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Even before the pandemic, the whole fashion industry had started to unravel. What happens
now that no one has a reason to dress up? By Irina Aleksander
 August 9, 2020

7 Screenland Peer Review By Jason Zengerle / 11 Talk Padma Lakshmi By David Marchese / 14 The Ethicist Is It OK That I Haven’t Told My Parents I Was Fired?
By Kwame Anthony Appiah / 16 Letter of Recommendation Street-Casting By Jon Gluck / 18 Eat Rethinking Sourdoughs By Tejal Rao

20 Doctor vs. Doctor

By Susan Dominus / How much
freedom should physicians have
in treating Covid-19 patients?
The question has opened up a civil
war in some hospitals.

28 Sweatpants Forever
By Irina Aleksander / Even before
the pandemic, the whole fashion
industry had started to unravel.
What happens now that no one has
a reason to dress up?

34 Solitary Soul
By Megan K. Stack / In 2013, Australia
sent hundreds of would-be asylum
seekers to a secretive offshore
detention center. Then one of the
detainees, a journalist named
Behrouz Boochani, told the world all
about it.
Photograph by Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

A bag of frozen convalescent

plasma at Long Island Jewish
Medical Center in Queens. The
plasma, collected from the blood of
Covid-19 patients, is a still-unproven
treatment for the disease, but
American patients have received
tens of thousands of doses. Page 20.

4 Contributors / 5 The Thread / 10 Poem / 14 Judge John Hodgman / 17 Tip / 41, 44, 46 Puzzles / 41 Puzzle Answers

Behind the Cover Gail Bichler, creative director: ‘‘In this week’s cover story, Irina Aleksander explores why this moment belongs to sweatpants and is
fundamentally changing the fashion industry. We feel the bold yellow type plays off the humorous spirit of the image of a sweatpants flag, flying triumphantly.’’
Photograph by Stephanie Gonot for The New York Times. Prop styling: Machen Machen Studio.

Copyright © 2020 The New York Times 3

Contributors

Irina Aleksander ‘‘Sweatpants Forever,’’ Irina Aleksander is a contributing writer for the Editor in Chief JAKE SILVERSTEIN
Page 28 magazine. Her last cover story was about Deputy Editors JESSICA LUSTIG,
BILL WASIK
Oliver Stone’s quest to make a biopic about Managing Editor ERIKA SOMMER
Edward Snowden. In this issue, she writes Creative Director GAIL BICHLER
Director of Photography KATHY RYAN
about the collapse of the fashion-industry bubble Art Director BEN GRANDGENETT
amid Covid-19 and one designer who saw it Features Editor ILENA SILVERMAN
Politics Editor CHARLES HOMANS
coming. ‘‘I wanted to write about fashion as if Culture Editor SASHA WEISS
it were any other industry in crisis, such as Digital Director BLAKE WILSON
Story Editors NITSUH ABEBE,
finance or film, and tell this incredible story of how SHEILA GLASER,
it all got out of hand,’’ Aleksander says. ‘‘Scott CLAIRE GUTIERREZ,
JAZMINE HUGHES,
Sternberg was so forthcoming about his own rise LUKE MITCHELL,
and fall in the fashion system that I realized DEAN ROBINSON,
WILLY STALEY
he was a compelling guide to take us through it.’’
At War Editor LAUREN KATZENBERG
Assistant Managing Editor JEANNIE CHOI
Susan Dominus ‘‘Doctor vs. Doctor,’’ Susan Dominus is a staff writer at The New Associate Editors IVA DIXIT,
KYLE LIGMAN
Page 20 York Times Magazine. She last wrote about the Poetry Editor NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
audiobook stardom of Eduardo Ballerini. Staff Writers SAM ANDERSON,
EMILY BAZELON,
RONEN BERGMAN,
TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER,
C. J. CHIVERS,
PAMELA COLLOFF,
Stephanie Gonot ‘‘Sweatpants Forever,’’ Stephanie Gonot is a Los Angeles-based NICHOLAS CONFESSORE,
Page 28 photographer and director known for her use of SUSAN DOMINUS,
MAUREEN DOWD,
vivid colors and playful style. NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES,
JENEEN INTERLANDI,
MARK LEIBOVICH,
JONATHAN MAHLER,
DAVID MARCHESE,
WESLEY MORRIS,
Megan K. Stack ‘‘Solitary Soul,’’ Megan K. Stack is an author and a journalist living JENNA WORTHAM
Page 34 in Washington. Her most recent book is ‘‘Women’s At War Reporter JOHN ISMAY
Digital Art Director KATE L A RUE
Work: A Personal Reckoning With Labor, Designers CLAUDIA RUBÍN,
Motherhood, and Privilege.’’ She last wrote about RACHEL WILLEY
Deputy Director of Photography JESSICA DIMSON
the coronavirus outbreak in Singapore.
Senior Photo Editor AMY KELLNER
Photo Editor KRISTEN GEISLER
Jason Zengerle Screenland, Jason Zengerle is a writer at large for the Contributing Photo Editor DAVID CARTHAS
Photo Assistant PIA PETERSON
Page 7 magazine. He last wrote about Joe Biden’s Copy Chief ROB HOERBURGER
running for president during the pandemic. Copy Editors HARVEY DICKSON,
DANIEL FROMSON,
MARGARET PREBULA,
ANDREW WILLETT
Head of Research NANDI RODRIGO
Research Editors ALEX CARP,
CYNTHIA COTTS,

Dear Reader: What Is the Best ‘Fast and Furious’ Movie? JAMIE FISHER,
LU FONG,
TIM HODLER,
The magazine publishes the results of a study conducted online in March 2020 by The ROBERT LIGUORI,
New York Times’s research-and-analytics department, reflecting the opinions of 2,250 LIA MILLER,
STEVEN STERN,
subscribers who chose to participate. MARK VAN DE WALLE,
BILL VOURVOULIAS
Production Chief ANICK PLEVEN
‘‘The Fast and the Furious’’ 30% Production Editors PATTY RUSH,
HILARY SHANAHAN
Managing Director, MARILYN McCAULEY
‘‘2 Fast 2 Furious’’ 4% Specialty Printing
Manager, Magazine Layout THOMAS GILLESPIE
Editorial Administrator LIZ GERECITANO BRINN
Editorial Assistant ALEXANDER SAMAHA
‘‘The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift’’ 7%

‘‘Fast & Furious’’ 15% NYT MAG LABS

Editorial Director CAITLIN ROPER

‘‘The Fate of the Furious’’ 2% Art Director DEB BISHOP
Senior Editor ADAM STERNBERGH
NYT for Kids Editor AMBER WILLIAMS
Staff Editor MOLLY BENNET
‘‘The Fast and the Furious Present: Hobbs & Shaw’’ 6% Associate Editor LOVIA GYARKYE
Designer NAJEEBAH AL-GHADBAN
Project Manager LAUREN M C CARTHY
Did not answer 36%

4 8.9.20
 The Thread

Readers respond to the 7.26.2020 issue.
RE: CLIMATE MIGRATION
Abrahm Lustgarten wrote about how climate
change is leading to a destabilizing migration
of populations.
This was a beautiful piece of writing, and
it explains in great detail the impacts of
the choices we, as a country, make today.
I especially appreciated the graphics and
how well the writers explained that the
effects of climate change go far beyond
sea-level rise.
Marie
RE: KARIBA DAM
Namwali Serpell wrote about the history of
the dam in the Zambezi River Valley.
sensitive article. I felt love for the place,
the people and the culture and sadness
in thinking about the history, particular-
ly that the Tonga people were forcefully
removed from fertile land and made to
resettle on infertile land that could not
support them. I hope and pray that a
workable solution can be found.
Addy, Michigan
I started reading this
RE: CÓRDOBA PROVINCE
Noah Gallagher Shannon wrote about
the fearsome thunderstorms in northern
Argentina and the scientists who chase them.
Amazing article. We passed through the
area in February, on a double-decker bus
from Mendoza to Buenos Aires. Indeed,
there were powerful storms to the north
of us — in the direction of Córdoba.
Like Patagonia, it is a vast area of open
spaces where one learns to anticipate and
respect the weather.
Dirk Durstein, Wilmington, Del.
I left the front page of the paper feeling
depressed about the world, but this article
has completely reinvigorated me. Science
got us out of the darkness of superstition
and religious overbearing. It will do so
again. Thank you for this wonderful piece!
It is not a contradiction in terms to say,
‘‘Thank God for science.’’
Amy Haible, Harpswell, Maine
I was part of the RELAMPAGO team
leading the hydrometeorological impacts.
You made me relive this amazing expe-
rience. Beautifully written article and
amazing photographs!
Francina, Champaign
THE STORY,
The best I have read on the subject of
ON INSTAGRAM ‘‘monster storms’’ because of the thor-
oughly diagramed layout of how these
and stopped, I got
storms form, how meteorologists are
so sad. I will finish it. adapting to acquire and expand their
@ellejack01 predictive facility and the inclusion of
the effects of terrain in storm formation.
The photos perfectly support the article,
to where they merge with it.
Allen, Philadelphia
While I second the positive comments on
the article 100 percent, I’m struck by the
quality of the photography, in and of itself
and in its support of the concepts. Black
and white was the way to go for emphasiz-
ing the sky over the land and for bringing
out the details of the cloud structure. I
love the composition that shows just how

An amazing article, thanks for doing it.
When I was a boy in Canada in the early
’60s, we watched BBC films featuring the
reclamation of wildlife as the waters rose
on this project. All these years later, as
an adult, it’s good to explore the human
and political past and especially futures
of the area.
John Arthur Feesey, Vancouver
Wonderful article. Well researched,
informative and beautifully written. It was
as if I were standing in the pampas look-
ing at a foreboding storm on the horizon.
These dark tempests are an ominous sign
of a changing climate.
Mark, El Paso vast the landscape can be — supporting
that scale as part of the equation.
Bruce, Maine

As an electrical engineer who has worked CORRECTION:

at Kariba Power Station, I salute the great An article on July 26 about the Kariba
engineers for what was then a technologi- Dam, on the border between Zambia and
cal marvel. As a Zambian, I salute Namwali Zimbabwe, misstated an aspect of the dam.
Serpell for a sensitive perspective from ‘I felt love for Erosion threatens the foundation; it is not
a little-explored angle. She’s an eloquent the place, the the case that the foundation is eroded. The
Photograph by Meridith Kohut

advocate for many amorphous historical article also misstated the location of a future
misgivings that persist to this day. people and the dam. It will be on a tributary of the Zambezi
Russell, Lusaka, Zambia culture and River, not on the Zambezi River. And the
sadness in trees in Lake Kariba are dead trees; they
Beautifully written. My spouse and I do not continue to grow.
lived in Zambia for six years, 1972-78. I thinking about
enjoyed reading this very informative and the history.’ Send your thoughts to magazine@nytimes.com.

Illustrations by Giacomo Gambineri 5

Screenland

Peer Review

A set of voter testimonials hopes to convince Republicans

that it’s completely normal for them to have turned
against the president. ⬤ By Jason Zengerle ⬤ The man
— bearded, shirtless, a Marlboro Light clutched
between two fingers as it smolders uncomfortably
close to his temple — looks as if he has something
heavy he wants to get off his chest. Like a person
attending his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,
8.9.20 7
Screenland
he seems at once eager and apprehen-
sive. ‘‘Hi, my name is Josh. I live in North
Carolina, and I voted for Donald Trump,’’
he begins, in a tone of abject resigna-
tion. He cocks his head and rolls his eyes.
‘‘My bad, fam,’’ he apologizes. ‘‘Not my
proudest moment. I will not be voting
for him again.’’
The confession comes from Josh Har-
rison, a 40-year-old exterminator from
the Raleigh area, and it appears on the
website and social media platforms of a
group called Republican Voters Against
Trump. Created by the conservative writ-
er Bill Kristol and a handful of his fellow
Never Trump Republicans, RVAT, as its
name indicates, is dedicated to defeat-
ing the president this November. Toward
8 8.9.20
that end, the group has curated an online
collection of more than 500 selfie videos
from Republicans, many of whom voted
for Trump in 2016 and all of whom plan
to vote against him in 2020.
Harrison recorded his confession in
June, sitting on his back deck around 2
in the morning, after consuming some
White Claw and red wine. ‘‘It’s the first
time I’ve ever voted for a Democrat,’’ he
says in the video. ‘‘But if Joe Biden drops
out and the D.N.C. runs a tomato can, I
will vote for the tomato can, because I
believe the tomato can will do less harm
than our current president.’’ When Harri-
son sent the video, unsolicited, to RVAT,
he felt as if he were shouting into a void.
But since RVAT posted the video online,
Photo illustration by Mike McQuade
‘If Joe Biden it has been viewed more than a million
Getty Images; Joshua Roberts/Getty Images; Getty Images. Opening
times on the group’s Twitter account,
Source photographs (above): Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse, via
drops out seen more than 100,000 times on its You-
and the D.N.C. Tube channel and received plenty of
runs a tomato media attention.
The Never Trump Republican adver-
can, I will tising space is a crowded one this cam-
vote for the paign. The Lincoln Project releases new
tomato can.’ spots seemingly every day — one blaming
Trump for the pandemic, another claim-
page: Screen grab from YouTube.
ing that he’s seriously ill, yet another inti-
mating that his genitalia are small. But
while the slick Lincoln Project ads ‘‘work
exclusively on the predispositions of the
faithful,’’ as Andrew Ferguson has written
in The Atlantic, the bare-bones RVAT tes-
timonials are intended to do that rarest
of things in politics these days: persuade.
And the method RVAT has chosen to per-
suade Republicans to vote against Trump
is an interesting one: These videos are the
group’s attempt to help create a ‘‘permis-
sion structure’’ for voters to act in ways
they never expected.
The permission-structure strategy was
used to great effect by Barack Obama’s old
political strategist, David Axelrod. Before
Axelrod went to work for Obama, he cut
his teeth helping to elect Black mayors
in cities like Cleveland, Detroit and Phil-
adelphia. The key to winning those races,
which often featured multiple African-
American candidates, was attracting a
sizable percentage of the white vote. To
do that, Axelrod spent a lot of time and
effort working to win his Black clients
what he called ‘‘third-party authentica-
tion’’ — endorsements from individuals
(like elected officials) and institutions (like
newspaper editorial boards) that white
voters trusted to make safe, conventional
decisions about whom to vote for. Once
Axelrod’s Black candidates had those
stamps of mainstream validation, white
voters believed they had permission to
vote for them.
Axelrod’s track record of selling Black
candidates to white voters is a big reason
Obama hired him to run his 2004 Senate
campaign in Illinois. In that race, Axel-
rod planned to use Paul Simon, a former
Illinois senator, as a third-party authen-
ticator, but Simon died, suddenly, before
he could make an official endorsement.
‘‘If you ask me, Joe Instead, Axelrod filmed an ad featuring
Biden is closer to a
moderate Republican
Simon’s daughter, Sheila, in which she
than Trump will said Obama and her father were ‘‘cut from
ever be.’’ Mike from the same cloth’’ — a powerful signal to the
Arizona, in one rural white Illinoisans who had repeatedly
Republican Voters
Against Trump video cast votes to send Simon to the Senate.
RVAT has taken Axelrod’s strategy
and updated it for our current political
moment — in large part by inverting
where voters are looking for permis-
sion. The group isn’t seeking third-party
authentication from conservative institu-
tions, or notable politicians, or decorated
military officials, or even former members
of Trump’s administration — Republicans’
loss of faith in precisely those people is
why they voted for Trump in the first
place. Instead of Mitt Romney or The
9
Screenland
Weekly Standard-in-exile or William
McRaven or John Bolton telling Repub-
licans that it’s OK to vote against Trump,
RVAT has turned to Tom from Arizona
(‘‘I’ve been a Republican all my life, and
this November I’m voting for Joe Biden
for president’’), Kelly from Florida (‘‘Biden
has my vote because we need to do what-
ever we can to get that monster out of
the White House’’) and Josh from North
Carolina to grant permission. Scrolling
through the testimonials on RVAT’s web-
site, the message to Biden-curious Repub-
licans is clear: You are not alone.
That sense of belonging, after all,
was part of what propelled voters into
Trump’s corner in 2016. They may not
have seen many elected officials or émi-
nences grises getting behind Trump, but
they didn’t need to; it was enough to see
their friends and neighbors, or people
who looked like their friends and neigh-
bors, packing airplane hangars or lining
up outside arenas. Those crowds signaled
to potential Trump voters that the outré
reality-TV star they liked watching in the
debates — the one all the pundits dis-
missed as a novelty act — was, in fact, a
realistic candidate to support.
As Axelrod’s career attests, this kind
of social permission isn’t a rare thing to
try to offer voters. It’s fascinating, though,
to watch it happen at a moment like this.
Americans find themselves seeking per-
mission for a lot of actions these days,
like abiding by (or flouting) mask require-
ments and sending (or not sending) their
children to school. Things once viewed
as inconceivable are now unavoidable;
things once taken as givens are now in
doubt. The unfamiliarity of the moment
has also made its political possibilities
seem endless, ranging from drastic
public-health and economic measures
to aggressive changes in policing.
When everything is abnormal, social
guidance becomes all the more powerful.
That reassurance is what RVAT is trying to
provide. In an era of extreme polarization
and negative partisanship — one in which
political allegiances are determined less
by affection for one party than by hatred
of the other — the notion of a Republi-
can voting for Biden feels aberrant. But
there’s so much aberrant about America
right now that nothing, presented in the
right voice by the right messenger, seems
especially outlandish. Not even voting for
a tomato can.
10 8.9.20
When Poem Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye
everything Each of us carries a cord of hope through all our wandering days. Where it begins, when
is abnormal, we found ourselves leaving home — so many homes; or when we arrived, when consciousness
social guidance widened to possibilities of community — the cord grows stronger or frays. Juan Felipe
Herrera’s magnificent new poems in ‘‘Every Day We Get More Illegal’’ testify to the deepest
becomes parts of the American dream — the streets and parking lots, the stores and restaurants
all the more and futures that belong to all — from the times when hope was bright, more like an intimate
powerful. song than any anthem stirring the blood.
i want to speak of unity
By Juan Felipe Herrera
— i want to speak of unity that
indescribable thing
we have been speaking of since ’67 when I first stepped
into LA
with a cardboard box luggage piece I was distracted by you
your dances askew & somersaults the kind you see at
shopping centers
& automobile super sale events — the horns &
bayonets most of all
I wanted to pierce the density the elixirs of everything
something
like Max Beckmann did in that restaurant painting of
’37 or ’38 exiled
from Germany banned & blazing black jacket — that
everything
in a time of all things in collapse
that embrace that particular set of syllables of a sudden
attack
or just a breath of a song the one I would hear back in
the early ’50s
when I walked the barren earth with my mother &
father the sound
of One when Luz still lived & Felipe still parted the red
lands
& no one knew we existed in the fires the flames that
consume all of us
now
Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her latest
book is ‘‘Cast Away,’’ from Greenwillow Books. Juan Felipe Herrera traveled the nation from 2015 to 2017
as the United States poet laureate and wrote about it in ‘‘Every Day We Get More Illegal’’ (City Lights
Publishers, 2020).
Illustration by R. O. Blechman
Talk By David Marchese

Padma Lakshmi wants us to eat — and think —

more adventurously. ‘There’s such a laziness about
reaching for the thing that is most familiar.’

Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya 11

Talk

If you’re only familiar with Padma Lak- isn’t it a requirement in culinary school Below: Padma is unconscious racism and subconscious
Lakshmi with
shmi through her work as a host and to understand the Native foods of North racism and bias and favoritism because
other judges on
judge on Bravo’s long-running cooking America? And these chefs who have ‘‘Top Chef’’ in we are attracted to people like us. Look
competition ‘‘Top Chef,’’ then the 49-year- power now, usually white male chefs, 2009. Opposite: at the people who get things greenlit.
old’s new show might seem like a detour. they’re often mentoring people whom Lakshmi with For the most part, they’re white. That’s
Emiliano Marentes
Part food travelogue, part exploration of it’s easy for them to mentor. I would love in his El Paso
what it feels like. When I walk around
the benefits and blind spots of multicul- to see those chefs go into urban environ- restaurant on New York City or El Paso or Las Vegas,
turalism, Hulu’s ‘‘Taste the Nation’’ finds ments and high schools or colleges and “Taste the Nation.” I see a whole bunch of different kinds
Lakshmi cracking crab shells with South search for people to mentor who aren’t of people. There’s such a laziness — it’s
Carolina’s Gullah Geechee community, necessarily already in their universe, so not often malicious — about reaching for
partaking of brats and beer at Oktober- that when people want to come on ‘‘Top the thing that is most familiar. But it’s
fest in Milwaukee and comparing flour Chef’’ they’re trained properly and can not only ethical to be more inclusive; it’s
and corn tortillas along the border in El compete on equal footing. good for business.
Paso. It’s a long way from the glamour of There has been a ton of discussion and You’ve said elsewhere recently that over
‘‘Top Chef,’’ but as Lakshmi tells it, the controversy lately about race and cul- the years you’ve had trouble getting
show is the culmination of her aim to tural appropriation in food media. Did attention and coverage from certain
‘‘demystify foods that are part of our cul- you have much sense of the dynamics outlets and publications. Can you tell
ture but get othered by the greater Ameri- going on at a place like Bon Appétit? 2 me more about that? Listen, I pitched
can culture.’’ Pursuing that aim has been Or in food media more generally? I ‘‘Taste the Nation’’ to several networks.
the hidden throughline connecting her didn’t know to what degree they went I flew to Los Angeles on my own dime
three cookbooks, her pre-‘‘Top Chef’’ TV on at Bon Appétit. I certainly didn’t know two or three times, and everybody said
appearances on the Food Network and about the pay discrepancy. I don’t know no. When my agent told me that Hulu
even her well-regarded 2016 memoirs, Adam Rapoport socially beyond food- called and said they’d love to talk, I said:
‘‘Love, Loss, and What We Ate.’’ It is, she world things. That picture of him and his ‘‘I’m not flying to L.A. again. I’m done.’’
says, ‘‘something I’ve been thinking about wife dressed up is the least of the issue, I hated coming home after being away
for a long time.’’ in my opinion. I think Adam Rapoport from my kid, and she’s saying, ‘‘Mommy,
David Marchese
is a symptom of something much bigger is the magazine’s did you sell it?’’ and I have to look at this
An idea that’s implicit in ‘‘Taste the and more insidious, which is that there Talk columnist. 9-year-old and say, ‘‘No, I didn’t.’’ One
Nation’’ is that the more we know about
the cultural history of our food, the more
that leads to cultural openness. What
makes you believe that this idea is more
than just a platitude? Listen, I’m under
no illusions. I’m not one of these kum-
baya people. But I think the willingness to
break bread with someone shows a crack
of openness. I believe in that quote, ‘‘Tell
me what you eat, and I will tell you who
you are.’’ Through food, you can tell a lot
about not only a person or a family but
also a community. You can trace history
through foods. You can trace coloniza-
tion. Food can be a great instrument, and
that is how I try to use it.
The new show is really about diversi-
ty. ‘‘Top Chef’’ hasn’t necessarily had
the greatest track record in that area.1
Could the show be doing more? Every-
body should be doing more. I think that
we have gotten better. I think we have
a long way to go. As a producer, I have
power now that I didn’t have when I start-
ed on ‘‘Top Chef.’’ I think we’ve done well
in the last few years, but there has to be
a revolution from the ground up. What
I mean by that is: Why don’t we teach
African-American cuisine in our cook-
ing schools in this country? Why does it
always have to be French-centric? Why

12 8.9.20
 entity — I won’t name names, but he’s no
longer at the network — even wrote me a
long email about why he said no. I guess
he was trying to be respectful, but I don’t
need a 900-word email about how my
show idea is derivative. Especially when
there’s nothing that I can see on TV like it.
I’ve heard an Italian expression, ‘‘È come
essere schiaffeggiato nel buio,’’ which means
‘‘It’s like being slapped in the dark.’’ You
don’t know where it’s coming from, and
you don’t know why it’s happening to
you. I have experienced this in a million
ways. You have to remember, I’ve been
on prime-time television for 14 years. I
have a show that airs in countries all over
the world. I was well known before ‘‘Top
Chef.’’ My show has been nominated for
an Emmy every single year that I’ve been
doing it. And yet all these networks that
claim they want diversity — and here
was ‘‘Taste the Nation,’’ a show about
the diversity of our country, and they
said no. I started to think, Maybe I’m
the only one interested in this stuff. It’s
the same thing when I see other, white
women being published constantly, and
their books selling, and I know that their
recipe is a watered-down version of an
Indian recipe or a Moroccan recipe.
Is that a reference to Alison Roman’s
stew?3 I’m not going to comment on
anybody specific, because I don’t think
that’s productive.
Without commenting on individuals,
what did the blow-up4 with her and
Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo sig-
nify to you? I think she, like all of us
sometimes, suffered from a bad case of
foot-in-mouth disease. It’s unfortunate. I
Left: Kelsey McNeal/Bravo, via Everett Collection. Right: Dominic Valente/Hulu.
think all three of those women probably
want the story to go away. That’s all I will
say about it.
Has your thinking about cultural appro-
priation and food changed? There was a
profile of you in New York magazine last
year, and in it you said — I’m paraphras-
ing — that if cultural appropriation gets
more people open to more flavors, then
you’re OK with it. Do you still feel that
way? Look, I’m not saying that you can’t
use turmeric on a menu or in a cookbook
unless you do a doctoral dissertation on
ayurvedic medicine. I’m just saying that
a couple of sentences at the top of a rec-
ipe would place it in context. I love the
commingling of cultures. My cookbooks
are not all Indian, because I don’t eat like
that. I don’t experience life like that, and
1 In 17 seasons on
the air, ‘‘Top Chef’’
has had five Asian-
American winners,
but only one Black
winner, Kevin Sbraga.
2 In June, the food
writer Tammie
Teclemariam tweeted
a photo of the
magazine’s editor
in chief, Adam
Rapoport, dressed in
a racially insensitive
Halloween costume.
Employees of
color at Bon Appétit
revealed that they
were not paid for on-
camera appearances,
but that white
employees were.
Rapoport resigned.
I don’t think most Americans do, either. it. It has provided my daughter and me
3 In 2019, a recipe
for a chickpea-and- So I’m not saying that Indian food should with a great lifestyle. If I’m going to
coconut-milk stew by only be cooked by Indians. But it would take time out of my life, it’s got to be
the food writer be great if a recipe that went viral were something that I feel is worthwhile. And
and New York Times
placed in the context of its own history. ‘‘Taste the Nation’’ is what I feel is most
contributor Alison
Roman went viral. It’s not taking anything away from cre- worthwhile. A lot of immigrants, we live
Critics argued that ativity to do that. It is acknowledging that in this weird in-between land; there is a
Roman’s recipe — these things didn’t come out of a vacuum. lot of code-switching that goes on when
a curry by any other
name — was an Aside from that, what might a more cul- you walk into your family home and then
example of cultural turally equitable food world look like to when you go to school. We have to navi-
appropriation. you? I would like to see the food section gate that. So on ‘‘Taste the Nation’’ I want
of papers like The New York Times not be to show a Thai grandmother making her
4 In an interview in
May, Roman made so white. I would like to see Condé Nast dish so that the Thai immigrant ver-
negative comments have more editors who are not white. sion of me6 who’s in elementary school
about the lifestyle That’s a real, concrete ask that I’m mak- now can see her and say: ‘‘Oh, OK. My
influencers Chrissy
Teigen and Marie
ing. You have to make sure you’re hiring grandma is not that weird, because this
Kondo, drawing writers who have a different perspective other grandma was on Hulu.’’ I know that
criticism for having than the rest of your staff, because that’s sounds like a little thing, but it’s not.
singled out two good for your newspaper or magazine. This last question doesn’t have to do
women of color.
I would like them to consider balanc- with food: You’ve had a lot of traumat-
5 Lakshmi hosted ing whom they interview, even bending ic events7 in your life, and it seems as
‘‘Padma’s Passport’’ over backward a little bit, to even out if it would be easy for somebody who’s
for the Food Network, our presence. had those experiences to end up cyni-
as well as two ‘‘Planet
Food’’ specials. ‘‘Top Chef ’’ excepted, the other cal or pessimistic. You’re not. How did
food-related shows5 you’ve done have you avoid that? Yes, a lot of [expletive]
6 Lakshmi was born been weighted toward non-European has gone down. I do have a bit of ‘‘the
in Delhi, India.
food. Does that suggest biases about sky is falling’’; people who are close to
Her parents divorced
when she was 2. what television executives are com- me would say, ‘‘She’s always worst-case
She immigrated to fortable with you doing? Would it scenario.’’ But I remember something my
the United States give them pause if you pitched a show grandfather said to me. He said, ‘‘When-
two years later,
following her mother,
about French cuisine? I don’t think so, ever you go to sleep, I want you to feel
who went ahead because I have 14 years on ‘‘Top Chef.’’ like you did something good today.’’ You
of her to find work. But I am a brown woman working in a have control over what you accomplish.
white, male Hollywood. It is very hard You don’t always have control over what
7 At 14, Lakshmi was
seriously injured in for us to get a show to begin with, never happens to you, but you have control over
a car crash. She has mind the subject matter. But it’s a good how you react. In spite of everything that
twice been a victim question. If you’re talking about my sit- happened to me, look where I am today.
of sexual assault, at
uation, I would never pitch a show like
ages 7 and 16. At
36, she found out she what you described. I already have a This interview has been edited and condensed
had endometriosis. successful show. I’m very thankful for for clarity from two conversations.
13
The Ethicist By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Is It OK That I Haven’t Told
My Parents I Was Fired?
Last year I was abruptly let go from my
job. I ramped up my side business, which
was fine except that now the pandemic
has caused an immediate decline — and
potential future decrease — in business
because my clients cannot quickly
adapt to technology to allow for work
to continue. My clients requested that
I reschedule work until the fall of this
year; they think that is when business
will return to pre-crisis levels. (This
is an industrywide issue as well.)
The trouble is that I never told my
elderly parents that I was let go. I no
longer talk about the job, a topic we used
to discuss frequently. Now I discourage
discussion about it, saying it is a ‘‘toxic
work environment.’’ Instead, I steer
the discussion toward small triumphs
with my side job, which is now my
primary source of income. During this
economic turbulence caused by the
pandemic, both parents often verbalize
how blessed our family is that all of their
children are still employed. I continue
to play along because I don’t want my
octogenarian parents worrying about it.
14 8.9.20
that having a job gives them a kind of
moral standing, marks them out as a con-
tributor, a giver and not a taker.
I’m tempted to say that this is a very
American idea. Benjamin Franklin, in
his autobiography, wrote of his ‘‘bold
and arduous project of arriving at moral
perfection,’’ which involved such max- Bonus Advice
ims as ‘‘Industry: Lose no time; be always
employ’d in something useful; cut off all
From Judge
unnecessary actions.’’ (Max Weber later John Hodgman
cited Franklin’s cherishing of industry as
evidence for what he called the Protes- Doug writes: My
girlfriend, Susan, and I
tant ethic.) But then I think of the French enjoy long, brisk walks
film ‘‘Time Out’’ and the Japanese film and quickly fall into
‘‘Tokyo Sonata,’’ each of which memora- great conversations.
bly depicts a fired white-collar worker Oft times, after I
share a witty remark,
whose family thinks he is still going to she stops in her tracks
the office. The workplace as a source of to laugh, leaving me
worth is a widespread tenet. So I can see walking alone,
sometimes for 15 to
why you wanted to keep this from your 20 seconds. Her habit
parents. Losing your job — a condition interrupts the flow
that the pandemic has now visited upon of our clever banter.
tens of millions of Americans — imposes She argues she
has the right to react
harms beyond the financial ones. as she sees fit.
You understandably don’t want your ————
folks to worry, and you might well feel Dear Aaron Sorkin
(you can’t fool me):
that it is up to you whether you disclose
Your zippy walk-and-
what happened. Family relationships talk fantasy dialogue
don’t require frankness about everything. looks good onscreen,
They may, on the contrary, require discre- but it’s not really
how typical humans
tion about certain things. But deceiving interact. So I’m not
I have not shared the news with my your parents about your employment sta- surprised Susan
family because I am hurt and embarrassed tus is wrong, a pattern of deception that has countered with
by the circumstances of my departure isn’t in keeping with a loving relationship. her own cinematic
cliché: the dead stop.
from the job. I am considering taking legal You should end the charade before your Presuming your bon
action to address what I believe parents learn the truth from someone else mots are truly as
to be disparate treatment. I feel as if and are left feeling betrayed. It won’t be bon as you think, you
should be flattered
discussing this matter will be a ‘‘downer’’ easy, I realize. Letting them know that that she stops to
for everyone at a time when we all crave you haven’t been honest with them is laugh; and given that
good news. I believe that I have good bound to be a source of shame — this you are in love, you
reasons for not sharing my job loss with my time justified. should probably try
to notice when she is
parents, who tend to share details I would and isn’t around, lest
rather keep private. Still, I think I behaved she eventually let you
unethically by not fully sharing my My husband and I are very fortunate keep walking forever.
Also, you wrote ‘‘oft
situation with them. What do you think? financially. We are the quintessential times.’’ Come on,
‘‘DINKs’’ (double income, no kids): We Aaron: Listen to how
Name Withheld have white-collar jobs and our savings are actual humans speak
good. We could live on his salary even if some day!
Illustration by Louise Zergaeng Pomeroy
It’s a sign of something morally odd I were to lose my job. That seems like a real
about our attitude to employment that possibility: While layoffs may not To submit a query:
you feel ashamed of having been fired, be imminent, the organization I work for, Send an email to
even though you think the firing was a nonprofit, was already on a shrinking ethicist@nytimes
.com; or send mail
unjust. (You say ‘‘embarrassed,’’ but that’s budget before the current economic shock. to The Ethicist, The
usually a gentler way of saying the same Now the odds are even higher that they will New York Times
thing.) If you’re right, the shame should have to let people go before the year is out. Magazine, 620
Eighth Avenue, New
attach not to you but to the people who (I am actively looking for another position.)
York, N.Y. 10018.
fired you. And yet your response is entire- Should I lose my job, is it ethical (Include a daytime
ly representative. People tend to think for me to claim unemployment benefits, phone number.)
Illustration by Tomi Um
at a time when an unprecedented number found myself saying that to people I know Losing your misleading anyone. ‘‘I’m praying for you’’
of people are doing the same? Sure, I who are deeply religious, even though could, against a certain cultural back-
would be legally entitled to do so. But I I don’t literally pray. I don’t want to be job — a ground, be formulaic in just this way.
fear that I would be taking money that facile or deceptive, but it is what people condition that But what if ‘‘I’m praying for you’’
I don’t really need — and that someone say in our country. If the other person the pandemic brings someone consolation not just by
else desperately does — out of a system has already spoken about God’s will, expressing compassion and concern but
that seems likely to be spread even thinner is responding in their lingua franca a sign has now by suggesting, falsely, that you are actu-
the longer the downturn goes on. of empathy or a kind of appropriation? visited upon ally praying? Perhaps religious people
If someone can afford not to take tens of would be especially prone to mistake
unemployment benefits, are they Jezra Kaye, New York your parrotings for promises. What’s
ethically obligated not to? During these millions of at stake, in these circumstances, isn’t
scary economic times, do we have Not every use of religious language sig- Americans — appropriation but deception. Nor is this
an obligation to ‘‘flatten the curve’’ at the nals religious commitment. An atheist can imposes harms a white lie, a trivial fib meant to spare
unemployment office as well as the hospital? say ‘‘Bless you’’ when someone sneezes; someone’s feelings. The act depends
it’s just a conventional formula. The same beyond the upon deceiving listeners about some-
Name Withheld, California is true of ‘‘goodbye,’’ said at parting, even financial ones. thing that is — from their point of view,
though it’s an abbreviation of ‘‘God be with if not yours — genuinely important. Like
I just mentioned the concern many peo- you.’’ When people leave my presence in many attempts at kindness, it would be,
ple have to be a giver, not a taker, and that’s Asante, the region of Ghana where I grew at the very least, condescending.
clearly one that you share. Unemployment up, I often say ‘‘Wo ne Nyame nko,’’ which
payments are a legal right for those who literally means ‘‘Go with God.’’ (It’s more
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy
qualify, which doesn’t mean you have to traditional than the alternative, which is
at N.Y.U. His books include ‘‘Cosmopolitanism,’’
exercise the right. But it isn’t incidental an Asantified version of ‘‘bye-bye,’’ name- ‘‘The Honor Code’’ and ‘‘The Lies That Bind:
that, like Social Security, the program of ly ‘‘Baabae-o.’’) I’m pretty sure I’m not Rethinking Identity.’’
unemployment insurance to which you
would be applying is not means-tested.
There may be political advantages to that
design: In a society like ours, benefits that
aren’t means-tested tend to garner more
support and carry less stigma. In our pres-
ent economic circumstances, too, we don’t
want people to cut back on spending, and
your unemployment pay will reduce the
temptation to do so.
Of course, your particular decision will
not make much difference to the world:
Not taking these benefits will save the
government an amount that’s well with-
in the rounding error of the budget,
and spending it won’t increase demand
detectably. (At least not in the aggregate: I
suppose it might make a detectable differ-
ence for a small neighborhood store you
patronize regularly.) But there’s nothing
wrong about taking part in a basically just
system in ways permitted by its rules.

