Malibu and didn’t have the money it
has now. But I loved California. I was
eating avocados of the trees for lunch.”
A year and a half later, she moved to
Ohio and took a position at the Inter-
museum Conservation Association, then
situated at Oberlin. In 1982, she was
recruited to be the chief conservator at
the Menil collection, in Houston, where
she stayed for nearly twenty years, un-
dertaking major restorations of works
by Cy Twombly, Barnett Newman, and
Jackson Pollock, among others. “With
the exception of one canvas by Joan
Miró, I’d never conserved a work of
modern art before I came to the Menil,”
Mancusi-Ungaro told me. “I was ex-
cited by the immediacy of it—how I
was often the first person restoring a
canvas, as opposed to dealing with a
century of past restorations. And I loved,
whenever possible, consulting with the
artists themselves.”
In 1964, Mark Rothko painted two
black-form triptychs (black rectangles
on a plum-colored ground) for the Menil
Chapel. The paintings were finished
in 1967 and installed in 1971. Shortly
thereafter, the paint began to whiten,
and a mysterious crystalline pattern
spread across the surface. This wasn’t
Rothko’s hand or the hand of time; it
was the material’s instability in the chap-
el’s humid conditions. Removing the
disturbance became one of Mancusi-
Ungaro’s chief preoccupations during
her time at the Menil.
She and her team could have sim-
ply remade the Rothko paintings—
after all, assistants had helped to paint
them in the first place—but Mancusi-
Ungaro wasn’t going to pursue repli-
cation. “Although Rothko may not have
physically painted every inch, he or-
chestrated the brushwork of his assis-
tants in a way that asserted his author-
ship,” she told me. Rothko committed
suicide in 1970, but she tracked down
one of the assistants, Ray Kelly, and
asked how Rothko’s colors had been
prepared. The blacks, velvety and matte,
were made fresh every morning by mix-
ing (in unrecorded proportions) oil
paint, turpentine, damar resin, and
whole egg. Mancusi-Ungaro, working
with scientists at Shell, painstakingly
simulated this process and eventually
determined that the egg was causing
the white film on the paintings’ sur-
face. She and her collaborators devel-
oped a fast-evaporating solvent mix-
ture that could remove the whitening.
It was, deliberately, a superficial inter-
vention. The discoloration has not re-
curred, but if it does the treatment can
be repeated indefinitely without dam-
aging the work.
Mancusi-Ungaro’s frustration that
she couldn’t consult with Rothko dur-
ing the restoration process led her, in
1991, to start the Artist Documentation
Program, a series of interviews with
artists about their “materials, working
techniques, and intent for conservation
of their works.” The interviews are both
illuminating and a little eerie, because
they are essentially living wills. (She
plans to conduct such an interview with
Kline.)
In the absence of explicit and com-
plete instructions—that is, most of the
time—conservation is fundamentally
an interpretive act. After Rothko’s death,
many critics described (or dismissed)
his late, dark works as monochromatic
dead ends, evidence of his despair. But
Mancusi-Ungaro felt that the subtle
contrasts between the plum-colored bor-
ders, which are painted with pigments
dissolved in rabbit-skin glue, and the
black expanses represented a more com-
plex range of aesthetic and emotional
concerns. “These paintings aren’t about
darkness,” Mancusi-Ungaro told me.
“They’re about light—about reflectance.”
Her interpretation helped to change
critical attitudes about Rothko’s later
work. A less exacting conservator (“ivory
black”; “vine black”), or a conservator
blinded by the common view (black
works; bleak time), might have missed
this element of the Rothkos, and likely
destroyed it.
Talking about Rothko with Mancusi-
Ungaro, I was struck, not for the first
time, by how the work of a conservator
can re-sacralize the original art object.
Had Mancusi-Ungaro and her team
replicated the Rothko murals, I’m not
sure that I would have been able to tell.
An awareness of her labor, however, in-
vests those particular surfaces with a
powerful charge. The care the paintings
inspired feels like evidence of their im-
portance, as if it were not just a clean-
ing but a veneration (an efect amplified
by the fact that the surfaces are in a
chapel, no matter how modern). Con-
servation can help produce—not just
protect—the aura of the original.
I n 2001, Mancusi-Ungaro was ofered
two jobs simultaneously: the Whit-
ney wanted her to start a department
of conservation, and Harvard wanted
her to establish a center for the study
of modern and contemporary artists’
materials. She felt that the Whitney
had great art but limited research re-
sources, and that Harvard had great
research resources but a less expansive
collection of modern art. So she took
both positions at once, serving as a
bridge between the two institutions.
Mancusi-Ungaro’s final project at
Harvard—as of last year, she’s been at
the Whitney exclusively—also involved
Rothko. In both its boldness and its cau-
tiousness, it typifies Mancusi-Ungaro’s
voice as a conservator. In 1962, five large
mural paintings by Rothko, ranging
from light pink to deep purple, were
displayed in Harvard’s Holyoke Cen-
ter. A decade of exposure to sunlight
had destroyed the original coloration:
some areas were washed out, others faded
to blue. The compromised canvases were
determined to be beyond repair and
moved to storage.
In 2007, Mancusi-Ungaro helped
form a team to study the murals. The
team developed a series of colored-light
projections that, when thrown against
the canvases, would return the works to
their original colors. It was a radical,
digital tratteggio. Last year, the enhanced
canvases were displayed publicly for the
first time; the efect was of the mirac-
ulous and instantaneous resurrection of
the paintings. (At least, according to
those who saw the exhibit. It was closed
by the time I learned about it—the light
projections stored digitally, the canvases
in a climate-controlled facility.) Yet the
projections are a little larger than the
canvases, and the projector makes noise,
breaking the spell. Bold: we’re no lon-
ger looking at paintings but at a multi-
media installation. Cautious: this might
be the most fully reversible restoration
in history.
Does this light projection difer in
kind, or only in degree, from a gallery
controlling its lighting conditions? The
Harvard team insists on the specificity
of the interaction between the damaged
canvases and the light display, but surely
that’s a technical “problem” that could
eventually be overcome. What if the
projections alone could produce the same
optical efects? Then the “Harvard Mu-
rals” could be displayed anywhere in the
world, or in multiple places at once, and
the paintings themselves could be dis-
carded. This is not replacing the wooden
planks of Theseus’ ship(s) with new
wooden planks; it is changing media,
pigment for projection. Mancusi-
Ungaro’s work at the Rothko Chapel is
centripetal, focussing on the object; her
experiment at Harvard is centrifugal,
spinning away from the actual.
T he room on the seventh floor of the
Whitney where the replication com-
mittee interviewed Kline about “Cost
of Living (Aleyda)”—the Frances Mul-
hall Achilles Library—has a huge bank
of sloped windows facing the Hudson
River. When I was told we’d be meet-
ing in the “Achilles Library,” I remem-
bered how the Greek hero would have
been immortal, wouldn’t have had a vul-
nerable heel, if his mother had fully var-
nished him in the River Styx. But when
I arrived at the library I was put in mind
of more recent mythology: the architec-
ture recalled the observation deck of the
U.S.S. Enterprise in “Star Trek: The Next
Generation,” a show that I watched late
in the last millennium in my childhood
home, in Topeka. On the Enterprise,
you asked the computer’s “replicator”
when you wanted something to eat or
drink and it materialized before you—
no alien workers necessary.
As I sat watching a plane trailing a
banner that read “Happy Birthday Dalai
Lama” above the sparkling water, I
thought about the Prime Directive, from
“Star Trek”: Starfleet oicers may not
interfere with the development of alien
civilizations. This imperative has a kind
of Petryn-like absolutism about it, and
many “Star Trek” episodes revolve around
the moral quandaries that arise as a re-
sult. Conservators also strive to avoid
interference—conservation is not sup-
posed to afect creation—and yet, as
Mancusi-Ungaro and the other Whit-
ney “oicers” prepared to interview Kline,
I was struck by how contact between
the museum and the artist inevitably
changes the art it would conserve. The
questions, however neutrally posed, com-
pel the artist to make decisions about
what is permitted and what isn’t, deci-
sions that then become part of the work’s
conceptual content.
Kline arrived at the meeting flanked
by two fabricators from N.Y.U.’s Ad-
vanced Media Studio, who oversee the
printing of his sculptures. Mancusi-
Ungaro introduced everyone and asked
Kline if he’d like to say a few words about
“Cost of Living.” Kline said that the
digital files contain the still unrealized,
the still unrealizable, scans, and that
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 55
“there is nothing precious about the
current prints.” Everyone nodded politely.
There was a pause during which the
only sound was a curatorial assistant
taking notes by hand. (I thought it was
strange that a meeting about archives
and cutting-edge technologies was not
itself digitally recorded.) Then came a
barrage of questions:
“Can and should the Whitney retain
old prints as part of the archive?” Far-
ris Wahbeh, an archivist, asked. “And
what about old file formats of the scans
as software changes?” Kline deferred to
the museum to make a decision.
“Can individual components of the
assemblage be reprinted?” Margo De-
lidow, a sculpture conservator, asked. De-
lidow was interested in immediate issues
of material care. (I later heard her say, “If
I can bump into it, I have to conserve it.”)
“Is the kind of tape holding the L.E.D.
lights significant?” she asked Kline. If so,
is it the color of the tape that matters, or
the make, or the level of adhesiveness?
Kline said that the color temperature of
the lights was important, and that he
preferred gray; as long as that condition
was met, the tape could be replaced. I had
the sense that he was thinking out loud.
Dana Miller, a curator and the di-
rector of the Whitney’s permanent col-
lection, had concerns that were both
philosophical and practical. “If there’s a
show in, say, China, do we need to ship
these objects, or can they just be re-
printed there? If they can be reprinted
and not shipped, could the same work
be shown in two locations at once?”
Mancusi-Ungaro remained focussed
on fundamental issues. “How much does
the printing technology need to im-
prove—or how much do these prints
need to degrade—in order to trigger re-
printing?” Kline said that he hadn’t es-
tablished clear thresholds, and that he
would need to reassess over time. No-
body brought up the fact that these ques-
tions might outlive him.
Kline is a thoughtful artist, and he
was frank about what he hadn’t yet de-
termined. The goal of the Whitney’s staf
was to honor his intentions with the
greatest degree of exactitude possible.
But, precisely because of the thorough-
ness and intelligence of their queries,
I felt that I was watching conservation
shade into collaboration. This didn’t
bother me at all, but Mancusi-Ungaro
56 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
WHEN GRACE AT THE BLISS CAFÉ CALLS
It’s a terrible day in Baltimore,
and in Kathmandu, and in the port
city of Salerno gloom pervades, and
your own private sorrow’s throbbing
in the exact center of your right
hand, a pain that radiates outward
from palm to fingers that cannot find
the shape of your mechanical pencil,
a Mont Blanc in the burgundy they
don’t make anymore, a gift given
long ago, engraved, and obviously
too good for you since now you’ve lost
it, and this lack fixes you in a place
of grief age-old and physical, an
ache so similar to the pulsing you’d
feel in the exact center of either palm
after your father killed himself and
you felt the immediate need to write
lists, words invented for some self-
administered spelling test, your then
being told this was an odd, wrong,
cold thing to do. America, you’d
write, if you had your pencil, will you
now turn out to be only a beautiful
idea? You dreaming the weight of
a loss that feels as incalculable as
being orphaned at nine or seeing
another neighborhood gutted or
clearly didn’t like the word “collabora- Mancusi-Ungaro put it in another con-
tion” when I brought it up in a later con- versation, “unencumbered by traditional
versation. “We’re not trying to influence structures.” To boldly go where no con-
the work,” she said. “These decisions will servator has gone before.
have to be made at some point, and we
want the artist to be heard.”
But why not embrace conservation
as collaboration? The Whitney was
I n an unpublished lecture that
Mancusi-Ungaro gave at N.Y.U.’s
Institute of Fine Arts, in 2011, she de-
founded to focus on living artists, to ex- scribed how conservators of modern
periment with new media—to be, as art are increasingly confronted with