I am Jewish by birth, upbringing and

culture but consider myself an agnostic.
Questions about the existence of God
have no interest for me, and my religious
observance is more family- than God-
oriented. In this period of intense suffering
and loss, though, I’ve struggled with how
to honestly express feelings of hope and
sorrow. ‘‘You’re in my heart’’ or ‘‘I hope
your loved one gets better’’ just doesn’t
seem to carry the same weight as ‘‘I’m
praying for you’’ — and recently, I’ve
Letter of Recommendation
Street-Casting
By Jon Gluck
I live in New York City, in downtown
Manhattan, on the seventh floor of a
13-story apartment building. Two or three
times a week, I wake up early, ride the
elevator down to my lobby and say good
morning to my doorman, in the custom
of millions of city dwellers everywhere.
But on the particular days I’m describ-
ing, my next move isn’t so familiar: I plant
myself in the middle of West 12th Street
and commence fly-casting — essentially
fly-fishing without the fish — slinging 30
or 40 feet of thin nylon line behind me
16 8.9.20
and in front of me, over and over again
while stepping in and out of the street
in sync with the traffic-light cycles to
avoid passing cars, like some kind of
bastardized urban version of Brad Pitt
in ‘‘A River Runs Through It,’’ God and
Norman Maclean forgive me.
I’ve been practicing this peculiar
ritual for years. Some time ago, I was
looking to shake off the rust and get my
arm in shape to prepare for an upcom-
ing fishing trip to Wyoming, but living
where I do, I didn’t have a suitable place
Photograph by Malike Sidibe
In pursuit of to do so. Or I thought I didn’t, anyway.
the elusive in
troublesome times.
But then it occurred to me that a city
street — long, straight and, in my case,
relatively free of traffic — is actually
quite suitable. Pretty great, even. Pecu-
liar is in the eye of the beholder.
This year, street-casting has taken on a
new urgency. I typically fish 20 or so days
a year, everywhere from the Catskills to
the Bahamas, but because of Covid-19, I
haven’t managed to get out on the water
at all. And yet, like many of us these
days, I’m desperate to find pockets of
joy wherever I can. Some people bake
bread; others do jigsaw puzzles. I cast a
fly rod on West 12th Street. For now, it’s
not a way for me to prepare for a trip —
it is the trip.
While street-casting, per se, may not be
an actual thing, fly-casting definitely is.
The sport dates back some 150 years and
was popular enough in the first half of the
20th century that competitions were held
at Madison Square Garden. Today the pur-
suit is mostly centered on local clubs, with
various associations hosting distance and
accuracy competitions around the world.
Fly-casting’s undisputed GOAT, 63-year-
old Steve Rajeff, won the American Cast-
ing Association’s all-around champion-
ship 46 years in a row and has taken first
place at the World Casting Championship
14 times. Its newest superstar is Maxine
McCormick, a 16-year-old who took up
casting at age 9 and notched two world
titles by the time she was 14. (She has been
called the Mozart of fly-casting.)
There’s a simple Zen pleasure in the
metronomic rhythms of fly-casting, and
it’s a pretty cool experiment in applied
physics. The trick is to ‘‘load’’ the line on
the back cast, then transfer the coiled
energy on the forward cast, stopping
the rod at precisely the right moment to
shoot the line forward with maximum
speed. As with a golf swing, a million
things can go wrong. But when you get
it right, it’s magic.
In some ways, casting in the street isn’t
all that different from casting on a river.
For safety reasons, I cut the hook off the
fly, and I practice my accuracy by aiming
for things like street signs and manholes.
They’re not exactly rising trout, but they
do. Any distance constraints the street
presents aren’t really an issue, at least not
for me. Championship casters regularly
shoot line well over 200 feet — the current
U.S. record, held by Rajeff, stands at an
astonishing 243 feet — but I’m more of a
30-to-40-feet guy.
The casting itself is only part of the
appeal. I also find myself reveling in the par-
ticular pleasures of doing something weird.
Just about everyone who passes by on
the sidewalk stops, gawks or comments.
Roughly half of them say, ‘‘Catch any-
thing?’’ The more self-conscious among
them note that I probably get that all the
time. (For the record, that does not make
the question any less awkward.)
This is a time At the same time, a certain kind of blithe
New Yorker will affect a ‘‘no big deal’’ atti-
to do whatever tude when they see me, as if the strange
we can to find tableau they’ve come upon is something
our moments of they’ve beheld a thousand times before.
(Most of these people are men.)
peace and People will often try to surreptitious-
contentment, no ly take a picture or shoot a video. They
matter how aren’t as clever as they think they are
(and are sometimes a little creepier than
strange a form they probably imagine). On the other
they may take. hand, there’s something warm, even
life-affirming, about people who ask me
if I’d mind.
Tourists under age 35 who stumble
upon me tend to act as though they’ve
witnessed an Instagram-age miracle. I
can practically hear them composing
Tip By Malia Wollan
How to Keep a
Condor Wild
‘‘Don’t treat condors as pets,’’ says Tiana
Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok
Tribe Wildlife Department. Scavengers
with a nine-and-a-half-foot wingspan,
condors are sacred in Yurok cosmology,
but it has been more than 100 years since
they soared over the tribe’s ancestral ter-
ritory, in northwestern California. Next
spring, Williams-Claussen and her team,
along with state and federal government
partners, hope to release six juvenile
birds born in captivity. Creatures not
raised in the wild often need time to learn
and practice how to exist without human
help. ‘‘Let them engage in natural behav-
iors without being influenced by humans
too close by,’’ Williams-Claussen says.
Jon Gluck
By the early 1980s, there were just 22
is the editorial
director, special projects California condors left in the wild. Des-
at Medium. perate to save the birds from extinction,
Illustration by Radio
their caption: Dude fly-fishing in downtown
Manhattan! (With three Edvard Munch
‘‘The Scream’’ emojis.)
Who can blame them? There’s no
denying fly-fishing in the middle of a
Manhattan street isn’t exactly ‘‘normal.’’
Then again, what is normal right now?
This is a time to do whatever we can to
find our moments of peace and content-
ment, no matter how strange a form they
may take.
A few weeks ago, on a Sunday morn-
ing, a woman who looked to be at least 90
walked past me on the sidewalk without
so much as slowing down. ‘‘I’ve lived in
this neighborhood my whole life,’’ she
said, as much to the universe as to anyone
in particular. ‘‘That I have never seen.’’
biologists captured the last of them in
1987 to breed in zoos. The birds to be
released will join 337 others now flying
free. They need to be monitored, peri-
odically captured and regularly fed by
humans. Only trained condor biologists
should approach the birds or their nests.
Even the experts should proceed with
caution. ‘‘Keep out of sight as much as
possible,’’ says Williams-Claussen, espe-
cially when putting out food; a condor
that associates food with humans might
start following people around.
Trap the birds twice yearly for their
health checks by using carrion to lure
them into an enclosure, then net them
before sneaking up on them and grab-
bing the back of their head. ‘‘They’ve got
a wicked beak,’’ says Williams-Claussen,
who has been working to return con-
dors to Yurok territory for more than a
decade. Proximity to such a strange big
bird will make your heart race. You might
find yourself nervously doing baby talk.
You shouldn’t. ‘‘Don’t coo at them,’’ Wil-
liams-Claussen says. ‘‘Don’t pet them.’’
In the nearly 40 years of breeding con-
dors and reintroducing them to the wild,
birds have occasionally become habitu-
ated to humans in odd ways, including
lurking around campsites and lunging
at hikers to steal their shoelaces. Wil-
liams-Claussen feels confident that along
her tribe’s remote section of coast, con-
dors will have the space to find their niche
in the wilderness. ‘‘When you actually see
these birds soaring overhead,’’ she says,
‘‘there is absolutely nothing like it.’’
17
Eat By Tejal Rao

Rethinking Sourdoughs: A Honduran bread made with

coconut milk, pan de coco does not look like European
sourdough — and that’s part of the pleasure.

It’s not that Bryan Ford didn’t love those
tall, quintessentially crusty, flour-dust-
ed, rustic French and Italian sourdough
loaves — the kind you’ve seen cross-sec-
tioned and shot from every angle on
bread blogs and in cookbooks and on
Instagram. The kind an algorithm may
have even directed you toward with a
far higher frequency since the pandem-
ic pushed more home cooks to care
for sourdough starters. He loved those
breads! But Ford, a Honduran-American
baker from New Orleans, also wondered
why other breads weren’t valued in the
same way, and why other doughs, espe-
cially doughs that predated the sour-
dough fad, and that went through their
own processes of wild fermentations in
home kitchens all over the world, were
left out of the conversation.
Choco pan The slow, overnight fermentation
de coco.
of dhokla leads to an airy, tangy batter,
steamed so it’s very tender. But until I
read Ford’s work, it never even occurred
to me to refer to it, or to so many of the
other everyday fermented batters I grew
up making and eating as ‘‘sourdoughs.’’ I
couldn’t explain why, though maybe it’s
because their techniques and their visual
languages were just so different from the

18 8.9.20 Photograph by Heami Lee Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.
wide, open crumbs and crackling edges
‘People get
fetishized on Instagram. And maybe, if
I’m being honest, it’s because I didn’t
think I was allowed — sourdough, inten-
tionally or not, has an exclusive Eurocen-
tric definition as crusty bread built with
a starter. As a result, many of the world’s
great fermented breads, from injera to
dosa, are often left out. But Ford didn’t
wait for anyone’s permission to expand
sourdough’s definition.
Ford grew up in New Orleans, a child
of Honduran immigrants. Once a week,
sometimes more often, his father picked
up a bag full of pan de coco from a Hondu-
ran bodega, and Ford would grab one or
two of the dense little rolls from the bag
and run off to eat them to tide himself
over before dinner. His parents sat on
the porch to have theirs, dipping them
in coffee, talking. Honduran pan de coco,
traditionally made with coconut milk and
some whole-wheat flour, might be used
to soak up soup or sauce with a meal, or
eaten plain as a snack. ‘‘It’s such a beau-
tiful thing,’’ Ford said, ‘‘and for me, that
is good bread.’’
In 2018, when he was working as a
baker in Miami, he changed the way he
thought about sourdoughs, expanding
it to include fermentations from all
over the world and applying the word
to breads that had most likely benefited
from natural leavening in warm kitch-
ens in the past. ‘‘Before, I’d been posting
rustic loaves, baguettes, crumb shots,
all the same-looking thing,’’ Ford said.
‘‘I was getting trapped in that mentali-
ty.’’ But when his mother came to visit,
Ford baked pan de coco with a sourdough
starter instead of yeast, complicating the
bread’s flavors and changing its texture.
He documented the process with just
as much care as he had before. ‘‘Peo-
ple saw I was proud to be Honduran.
My following grew.’’ Soon, Ford started
posting his bread recipes in English and
Spanish, fielding questions from home
bakers all over the world about doughs
not rising properly, about caring for
a healthy starter and about the abyss
between their homemade loaves and
the ones posted by professional bakers
on Instagram.
Ford’s cookbook, ‘‘New World Sour-
dough,’’ published in June, is full of deep
expertise that answers many of these
questions, but it’s also an unusually warm,
friendly invitation to making sourdough
bread, a subgenre of the baking world
that isn’t known for being so inclusive
into baking and approachable. In the introduction,
bread with Ford writes that he wants bakers to
change their expectations of bread. ‘‘I
an idea of what
really really mean it,’’ Ford said. ‘‘People
it’s supposed get into baking bread with an idea of what
to be, but when it’s supposed to be, but when you lose
you lose those those expectations, you can make a roti
or naan or semita, and you can appreciate
expectations, it just as much.’’
you can make a The first recipe I made from the book
roti or naan or was a version of Ford’s pan de coco, sweet,
mottled brown with cocoa powder and
semita, and you chocolate chips, the tin greased with
can appreciate coconut oil. As it baked, it filled my kitch-
it just as much.’ en with the rich smell of coconut. It came
out of the oven airy, pulling apart with
threads that let out puffs of steam, smear-
ing my fingertips with melted chocolate.
But it cooled to a more dense and whole-
some texture. I wasn’t sure if I got it right,
if my starter was in a good place when I
used it and if this bread was the way Ford
intended it to be. Had I failed? I wanted
to show him a photo of the bread, the
way it looked when it was risen, the way
it looked when I tore it open and ate it,
standing in front of the oven. But I didn’t
need to. ‘‘When someone messages me
about a failure, I’ll always ask, well did you
share it? Did you like it, did your friends
and family like it? OK, then be proud of
making delicious bread!’’
Choco Pan de Coco
Time: 2 hours, plus fermentation
For the levain:
2 ounces/60 grams mature sourdough
starter
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons/120 grams bread
flour
½ cup/110 milliliters warm water
For the final dough:
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons/200 milliliters
canned coconut milk
Scant ½ cup/100 milliliters water
7 ounces/200 grams levain
(about 1 generous cup)
1¾ cups/225 grams all-purpose flour
1⅔ cups/225 grams bread flour
1⅔ cups/125 grams unsweetened
shredded coconut
¼ cup/25 grams Dutch process
cocoa powder
Scant ⅓ cup/50 grams bittersweet
chocolate chips
2 tablespoons/30 grams softened unsalted
butter or coconut oil, plus 1 tablespoon
for greasing pan
2 tablespoons/30 grams light brown sugar
2 teaspoons/10 grams kosher salt
1. To build the levain, in a large bowl, mix
the mature sourdough starter, flour and water
until incorporated. Cover, and leave in a
warm place for 3-4 hours, or until doubled in
size. Use immediately, by going to Step 2,
or refrigerate the levain to use the next day.
2. Prepare the final dough: Combine the
coconut milk and water, and warm gently
in a pan over low heat or in the microwave
until steaming. Transfer to a large bowl, and
add 7 ounces/200 grams of levain (about
1 generous cup), along with all the remaining
dough ingredients. Using your hands,
squeeze everything together. Turn out onto
a clean work surface, and knead, using
the palm of your hand to push the dough
forward and your fingers to pull it back.
Repeat until the dough is mostly smooth.
Cover, and let ferment for 4 hours, then
refrigerate for 12 hours.
3. Coat a loaf tin with 1 tablespoon coconut
oil or butter, and set aside. Place the dough
on a lightly floured work surface, divide
into 6 pieces and let rest for 20-30 minutes.
Ball each piece: Flatten the dough, fold
the corners to the center and press down,
then flip the dough to reveal a smooth
surface, and tighten the dough into a ball
by tucking the edges in with your palms.
Repeat with the remaining pieces, then place
the pieces inside the tin, arranging in 2 rows
of 3. Cover, and proof until dough rises by about
a third, for 3-4 hours at room temperature.
4. To bake the bread, heat the oven to 375.
Bake for 35 minutes, or until lightly brown
and shiny on top, turning the pan once in the
middle of cooking. Let the bread rest in
the pan for 20 minutes, then remove from the
oven, and let cool an additional 30 minutes.
Yield: 1 (8- or 9-inch) loaf.
Adapted from ‘‘New World Sourdough,’’
by Bryan Ford.
19
Doctor vs. Doctor

How much
freedom should
physicians
have in treating
Covid-19
patients? The question
has opened up
a civil war in
some hospitals.