our communal need to witness the
next 300 lost at sea. Your name
almost exactly his, the etching now
faint along its barrel, and how you’ve
given pens and pencils to your own
kids extravagantly, each birthday, every
Christmas, then found them still in
boxes stufed in a sock drawer after
they’d returned to school. It was the
classroom that saved you, the clean
notebook, the word September, and
all that white around the black block
of text where you could write what
you really thought, which was that
the dead could talk to you, like when
you stayed in bed all day drawing
lilacs because Ross’s wife was Orthodox
so there was was no time to get to his
funeral. Stones thrown, cop cars
torched, bells ringing out across our
riven land, and it’s exactly here, typing
the word riven, then wondering if
you know what it really means, that the
phone rings, the read-out saying Bliss
and it’s Grace, your server at the
vegetarian café by the creek 200 miles
away where you ate three days ago,
saying she needs your address so she
can mail your pencil back to you.
—Jane Vandenburgh
the problem of the “elusive original.” Many Oldenburg sculptures present
“Traditionally, scientific analysis has everyday objects on a monumental
been able to distinguish authenticity scale, and “Ice Bag” is—well, an ice
by the nature and age of materials,” she bag, the kind people once used for
said. But what is the status of the “orig- headaches. Oldenburg worked with a
inal” when the artist’s hand wasn’t di- TV-production company to build the
rectly involved in the fabrication of the sculpture, which is eleven feet high
work? and more than thirteen feet in diam-
The Whitney acquired Claes Ol- eter. Inside is a combination of cus-
denburg’s “Ice Bag Scale C” in 1972. tom-made and commercially available
materials, including three motors and
six fans designed to make the bag move
more or less at random—to make it
seem alive.
It’s hard not to joke about Olden-
burg giving the Whitney a headache.
According to an academic paper de-
tailing its exhibition history, “ ‘Ice Bag’
never functioned for longer than a few
days at a time, and, even then, it per-
formed only part of its intended mo-
tion. Throughout its exhibition history,
‘Ice Bag’ had broken gears, exuded nox-
ious fumes, leaked oil, ripped its own
fabric exterior, growled, squeaked, and
set itself on fire.” It is described in mu-
seum archives in psychological terms:
the sculpture is reported to be “moody”
at one point, “suicidal” at another.
In 2009, the Whitney decided to
restore “Ice Bag.” The conservator El-
eonora Nagy, who oversaw the efort,
had little information about the sculp-
ture’s original construction; she told
me that she “had to restore it in order
to figure out what it was.” The acrylic
lacquer on the cap of the ice bag was
refinished by an autobody expert who
works on vintage cars. The sculpture’s
exterior fabric was discolored, brittle,
permanently creased. The team searched
everywhere for the same fabric (18404
Black Aluminum buf-free neoprene-
coated nylon, for the record) and found
a perfect match in every way but one:
the color was close but not identical.
The Whitney asked Oldenburg if he
would approve the change in color, and
he did.
But Nagy decided to repair the in-
ternal mechanisms whenever possi-
ble, rather than replace them. She and
Mancusi-Ungaro hired experts of var-
ious sorts—a guitar maker, an electri-
cian, a robotics engineer—to fix most
of the original motors and wiring.
The replication committee ultimately
determined that “Ice Bag” had been
conserved, not replicated—that the
sculpture remained original—because,
although the exterior was replaced or
repainted, most of the internal parts
were maintained. This allows the mu-
seum to continue to exhibit the work
as “Ice Bag Scale C,” not as a version
of “Ice Bag Scale C.”
Oldenburg made his name, in part,
by mocking art-world pretension, and
yet the Whitney treated his sculpture
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 57
with an attention that would have been
appropriate for a religious icon. It
would have been easier to jettison the
original motors and wiring and re-
place them with a new system. The
bag would have moved as intended;
the change would have been imper-
ceptible. Why are the mechanical guts
worth preserving? I don’t believe that
they have a patina, or that they show
the artist’s hand—they are invisible,
after all, and Oldenburg outsourced
most of that labor. Furthermore, if the
eccentricity of the original machine
was valuable, isn’t something lost when
it actually works? The replication com-
mittee here approaches the contradic-
tory logic of Viollet-le-Duc, attempt-
ing to “reëstablish” that “which may
in fact never have actually existed at
any given time.”
T he replication committee assumes
that replication should be avoided
whenever possible. But Josh Kline’s
work makes it impractical to privilege
rehabilitation over replication. “Cost
of Living (Aleyda)” stages a confron-
tation between the culture of museum
conservation and the culture of the dis-
posable prototype.
A few weeks after the session with
Kline, I attended an oicial meeting of
“I suspect a challenger from the right. Let’s slaughter everyone on the right.”
the replication committee. Mancusi-
Ungaro opened the discussion about
“Cost of Living (Aleyda)” by saying,
“This work represents an emerging cat-
egory of object.”
Dana Miller agreed. “Plenty of works
in our collection involve a split between
a file and an output”—any film or dig-
ital work does. And many works might
require partial refabrication (re-creating,
for example, the nylon exterior of “Ice
Bag”). But with Kline’s sculpture, Miller
said, “we have no ‘correct’ physical work
to match new iterations against.”
The discussion circled back repeat-
edly to a central question about Kline’s
project: “What is the medium?” This
is both a deep philosophical query
and, for an archivist registering works
or a lawyer defining them in contracts,
an urgently practical one. The com-
mittee thinks of Kline as a maker of
objects, but much of the making has
been deferred into the future. Listen-
ing to the committee’s discussion,
however, I increasingly felt that Kline’s
medium, rather than digital files or
3-D prints, is museum conservation
itself. And it’s a rich medium. At a
time when so many artists outsource
fabrication, Mancusi-Ungaro and her
peers are conservators of skill: they
know a material’s chemical composi-
tion, its reflectance levels, its history
of usage (and if they don’t know they’ll
find out). In an era when many crit-
ics speak of the rise of curation as
art—when artists arrange objects as
often as they make them—conservation
is deeply curatorial, as conservators
choose which aspects of a work are
presented and how. To treat conser-
vation as it has traditionally been
treated—as the behind-the-scenes
work of minimally invasive techno-
crats, bursting onstage every few de-
cades during a cleaning controversy
and then receding into the shadows—
is to exclude essential questions about
culture and value from the domain of
contemporary art.
What will be the new tratteggio? I
don’t mean a technique for covering
losses in new media. I mean a strat-
egy for acknowledging the hand of
the institution in the life of the work—a
way of showing when and how and
why the museum has altered what it
displays. In the Whitney’s recently
concluded inaugural exhibition, the
museum label describing “Cost of Liv-
ing (Aleyda)” was somewhere between
insuicient and misleading. It said that
the objects on the cart were made by
3-D printing, but it said nothing about
the planned obsolescence of those par-
ticular objects; it did not indicate that
the work remains unfinished, await-
ing more advanced printers. (Cura-
tors, as if granting Duchamp’s pessi-
mism about conservation, call museum
labels “tombstones.”) This placard is
a placeholder until Kline and the Whit-
ney can settle on a more accurate de-
scription of the work. What’s clear is
that the traditional data—measure-
ments, materials, even dates—will be
inadequate.
These omissions seem particularly
significant given that the sculpture was
displayed in a gallery whose wall text
described “a revolution in digital tech-
nologies” that has altered the produc-
tion and consumption of images. The
exhibition in which “Cost of Living
(Aleyda)” was included was called
“America Is Hard to See.” Kline’s work
is, indeed, hard to see—one could argue
that, owing to the “resolution gap,” you
can’t yet see it at all.
The vast conservation spaces in the
new Whitney are visible from outside
the building—from the High Line,
from the street—as if to announce
that the institution will no longer treat
conservation as marginal. “Everybody
who walks in here feels that this space
is an endorsement of the importance
of conservation,” Mancusi-Ungaro
told me during my last visit. To me,
it feels like the bridge of the ship. And
I admire the mixture of openness and
expertise that I hear in the commit-
tee’s conversations. No single profes-
sional vocabulary—conservatorial,
curatorial, legal, archival—is more im-
portant than another; nobody pre-
tends that the questions that are en-
countered can be answered impartially
or finally.
We stood on her oice’s outdoor
deck overlooking the Hudson. I could
see happy-hour drinkers atop the Stan-
dard hotel; I watched a blue tugboat
push something, probably a trash
barge, slowly upriver. As we discussed
the sweep of her career, from Renais- “Michael self-published his novel and then bought up his own film rights.”
sance pigments to disposable 3-D
prints, I registered how the replica- • •
tion committee had dissolved much
of my initial skepticism about the
Whitney—how the tone of the place to lament, and one New York is al- that inconsistency somehow touching;
had changed for me. Instead of see- ways passing into another anyway. I don’t want these statues to look like
ing the new building as pure trium- Meanwhile, ISIS continues to make its the loudly painted figures of the
phalism, another “capital project” in a horrifying video art; I watched that miniature-golf courses of my youth,
sinking city, I’d grown aware of a gen- video of men in Mosul destroying even if they did.
uine exploratory current—a mixture statues with sledgehammers while In my favorite nineteenth- and
of boldness and caution, strength and my Q train idled on the Manhattan twentieth-century European-painting
flexibility. Bridge. Oxford and Harvard arche- galleries, I see van Goghs (many of
ologists are distributing thousands his paintings ruined, say some conser-

R ecently, I’ve been walking around

listening to Nina Simone’s ver-
sion of “Who Knows Where the Time
Goes.” The recording sounds partic-
ularly beautiful, because my head-
phones are staticky, a false patina that
interacts well with the lyrics and the
grain of Simone’s voice. (“I do not
count the time / for who knows where
the time goes?”) Everywhere I look,
I see development that’s hard to difer-
entiate from destruction: the prolif-
eration of Chase Bank branches; the
speakeasy storefronts bearing the com-
modified image of the Brooklyn that
preceded the Brooklyn they’re replac-
ing, as if gentrification were resto-
ration. I have little right to lament,
Ruskin-like, the passing of “the old
New York”—I’m part of the gentrifi-
cation it’s fashionable for gentrifiers
of 3-D cameras in Middle Eastern
conflict zones, hoping to capture im-
ages that will allow them to replicate
crucial artifacts once they are de-
stroyed. In Kline’s work, I discover (or
at least I project) vulnerability as well
as technophilia: rather than produc-
ing works that can be shattered or
lost, he is sending blueprints into the
future.
I wander through the Met, which
will soon take over the Whitney’s old
location on the Upper East Side. I walk
among the ancient sculptures that we
leave fragmented and paintless even
though we could try to restore the vivid
polychromy they originally possessed.
We refuse to undertake such resto-
ration, however, because it would dev-
astate the image of antiquity we’ve in-
herited from the Renaissance. I find
vators, by wax lining) and Braques
(many destroyed, supposedly, by var-
nish), and I wonder what to make of
the fact that several of the defining
aesthetic experiences of my life took
place in front of canvases that were
merely a “false description of the thing
destroyed.” At the moment, I find it
enlivening rather than depressing.
Spending time among the replicators
has helped me become aware of what
it’s easy to acknowledge intellectually
but more diicult to feel: that a piece
of art is mortal; that it is the work of
many hands, only some of which are
coeval with the artist; that time is the
medium of media; that one person’s
damage is another’s patina; that the
present’s notion of its past and future
are changeable fictions; that a museum
is at sea. 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 59
60 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY JON GRAY/GRAY318