By
Susan
Dominus
Photographs
by Adam Ferguson 21
Mangala
Narasimhan,
an intensive-care-unit doctor, started feeling
impatient soon after the start of a meeting she
attended at Long Island Jewish Medical Center
on May 13. She wanted to get back to the unit,
but instead she was sitting in a conference room
with about a dozen colleagues. By then, the surge
of Covid-19 cases, the waves of suffering that had
crashed down on her hospital for months, was
beginning, miraculously, to recede. The throngs
of out-of-town health care workers who had
come to New York City to help were also dimin-
ishing, heading home to regions whose own
times would come. Narasimhan and her team
now had fewer hands to oversee new patients
coming in and the long-suffering ones on venti-
lators who were still in need of meticulous care.
Long Island Jewish, in Queens, had, at the time,
treated more Covid-19 patients than any other
hospital in the country; the doctors there were
still weary, still battered, their energy and time
in need of careful rationing.
Narasimhan, who was in charge of more than 20
I.C.U.s across the Northwell Health system, knew
heading into the meeting that it might be tense.
Adey Tsegaye, a pulmonary-critical-care doctor
who was calling in remotely, shared some of Nara-
simhan’s concerns. The meeting’s agenda includ-
ed time for remarks from Alex Spyropoulos, a lead
researcher at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical
Research — the research arm of Northwell — who
was running a clinical trial. The research was try-
ing to determine whether a standard dose of an
anticoagulant or a higher dose yielded better out-
comes for Covid-19 patients who were already on
oxygen or a ventilator and were at high risk of
organ failure and clotting.
A doctor on Narasimhan’s unit had recently
been at odds with a member of Spyropoulos’s
research team. Stella Hahn, a pulmonary-critical-
care doctor, arrived at work the day before the
meeting to find that a Covid-19 patient had gone
into cardiac arrest. She knew that the patient
was enrolled in the clinical trial and had been
randomly assigned to receive either the standard
dose of the anticoagulant or the higher one. As is
always the case in the most rigorous trials, neither
the patient nor Hahn was supposed to know to
which group this woman belonged. Double-blind,
randomized, controlled trials — R.C.T.s — are con-
sidered the gold standard in research because
they do not allow findings to be muddied by any
individual doctor’s biases or assumptions. But
Hahn believed that the patient’s condition now
22 8.9.20
called for the higher dose, which could potentially
require the patient’s removal from the trial.
Word made it back to a doctor working with
Spyropoulos, and that doctor called Hahn to urge
her to reconsider, or at least to get more tests
before acting. They exchanged heated words,
as the colleague implored her to stay the course.
Hahn pushed back: She had to rely on her clini-
cal judgment and believed that it was unethical to
wait for more information. How could researchers
dictate care to a doctor right there at the bedside,
especially when a patient’s condition was so dire?
The point of contention would be discussed at
the May 13 meeting. Dozens of doctors from the
Northwell system videoconferenced in, includ-
ing Spyropoulos, who was seated in his home in
Westchester. Hahn and her colleagues, a tightknit
unit who had seen one another through so much,
sat together in the conference room, occasional-
ly checking their phones or exchanging glances
as the meeting went on. As Spyropoulos recalls,
he talked to the group about the importance of
high-quality, randomized trials in making scien-
tific progress, and the risks of trying experimental
treatments without them. ‘‘I stressed to the group
that we should not abandon this principle, even in
the very stressful environment of a pandemic that
was overwhelming our hospitals at Northwell,’’ he
said. Relying on gut instinct rather than evidence,
he told them, was essentially ‘‘witchcraft.’’
For Tsegaye, the word landed like a blow.
‘‘There was a chill in the air,’’ said Tsegaye, who
registered it even by videoconference. ‘‘Followed
by rapid backpedaling.’’ Spyropoulos quickly
explained that he had so much respect for what
those doctors had done — he had not been in
those critical-care units, in the emergency room,
which he knew were unlike any other he had ever
experienced. ‘‘But it was like a retraction sent to
the newspaper the next day,’’ Tsegaye said. ‘‘The
headline says it all. The retraction the next day?
It doesn’t have the same impact.’’
In the days to come, whenever Tsegaye thought
about what Spyropoulos said in that meeting, she
felt appalled all over again. She knew that she had
never extended herself on behalf of her patients
the way she had since March. She kept flashing
back to a day when she was told that a ventilated
patient’s endotracheal tube had fallen out, a sit-
uation that can be fatal for the patient and is also
dangerous for the physician: Replacing it requires
the doctor to come into close contact with the
patient’s breath. Tsegaye was putting on her N95
mask to enter the patient’s room when its elastic
snapped in two. There was no time to go to the
supply area to get a new mask. What was the right
thing to do? With a sense of dread, she found her
feet and moved toward the patient’s room. As she
prepared to enter, one of her fellows, whose mask
was intact, told her to leave — she could manage
it on her own.
Looking back, Tsegaye felt that the agony of
making those kinds of decisions all day long
compounded the grief she felt while treating so
many patients she could not help. ‘‘These are the
decisions we have had to face,’’ Tsegaye said. ‘‘For
someone like me, who had been in that situation,
to have someone tell you that you have been prac-
ticing witchcraft is kind of giving no value to the
sacrifice that I have made — that my colleagues
have made.’’
As doctors face new spikes of Covid-19 cases
around the country, they are also confronting a
harsh reality: The virus’s deadly secrets remain
largely intact. The medical community now has
some research-backed drug treatments — rem-
desivir, an antiviral drug found to shorten hospital
stays, and dexamethasone, a cheap, readily avail-
able steroid that seems to cut deaths of patients
on ventilators by a third. But six months after the
first patient tested positive on the West Coast,
there is still no treatment that reliably slows
progression of the illness, much less a cure. In
July, the number of patients dying in this country
topped 1,000 five days in a row, according to the
Covid Tracking Project.
In these early months, doctors have faced two
unknowns in trying to fight the devastation. The
first is the virus itself: deadly, contagious and
entirely novel. The standard of care for most
intractable illnesses develops over years, as doc-
tors build a body of research that tests various
theories, compares and contrasts dosages, mea-
sures one drug’s power against another. Here
doctors were starting from scratch: Any treat-
ment protocol beyond supportive care — oxy-
gen, hydration, antibiotics and ventilation — was
conjecture. The second, equally novel challenge
has been the sheer scale of the outbreak. Few
doctors in this country had encountered the
overwhelming volume of patients, the sense of
helplessness, the exhaustion and the despera-
tion to save lives. Hospital administrators found
themselves plunging headlong into making diffi-
cult decisions in the absence of strong, unifying
federal guidance. Most did so without the bene-
fit of perfectly parallel case studies or personal
experience in hospitals so overrun by suffering.
When there is no precedent, when there is
an information vacuum, decisions are inevita-
bly subject to challenge. In an already heated
environment, some of the worst of the tensions
played out between research-oriented doctors
and those who saw themselves primarily as
clinicians. Many treating patients on the floor
considered it axiomatic that, with so many dying
so fast and so little to go on, they would rely on
their experience to make judgment calls about
treatment options. They would try using medi-
cations that had been approved for other illness-
es but not yet for this one — what the medical
community calls off-label uses — if they felt they
had good reasons to do so. They would take into
consideration any information that was available:
the observations of doctors in Milan and China,
conversations among doctors in WhatsApp
group texts and in Covid-19 physician Facebook
groups, tidbits of research that made medical
sense but had not yet been peer-reviewed.
Other clinicians, and especially doctors more
heavily involved in research, were frustrated
that many of their colleagues were not suffi-
ciently invested in the importance of empirical
research to figure out which treatments worked
best and were safest. Kevin Tracey, president of
the Feinstein Institutes, tried to emphasize to the
doctors affiliated with the Northwell hospital sys-
tem that if they were going to try drugs off-label,
they should always be doing so in the context
of a clinical research trial: The drug might help
some patients but could hurt even more of them.
If that was the case, it was better to know than
to operate out of a mix of hope and conviction.
He understood, he said, the impulse for doctors
to try drugs off-label out of compassion — and
the ‘‘raw emotion of humans trying to help each
other survive and not knowing what to do.’’ But
he did not approve of it. ‘‘Emotions cannot carry
the day,’’ he said. ‘‘You need evidence-based med-
icine, and you need clinical trials. You don’t make
an exception in the middle of a pandemic.’’
Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University of
California, San Francisco, who specializes in met-
abolic research, spent two weeks treating patients
at a hospital in New York and was also distressed
by how quickly doctors were trying untested ther- Adey Tsegaye, a pulmonary-critical-care doctor at Long Island Jewish
apies outside clinical trials. ‘‘I mean, it felt like it Medical Center in Queens. Opening pages: Alex Spyropoulos, a lead
wasn’t even World War I medicine,’’ he said. ‘‘It was researcher at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research.
almost like Civil War-level medicine.’’ He asked
that the name of that New York hospital be with-
held out of respect for his colleagues, whom he always existed. But during the early months of is the most likely one. Clinical equipoise is an
knows were not only risking their lives but were the pandemic, the disagreements — what one elegant characterization of a humble admission:
also overwhelmed by their clinical demands and critical-care doctor called, on his well-read blog, I have no idea which of these two choices is better.
had no research to rely on. He nonetheless was the profession’s ‘‘intellectual food fight’’ — provid- Equipoise gave way to unbridled enthusiasm
surprised to see many of them making decisions ed another layer of painful stress to some doctors among some physicians at Lenox Hill Hospital on
‘‘based on the sort of opinion or written protocol already near their limits. ‘‘It became like Republi- the Upper East Side of New York in April when the
of one or a couple of people that was based on cans and Democrats,’’ said Pierre Kory, a critical- city was in the thick of the surge. Many doctors
kind of nothing that I could see, other than just, care doctor who faced that tension himself at the there believed they were seeing great results by
‘This seems like a good idea.’ ’’ University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. ‘‘The providing tocilizumab, an anti-inflammatory drug
Many clinicians on the ground felt the urgen- two sides can’t talk to each other.’’ that tamps down the autoimmune response and
cy of treating the hundreds of patients dying in is used for rheumatoid arthritis. The doctors were
front of them; researchers, with their literal and As they prepare to evaluate a given medica- prescribing the drug, sometimes in conjunction
intellectual distance from the I.C.U., were pressing tion or procedure, researchers are expected to with a steroid, to Covid-19 patients, particularly
them to think about the thousands of patients who approach their task with a certain neutral mind- those who were not yet on ventilators but whose
were sure to follow — to slow down long enough set. The official term for that stance sounds both blood tests suggested that they were about to take
to build a body of evidence that they knew with scientific and strangely poetic: ‘‘clinical equi- a turn for the worse. In using it, doctors hoped
more certainty could help. The tensions between poise.’’ It’s a point at which a doctor’s curiosity to stave off what’s known as a cytokine storm, a
these two ways of thinking about medicine have is greater than her conviction that any one result potentially deadly immune-system overreaction

Photograph by Adam Ferguson for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 23
Michelle Ng Gong, the director of critical-care research Mangala Narasimhan, a doctor who is in charge of intensive-
for the Montefiore Health System in New York. care units throughout the Northwell Health system.

in which a torrent of cytokines — proteins that
can trigger infection-fighting forces — is released.
Tocilizumab, which blocks the pathway of a cyto-
kine called IL-6, might prevent that deadly storm
from gathering force. But any anti-inflammatory
carries risk, because in fighting inflammation, it
can also hamper the body’s ability to clear the pri-
mary infection or others that follow; tocilizumab
is also thought to carry some elevated risk of ana-
phylactic shock and lower-intestinal perforation.
Patients with extreme flu in the I.C.U. some-
times received tocilizumab; it is also used to treat
cytokine storms that some cancer patients expe-
rience as a side effect of treatment. Doctors at
Lenox Hill did not believe it was a leap to think
that the drug could address cytokine storms in
Covid-19 patients. They knew that doctors in
Milan were leaning heavily on the drug; they were
in conversation with doctors at Yale New Haven
Health, considered a fortress of research-heavy
medicine, which also incorporated tocilizumab
into their protocol. In addition, some small stud-
ies showed support for the drug’s effectiveness,
though none were randomized, controlled trials.
‘‘I understand that it has never been trialed,’’
John Boockvar, a neurosurgeon at Lenox Hill
who is affiliated with the Feinstein Institutes, told
me in late April. (Boockvar is one of the doctors
featured on the documentary series ‘‘Lenox Hill.’’)
‘‘But there is clearly enough data to support its
use.’’ The doctors at Lenox Hill had also briefly
participated in a randomized, controlled trial for
another drug with a similar mechanism, called
sarilumab. But to Boockvar, enrolling a patient in
that trial, which might result in a patient receiv-
ing a placebo, posed an ethical challenge when
he could simply prescribe tocilizumab — doctors
refer to it as toci — instead. In April, he learned
that Massachusetts General Hospital was starting
a randomized, controlled trial for tocilizumab.
‘‘If that was my loved one,’’ he said, imagining a
family member who might receive a placebo in
that trial, ‘‘I’d be upset. I’d think, Why am I doing
this? If it’s an off-label use with an approved drug
— give the damn drug to everybody.’’
At Long Island Jewish, some doctors who
were hearing about the drug from colleagues at
Lenox Hill, a part of the Northwell Health con-
sortium, started clamoring for liberal access to it.
And yet sometimes, when doctors placed orders
with the hospital pharmacist, their prescriptions
were declined; those patients didn’t meet criteria
Northwell had established for administering toci-
lizumab, which was in short supply. Physicians
were frustrated that patients who they believed
would benefit from the drug could not receive
it. Northwell wanted to be conservative about
the off-label use of drugs outside clinical trials.
‘‘There’s no proof that anything works!’’ Tsegaye
thought at the time. ‘‘Everything is experimen-
tal!’’ As for enrolling patients in a trial, as over-
whelmed as she was, she hardly felt she was in a
position to take that on.
Tsegaye’s supervisor, Narasimhan, also knew
researchers were concerned that in prescribing
tocilizumab so readily, physicians were possi-
bly hampering enrollment in the trial underway
at her hospital for sarilumab — a patient who
received tocilizumab could not also receive sari-
lumab. She and her team did not prioritize the
trials, she said; they wanted to provide the drugs
they thought were needed. ‘‘We’ve always been
allowed to choose treatment, right or wrong,
based on what we thought was best,’’ Narasimhan
said in May. ‘‘And that was gone. It was hard.’’
In addition to fighting resistance from their
administrators, the doctors were sometimes
also at odds with their colleagues, especially