S he visits others. Before they’re up,
dawn, she walks to the lake, lis-
tening to Bach, the first clavichord ex-
ercise, which she plans to have played
at her funeral someday, has had this
plan since she first heard the music
and, thinking of it, she weeps lightly.
The lake is whipped by wind and tides
(big lake) doing what tides do, she
never knows in or out. There is a man
standing on shore and a big dog swim-
ming back to him with stick in mouth.
This repeats. The dog does not tire.
She peels a swim cap onto her head,
goggles, enters the water, which is cold
but not shocking. Swims. High waves
in one direction. The dog is gone. Now
she is alone. There is a pressure to swim
well and to use this water correctly.
People think swimming is carefree and
efortless. A bath! In fact, it is full of
anxieties. Every water has its own rules
and ofering. Misuse is hard to explain.
Perhaps involved is that commonplace
struggle to know beauty, to know
beauty exactly, to put oneself right in
its path, to be in the perfect place to
hear the nightingale sing, see the groom
kiss the bride, clock the comet. Every
water has a right place to be, but that
place is in motion. You have to keep
finding it, keep having it find you. Your
movement sinks into and out of it with
each stroke. You can fail it with each
stroke. What does that mean, fail it.
After a while, she climbs out over
stones, puts on small flippers, reënters
the water. The diference is like the
diference between glimpsing a beau-
tiful thing and staring at it. Now she
can stream into the way of the water
and stay there. She stays. She is one of
the most selfish people she has ever
known, she thinks about this while
swimming and after, on the beach, in
her towel, shivering. It is an aspect of
personality, hard to change. Generous
gestures, when she attempts them, seem
to swipe through the lives of others like
a random bear paw, often making mat-
FICTION
1=1
BY ANNE CARSON
ters worse. And she finds no momen-
tum in sharing, in benevolence, in char-
ity, no interaction with another person
ever brought her a bolt of pure alive-
ness like entering the water on a still
morning with the world empty in every
direction to the sky. That first entry.
Crossing the border of consciousness
into, into what?
And then the (she searches for the
right word) instruction of balancing
along in the water, the ten thousand
adjustments of vivid action, the stain-
ing together of mind and time so that
she is no longer miles and miles apart
from her life, watching it diferently
unfold, but in it, as it, it. Not at all like
meditation—an analogy often thought-
lessly adduced—but, rather, almost fo-
rensic, as an application of attention,
while at the same time, to some de-
gree, autonomic. These modes do not
exclude each other, so swimming in-
structs. There is a stoniness. Water is
as diferent from air as from stones,
and you must find your way through
its structures, its ancientness, the his-
tory of an entity without response to
you and yet complicit in your obsti-
nate intrusion. You have no person-
hood there, and water is uninterested
in itself, stones don’t care if you tell
their story nicely. Your bowels, your
miraculously lucky life, your love of
your mother, your well-crafted simi-
les, all are lost in the slide from depth
to depth, pure, impure, compassion-
less. There is no renunciation in this
(cf. meditation), no striving to detach,
all these things, all the things you
can name, being simply gone. Mean-
ing, gone.
H er visit ends. Back at home, the
newspapers, front-page photos
of a train car in Europe jammed floor
to door with escaped victims of a war
zone farther south, people denied tran-
sit. Filthy families and souls in despair
pressed flat against one another in the
grip to survive, uncountable arms and
legs, torn-open eyes, locked in the train
all night waiting for dawn, a scene so
much the antithesis of her own morn-
ing she cannot enter it. What sense it
makes for these two mornings to exist
side by side in the world where we live,
should this be framed as a question,
would not be answerable by philoso-
phy or poetry or finance or by the shal-
lows or the deeps of her own mind,
she fears. Words like “rationale” be-
come, well, laughable. Rationales have
to do with composite things—mi-
grants, swimmers, the selfish, the
damned, the plural—but existence and
sense belong to singularity. You can
make sentences about a composite
thing, you can’t ask it to look back at
you. Sentences are strategic. They let
you of.
She goes downstairs and out to the
stoop, hoping it’s cooler there. Traic
crashes past. Chandler on the side-
walk making a chalk drawing. Com-
rade Chandler, she says. He doesn’t
look up. What’s the drawing? He goes
on chalking. His gaze is ahead and
within. He lives in the back of the
house somewhere, speaks not much,
draws a lot. She calls him Comrade
because she’d been reading Russian
books the summer she met him and
she thought him secretive. This was
an error. Secrecy implies a concern
for one’s own personality. You hardly
ever see Chandler enter a room, he’s
just there, or leave a room, he seeps
away, small tide of person, noticed as
a retraction.
She stands nearer. The drawing is
a pear tree. She can see the pears all
over it, small, perfect green chalk globes
with yellow-cream-white highlights.
She wants to lean down and bite them.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here,
Comrade, she says. He doesn’t answer.
Once they had a conversation, extend-
ing over many months, in broken bits,
about mushrooms. He’d said the thing
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 61
 he hated about being in prison was the
mushrooms. For several days, she won-
dered if he meant the food, but it didn’t
make sense they served mushrooms in
prison often enough to be a problem,
or if he had a damp cell with fungus
sprouting in the corners, but this, too,
seemed extreme, and gradually she un-
derstood him to mean he had been
able to see a patch of mushrooms, bo-
letus, from his window and he used to
go hunting for those in the woods with
his mother when he was a kid and it
made him sad. Not a mushroom fan-
cier herself, she didn’t have anything
subjective to say at the time, so she told
him John Cage was a mushroom hunter,
too, and wrote a book about it, a sort
of mushroom guide, that she could
lend him. Chandler didn’t answer. She
wasn’t sure he read books or knew who
John Cage was. Conversation is pre-
carious. Now, as she looks at the very
round, chalky pale pears, mushrooms
come to mind again, and she says, One
day, as I remember it, John Cage was
out mushrooming with his mother,
after an hour or so she turns to him
and says, We can always go to the store
and buy some real ones.
Silence from Chandler. He is add-
ing touches of red to the pear array,
here and there. Then suddenly all his
five teeth laugh. The laugh slams out
of him and is gone. He returns to chalk-
ing. Quickenough quickenough, mut-
tering to himself, and something she
can’t quite hear, had a kidscad butt-
ended, it sounds like. She returns to
the stoop and stands on the bottom
step. Evening now. Still hot. Long day,
Chandler, she says to the back of his
head. He’s moving down the sidewalk
to mark out a new drawing, red chalk
in hand. It will be a fox. He likes a fox
at the end of the day.
Upstairs, she finds herself thinking
again about the failure to swim. It can
be quantitative as well as qualitative.
Imagine how many pools, ponds, lakes,
bays, streams, stretches of swimmable
shore there are in the world right now,
probably half of them empty of swim-
mers, by reason of night or negligence.
Empty, still, perfect. What a waste,
what an extravagance—why not make
oneself accountable to that? Why not
swim in all of them? One by one or
all at once, geographically or concep-
62 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
tually, putting aside gleaming Burt
Lancaster, someone should be using
all that water. Across the level ocean
of her mind come floating certain ref-
ugees in a makeshift plastic boat so
crowded with passengers they are
stacked in layers and dropping over
the sides. She has seen this picture.
She has read that larger ships might
sail very near, that they might stop to
consider the woe and the odds, then
keep going. Sometimes bottles of water
or biscuits were tossed from the larger
ships before they started their engines
again. What could she put against the
desolation of that moment, watching
the ship start its engines again. What
is the price of desolation, and who
pays. Some questions don’t warrant a
question mark.
Passengers. To pass. To pass mus-
ter. To pass over. To be passed over.
To pass the buck. To pass the butter.
To pass out. To pass to one’s reward.
She is eating yogurt when the door-
bell rings. Didn’t know that bell
worked, she says, wiping her mouth
with her sleeve, as she gets to the door.
Comrade Chandler doesn’t answer.
He gestures with his head toward the
street. They descend. Yogurt on your
eyebrow, he says over his shoulder as
they go down. Oh, she says, thanks.
The finished fox drawing is under a
streetlamp. It glows. He has used some
sort of phosphorescent chalk, and the
fox, swimming in a lucent blue-green
jelly, has a look on its face of escap-
ing all possible explanations. She stares
at the blue-green. It has clearness, wet-
ness, coolness, the deep-lit self-im-
mersedness of water. You made a lake,
she says, turning to him, but he is gone,
now it is night, of to wherever he goes
when he is absolved. She stands awhile,
watching the fox swim, looking back
on the day, its images too strong, and
yet the soul—how does it ever get
peace in its mouth, close its mouth on
peace while alive. To be alive is just
this pouring in and out. Find, lose,
demand, obsess, move head slightly
closer. Try to swim without thinking
how strong it looks. Try to do what
you do without mockery of our heart-
broken little era. To mock is easy. She
feels a breeze on her forehead, night
wind. The fox is stroking splashlessly
forward. The fox does not fail. ♦

A VIEW FROM THE FRINGE
The John Birch Society and the rise of the radical right.
I have several reasons for keeping a
half-century-old “Goldwater for
President” poster on a wall of my uni-
versity oice. It serves as a reminder of
ABOVE: GUIDO SCARABOTTOLO
youthful political passion (I turned thir-
teen the day before Lyndon Johnson
crushed the Arizona senator at the
polls), and it pays tribute to the plain-
spoken candidate’s libertarian anti-
Communism. It also, I suppose, ofers
my own bit of micro-aggression to-
ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
BY THOMAS MALLON
ward those colleagues—which would
be all of them—who find Goldwater’s
world view, if they know it, even more
abhorrent than antique.
There were things about him not
to like, chief among them his consti-
tutionally based refusal to vote for the
1964 Civil Rights Act. There was also
his ongoing attempt, in the run-up to
the nomination and throughout the
Presidential campaign, to thread the
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
needle in the matter of the John Birch
Society. Founded in 1958 by the busi-
nessman Robert Welch, the society was
the most robust political fringe group
of its day, intent upon thwarting any
U.S.-Soviet coöperation, withdrawing
America from the United Nations, ex-
posing Communists in the federal gov-
ernment, and impeaching Chief Jus-
tice Earl Warren. Rick Perlstein, in his
2001 book, “Before the Storm: Barry
63
Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus,” summarizes the
trimming strategy: “Goldwater would
take the line that Robert Welch was a
crazy extremist but that the Society it-
self was full of fine, upstanding citi-
zens working hard and well for the
cause of Americanism.” Throughout
the 1964 race, Goldwater availed him-
self of Bircher money and manpower
at the risk of being soldered, by his op-
ponents, to the Birchers’ more addled
views, the most notorious of these being
Welch’s suggestion that Dwight Ei-
senhower had consciously acted as an
agent of the international Communist
conspiracy.
The association of Goldwater and
the society helped to take both of them
down. By 1968, Richard Nixon, a nee-
dle-threader extraordinaire, had cap-
tured the Presidency and cemented an
identification with conservatism de-
spite being loathed by the Birch lead-
ership for a lack of true belief. Nixon
had famously withheld his applause
when Goldwater declared, at the 1964
Convention, that “extremism in the de-
fense of liberty is no vice”; two years
before that, he had been badly bruised
by the society during his failed run
for the governorship of California.
(Screeching Bircher resistance during
the Republican primary had left him
exhausted for the general election.)
After Nixon reached the White House,
the dignified, mainstream suferings
of the “silent majority,” not the rants
of the Birchers, became the engine of
his feinting, flexible conservatism,
which pivoted most audaciously with
his decision to visit China in 1972.
No destination could have been more
infuriating to the J.B.S., China being
where its eponymous idol, a twenty-
seven-year-old American missionary
turned military intelligence oicer,
met his death at the hands of Mao
Zedong’s Red Army, on August 25,
1945—becoming, in Welch’s estima-
tion, “the first casualty” of the Cold
War. Welch did not discover Birch’s
story until 1953: in his brief book “The
Life of John Birch,” published the fol-
lowing year, he describes how “all alone,
in a committee room of the Senate
Oice Building in Washington, I was
reading the dry typewritten pages in
an unpublished report of an almost
64 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
forgotten congressional committee
hearing. Suddenly I was brought up
sharp by a quotation of some words an
army captain had spoken on the day
of his death eight years before.” Welch
tells his readers it is “no accident” that
neither he nor they heard of Birch until
years after his death—never mind that
Welch’s own awareness, however de-
ferred, came from reading the oicial
transcript of a legislative hearing.
In “Before the Storm,” Perlstein
describes Welch as a “very curious”
combination of “arrogance and inno-
cence,” and Terry Lautz, Birch’s most
recent biographer, believes that the
founder may have envied Birch’s reli-
gious certainty and seen in him “the
heroic figure that he always wanted
to be,” something beyond a prosper-
ous executive in his brother’s candy
business. (The James O. Welch Com-
pany’s most distinguished product was
Pom-Poms, my nickel-a-box confec-
tionary preference during the years of
Goldwater’s ascendancy.) The subti-
tle of Welch’s book—“In the story of
one American boy, the ordeal of his
age”—reveals an author who can’t wait
to be of to the races, and by the sec-
ond page of his foreword Welch is in
full gallop toward his goal of exem-
plarity: “even the purity of character
and nobility of purpose of a John Birch
can atone for only a small part of so
much human vileness. But there is strong
encouragement in finding so firm an
entry on the credit side.”
D. J. Mulloy, in “The World of the
John Birch Society,” published in 2014,
shows how Welch’s anti-New Deal
views, ordinary enough in a business-
man, contained an “embryonic” radi-
calism that expanded during the early
years of the Cold War. He describes
Welch’s “belief that both his great po-
litical heroes, Robert Taft and Joseph
McCarthy, had been ‘betrayed’ at cru-
cial points in their careers by the Re-
publican political establishment”—an
entity that remains a given to both far-
right Republicans and mainstream jour-
nalists. It has no clear counterpart in
the Democratic Party, which even in
periods of insurgency (Eugene Mc-
Carthy’s candidacy, say, or George Mc-
Govern’s) is rarely imagined to be op-
erating by directives whispered from
on high. Taft’s defeat by the Eisen-
hower vanguard at the 1952 Conven-
tion was especially embittering to
Welch, “providing one of the principal
launching pads for his career in con-
spiracism,” according to Mulloy. Two
years later, in “The Life of John Birch,”
Welch argued that “suppression” of the
truth about Birch’s killing was “a minor
chore” for the Communist conspiracy
within the American government.
For a full understanding of that con-
spiracy, Welch directed his readers to
“go back further”: past urgings by Dean
Acheson and Henry Morgenthau, in
1933, that the U.S. recognize the
U.S.S.R.; past the prior radicalization
of American labor unions; even past
the social-welfare experimentation of
Bismarck’s Germany, which resulted in
more “minute controls over the lives of
its subjects than had been seen since
the time of Constantine.” As the years
went on, Welch became lengthily fix-
ated on the Illuminati of the eighteenth
century. But, in 1954, the immediate
aim of his lives-of-the-saints prose
(“love for his parents that amounted
almost to reverence . . . his deep and
glowing afection for his brothers and
sisters”) was to make John Birch into
the first Bircher. The conditional-per-
fect tense provided much help: “he
would never have been willing to ac-
cept peace, even for a short time, when
purchased by a tolerance of such evils
as he would soon have seen the Com-
munists spreading across China and
the world.”
M ost treatments of Birch’s life
have tended to present it as a
short preface to the history of the so-
ciety carrying his name. But now, in
“John Birch: A Life” (Oxford), Terry
Lautz reverses the usual proportions
and pre sents a biography of Birch
in which the society figures as a sort
of epilogue. Lautz has the kind of
credentials—a trustee of the Harvard-
Yenching Institute; a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations—guar-
anteed to give fits to any Bircher past
or present, but his book is thorough,
judicious, and, except for a few over-
done academic references to Cold
War “paranoia,” respectful of larger his-
torical realities. Even conservatives
near the mainstream’s right bank will
be hard-pressed to see it as another
anti-anti-Communist undertaking.
John Birch went to China in 1940
not to fight Communists but to create
Christians. He was born in India, in
1918, during the overseas missionary
service of his parents, a three-year pe-
riod that ended in “frustration and dis-
appointment” for Ethel and George
Birch, whose evangelical zeal conflicted
with the more material progress being
pursued by the missionary Sam Hig-
ginbottom, their boss at the Allahabad
Agricultural Institute.
Birch grew up with six siblings in
New Jersey and Georgia, absorbing the
fundamentalist outlook of parents ever
more opposed to liberal American Prot-
estantism, and entered Mercer Univer-
sity, in Macon, Georgia, in 1935. Slim
and attractive, he was also, according
to Lautz, “obstinate, passionate, and
headstrong.” The most notable State-
side episode of his brief life involved
participating in a thirteen-member stu-
dent group against five professors whose
theological views they deemed hereti-
cal. The accusing students were a de-
cided minority on the Baptist campus,
and charges against the faculty were
dismissed after a ten-hour hearing.
Birch went on to graduate at the top
of his class but found himself “shunned”
by a portion of its members. He began
to feel that he had been used, provoked
into the fight by some of Macon’s townie
Baptist ministers. Lautz rejects argu-
ments that he was a temperamental ex-
tremist of the Robert Welch sort, and
some signs of a greater maturity and
forbearance in Birch’s postgraduate years
support this view, though it’s worth
noting that Welch, in his own biogra-
phy of Birch, says of the Mercer epi-
sode, “In the ardent certainty and fer-
vor of his own early faith, he had been
guilty of intolerance—or of what might
be so construed by many people.” This
is a mouthful coming from the founder.
Birch followed Mercer with a year
of study at a Fort Worth Bible insti-
tute run by J. Frank Norris, a funda-
mentalist radio preacher. Seeing great
potential in Birch, Norris kept track of
the evangelist after pointing him to the
Sweet Baptist Mission in Hangzhou,
China, where he arrived in September,
1940. After a year in the country, then
at war with Japan, Birch moved at some
peril to Shangrao, about two hundred
miles away. In time, he became skilled
in Mandarin, an attainment that likely
reflected not only professionalism but
also a respect for the Chinese that
exceeded the norm for proselytizers.
(There is evidence from Birch’s Geor-
gia youth that he recognized his own
racial prejudice and struggled to over-
come it.) Birch’s love of China, and his
oft-expressed intention to stay there,
eventually dissuaded his mother from
making eforts to repatriate his body.
By April, 1942, Birch had become
discouraged by illness, hunger, and mis-
sionary “bureaucrats” far from the scene.
He wrote a letter volunteering for ser-
vice, preferably as a chaplain, with the
American Military Mission to China.
Before getting a reply, he fortuitously
encountered some of Jimmy Doolit-
tle’s Raiders, who had landed a plane
near Quzhou after their famous air
raid on Tokyo. “They saw a gaunt West-
ern man with several-days’ growth of
beard,” Lautz writes, “and one of the
airmen exclaimed, ‘Well, Jesus Christ!’
The missionary replied, ‘That’s an aw-
fully good name, but I am not he.’ ”
Birch began playing what his biogra-
pher calls a “useful but limited role in
assisting the Doolittle Raiders”—aid
that would later be pufed up by J. Frank
Norris and, finally, by Welch—and
went on to serve as “the eyes of the
14th Air Force,” the Flying Tigers, led
“I dreamed I was being chased by a giant standardized test.”
by General Claire Lee Chennault. He
retained his ambition to do evangeli-
cal work in Tibet once the war ended,
but by the middle of 1945 he was
depleted by malaria—“physically and
mentally exhausted.” When he received
a final military assignment in August—
just after the Japanese surrender was
announced and at the beginning of re-
newed conflict between the Chinese
Nationalist and Communist forces—
he was, Lautz writes, “showing signs
of paranoia” and possible post-trau-
matic stress disorder.
This last mission involved search-
ing for documents left behind by the
Japanese in Jiangsu Province and as-
sessing the state of the local railways
and roads. Birch’s party ran into a group
of Red Army soldiers; the Americans
were told to disarm. Birch became angry
and insulting; things quickly escalated
and he was shot. Immediately after-
ward, at least one of the Communist
soldiers mutilated his face “beyond rec-
ognition with a bayonet or knife.” Mao
Zedong apologized for the killing to
the American general Albert Wede-
meyer, but came away from their meet-
ing feeling “incensed and humiliated”
by Wedemeyer’s insistence on “being
able to send American troops anywhere
in China without necessarily inform-
ing the Chinese beforehand.”
Lautz conscientiously presents the