24 8.9.20 Photographs by Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Steven Libutti, the director of the
Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
infectious-disease doctors, many of whom
believed that anti-inflammatories like tocilizumab
and steroids could do more harm than good.
‘‘You’re killing these patients,’’ one infectious-
disease doctor told Hahn at Long Island Jewish.
In the Mount Sinai Health System, tocilizumab
was also in demand. Administrators felt the stress
of making decisions in the absence of clear data.
Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infec-
tious diseases for Mount Sinai, fielded demands
from doctors working on wards who wanted
to use tocilizumab, early and often. ‘‘I have to
give her credit; she was single-handedly fight-
ing off a lot of pressure from hematologists,’’
said Keren Osman, a Mount Sinai oncologist
and hematologist who was on some of those
calls. As experts in blood cancers and diseas-
es, hematologists had experience working with
tocilizumab to treat cytokine storms that were a
side effect of some cancer treatments. ‘‘She was
saying, ‘I’m not comfortable just giving patients
willy-nilly anything we have — we don’t know.’ ’’
Patients and their families, who heard through
the news media about the drug, also started to
demand it, even for Covid-19 patients whose
inflammatory markers were normal. ‘‘People were
Stella Hahn, a pulmonary-critical-care doctor
at Long Island Jewish Medical Center.
calling for us to give it, just to give it, because
there were no other therapies,’’ Aberg said. At
first, a medical team that included Aberg agreed
to put some patients who were on ventilators on
the drug — in those patients, it was obvious that
systemic inflammation was already evident; also,
the closer the patient was to dying, the more the
risk seemed justified. Eventually, the thinking at
Aberg’s hospitals and at others evolved to favor
use of the drug earlier, before systemic inflam-
mation did so much damage that the patient was
already clinging to life.
By May, doctors at Long Island Jewish and
Mount Sinai had stopped pressing for tocilizumab
— if it was effective, it was not such a miracle drug
that they could see its effects clearly. Many had
started to pin their hopes instead on convalescent
plasma, another experimental treatment in which
sick patients are given plasma from recovered
patients with antibodies, though its effectiveness
is still unknown. ‘‘We did rush,’’ Aberg says now.
‘‘I mean, we were pushed. We were grasping for
anything that we could possibly do.’’
In early July, the drug company studying
sarilumab, the drug similar to tocilizumab,
announced that it was halting its trial; researchers
found, as Aberg put it, ‘‘nada.’’ A few weeks later,
the pharmaceutical company Roche announced
preliminary results of a tocilizumab trial that
was run on Covid patients with pneumonia. The
drug’s effects were no better than a placebo. By
then, Narasimhan was also starting to see pre-
liminary reports of other research that showed
the drug could, in fact, be dangerous, increasing
the risk of fatal secondary and fungal infections.
‘‘My take-home is that I wish we had done
more randomized, controlled trials so we could
have some real answers, so that we could tell
Florida and Texas, ‘This works, and this doesn’t
work,’ ’’ Narasimhan, who is now in charge of
intensive-care units throughout the Northwell
Health system, told me in July. ‘‘We could have
had so many more answers in a way that was
meaningful. We had this fixation that all these
drugs were curative. And they weren’t.’’
The story of hydroxychloroquine will most likely
be recalled as a classic medical parable of the
pandemic. It was a drug that seemed so prom-
ising that physicians were desperate to use it,
and researchers were equally driven to see if it
actually delivered the hoped-for results. In the
The New York Times Magazine 25
end, the enthusiasm of the first camp most likely
slowed the speed with which the second could
study the drug — only to find that the enthusiasm
was never really justified in the first place.
In mid-March, Steven Libutti, director of the
Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, read about
a small hydroxychloroquine trial in France that
was generating attention, having found that the
anti-malarial might be effective in the treatment of
Covid-19. ‘‘It looked interesting, exciting, promis-
ing, but it looked very far from convincing,’’ Libutti
said. Although his specialty is cancer, he wanted
to bring his extensive research knowledge to bear
on the pressing question of the drug’s effective-
ness. He wrote a proposal for a randomized, con-
trolled trial that would measure the effectiveness
of hydroxychloroquine on a patient’s viral load.
(He was comparing the effect of the drug alone
with placebo, as well as with the drug when admin-
istered with another drug called azithromycin.)
The Food and Drug Administration and the
ethical review board at the Rutgers Cancer Insti-
tute approved his trial in record time, as has been
Medications used in the treatment of Covid-19.
26 8.9.20
typical for many proposed drug trials during the
pandemic. He enrolled the first patient on April 1,
hoping he could easily reach 150, calling on doctors
to recruit patients at six hospitals in New Jersey.
By then President Trump had claimed in
mid-March that the drug was a ‘‘game changer.’’
Some doctors in New York were quietly taking it
prophylactically. That month, the F.D.A. autho-
rized hydroxychloroquine for emergency use,
a special dispensation that facilitated doctors’
access to the drug even outside the context of a
trial. Many New York hospitals’ standard treat-
ment protocols encouraged doctors to consider
hydroxychloroquine for patients, even though
the evidence that it worked remained slim and
reports were emerging that in some patients it
was causing heart problems.
Thousands of patients were pouring through
those six New Jersey hospitals, but Libutti wait-
ed, for weeks, with great frustration as only a
handful of patients were enrolled in his trial
each day. Typically, in clinical trials, after a
patient is admitted to the hospital, a doctor or
nurse, often affiliated with the research, talks to
the patient about the possibility of enrolling in a
clinical trial. But Libutti’s team was finding that
by the time a nurse could begin the conversation
with the patient, that person had already been
administered hydroxychloroquine — which
meant the researchers could not get a baseline
reading of that patient’s viral load. Patient after
patient was disqualified from the study. They
had ‘‘been handed hydroxychloroquine along
with their toothbrush and slippers when they
got to the emergency room,’’ Libutti told me.
‘‘They were giving it out like dinner mints.’’ The
researcher said he ‘‘was shocked by the num-
ber of folks whom I thought were incredibly
well-read, knowledgeable physicians but were
just panic-prescribing hydroxychloroquine.
I’ve never seen anything like it. It just shows
how lost in the storm folks were.’’ (Michael
Steinberg, who helps oversee trials as well as
clinical care at Robert Wood Johnson Univer-
sity Hospital, which was involved in Libutti’s
trial, said that although physicians use their
Photograph by Adam Ferguson for The New York Times
clinical judgment to make decisions about
treatment, they strongly encourage doctors to
use evidence-based criteria.)
Other doctors shared Libutti’s experience.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York Univer-
sity’s medical school, said he is aware of three
medical centers where researchers trying to study
hydroxychloroquine felt that the early ardor for
the drug among doctors and patients made it dif-
ficult for them to recruit subjects — to determine,
essentially, whether the embrace of the drug was
at all justified. Caplan and a colleague argued, in
an article published online in April in The Journal
of Clinical Investigation, that ‘‘panicked rhetoric
about right-to-try must be aggressively discour-
aged in order for scientists to learn what regimens
or vaccines actually work.’’ Communicating direct-
ly with doctors at various hospitals who were mak-
ing the drug part of the official protocol, he used
more plain language: ‘‘This is nuts!’’
The Montefiore Health System in New York
was one of the many that included hydroxy-
chloroquine as an option in its treatment proto-
col, starting in late March. Michelle Ng Gong, the
director of critical-care research, did not actively
fight to have the drug removed from the protocol.
But when she was working in her capacity as a
critical-care doctor, she does not recall ever pre-
scribing the medication, and she sometimes took
patients who had received it in the emergency
room off it. ‘‘When so many people are dying,
you want to do something,’’ she said. But very sick
patients are more susceptible to adverse events.
‘‘The problem is that we know from critical-care
literature, as well as trials in the past, that we can
always do more harm.’’
In the end, the biggest randomized, controlled
trial on hydroxychloroquine came out of Britain
in June, and preliminary results found that the
drug was not an effective treatment for Covid-19.
In contrast to American doctors whose access to
the use of the drug, even outside trials, had been
eased by a federal agency, British physicians were
given the opposite message. On April 1, the high-
est medical officials in England, Wales, Northern
Ireland and Scotland each sent a letter to every
hospital in their respective countries, urging doc-
tors not to prescribe medications off-label outside
trials. Instead they encouraged doctors to enroll
their patients in large, multicenter, randomized,
controlled trials, like a study run by the Univer-
sity of Oxford called Recovery, which looked at
the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, tocilizumab,
convalescent plasma, dexamethasone and two
other treatments. At some hospitals in Britain,
as many as about 60 percent of patients were
enrolled in Recovery trials; even the Northwell
system, which is committed to research, was able
to enroll, at its most trial-driven hospital, North
Shore University Hospital, around only 20 per-
cent of its patients in clinical trials.
A flood of patients all with the same illness
presents logistical challenges to trials, but also
the perfect conditions for them; that the Amer-
ican medical system could not harness more of
those patients into randomized, controlled trials,
said Peter Horby, one of the two chief investiga-
tors for Oxford’s Recovery trials, represents a lost
opportunity. Whether or not convalescent plas-
ma actually helps patients, for example, has not
yet been resolved by a randomized, controlled
trial despite the tens of thousands of doses that
American patients have received, numbers that
dwarf those in Britain. Given those numbers,
American researchers ‘‘could have nailed it by
now,’’ said Horby, whose own trial on convales-
cent plasma is still underway.
Caplan, the N.Y.U. bioethicist, acknowledges
that doctors in the United States did manage to
enroll more patients in trials more quickly than
ever. But even still, he believes that the commit-
ment to long-shot efforts to rescue patients was
stronger than the commitment to science, which
slowed results and possibly cost more lives. ‘‘We
did a lot,’’ he said. ‘‘But we could have gone faster
and resolved questions sooner.’’
‘We just lived through a plague. It was life
and death. Fear. Ignorance. You were
seeing raw human behavior in survival
mode, a classic reaction to threat.’
If researchers see hydroxychloroquine’s failure
as a cautionary tale about the perils of acting
without evidence, Pierre Kory, the Wisconsin
critical-care doctor, sees a different medical
lesson emerging from the pandemic: that the
emphasis on randomized, controlled trials can
get in the way of doctors’ providing common-
sense, lifesaving treatments.
In April, supportive care alone was consid-
ered the best option for patients with Covid-19,
given that there was no evidence yet to back
other treatments. Kory, who was then the chief
of critical-care service at the University of Wis-
consin Hospital and Clinics, believed instead
that medications commonly used in critical
care would most likely help critically ill Covid-19
patients, too. That month, at a well-attended
meeting with fellows, residents and leadership,
including Lynn Schnapp, the chair of the medical
school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
Kory suggested an approach that went beyond
supportive care. He had been consulting with
senior hematologists at the hospital and had
observed alarming blood clotting in Covid-19
patients. He and the hematologists proposed that
the hospital consider administering an aggressive
dose of anticoagulants to patients whose blood
tests showed elevated risks for clotting. (Many
medical-society guidelines that once called for
only supportive care now recommend the use
of anticoagulants in Covid-19 patients, but not
in doses as aggressive as those that Kory and
specialists at the hospital had proposed.)
The meeting among Kory and his colleagues
took an adversarial turn. ‘‘No one else is doing
this,’’ said Lynn Schnapp, as Kory recalls. (She
denies saying that, although a former colleague
of Kory’s who attended the meeting confirmed
Kory’s account.) ‘‘There is no evidence,’’ a fellow
I.C.U. doctor said more than once, her voice
raised. Kory, who pointed out at the meeting
that his suggestion was based on the opinion
of the hospital’s own experts, says he fired back
with equal intensity. ‘‘And this is Wisconsin,’’
he told me. ‘‘People don’t yell here.’’ Other col-
leagues who were supposed to jump off the
call to attend another meeting later confided
to Kory that they couldn’t bring themselves to
leave, for fear of missing out on this unusual
hospital drama.
At a subsequent, smaller meeting, Kory
brought up with Nizar Jarjour, a division chief, the
possibility of giving steroids, commonly used on
critical-care patients, to Covid-19 patients in the
I.C.U. ‘‘I don’t want to talk about it,’’ Jarjour said.
In a lengthy email Jarjour later sent me, he
explained that open discussion was welcome
during that period of time; he also sympathized
with the sentiments of the I.C.U. colleague who
was urging caution while facing a novel virus.
Corticosteroids have a complicated and contro-
versial history in critical-care medicine. Numerous
trials over the past 50 years have been conducted
on their efficacy in patients with acute respirato-
ry distress syndrome, or ARDS, a diagnosis for
patients who have reached a stage of perilous
respiratory failure. Because many of those patients
at that stage of illness have confounding factors,
findings are far from definitive. But based largely
on some meta-analyses, including those looking
at how patients with MERS and SARS fared, the
World Health Organization advised, early in the
pandemic in this country, against the use of ste-
roids in Covid-19 patients experiencing ARDS,
which is to say, most patients on ventilators.
Kory and several colleagues at hospitals around
the country noted that the (Continued on Page 45)
The New York Times Magazine 27
E V E N B E F O R E T H E

P A N D E M I C , T H E W H O L E

F A S H I O N I N D U S T R Y H A D

S T A R T E D T O U N R A V E L .

W H A T H A P P E N S N O W T H A T

N O O N E H A S A R E A S O N T O

G E T D R E S S E D U P ? B Y I R I N A

A L E K S A N D E R P H O T O G R A P H S

B Y S T E P H A N I E G O N O T

S W E A T P A N T S F O R E V E R

29

I T ’ S D I F F I C U L T ,
in retrospect, to pinpoint when exactly panic
about coronavirus took hold in the United States,
but March 12 stands out. Stores ran out of canned
goods. Streets emptied of cars. Tom Hanks had just
tested positive for the virus. That evening, Scott
Sternberg, a fashion designer, was lying awake at
home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Ange-
les, thinking about Entireworld, a line of basics he
founded two years earlier. Would people still buy
clothes? How much cash did he have to keep going?
When would he have to lay people off ? ‘‘My Band
of Outsiders battle scars just opened wide,’’ he said.
Band of Outsiders was Sternberg’s previous
company. He founded it in 2004 as a line of slim
shirts and ties. (Remember the skinny-tie boom?
That was Sternberg.) Eventually it grew into full
men’s and women’s collections that won over
the fashion world with self-consciously preppy
clothes. Sternberg took home two Council of Fash-
ion Designers of America (C.F.D.A.) awards, the
industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. He posed for
photos with Kanye West. Michelle Obama wore
one of his dresses. He opened stores in Tokyo and
New York. Then, in 2015, to everyone’s surprise,
Sternberg announced that Band was going out of
business. An investment with some Belgians had
gone bad, but that didn’t feel like the whole story.
Sternberg knew the whole story. Every choice he
made at Entireworld was to prevent it from hap-
pening again. Now a global pandemic had hit. He
couldn’t foresee that. No one did.
Unlike other designers, Sternberg studied not
design but economics, a major he chose in part
because the year he entered Washington Univer-
sity in St. Louis, the economist Douglass North,
a professor there, won a Nobel Prize. Sternberg
graduated summa cum laude. His senior thesis
was about the economics of actors in Hollywood,
which is how he wound up in Los Angeles in the
first place. This is all to say that Sternberg knew
what uncertainty does to consumer behavior.
‘‘What was going through my head was: Man, I
don’t know how big businesses are going to deal
with this,’’ he said. ‘‘But for a small business this
is enough to take all of us out’’ — he snapped his
fingers — ‘‘in one shot.’’
As it happened, it was the giants who would fall
first. Over the next few months, J. Crew, Neiman
Marcus, Brooks Brothers and J. C. Penney filed for
bankruptcy. Gap Inc. couldn’t pay rent on its 2,785
North American stores. By July, Diane von Fursten-
berg announced she would lay off 300 employees
and close 18 of her 19 stores. The impending dam-
age to small businesses was inconceivable.
The next morning, a Friday, Sternberg drove to
Entireworld’s offices in Koreatown. He sat down
30 8.9.20
at his desk and began drafting an email: ‘‘Wow.
I mean, WTF.’’
He didn’t run the email by his staff. There was
no meeting about it. He just sat down and wrote it.
‘‘Am I sick already? Can I leave my house? What
do I tell my employees? Will my mom be OK on her
flight home today? Can Zod’’ — Sternberg’s dog
— ‘‘get coronavirus? Did I buy enough T.P.? How
long will this last? Who’s in charge? What’s next?’’
The email went out to the brand’s 30,000 sub-
scribers on Sunday, March 15. It was, in a sea of
daily promotional emails, a distinctly human one.
But this was still a promotion: for a sweatsuit,
the brand’s top seller, a ‘‘hero item’’ in indus-
try speak. Inspired by a French children’s film,
Entireworld’s sweatsuits come in a prism of
cheery colors and, in Sternberg’s vision, ‘‘sort of
make you look like a cross between a Teletubbie,
Ben Stiller in ‘The Royal Tenenbaums,’ and a J. C.
Penney ad from 1979.’’
It wasn’t long before Sternberg’s employees
began texting him happy-face emoji. On an
average day, the brand — still in its nascent stage
— sells 46 sweats. That day they sold more than
1,000. When they ran out of sweatsuits, shoppers
moved through the T-shirts, socks and under-
wear. By month’s end, the brand’s sales were
up 662 percent over March the previous year.
The daywe met, April 24, was the highest-grossing
day in the company’s history. A new shipment
came in that morning and promptly sold out again.
Entireworld had now grossed more in two months
than in its entire first year in business.
By ‘‘met,’’ I mean that we were in Sternberg’s
backyard in chairs positioned 20 feet apart,
with a setup of disinfectant wipes between us.
At this point, Sternberg hadn’t been leaving
the house much, instead subsisting on deliver-
ies from BlueApron, the meal-kit service, and
rationing the ingredients into multiple meals.
Entireworld’s managing director, Jordan Schiff
— formerly of Dov Charney’s American Apparel,
whose heyday Sternberg’s line openly pays hom-
age to — had just come down with Covid-19. But
he was still tracking the numbers. Just a few days
before, Schiff reported that the company had
sold out of 600 pairs of lavender women’s socks.
Sternberg was in a good mood. This was obvi-
ously not just because of an email. Nor was it sim-
ply because America had settled into sweatpants
for the foreseeable future. He’d been laying down
this groundwork since Band of Outsiders implod-
ed. Entireworld wasn’t a departure in name only,
suggesting as it does the opposite of the in crowd.
It was also Sternberg’s rejection of the traditional
fashion system, the one that once vaulted him to
success. No more fashion shows, no more sea-
sonal collections, no more wholesale accounts
that had become unreliable (R.I.P. Barneys) or the
markups required to pay for it all. (Band’s shirts
started at $220; Entireworld’s are $95.)
For years, Sternberg had been saying that
the fashion industry was a giant bubble head-
ing toward collapse. Now the pandemic was
just speeding up the inevitable. In fact, it had
already begun. An incredible surplus of clothing
was presently sitting in warehouses and in stores,
some of which might never reopen. ‘‘That whole
channel is dead,’’ Sternberg said. ‘‘And there’s no
sign of when it’s turning on again.’’
In April, clothing sales fell 79 percent in the
United States, the largest dive on record. Pur-
chases of sweatpants, though, were up 80 per-
cent. Entireworld was like the rare life form that
survives the apocalypse. By betting that the lux-
ury market would fail, Sternberg had evaded the
very forces that were bringing down the rest of
the industry. ‘‘Because you could see the writing
on the wall,’’ he said. ‘‘The Neimans writing on
the wall, the Barneys. . . . Listen, Barneys? That
was not a shock to anyone.’’
IF THERE’S ONE image that I will remember from
the last days of the fashion industry as it has
existed for the last two decades, it’s Marc Jacobs
streaming live from the Mercer Hotel in New
York in pearls and perfect makeup. The broadcast
ran to 75 minutes in length over two different
virtual events. It began on April 15, with Vogue’s
Global Conversations, a series the magazine
introduced to figure out how to fix the fashion
industry, and continued a month later, on May
15, with Business of Fashion, the industry’s go-to
news website.
‘‘I’m in the process of grief right now,’’ Jacobs
told Vogue.
Why are you grieving, Marc? the moderator asked.
‘‘Why? Because this is all very sad.’’
Then, later: How are you going to present your
spring/summer '21 collection?
‘‘I’m not sure there will be a spring/summer
’21 collection.’’
Jacobs had come to see his fall 2020 show as a
kind of farewell. ‘‘I’ve said this to my psychiatrist,
my lovely Dr. Richardson,’’ he told Business of
Fashion, after taking a long drag from his vape
pen, ‘‘that I would be very happy if that were my
last show.’’ That collection would never be pro-
duced. Buyers couldn’t place orders, and even if
they had, factories were shut down. Jacobs said
he had to lay off ‘‘a bunch of people’’ and ask
others to take pay cuts. Not that this began with
the pandemic. Since 2013, Jacobs’s business had
shrunk from 250 stores to just four. Speaking to
Vogue, he said, ‘‘This has been a very difficult
business to be in for a long time, I think.’’
Things looked different in 2005. I’m choos-
ing that year somewhat subjectively, because
that’s when I started as an intern at Women’s
 Scott Sternberg, creator of the Entireworld clothing label.
Wear Daily. It was a thrilling time in American
fashion. A new guard of young designers had
just entered the scene, displacing the stars of
the 1980s and ’90s (Donna Karan, Calvin Klein,
Michael Kors, et al.) and re-energizing the run-
ways. Interns don’t see much, but occasionally
fashion week invites trickle down. My first show
was Zac Posen, in something like Row 8. My
second was Proenza Schouler. Those designers,
along with Alexander Wang, Derek Lam, Phillip
Lim, Rag & Bone, Rodarte, Jason Wu and later
Joseph Altuzarra, seemed to grow into global
brands overnight, with the help of store buyers
and fashion editors eager to usher in a post 9/11
generation of American talent.
Band of Outsiders was part of that. Sternberg
was 29 when he started the brand in 2004. Like
the Rodarte sisters, who had no formal training
and lived with their parents in Pasadena, Calif.,
Sternberg, a former agent at Creative Artists
Agency designing a line in what was then a fash-
ion desert, was an outsider instantly embraced.
Within months he had a full-page photo of his ties
in GQ and was picked up by Barneys. ‘‘We were
next to Dries, Balenciaga, Prada,’’ he said. ‘‘And
‘we’ were . . . me, making shirts and ties in L.A.’’
Photograph by Stephanie Gonot for The New York Times
Along with brands like Thom Browne, Band
joined the wave of the nerdy-preppy resurgence
— shrunken blazers, polos, boat shoes — or what
Sternberg called ‘‘preppy clothes about preppy
clothes.’’ Once he expanded into women’s wear,
the brand grew into a $15 million wholesale busi-
ness, sold in 250 stores worldwide. ‘‘It wasn’t by
the end all that good for us, obviously, because
we weren’t building a sound business,’’ Sternberg
said. ‘‘But it’s pretty incredible the power of what
that global fashion system could do.’’
When Sternberg says ‘‘global fashion system,’’
he’s referring to the ecosystem of designers, fash-
ion media and stores that puts us all in clothes.
Fashion week is where those entities meet. The
reason spring collections are shown in the fall (and
vice versa) is so they can be ordered, reviewed
and produced in time for the actual season. As
with most things, this system was upended by
the internet. Once normal people could view
collections online — which, confusingly, they
couldn’t buy until six months later — everything
began to accelerate. Now stores needed deliv-
eries earlier to fill demand, and two deliveries
simply weren’t enough. Suddenly midseason col-
lections — mainly, pre-fall and resort (also known
as cruise) — became the norm, even for smaller
designers whose customers were not necessarily
among the small subset of people who jet off to
Capri or St.-Tropez for the winter months.
So designers went from making two col-
lections a year to four. If you had a men’s line,
maybe it was actually six, and if you were Dior
or Givenchy, you were also doing couture. As
fashion shows had grown into huge marketing
events because Rihanna or Anne Hathaway or
whoever was sitting in the front row, each of
those collections was also a show. Somehow this
was all still going pretty well. Consumers were
consuming, store buyers were buying more and
designers produced more and faster. Business
boomed. And everyone just kept growing.
If there was a turning point, it might have been
fall 2008. That year, New York Fashion Week drew
an estimated 232,000 attendees and generated
$466 million in visitor spending. Three days after
it ended in September, the economy collapsed.
The luxury market was already oversaturated,
and now there was no one to buy the stuff. Stores
panicked and marked everything down early. But
then they did it again the next year, and the year
after that, relying on markdowns to generate
The New York Times Magazine 31

revenue and training consumers to shop on sale.
So now you had summer dresses arriving in Jan-
uary and being discounted before the weather
would even allow you to wear them.
The fashion cycle stopped making sense. Despite
dwindling budgets, thousands of people were still
flying all over the world every two months for the
shows. Designers started to crack under the pace,
most notably John Galliano, who attributed his 2011
anti-Semitic rant (and subsequent firing from Dior)
to work-related stress. And the clothes themselves
got kind of weird. The sped-up calendar gave birth
to ‘‘seasonless dressing,’’ a trend of Frankenstein
clothing items: toeless boots, sleeveless coats —
you get it. When you’re delivering fall in July, it’s
really not about the weather anymore.
This might have been the time to rethink
things. Instead, everyone doubled down and
made more stuff.
As online retailers like Net-a-Porter and
Matches Fashion gained traction, and everything
32 8.9.20
was suddenly sold everywhere, department
stores looked for new ways to draw customers.
Enter ‘‘novelty,’’ a term for the sometimes-literal
bells and whistles that buyers increasingly asked
designers to add to collections in order to entice
straying customers like cats. If in the last decade
you’ve gone looking for a simple cashmere sweat-
er and instead encountered ones with zippers,
giant animal faces, glitter shoulders or ‘‘dis-
tressed’’ anything — that’s novelty. If you found
yourself annoyed, you were not alone. ‘‘That was
so we could sell to Saks, Neiman, Barneys, Nord-
strom, Colette, and everybody could have their
own special thing,’’ Sternberg recalled. ‘‘I was basi-
cally making stuff I didn’t like because I thought a
buyer wanted it, not even the customer.’’
It used to be that stores attracted shoppers with
the promise of an exclusively carried designer.
Once designers could no longer afford to remain
exclusive to a certain store, the compromise
was exclusive styles. In addition to a presented
Photograph by Stephanie Gonot for The New York Times
collection, buyers requested slightly altered looks
— lengthen a hem here, add a sleeve there, take
the print from that dress and make it into pants
— that could then be exclusive to their customers.
This is still going on. ‘‘The amount of work you do
for exclusives is out of control,’’ Batsheva Hay, a
former litigator who started her namesake line of
off-kilter prairie dresses in 2016, told me. ‘‘ ‘I want
this, can you make this with a little this. . . . ’ Some
of it is because they think it might sell, but some
is just so they can say it’s exclusive.’’
Molly Nutter, a former V.P. for merchandising
at Barneys, worked for the department store for
19 years. ‘‘The system has been broken for a long
time,’’ said Nutter, who is now the president of
ByGeorge, a specialty store in Austin, Texas.
‘‘There was a lot of pressure on designers to
produce more collections, and therefore more
product. I would say it wasn’t a real demand by
the customer; I think it was just retailers trying
to grab market share. They thought, If I can get
more in, and earlier, then I can get more clients
through my door. But with everyone doing this,
it just compounds the problem. Then of course
all of these stores end up with too much inven-
tory, and this is where all of the promotional
activity starts to take place. You’re basically put-
ting luxury product out there and devaluing it
almost right away. It was just this vicious cycle.’’
This is what Jacobs would later be mourning
in his hotel room. While everyone seemed eager
to define fashion’s future, he was holding space
for its present. He was lucid, candid, somehow
smarter than everyone. (I was relieved when he
declined to be interviewed for this article.)
‘‘We’ve done everything to such excess that
there is no consumer for all of it,’’ Jacobs told
Vogue. ‘‘Everyone is exhausted by it. The design-
ers are exhausted by it. The journalists are
exhausted from following it.’’ He added, ‘‘When
you’re just told to produce, to produce, to pro-
duce, it’s like having a gun to your head and say-
ing, you know, Dance, monkey!’’
sat down with the chief
I N 2 0 1 3 , ST E R N B E RG
executive at Barneys at the time, Mark Lee,
who Sternberg says overpromised how much
inventory the department store would be able
to sell. ‘‘Barneys promised us the world and never
delivered on any of it,’’ Sternberg said. (Lee did
not respond to requests for comment.) ‘‘And it
was stupid of us to listen to them. But we trusted
them. That was a complete killer. And you feel
insecure, like, I need Barneys to be cool. And then
Prop Styling: Machen Machen Studio
there are these things called R.T.V.s.’’
R.T.V. stands for ‘‘return to vendor,’’ which is
what it sounds like: If a collection — the one that
the store has asked you to pad out with novelty and
exclusives — doesn’t sell, the retailer can return it
and ask for its money back. According to Nutter, as
stores struggled, the terms of this deal got worse. In
some cases, stores asked designers to sell on con-
signment or to share costs if a certain percentage
of the collection didn’t sell at full price. So let’s say
a store decided to mark the collection down early:
You now owed it for those losses. ‘‘Even as I’m tell-
ing you this,’’ Nutter said, ‘‘I’m like, Isn’t that crazy?’’
It is. It is crazy. And here’s where it got even
crazier: In order to protect exclusivity, stores had
to commit to even larger buys, ordering more
clothes than they could possibly sell. Then, when
they couldn’t move the stuff, they’d return it.
Thanks to the rise of fast fashion and the luxury
market’s simultaneous attempt to keep up with
its impossible pace, it all started to feel dispos-
able. So detrimental was the cycle of overproduc-
tion and discounting to luxury goods that in 2018,
Burberry, the British label, revealed that it had
been burning — not metaphorically but literally:
burning — $37 million of worth of merchandise
per year to maintain ‘‘brand value.’’
In short, fashion seemed to slowly annihilate
itself. Remember fashion week? While incurring
all those losses, designers were still putting on
shows roughly every three months, productions
that ran hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Or
millions, if you were Chanel.) The problem is that
everyone who attended the shows and streamed
them out via endless blurry Instagram videos was
actively making the case for the demise of their
jobs. Because if you’re there watching via the tiny
screen on your phone while the real live show is
happening feet away, why even go? ‘‘God bless
fashion media,’’ Sternberg said. ‘‘They still have
not caught up to the idea that everyone is seeing
it at the same time.’’
‘‘It’s such a little scam, fashion week,’’ he con-
tinued. ‘‘I love doing shows, but you get caught up
in it. And then you can’t stop. Because if you stop,
they’re going to write about you stopping, and
you’re going to look like a failure. Or the stores
will stop buying your stuff, and you don’t really
know why they’re buying your stuff, but they’re
buying it. And you’re not relevant anymore if
you’re not doing a show.’’
Sternberg acknowledged that there were other
factors that killed Band of Outsiders, chief among
them his own inexperience in scaling a niche
brand, but ultimately he was underfunded and
overleveraged. The day he opened the store in
SoHo — with a Momofuku Milk Bar attached — he
knew it was over. Sternberg took a $2 million con-
vertible loan from CLCC, a fashion fund backed
by by a Belgian shipping magnate, and defaulted
six months later. The brand was collateral. (Band
has since been reborn as a zombie version of itself,
run by the Belgians.) In May 2015, he handed off
passwords, keys and a storage locker in Pomona,
Calif., with the brand’s archive and walked away.
‘‘But it wasn’t some big disaster,’’ he said. ‘‘Well . . .
by the end it was a little bit of a disaster.’’
Sternberg’s story was not unique among his
peers. In Europe, luxury fashion conglomerates
like LVMH and Kering paired young designers
with experienced businesspeople. ‘‘In America,
it was much more entrepreneurial,’’ Andrew
Rosen, a founder of Theory and an early investor
in Proenza and Rag & Bone, told me. ‘‘You had a
lot of these incredibly talented young designers
that frankly didn’t have the business partnership
to go along with it.’’
I asked Sternberg if he felt as if he’d lost the
narrative. ‘‘To some extent, I didn’t lose the
narrative, because I never had one,’’ he said. ‘‘I
started making shirts and ties for men, and every-
body loved them. Then I made men’s clothes for
women, and everybody loved them. All these
amazing stores and magazines were eating them
up. I was just a kid in a candy store, waiting for
an adult to step into the room and rein it all in.’’
The adult never came. Proenza Schouler has
gone through myriad investors, ending up with
one that specializes in distressed assets. Last
summer, Derek Lam shut down his high-end line.
In November, Zac Posen went out of business
the same week as Barneys, the store that once
discovered him, followed closely by Opening
Ceremony in January.
Then Covid-19 hit.
Consumers stopped having any need for fash-
ionable clothing. Retailers scrambled to cancel
and return orders. (Remember R.T.V.s?) Design-
ers were unable to cover basic expenses like rent
and payroll, let alone upcoming collections. Sud-
‘ I T ’ S
L I T T L E
F A S H I O N
denly an industry that was already on the brink
ground to a complete halt.
‘‘It crystallized a lot of conversations that the
fashion industry had been having for some time,’’
Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue and artistic direc-
tor of Condé Nast, told me when we spoke via
Zoom in May. ‘‘For an industry that is meant to
be about change, sometimes we take a long time
to do just that, because it’s so big and there are
so many moving parts. But now we were really
forced into a moment when we had to reset and
rethink.’’ (Full disclosure: I’ve written for Vogue.)
Later, I asked Wintour why so many design-
ers of that generation were now struggling. ‘‘I
think in general, we’ve created a system that is
unrealistic and a strain for even the largest of
brands,’’ she wrote in an email. ‘‘It could be that
some younger designers were playing the same
game and trying to keep up with the big brands
rather than determining what’s best for them.’’
In March, Vogue partnered with the C.F.D.A.
to set up A Common Thread, a pandemic-relief
initiative that has raised $4.9 million to date. By
May, more than 1,000 companies had applied for
aid. ‘‘I was truly saddened by the number,’’ Win-
tour said, adding: ‘‘I think it really is a time where
we need to learn from what’s happened, almost
about how fragile and on the edge we were all liv-
ing. And that it wasn’t that solid.’’ Steven Kolb, the
president of the C.F.D.A., was even more blunt.
‘‘I think there will be brands that don’t come out
of this still a business,’’ he said.
How did we get here? This is a question I asked
almost everyone.
‘‘I think everybody would say it’s the other and
not themselves,’’ Kolb told me.
‘‘I don’t think you can blame one person, or
one part of the industry,’’ Wintour said. ‘‘Cer-
tainly the media had something to do with it as
everything went so instant through digital and
the emphasis on what’s new.’’
In May, I called Jeffrey Kalinsky, the retail
pioneer who opened Jeffrey in New York’s
meatpacking district in 1999, transforming the
neighborhood into the retail zone it is today.
Kalinsky was first in New York to sell Band of
Outsiders. In 2005, his stores were acquired by
Nordstrom, one of the department stores said
to be well positioned to survive the pandemic.
‘‘I think all of us played a part,’’ Kalinsky said. ‘‘It
S U C H A
S C A M ,
W E E K . ’
was the stores and the customers and the brands
and . . . all of us. I hate what’s happening in the
world. But I think if there’s anything good that
can come out of this, it’s the chance to look at
ourselves.’’ Four days after we spoke, Nordstrom
announced that it was closing Jeffrey.
ST ER N B ERG N EV ER IN TEN D ED to design a uni-
form for sheltering in place. After Band of Out-
siders folded in 2015, he padded around his house
for a few weeks and avoided the press. Then, he
got an email from Gwyneth Paltrow. ‘‘I was so sad
when Band closed,’’ she wrote. ‘‘It was a dark day
for fashion. I’m not sure what you’re doing, where
your head is at or if you have a noncompete, but
I have an idea I’d love to run by you.’’
Soon Sternberg had a job designing Paltrow’s
clothing line for Goop, her wellness-and-lifestyle
business. Meanwhile, he thought about what he
might like to do next.
Sternberg surveyed the fashion scene and saw
a lot of noise: the luxury (Continued on Page 42)
The New York Times Magazine 33
Solitary

Soul
 In 2013,
Australia
sent
hundreds of
would-be
asylum
seekers
to a
secretive
offshore
detention
center.
Then one
of the
detainees,
a journalist
named
Behrouz
Boochani,
told the
world all
about it.