“Have you tried looking in the ocean?”
• •
killing as a fog-of-war incident in which
Birch’s “frustration and exhaustion” may
have impaired his judgment. Still, if
the author’s evenhanded efort shows
more respect to John Birch than to the
ideological martyrology that followed,
it is remarkable that he finds it neces-
sary to note how “all of the damage
done by the likes of McCarthy and
Welch paled by comparison with the
massive ideological witch hunts in
China under Mao.” The inclusion of
this wildly self-evident stipulation—a
sort of bland, unconscious concession—
says something, in its small way, about
the long-standing pervasiveness of
American anti-anti-Communism, a
quiescent orthodoxy that drove some
conservatives to extremes.
There was indeed something slip-
shod, if not sinister, about the initial
reports of Birch’s death: Ethel Birch
was first told that her son had been
killed by “stray bullets.” Sturdier infor-
mation came her way later, but requests
for a full accounting from the Penta-
gon and the O.S.S. left her convinced
of a whitewash and even susceptible to
the theory that his own government
66 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
had ordered his murder. She gave Welch
her permission to use John Birch’s name
for the society, but she hoped to see her
son accorded a religious rather than a
political martyrdom.
H eadquartered in Belmont, Mas-
sachusetts, near both Harvard
and the Welch candy company, the so-
ciety’s membership peaked, in the early
to mid-nineteen-sixties, at between sixty
thousand and a hundred thousand. In-
structed by the J.B.S. “blue book” and
kept up to date by its magazine, Amer-
ican Opinion, members participated,
during the organization’s first decade,
in those eforts to cancel U.S.-Soviet
summits and impeach Chief Justice
Warren, circulating petitions, conduct-
ing letter-writing campaigns, and screen-
ing informational filmstrips. But the
Birch leadership fought its deadliest
battles against non-rogue elements of
the conservative movement. Trying to
thread the same needle as Goldwater,
William F. Buckley, Jr., had National
Review show Welch the conservative
door in 1962; three years later, the mag-
azine shut it on the whole society.
D. J. Mulloy sees the Birchers as
having “played a crucial role in conser-
vatism’s revival” because of these inter-
necine smackdowns: the society helped
“by providing something for more ‘re-
spectable’ conservatives to define them-
selves against and diferentiate them-
selves from.” This seems a stretch: the
more that mainstream conservatives
downplayed the Birchers’ influence, the
more efectively liberal-minded media
and politicians tended to overestimate
it—and to condemn moderate con-
servatives for insufficiently distancing
themselves from the society. What
Mulloy calls the society’s “uncanny
ability . . . to draw attention to itself
and its causes and activities” can bet-
ter be attributed to the Birchers’ lib-
eral opponents than to themselves.
Conservatives both mainstream and
fringe were surrounded by what Mulloy,
Perlstein, and others see as a much
larger civic “consensus.” E. J. Dionne,
in his new book, “Why the Right Went
Wrong: Conservatism—From Gold-
water to the Tea Party and Beyond”
(Simon & Schuster), recalls the con-
servative strategist Richard Viguerie
explaining to him how direct-mail
fund-raising, which came of age in the
Goldwater campaign, “created lines of
communication among conservatives
unimpeded by mainstream media.” If
moderates and liberals didn’t feel sim-
ilarly impeded, it’s because by and large
they weren’t.
The aggrieved sense of being di-
vorced from the nation’s ethos helped
to push some conservatives beyond the
pale, into the exhilarating battle (and
fellowship) that the Birch Society, op-
erating locally in kafeeklatsch-size
chapters, seemed to ofer. Claire Con-
ner, in “Wrapped in the Flag: A Per-
sonal History of America’s Radical
Right” (2013), tells of growing up in
Chicago during the fifties and sixties
after “the John Birch Society became
my parents’ lifelong obsession.” (Her fa-
ther, Jay, she says, spent thirty-two years
on the society’s National Council.) Con-
ner’s memoir has its afecting moments,
but much of its dialogue is recalled with
a kind of camera-ready convenience
meant to penetrate the thickest skull:
“Suddenly Dad erupted, ‘The god-
damned liberal press smeared us again.’
He raged on about extremism, loyalty,
and conspiracies. ‘We are patriots!’ he
screamed. ‘Do you hear me? We are
patriots! ’ ”
Jay Conner particularly admired
Fred Koch, a Bircher businessman
whose travels in the Soviet Union during
the nineteen-thirties engendered a ha-
tred of Communism and organized
labor. Claire Conner’s treatment of
Koch’s now famous sons, Charles and
David, devotes no attention to how
they have moved away from their fa-
ther’s more outré positions. She tends
to ring the sort of conspiracy bells her
parents once did, as when she describes
the funding of President George W.
Bush’s Inaugural balls in 2001:“Much
later”—really?—“America learned that
a lot of that cash had come from big
corporations that did business, or
wanted to do business, with the fed-
eral government.”
Conner is routinely confounded by
revelations of the nefarious, but when
she learns, in 2007, “that the F.B.I. had
investigated the John Birch Society as
part of its Subversive Trends of Cur-
rent Interest Program,” she expresses
none of the alarm that typically greets
the discovery of similar Cold War sur-
veillance of the left. The former sort
can be presented, even in Birch histo-
ries less personal than hers, as pardon-
able or consoling. Mulloy may seem to
have reservations about how Governor
Pat Brown had California’s attorney
general investigate the society’s activi-
ties in 1961, but when Perlstein asserts
that President Kennedy “ordered an
aide to begin preparing monthly re-
ports on the right” and “asked the di-
rector of audits at the IRS to gather in-
telligence on organizations receiving
tax exemptions,” he doesn’t break into
a new paragraph, let alone a sweat.
The most interesting facet of Con-
ner’s unfortunate youth involves her hav-
ing been a student at the University of
Dallas, and a witness to the Presidential
motorcade, on November 22, 1963. “Did
the Birch Society have anything to do
with this?” she asks her father, just after-
ward, over the phone. “He hung up with-
out answering,” Conner tells the reader;
the gesture is meant to be read as fur-
tiveness, not indignation. For fifty years,
the judgment that the far right was at
least indirectly guilty of Kennedy’s kill-
ing has been a mainstream position. From
68 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
William Manchester’s “The Death of a
President” (1967) to Bill Minutaglio and
Steven L. Davis’s “Dallas 1963” (2013),
the argument is made that a hateful cli-
mate created by extreme conservatives—
particularly General Edwin Walker, a
Dallas resident and perhaps the most fa-
mous Bircher after Welch—somehow
hastened the President’s killing. It sim-
ply does not matter that Lee Harvey Os-
wald, a defector to the Soviet Union, had
espoused an ill-tutored form of Marx-
ism from the time he was a teen-ager, or
that seven months before killing Ken-
nedy, Oswald, with the same rifle, shot
at and nearly succeeded in killing Walker.
In April, we are supposed to believe, he
was shooting at hate; by November, he
was shooting from it.
J. Allen Broyles, in a book published
the year after Kennedy’s death, “The
John Birch Society: Anatomy of a Pro-
test,” wrote, “The assassination of Pres-
ident Kennedy brought home to all
thoughtful people our laxity in allow-
ing the creation of an atmosphere in
which assassination is not only possi-
ble, but almost expected.” Broyles makes
three references to General Walker in
his slender volume, but none to Os-
wald’s attempt on his life. “Commu-
nism killed Kennedy” remains one of
the few defensible statements that the
John Birch Society ever issued. Of
course, Welch added his own evi-
dence-free explanation of how Oswald
received his orders from the American
portion of the international Commu-
nist conspiracy.
I n 1989, the John Birch Society moved
its headquarters to Appleton, Wis-