By
Megan
K. Stack

Photographs
by
Birgit
Krippner

35
It was hard, in the end,
to figure out what to take and what to leave.
Spread over the linoleum floor of Behrouz
Boochani’s motel room were drifts of clothing,
books in Farsi and ashtrays overflowing with
cigarette stubs. It was a November morning
last year in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua
New Guinea; outside, roosters screamed under
a stinging equatorial sun. Boochani’s room was
cramped; the door propped open by a waste-
basket stuffed with the remains of chicken din-
ners. Everything he owned, all the objects and
talismans gathered during six and a half years
of imprisonment, were crammed into this small
room. Boochani had been an Iranian dissident
and a boat person; a detainee and a refugee. In
the morning he would strike out again, hoping
to reach yet another new life. It didn’t matter,
really, what stuff he carried along. ‘‘I don’t care
about these books,’’ he said suddenly, though
many of them contained Boochani’s own work.
The motel loomed around him, a sealed, som-
ber spot in the bustle of the port town. Everyone
staying in Lodge 10 — every guest, although that’s
the wrong word — was a refugee awaiting reset-
tlement. These men were brought into the coun-
try against their will for the noncrime of seeking
political asylum in Australia. They were among
hundreds of migrants locked up in an old naval
base on Manus Island, which lies off the north-
east coast of mainland Papua New Guinea. Now
they had been moved to this motel with its shared
toilets and atmosphere of stultified trauma. Some
of the refugees hardly stirred from bed; medical
contractors dosed them with sleeping pills and
psychiatric drugs. They had survived Manus only
to find themselves floundering like castaways in
Port Moresby, one of the world’s most danger-
ous cities, notorious for armed robberies, gang
Behrouz Boochani on the back porch of his house in Christchurch, New Zealand, in July.
violence and rape. Days, weeks, months slipped
away while they waited for news of resettlement.
Meanwhile, they were stuck. Or, to be precise,
everyone but Boochani was stuck.
All the men had started out together in the
shared misery of detention, but then Boochani
did something extraordinary: Letter by letter,
pecked out on contraband telephones while
locked up on Manus, he wrote his first book.
‘‘No Friend but the Mountains’’ was published
in 2018, electrifying readers with its harrowing
and deeply humanistic rendering of life in the
secretive and little-understood camp. The book
was an award-winning best seller; its beleaguered
author became a cause célèbre. Now Boochani
was armed with priceless paperwork: an invita-
tion from a literary organization in New Zealand,
a one-month visa to cross the border and a ticket
on a morning flight.
But for now Boochani was troubled and
chain-smoking. He stayed up late the night before,
glumly replaying his own comments from an ear-
lier interview. He wished he hadn’t described
himself as independent; he regretted saying that
he admired his own work. He was vexed by the
awkwardness of becoming a subject after all the
times he’d written about others. ‘‘I feel like I’m a
selfish person,’’ he said. With his haunting gaze,
unshaven jawline and mane of hair, photographs
of Boochani tend to draw comparisons to Jesus.
In person, though, his swagger is unmistakably
modern. In a polo shirt and tapered pants, Ray-
Bans perched to hold dark locks off his face, he
looked as if he belonged at a sidewalk cafe in
Rome. He seized a wheeled duffel. ‘‘This bag is
all right?’’ he asked. ‘‘It’s OK?’’ The suitcase was
old; a fading splash of paint stained its side along
with a label: MEG45 — Boochani’s serial number
at Manus. Nobody, I said, would pay attention to
his bag. He nodded, unconvinced.
Boochani didn’t have a passport, just a refugee
travel document with his name spelled wrong
— there was no guarantee that he would even
make it to New Zealand. He needed to be care-
ful, and also lucky. That’s why it was so startling
when morning came and Boochani was late to
the airport. Everybody arrived before him: the
TV crew filming his departure for a documen-
tary, friends who came to see him off, the other
passengers booked on the flight. By the time
Boochani ambled into the departure hall, bleary-
eyed and still wearing yesterday’s clothes, only an
hour remained before takeoff. It was cavalier; it
was incomprehensible. How could Boochani be
late to this flight, with its promise of long-elu-
sive escape? It was such an elaborate display of
insouciance that it was somehow wondrous.
But this is the alchemy of Boochani’s persona:
an impervious, unbroken spirit that defies his
oppressors and also, at times, his would-be sup-
porters. He projects the image of an undaunted
bohemian and lets you forget — maybe he hopes
you won’t notice — that he has also been a dis-
placed and vulnerable man.
As it turned out, Boochani was late to the
airport for the most obvious and unbelievable
reason: He didn’t know what time he needed
to show up. He had flown commercially exactly
once before, when he fled political persecution in
Iran. At the check-in counter, understanding his
mistake, a look of unease came into his eyes. And
when he finally — after tense debates and a flurry
of phone calls — got his boarding pass, he jogged
to the gate as if something were chasing him.
Once onboard, he collapsed into a window seat
and squinted into the rising sun spilling across the
runway. ‘‘I’m so tired of this country,’’ he erupted,
voice sharp and loud in the hushed plane. ‘‘It’s
a very strange country.’’ The plane lifted off and
rose on a run of sky. The earth fell away below —
green hills veined with red dirt roads, small islands
speckling the vast spread of sea. Papua New Guin-
ea vanished from sight.
A few hours later we landed in Manila for a
21-hour layover. Because he had no passport,
Boochani was forced to pass the time in a dim,
drab lounge with stiff chairs, a water dispenser
and a TV blaring ceaseless loops of Philippine
Airlines commercials. Smoking was forbidden
inside, and no, Boochani was told, he didn’t have
permission to step outside. He slammed his bag
to the floor and cursed. Boochani was still mut-
tering about cigarettes when he was approached
by two Afghan refugees from Manus — they were
headed for resettlement in the United States. The
men exchanged pleasantries in Farsi, but Boochani
soon moved away and stared grimly at the floor.
‘‘Seeing these guys here, it made me so depressed,’’
he said quietly. ‘‘Even I come here, I see refugees.’’
The day ground past in slow circles on the
wall clock. One hour, another hour. The room
kept getting colder. With a flimsy airline blanket
draped over his shoulders, Boochani looked like a
Photograph by Birgit Krippner for The New York Times
kid playing superhero. He sipped cup after cup of
plain hot water and talked elaborately about time.
He had lost time in Manus. Literally misplaced two
years. He was sent to Manus at age 28. Now he was
36. He’d been there for only six years. Explain that.
You can’t explain that. There must be a mistake.
There must be, but there isn’t. Boochani blamed
the ocean. He nearly drowned trying to reach
Australia and, as he flailed in the sea, he sensed a
kind of wild power in the water, enough to casu-
ally swallow a chunk of time or leave a memory
dull as sea glass. In the end, he simply accepted
that the loss of this time would never be explained
nor reconciled. It would linger as the cost of his
imprisonment. And even if the ocean had swal-
lowed time, Boochani had survived the ocean. He
mentioned often the feat of overcoming the sea.
In his mind full of metaphors, it was more than a
factual account of near drowning. He faced death
and madness but emerged, somehow, still intact.
I had planned to stay with Boochani until he
boarded the plane to New Zealand, but in the
morning, airport personnel marched him through
immigration and blocked me from following.
‘‘They still didn’t let me smoke,’’ he groaned when
he called from the plane. We talked and texted
intermittently until he took off. He was ready. And
then he was gone.
The cellphone was everything on Manus. Boo-
chani and the other detainees hoarded their
cigarettes for weeks to barter for phones with
the detention center’s local employees. Once
acquired, the phones had to be hidden from the
guards, who conducted surprise dawn inspec-
tions to hunt for contraband. Boochani’s phone
was confiscated twice; each time, there was no
recourse but to start over again, one sacrificed
smoke at a time.
The phones quickly became the only tool suc-
cessful at breaking through the shroud of secrecy
that Australia tried to throw over the migrants’
Boochani
wrote
feverishly,
finishing the
first draft
in six
months,
and with
a single
ambition:
He was
desperate to
make people
believe that
the asylum
seekers
on Manus
were being
tortured.
detention. Locked up in the disused rooms of the
old naval base, the asylum seekers were called by
serial numbers instead of names. Communica-
tions were tightly restricted. Under Australian
law, workers who spoke publicly about what they
saw or heard at the detention sites faced up to
two years in prison. But official documents and
accounts from survivors and whistle blowers
gradually leaked out, along with accusations of
sexual and physical abuse. Asylum seekers sought
solace in self-harm as their mental and physical
health crumbled under the strain of prolonged
and uncertain detention.
In his quest for refuge, Boochani had landed
in a dystopian enclosure administered by a crazy
collection of bureaucrats and guards and con-
tractors. A solitary soul, he was tormented in the
camp by the constant presence of so many other
people. He yearned for a paper and pen. The
only way to fight off a creeping madness, he con-
cluded, was to work. Boochani had been a jour-
nalist in Iran; now he started texting information
about Manus to journalists. As he grew more
bold, he moved on to writing his own dispatch-
es in publications including The Guardian and
giving speeches and interviews via livestream.
He co-directed a documentary, using his phone
to shoot intimate footage and interviews within
the detention center’s walls. Editors at Picador
in Australia approached Boochani about writing
a memoir; Boochani replied that he was already
working on a more genre-bending book.
Boochani wrote ‘‘No Friend but the Moun-
tains’’ in Farsi, sending texts of ideas and
descriptive fragments to nonexistent WhatsApp
numbers that he used to organize his thoughts.
Once satisfied with a passage, he sent it to
Moones Mansoubi, a translator in Sydney, who
organized the material into chapters before
sending it along to Omid Tofighian, an Iranian-
Australian philosophy professor. Slowly, halt-
ingly, Boochani and Tofighian texted back and
forth about how best to translate and arrange
the passages into a draft. Together they blended
poetry and prose into a genre Tofighian calls
‘‘horrific surrealism.’’
The book chronicles the early months of the
detention center, starting with Boochani’s des-
perate 2013 boat voyage from Indonesia to Aus-
tralia and ending with the first riot on Manus
the following year. Boochani describes the story
as autobiographical and true, but most of the
characters in the book are composites with nick-
names: the Prime Minister, the Cow, the Man
With the Thick Moustache, the Cunning Young
Man. The only exceptions are Boochani himself
and his friend Reza Barati, the first detainee to
be killed at Manus.
Boochani wrote feverishly, finishing the first
draft in six months, and with a single ambition:
He was desperate to make people believe that the
asylum seekers on Manus were being tortured.
Not mistreated or deprived of human rights,
‘Even if
I don’t
go to
Australia,
I will be a
part of
Australia.
They don’t
want to
recognize
they did
this crime,
because it
makes them
feel shame,
but it is
a part of
Australian
history.’
but tortured. It troubled him that even his sym-
pathizers pushed back against this description,
asking whether it wasn’t melodramatic or sensa-
tionalized. Boochani insists the systematic use of
psychological torment and dehumanization was
meant to destroy the men altogether.
‘‘I said, ‘Behrouz, the quality is amazing, the
nuances, the techniques,’ ’’ Tofighian recalled.
‘‘He said: ‘Omid, Omid, that’s not what I’m ask-
ing. Will people understand systematic torture?’ ’’
Boochani made international headlines in
2019 when the book won the prestigious Vic-
torian Prize for Literature — the most cash-rich
award in Australian letters — while he was still
detained on Manus. His immigration status
made him technically ineligible, but his publish-
er argued that, as a refugee living and writing
under Australian custody, Boochani had no other
homeland in which to be judged. ‘‘Even if I don’t
go to Australia, I will be a part of Australia,’’ he
told me. ‘‘They don’t want to recognize they did
this crime, because it makes them feel shame,
but it is a part of Australian history.’’
The award was a validation of Boochani’s
artistry, but it also served as a rebuke to those
who supported the ‘‘P.N.G. solution’’ — a policy
that had divided Australians bitterly. ‘‘I’ve been
attending these literary events for years, and
I’ve never seen anything like it,’’ Jane Novak,
Boochani’s agent, said. ‘‘Everyone was in tears.’’
Novak stayed up all night after the ceremony,
wading through hundreds of emails. When she
agreed to represent Boochani, she had warned
him that reception to his work would be ‘‘death
or glory.’’ That night, her doubts were erased.
‘‘Suddenly I had this army of true believers all
over the world.’’
First-person narratives that paint historical
events from the perspective of the persecuted
have proven powerful and enduring. These sto-
ries are subversive; the images slip into a reader’s
mind and create empathy where there was little
The New York Times Magazine 37
‘To return
to the
point
from
which
I started
would be
a death
sentence.’
before. They can permanently alter the way his-
tory is recorded and understood.
Boochani’s book challenges readers to
acknowledge that we are living in the age of
camps. The camps lie scattered throughout the
Middle East, cluster on Greek islands and stretch
like an ugly tattoo along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Camps sprawl through Bangladesh, Chad and
Colombia. People are suspended in a stateless
and extralegal limbo on the tiny Pacific island
nation Nauru, in Guantánamo and in the Syrian
town of al-Hawl. At no time since humans first
drew borders have there been more migrants
and refugees than today. Countless individual
lives weave into a collective panorama of dis-
placement and statelessness and detention.
These truncated journeys are a defining expe-
rience of our times.
As for Boochani, he refuses to cede the story
of his hardships to third-party observers. He crit-
icizes journalists who depict refugees as faceless
victims. He bristles at perceived condescension
from academics or activists who benefit from
what he describes as an industry built around
the plight of refugees. When Kristina Keneally, a
prominent center-left senator in Australia, sent a
tweet supporting Boochani, he tweeted in anger:
‘‘Such a rediclilius [sic] and unacceptable state-
ment by Labor Party. You exiled me to Manus and
you have supported this exile policy for years.’’
‘‘No Friend but the Mountains’’ had become
powerful — and sometimes its author chafed
against that power. ‘‘People just know me as a
person who wrote a book,’’ he said. ‘‘This book is
only a small part of my work.’’ He didn’t want to
get stuck forever writing and talking about Manus
Island and refugees. He wanted the world to view
him as a writer who had been, for a time, a refugee.
He was other things before; he wanted the
freedom to change again, and keep changing.
Boochani was the second of five children born
to illiterate Kurdish farmers. He grew up on the
outer fringe of a small village where the Zagros
Mountains ripple toward the Iraqi border. The
bloody slog of the Iran-Iraq war raged in the
surrounding countryside throughout his child-
hood, filling Boochani’s earliest memories with
warplanes and fear. The family sometimes went
hungry, so he climbed oak trees to gather pigeon
eggs. When people in his village needed money,
they stood on the edge of the road and waited
38 8.9.20
for someone to come looking for labor crews or
construction workers.
Because he is a Kurd, Boochani inherited a
legacy of bigotry and official repression in Iran,
but his upbringing also gave him a mind-set that
would eventually prove invaluable: The convic-
tion that he, a descendant of perpetually put-
upon warriors, could withstand even extreme
hardship with his dignity intact. Boochani was
better at sports than school, and so he sat for uni-
versity entrance examinations with little hope.
He could only afford to apply for a free slot at
a public university. He was competing against
more privileged students all over the country —
teenagers who grew up with books and highbrow
conversation and tutors. Boochani took the exam
and tried to forget about it.
High school completed, he joined a work crew
to dig out a building foundation. The dirt was hard;
the progress slow; the work exhausting. On the
third day he rode home in a funk. ‘‘This is how
the rest of my life will be,’’ he recalled thinking. As
the bus pulled into the village, he caught sight of a
pack of friends and cousins waiting on the road-
side. Jubilant, waving a letter they’d torn open,
they shouted the news: Boochani had earned a seat
at Tarbiat Moallem University in Tehran.
At university, one of Boochani’s closest friends
was Toomas Askarian, who still recalls their free-
wheeling discussions of ‘‘everything: European
football, philosophy, people.’’ They took rambling
walks and honed their novelistic skills by dream-
ing up elaborate back stories for their fellow stu-
dents. They had little interest in the formal niceties
of academia. Rather than spend money on texts,
Boochani would borrow the books to cram the
night before exams. Once again, his raw intellect
carried him. He completed his undergraduate
degree as well as a master’s in geopolitics. (Askar-
ian, by contrast, was asked to leave the university
without a degree.)
In Tehran, Boochani wrote dispatches for a
Kurdish magazine and quietly taught Kurdish
language lessons. Advocacy of Kurdish culture is
considered subversive by Shiite rulers who view
Kurdish nationalism as a threat, but Boochani was
unfazed. ‘‘We were working just to keep the Kurd-
ish language alive,’’ he said. ‘‘When you see a sys-
tem denying your identity or planning to destroy
your culture, you react.’’
After graduation, Boochani stayed in the cap-
ital. Journalism and activism paid little, and he
struggled for cash. He drifted around, crashing
with friends. Meanwhile, the political danger
was growing.
In 2013, the Revolutionary Guard raided the
magazine and jailed some of his colleagues.
Boochani went into hiding. ‘‘They were listening
to my phone,’’ he said. ‘‘They knew everything
about me. They were following me. It was too
much pressure.’’
He scraped together $5,000 to be smuggled
through a notoriously dangerous refugee route
to Australia. He would fly to Indonesia and
then sail hundreds of miles to the Australian
territory of Christmas Island, where he would
ask for political asylum. Plenty of migrants had