consin, the hometown of Senator
Joseph McCarthy, a fact usually men-
tioned with just-sayin’ brevity in his-
tories of the J.B.S. Reporting from the
time of the move, however, indicates that
the choice of a new location derived from
its proximity to the business enterprises
of the society’s C.E.O. at the time,
G. Allen Bubolz.
The diminished society can also
today be found on the Web, its friendly
home-page banner showing, when I
clicked my way to it, a happy, ethni-
cally diverse group of young people,
one of them literally wrapped in the
American flag. Issues highlighted by
the Web site include energy (support
for the nuclear variety), immigration
(a call for the enforcement of “existing
laws”), and trade agreements (opposi-
tion to the Trans-Pacific Partnership).
None of these positions are especially
radical, but it takes only a minute to
find the rabbit holes: “Agenda 21 seeks
for the government to curtail your free-
dom to travel as you please, own a gas-
powered car, live in suburbs or rural
areas, and raise a family”; the fight
against ISIS “is a charade to help build
the New World Order”; the most trou-
bling aspect of “Our Nation’s Expand-
ing Refugee Program” appears to be
“the UN’s role” in it. One page on the
site displays “Myths vs. Facts” about
the society, an exercise that ends up
striking a visitor as less defensive than
vestigial: six of the nine myths, includ-
ing how “the JBS considers public water
fluoridation part of a Communist
mind-control plot,” relate to contro-
versies from the society’s half-century-
old heyday.
Scholars and survivors of the soci-
ety are frequently determined, beyond
what is warrantable by the facts, to see
the spectre of Birchism in any full-
throated contemporary manifestation
of conservatism. In 2008, with the elec-
tion of Barack Obama and “a financial
crisis that paralleled the Great Depres-
sion,” Claire Conner found herself, as
so often, stunned, this time by a reali-
zation that “the slumbering John Birch
Society was about to be born again.”
In “Why the Right Went Wrong, ”
D i onne quotes Columbia professor
Alan F. Westin’s prediction from 1962—
“The future of the Birch Society and
the radical right will very largely be
shaped by the way business, conserva-
tives, and the Republican Party police
the boundaries of their movement”—
and updates it with the observation that
“those boundaries were to become quite
porous with the rise of the Tea Party.”
Even the levelheaded Terry Lautz, in
describing Ted Cruz’s September, 2013,
filibuster against funding for Obamacare,
declares that “this efort to restrict gov-
ernment in the name of protecting in-
dividual freedoms was entirely consis-
tent with both the principles and tactics
once advocated by Robert Welch.” Cruz’s
of-the-deep-end positions on a num-
ber of matters, including climate change,
are amply and regularly on display, but
how, exactly, does the use of parliamen-
tary procedure by an elected senator
square with Welch’s pamphleteering
fantasies about twenty-five thousand
traitors in our midst?
“All thoughtful people”—Broyles’s
phrase for that civic consensus—might
ask themselves if they sometimes
aren’t guilty of erasing the boundaries
they would have responsible conser-
vatives “police” by exhibiting a ten-
dency to see and speak of conserva-
tism as a single fairly despicable
continuum. It was Goldwater who
walked conservatives into a trap fifty
years ago, embracing the word “extrem-
ism” without in fact being an extrem-
ist himself. The result was to make the
term forever available as a kind of
branding iron to be applied from left
to right.
These are deeply depressing times
for moderate conservatives who are do-
nating their time and money and shred-
ded nerves to fending of the takeover
of the Republican Party by far-right
elements and non-ideological egoma-
nia. As they do so, they nonetheless
find themselves routinely equated with
the very forces to which they are in-
tramurally opposed. D. J. Mulloy’s
book quotes Robert Welch’s old com-
plaint that he was excoriated while his
“compatriots on the ideological battle
ground”—the mainstream conserva-
tives of his day—were “accorded by the
Left all the respect and privileges of a
‘loyal opposition.’ ” Today’s temperate
conservative feels less secure of such
status. He listens to his party being
called “crazy” and accused of “insanity”
in editorials by the nation’s newspa-
per of record; finds himself tiptoeing
through the watch-your-language world
of the American university (where the
Free Speech Movement took of during
the year of the Goldwater campaign);
and endures more and more instances
of left-wing triumphalism, such as the
New York City Council’s recent proc-
lamation honoring Ethel Rosenberg’s
one-hundredth birthday. Clinging to
neither guns nor religion, and anything
but blind to red-state fevers past and
present, he wonders only if those on
the other side of our ever more emo-
tive and reflexive politics can at least
see him apart from company he isn’t
even keeping. 
BRIEFLY NOTED
THE BIG GREEN TENT, by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the
Russian by Polly Gannon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Spanning
the period from the fifties until the collapse of the Soviet
Union, this epic chronicle of dissidence daringly subverts the
reader’s expectations of the classic Russian novel. The story
begins during the school years of three promising friends
initiated into the cult of great literature by a new teacher.
Gradually, the bildungsroman unravels into a web of inter-
connected stories, depicting the friends’ lives, and the lives
of their families, lovers, friends, and neighbors from a mul-
tiplicity of angles. The most memorable and afecting por-
trait is that of a daughter of Party oicials who finds her life’s
purpose in the production and dissemination of samizdat.
MARTIN JOHN, by Anakana Schofield (Biblioasis). The titular
character of this frenetic, risk-taking novel is an obsessive
public masturbator (an “inadequate molester”) who has a
complicated relationship with his “mam.” He is one of the
book’s narrators, along with his mam and women he has
touched. Through jumbled prose, often formatted as poetry,
we discover him to be Pynchonian in his conspiratorial sus-
picions, and Beckettian in voice. Deliberately cryptic and
bleakly funny, the novel puts you inside the mind of a per-
son you’d strive to avoid in real life, but also points to the
fundamental elusiveness of character. “There are simply
going to be things we won’t know,” Schofield writes. “It’s
how it is. As it is in life must it be unto the page.”
CUSTER’S TRIALS, by T. J. Stiles (Knopf ). Romantic, flamboyant,
imperious, priapic, courageous, foolhardy, ambitious, George
Armstrong Custer is most famous for his death, but this sym-
pathetic biography attempts to demythologize and reassess a
complicated figure who both embodied and chafed against a
modernizing society. Stiles captures his subject with verve. As
a political player, Custer attempted to follow where the wind
blew but often misread the weather; his published writing was
characterized more by floridity than by clarity; his investment
decisions approached pure gambling. Yet in war he was “de-
cisive, not reckless; shrewd, not foolish.” Stiles marks the irony
that, despite Custer’s acumen on the battlefield, he is most
often remembered as a leader who took his men to slaughter.
BLOOD BENEATH THE SKIN, by Andrew Wilson (Scribner). “My
work is like a biography of my own personality,” the late
fashion designer Alexander McQueen said, a thought that
informs the structure of this account of his life and work.
Detailed discussion of his sometimes macabre runway shows
reveals a man obsessed with death and spectacle and haunted
by childhood sexual abuse. Wilson reads in McQueen’s
clothes a complicated relationship with women. Some crit-
ics, observing the near-brutality of the shows—one featured
a model whose mouth was splayed open by metal braces—
charged McQueen with misogyny, but Wilson sees the more
extreme costumes as “armor,” a “sartorial force field,” and,
perhaps, an invitation to empowerment.
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 69

MUSICAL EVENTS
PIANO THEATRE
Igor Levit and Evgeny Kissin revise the recital format.
BY ALEX ROSS
I n the middle of December, the city
experienced some peculiar pianist
behavior. At the Drill Hall of the Park
Avenue Armory, the fast-rising Rus-
sian-German pianist Igor Levit played
the “Goldberg Variations” on a gradu-
ally rotating platform, as part of a clas-
sical-music installation designed by the
artist Marina Abramović. At Carnegie
Hall, the established virtuoso Evgeny
Kissin intermingled pieces by early-
twentieth-century Jewish composers
with his own dramatic recitations of
Yiddish-language poems by I. L. Peretz.
These departures from routine were
welcome. The recital format has be-
come so robotically predictable that we
At Carnegie, Kissin played Jewish-themed pieces and recited Yiddish poetry.
70 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016
tend to forget its origins in the flam-
boyant self-display of Paganini and
Liszt. The very idea of a piano “recital,”
introduced by Liszt in 1840, took in-
spiration from stage monologues and
poetry readings.
The “Goldberg” project seems to
have arisen from a historical misun-
derstanding. In an interview printed
in the program book, Abramović de-
clares that “classical-music concerts
have always been the same for centu-
ries.” In fact, as accounts of Liszt’s re-
citals show, they have undergone enor-
mous changes in the past hundred and
fifty years. What had been a rather un-
ruly afair, with listeners swooning as
musicians swanned about, became an
ostentatiously becalmed ritual. Abra-
mović, a performance-art celebrity who
has lately been concerned with coun-
tering digital-age distractions, did noth-
ing to disrupt this latter-day norm;
indeed, she further sacralized the for-
mat. Listeners were told to place elec-
tronic devices in a locker, take a seat
in the Drill Hall, and meditate in si-
lence for more than half an hour
while the automated platform contain-
ing Levit and his piano glided to the
middle of the space. Noise-cancelling
headphones were provided for the pur-
pose of “plunging audience members
into a sonically neutral and calming
state.”
I found this purgative exercise un-
helpful. Far from being calming, the
headphones gave me a panicky sensa-
tion of being isolated and entombed.
If we were supposed to unplug from
modernity, why were we being outfit-
ted with yet another gadget? At the
risk of incurring the artist’s wrath, I
removed the headphones and relaxed
into the Armory’s reverberant acous-
tic, which resembled that of a cathe-
dral after hours. I thought of Cage’s
“4'33'',” which is derived from the re-
alization that there is no such thing as
total silence: rather than trying to shut
out extraneous noise, we should absorb
it. Abramović’s concept seemed to be
more a symptom of the culture of dis-
traction than an antidote to it.
More successful was the lighting
environment, which was designed by
Urs Schönebaum, a veteran of the in-
ternational opera circuit. (He recently
worked on William Kentridge’s “Lulu,”
at the Met.) It consisted of a few sim-
ple but striking elements: rectangular
illuminated screens on each wall; a
thin band of light extending above the
rectangles; and a light aixed under-
neath the keyboard lid. In the course
of the performance, these lights slowly
dimmed. The scheme succeeded in di-
recting the audience’s attention toward
the pianist while preserving an aware-
ness of the Armory’s immensity. The
band of light was like a horizon be-
hind which an artificial sun had set.
The conceit came to life once Levit
began to play. He is among the finest
young pianists before the public, one
in whom impeccable technique is allied
ILLUSTRATION BY RUI TENREIRO
with inborn musicality. Having an-
nounced himself, three years ago, with
a recording of Beethoven’s last piano
sonatas, he has shown even greater am-
bition in releasing, on the Sony label,
a three-disk set of monumental varia-
tions: Bach’s “Goldberg,” Beethoven’s
“Diabelli,” and Frederic Rzewski’s daz-
zling 1975 fantasia on “The People
United Will Never Be Defeated,” a
Chilean anti-authoritarian anthem. He
delivers this thunderous program with
instinctive authority. His collaboration
with Abramović signals that he won’t
be content with a conventional busi-
ness-class career, shuttling from one
élite venue to the next.
Levit’s recording of the “Goldberg”
finds a middle ground between two
historical poles: the antic manner of
Glenn Gould and the spaciousness of
Rosalyn Tureck. A shade cool and re-
served, he lacks the geniality of Mur-
ray Perahia, on a classic Sony disk, or
the playfulness of Jeremy Denk, on
Nonesuch. Yet Levit, as in his Beetho-
ven performances, shows an extraordi-
nary ability to coax a singing line from
the piano, and he introduces myriad
subtleties into the purr of counterpoint,
often inserting elegant little ornaments
on the repeats. The efect is of strong
emotion held in check by a magiste-
rial intellect.
At the Armory, Levit played more
freely, lingering over certain phrases as
if he wanted to hear them echo through
the space. The dimming of the lights
perhaps led him to emphasize the deep-
ening gloom of the minor-key episodes,
in which chromaticism entwines the
rock-solid bass line underlying the cycle.
But he hardly faltered in the faster-
tempo variations; if anything, he drove
them harder. The wonder of the “Gold-
berg” is that it seems to darken and
brighten simultaneously: a few short
minutes after the cosmic sadness of the
so-called “black pearl” variation, Bach
unleashes the Quodlibet, in which old
folk songs irreverently intermingle. Levit
caught that awesome doubleness: in
his enigmatic brilliance, he is Bachian
to the core.
T o my ears, Kissin has long been
something of a cipher: a pianist of
staggering native skill who has never
quite outgrown his wunderkind status.
For many people, the skill is suicient:
Kissin is an artist-in-residence at Car-
negie this season, and in November he
accomplished the rare feat of selling
out two iterations of the same recital.
At the second, a hyperkinetic “Appas-
sionata” elicited a loud ovation. For
those who may have wondered what
lies behind the bashful-virtuoso façade,
the Jewish-themed program in De-
cember was a revelation, foreground-
ing the player’s passions. You needn’t
have looked at a personal Web site,
which is weighted with links to polit-
ical articles on Israel and terrorism, to
know that his engagement with Jew-
ish culture is profound.
The recitations were by no means
a vanity project. Kissin has mastered
the art of declamation, his speech as-
suming songlike character, his grasp of
emotional arcs acute. More than at the
Abramović afair, there was a sense of
modernity melting away, as a venera-
ble oral culture rematerialized. Peretz’s
poems are intricate creations, fusing a
German Romantic vocabulary with a
rhapsodic Russian manner. As far as I
could tell, Kissin was alert to their nu-
ances of irony and melancholy. A bit
of theatre might have heightened the
occasion: I wish the lights had been
lowered, as at the Armory.
No less bracing was to see Kissin
engage with repertory far outside his—
or anyone’s—usual fare. The program
consisted of Ernest Bloch’s Piano So-
nata, Alexander Veprik’s Second So-
nata, Alexander Krein’s “Suite Dansée,”
and, for an encore, Mikhail Milner’s
“Farn Opsheyd” (“Before Separating”).
All the pieces mixed Jewish folk ma-
terial with early-twentieth-century
modernist gestures: they often smacked
of Bartók in the shtetls. I was espe-
cially taken with the Veprik sonata,
with its hammering, double-octave in-
sistence on intervals of a fourth and a
tritone. The Yiddishkeit emerged only
at the end, and in a hard-nosed, per-
cussive fashion. Strong in itself, the
score was further elevated by the co-
lossal conviction that Kissin brought
to it.
The pianist is about to take a sab-
batical from performing; as he recently
told Vivien Schweitzer, of the Times,
he plans to study repertory ranging
from Bach to Bartók. The next phase
of his career may turn out to be the
liveliest—the one in which he forges a
distinct identity. At the end of the Car-
negie evening, he ofered a short poem
of his own, “Ani Maymin,” or “Credo.”
It closed with a line that every touring
artist can take to heart: “If I am like
the others, who will be like me?” 

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THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 11, 2016 71

 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 Mick Stevens, must be received by Sunday,
January 10th. The finalists in the December 21st & 28th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in
this week’s contest, in the January 25th issue. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Any resident of the United States,
Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or over can
enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THE WINNING CAPTION

THE FINALISTS

“Now who’s laughing all the way?”

Monte Vognsen, Madison, Wis.

“I just think it sends the wrong message.” “Our contract has a subordinate Claus.”
Jean-Marie Gard, Lexington, Mass. Benjamin Marcus, New York City

“This will go down in history.”

Alvin Cannon, Jr., Richmond, Va.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”