drowned on this voyage. But Boochani imagined
Australia as a prosperous country that protected
human rights and so, he decided, the journey
was worth the risk.
On his first attempted crossing, the boat sank
before clearing Indonesian waters. Thrashing in
the dark sea, Boochani prepared to die, but fish-
ermen hauled the migrants aboard and turned
them over to the Indonesian police. Back on dry
land, Boochani escaped from jail and then spent
time hiding in a hotel basement, where he ran out
of money and began to starve. He dreaded going
back to sea, but there was no choice — having
fled, he couldn’t go back to Iran. ‘‘To return to
the point from which I started would be a death
sentence,’’ he later wrote in his book.
The second craft was rickety and overcrowd-
ed; storms crashed; the boat got lost and nearly
sank. But the migrants reached Australian waters;
a naval ship took them to Christmas Island. At
that point, Boochani assumed, one of two things
would happen: Either he would be sent back to
Indonesia or his asylum case would be heard.
But as Boochani was enduring his desper-
ate escape, a harsh new migration policy was
announced in Australia. Prime Minister Kevin
Rudd declared, the same week that Boochani
landed on Christmas Island, that anybody try-
ing to reach Australia by boat without a visa ‘‘will
never be settled in Australia’’ and would instead
be shipped off to Papua New Guinea.
Manus Regional Processing Center doesn’t exist
anymore. Four years after Boochani arrived on
the island, he saw bulldozers razing the decrepit
buildings. Foundering in debt, rife with corrup-
tion and stunted by a legacy of Australian colo-
nialism, Papua New Guinea had agreed to host
the camp in exchange for about $300 million.
But backlash from the international community
was immediate and scathing. Pilloried by criti-
cism from home and abroad, Papua New Guinea
soured on the deal, and in 2016, the country’s
‘The distress
caused by
saying ‘‘hi’’
is so intense
that when
prisoners
pass each
other they
pretend
that they
don’t see
anyone.
It is like
shadows.’
Supreme Court declared the detention of asylum
seekers unlawful and ordered the camp closed.
Manus remains, however, as a cultural identity
shared by hundreds of asylum seekers who sur-
vived its barracks. They have their own history
and iconography; they carry a collective grief
for the seven men, at least, who were killed in
flares of violence, died by suicide or succumbed
to medical negligence.
It was on Christmas Island that Australian
officials began to taunt the asylum seekers with
lurid tales of cannibals and malaria-tainted mos-
quitoes. Boochani’s book describes the strange
day he was moved to Manus: ‘‘Guards came in
like debt collectors and heaved us out of bed,’’ he
wrote. The men were strip-searched and dressed
in ill-fitting clothes, marched past news photog-
raphers and loaded onto an airplane.
The miseries of offshore detention were meant
to pressure migrants to abandon their asylum
claims so they could legally be sent back whence
they came and — more crucial — to create a spec-
tacle so chilling that ‘‘boat people’’ would stop
coming to Australia altogether. That was the first
and last point of this byzantine enterprise.
Boats ferried the first white prisoners to Aus-
tralia in 1788, and today they float in the national
imagination as symbols of unchecked immigration
and demographic change. ‘‘Sometimes I feel that
Manus and Nauru are like a mirror,’’ Boochani said.
‘‘Australia sees its real face on that mirror, and they
hate it. Because we are boat people. They call us
boat people. But you are boat people, too.’’
Arriving in Manus, Boochani found himself
among tents and rough buildings of lime and dirt
that shed white powder onto the ground, sticking
to everyone’s feet. Drain pipes poked from bath-
rooms and the kitchen, dripping ‘‘a potion of rot-
ting excrement, the perfect fertilizer for the tropical
plants.’’ The generator whose failures paralyzed the
cooling fans was a never-seen, godlike presence, ‘‘a
mind made of machinery and wires . . . that takes
pleasure in throwing the prison into disarray.’’ The
harsh sun was ‘‘in cahoots with the prison to inten-
sify the misery,’’ but when the sun set, the darkness
was worse: ‘‘We are all transformed into dark shad-
ows scavenging for scraps of light,’’ he wrote.
The asylum seekers at first stuck with the peo-
ple they met on the sea voyage, but gradually,
in what Boochani described as ‘‘a kind of inter-
nal migration,’’ the men regrouped along ethnic
and national lines: Afghan, Sri Lankan, Sudanese,
Lebanese, Iranian, Somali, Pakistani, Rohingya,
Iraqi, Kurdish. They struggled against traumatic
memories and boredom — even playing cards
was banned. Somebody found a marker and drew
a backgammon board onto a plastic table; bot-
tle caps were gathered as checkers. But guards
defaced the board, scrawling ‘‘Games Prohibited’’
over the table, leaving the men ‘‘just staring at
each other in distress,’’ Boochani wrote.
The camp was suffused with a dark, existential
uncertainty. Nobody knew how long they would
Photograph by Birgit Krippner for The New York Times
The clock in Boochani’s kitchen in Christchurch stopped working.
He prefers to keep it there unmoving, suspended in time.
be held or what fate awaited them afterward. The
men were pressed to go home or stay in Papua
New Guinea for good. Asylum cases were sel-
dom and sporadically heard. The detainees didn’t
understand whether Australia would eventually
relent and accept them and, if so, how long they
needed to hold out. Meanwhile, they’d been
transported against their will over an interna-
tional border and held without trial or even the
suggestion of a crime. Imprisoned, Boochani
thought. Taken hostage.
These problems were enormous and unan-
swerable, but in the daily slog of camp life, small
objects and petty interactions dominated. Boo-
chani wrote of the irrational rush of euphoria
and pride he felt one night when, sleepless and
miserable with a toothache, he climbed onto the
camp’s roof and reached a mango tree coveted by
the detainees. ‘‘I have made it up here, up into the
ether, up on top of the prison,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Witness-
ing the spectacle, witnessing the jungle and the
ocean, observing as I evaporate into the darkness.’’
‘‘Humans are like this, after all,’’ he wrote.
‘‘Even in unexpected situations they become
gripped by wonder.’’
The men fought for a spot near the front of the
line at meals, which left Boochani a ‘‘frail fox,’’
because he was always at the back, subsisting
on the last and worst of the food. He loathed
having to greet, over and over, the people who
recurred constantly in the crammed yards. ‘‘The
distress caused by saying ‘hi’ is so intense that
when prisoners pass each other they pretend that
they don’t see anyone. It is like shadows.’’
As weeks slid past, paranoia clouded their
minds. Boochani was haunted by a fear that the
Australians might suddenly, one day, load all the
men onto a ship and push them out to sea to die.
‘‘For years I thought, Anytime, it’s possible — I
always imagined this — if a war happens, they’ll
put us all on a ship,’’ he told me. ‘‘They could do
this. People would talk about a Third World War.
I thought, They’ll kill everyone.’’
Self-harm provided a much-craved airing of
dark emotion. People swallowed razor blades;
sliced their wrists; hanged themselves; sewed their
lips together. Detainees hurt themselves in reac-
tion to even minor shifts or suggestions: a dawn
inspection, a change in Australian politics, a rumor.
After six months of misery and unanswered
questions, immigration officials appeared at the
camp and warned asylum seekers that they would
be stuck in Manus for a long time yet. Enraged
detainees rioted that night, lunging at the guards
and hurling chairs. Local police and Manus resi-
dents rushed into the compound to quell the unrest.
Dozens of detainees were injured, some suffering
broken bones and severe lacerations. One man lost
an eye; another’s throat was slashed, reportedly by a
guard. Barati, Boochani’s close friend, was viciously
attacked by a group that included an employee of
the Salvation Army, which had a $50 million con-
tract from the Australian government to provide
counseling to the asylum seekers. The assailants
killed Barati by dropping a heavy rock onto his
head. He was the first detainee to die on Manus.
As the years passed, the terms of the men’s
confinement changed, but freedom never came.
When they heard of the court order to close the
camp, they were jubilant with the assumption that
Australia would finally have to let them in — but
this, too, was a false hope. They could come and
go from the camp, but without travel documents,
the men were still stuck on the island. They swam
in the ocean, met women and played soccer by
the water — but they couldn’t leave. ‘‘Our prison
became bigger,’’ Boochani said. Tofighian, the
translator, traveled to Manus with proofs so the
The New York Times Magazine 39
pair could finalize the book in person. Novak, his
agent, came to meet him, too.
In the end, most of the men clung to the
camp. Traumatized and depleted, they balked
at moving to another detention center or start-
ing life in an unfamiliar land. Medical services
and food were withdrawn. Electricity and water
lines were cut. The police and guards attacked
them. Finally, the last holdouts were forcibly
relocated to temporary lodgings in and around
the nearby town of Lorengau.
In 2019, most of the asylum seekers were
moved to motels in Port Moresby because,
it seemed, nobody knew what else to do with
them. The Manus Regional Processing Center
was closed for good; the buildings and fences
mostly erased from the landscape. Now the Unit-
ed States and Australia have new ambitions for
the site: A joint naval base to counter Chinese
influence in the South China Sea.
The first time I saw Boochani, he was still being
detained on Manus Island. It was a chilly, wind-
scraped morning in 2019. Boochani was discuss-
ing his book via video link at the annual writers
festival in Byron Bay, Australia. When his face
flickered onto the screen, the overflowing crowd
that jammed the seaside auditorium gasped and
burst into applause. Boochani looked haggard
and detached; dangling hair framed his craggy
features. ‘‘Oh, God,’’ said a woman near me. ‘‘He
looks so alone.’’
Once the clapping died down, Boochani spoke
with the urgency of a man who knows he might
vanish at any moment. He told the Australian
crowd that their government had lied to them
about Manus. He described the years he spent
trying to get Australian readers to pay attention.
‘‘People didn’t listen to me,’’ he said. ‘‘This is part
of my struggle: to get my identity back.’’ The audi-
ence listened with a mood that approached grat-
itude. Some wept softly; others set their mouths
and nodded grimly. Invited to ask questions, sev-
eral audience members apologized to Boochani.
Australian politicians sometimes cast the
problem of the boats in humanitarian terms:
Ruthless people smugglers, they say, must be
starved out of business. At other times, the boats
are discussed as a security threat, carrying an
unchecked flow of strange and potentially dan-
gerous foreigners. Often these two strands of
thought — we don’t want those people here, nor
do we want them to drown — are woven together
so tightly they are impossible to separate.
At the same time, politicians have taken pains
to deflect attention from the human beings
aboard the boats. Former military spokespeo-
ple have said they were expressly forbidden to
humanize the asylum seekers or present them
as relatable to the Australian public. Politicians
scorn boat arrivals as ‘‘queue jumpers’’ who have
greedily taken the spots of rule-abiding migrants
seeking to come to Australia ‘‘the right way.’’ In
40 8.9.20
truth, there is no queue to jump; governments are
not obliged to consider wait time when choosing
people for resettlement. Most refugees will never
get the fresh start they seek; they are far more
likely to return to their home country or stay in
limbo until they die.
Peter Dutton, Australia’s home affairs minis-
ter, frequently says the asylum seekers in Papua
New Guinea include men ‘‘of bad character’’ —
‘‘Labour’s mess’’ that he has been forced to ‘‘clean
up.’’ Pauline Hanson, a right-wing populist sena-
tor, called the men ‘‘rapists’’ on the floor of Parlia-
ment this past winter. ‘‘These people are thugs,’’
she said. ‘‘They don’t belong here in Australia.’’
If any of this sounds familiar, that’s not a coin-
cidence. The practice of ‘‘offshore processing’’
can be traced to Guantánamo Bay, where the
United States housed tens of thousands of asylum
seekers who fled by boat from Haiti and Cuba
in the 1990s. Daniel Ghezelbash, an Australian
legal academic who wrote a book about links
between American and Australian refugee policy,
has documented decades of advice and influence
exchanged between the two governments. ‘‘The
goal is the same: Creating extralegal spaces which
you can exert control over but not be responsible
for,’’ Ghezelbash said. ‘‘Or ostensibly deny legal
responsibility for what goes on there.’’
President Obama, during his final months in
office, agreed that hundreds of detainees from
Manus Island and Nauru could resettle in the
United States. As part of the deal, Australia was
expected to grant asylum to an unspecified num-
ber of refugees from Central America and Africa.
Ghezelbash calls the swapping of politically incon-
venient people ‘‘refugee laundering.’’
When President Trump heard about the trade-
off he had inherited, he famously grumbled that it
was a ‘‘dumb deal,’’ but he didn’t stop it. Gradually,
quietly, refugees from Manus flew off to America.
At least 785 people from Manus and Nauru have
settled in the United States; more are expected
to arrive.
All told, Australia has locked up thousands
of desperate people, including children, in de
facto prisons on Manus and Nauru. The deten-
tions have been harsh but effective, officials say:
The flow of boats slowed and eventually stopped.
Asylum seekers are still stuck on Nauru; until
last year, they included children. The Australian
government recently spent about $130 million to
reopen the detention center on Christmas Island
— despite the lack of new arrivals to lock up. In
other words, the policy is still unapologetically
intact, ready and waiting for any boats that make
it to Australian waters.
It was a brilliant January day in Christchurch,
New Zealand. Screeching gulls wheeled in off the
Pacific; swollen roses bobbed in the breeze. In the
hydrangea-fringed garden of a spare, tidy house,
Boochani sat smoking. He couldn’t smoke inside
because the house wasn’t exactly his; it was on
loan from the University of Canterbury. Boochani’s
neighborhood looked as if Beatrix Potter had
painted it in watercolors: prim, ivy-laced cottages
and tidy beds of hollyhocks and lavender. It was
nice, Boochani conceded. Too nice, sometimes.
‘‘It’s too much, you know?’’ he said. ‘‘It’s too much
peace and too much beauty. It’s hard to deal with
this. It’s like you go from a very cold place to a
very hot place.’’
Boochani had landed in New Zealand without a
credit card or bank account; he had no idea what
his book earnings were worth in real terms. The
Christchurch mayor and local Maori representa-
tives welcomed him as he stepped off the plane.
He appeared before a rapt and sold-out crowd at
an event organized by Word Christchurch, the
group that had invited him to the country. He was
constantly surrounded by people offering help.
Somebody took him to buy clothes; somebody else
drove him on a run for hair gel. He was shown to
a room in an upscale hotel, then later moved to
a vacant apartment. The memories of detention
were still fresh, and Boochani struggled to adapt
himself to an unfamiliar place and lifestyle. He kept
signing up for grocery-store discount cards, then
losing them. His sleep was crowded with night-
mares; his days were full of meetings and public
appearances. He had an idea to write a new novel,
a contemporary Kurdish love story. He talked with
friends about starting a literary journal. More often
than not, he drifted around in a kind of daze. ‘‘I feel
empty,’’ he said. ‘‘Like I never read a book. But I’m
OK with that. And, I think, it will come.’’
During these early and disorienting weeks, Boo-
chani got word that it was finally time to begin
the final steps to resettle in the United States.
He’d been awaiting this news for months, but
when his chance came, he backed out. Reports of
tensions between the U.S. and Iran, immigration
crackdowns and political tumult had eroded his
eagerness. ‘‘I don’t feel safe in America now,’’ he
said simply. ‘‘I don’t mean that someone would kill
me. But I don’t trust the American system. It’s like
chaos there now.’’
Instead, Boochani took a bold gamble: He
applied for asylum in New Zealand. He accept-
ed a fellowship with the university’s Ngai Tahu
Research Center, which specializes in Maori and
Indigenous studies — a nod to his Kurdish iden-
tity — although the post would remain a secret
while his application to stay in New Zealand was
pending. Neither his whereabouts nor his plans
were public knowledge. Conservative politicians
in both New Zealand and Australia were calling
for Boochani to be turned out. What would he do
then, where would he go? He shrugged; he didn’t
answer; instead, he began to roll another cigarette.
The right to smoke had become a kind of index
by which Boochani took stock of his own liberty.
By that measure he was almost free, but not quite.
He dreamed of owning a house and smoking with
impunity. ‘‘I’ll put up a sign that says, ‘Smoking is
free.’ I’ll even say, ‘If you don’t smoke, don’t come.’ ’’
When he set eyes on this pretty cottage, with its Arriving in New Zealand just before the ear- Answers to puzzles of 8.2.20
two bedrooms and sensible kitchenette, he called liest coronavirus infections emerged in China, PUZZLIN’
one of his new friends in amazement: ‘‘You’ve got Boochani had freed himself as people around the I C E B E R G S H A R P T O N C U S S
to see this place, you’re not going to believe it!’’ The world were shut into quarantines. He sometimes M A T I N E E C O M E H E R E A S E T
friend, an Iranian-New Zealander named Donna thought that he had finally escaped detention S T A N D I N G R O O M O N L Y B E A R
E N T R A P S N A Y M E A D E
Miles-Mojab, laughed as she recounted this story and accidentally spread it all over the world. He
Z A N Y S L O P J E N S A L L O W
later. She rushed over, imagining a swimming wondered, too, whether this taste of extreme E P E E S E V E R L A S T I N G L O V E
pool, gleaming marble floors, elaborate gardens. isolation might help people imagine more clearly B I R T H S E R V I N E D E M O T E D

In those early months, Miles-Mojab became a the horror of being locked away. ‘‘People should R A D I O C A R T E I X E I R A
A S A O A R E R O S B O T C A A N
kind of guide and cultural translator to Boochani. understand now that life is not only food or hav- F A L L I N G R A I N M O M J A Y N E
Speaking in Farsi, she explained things to him in ing a bed,’’ he said. ‘‘We are nothing without peo- I M E A N T A R P S A O S I R E N S
a gentle, almost maternal tone. Boochani, she felt, ple. Absolutely nothing, you know?’’ S O R O S I I N P A R K I N G R A M P
H A T S D M S T R I X R A G Y E R
was oblivious to his own celebrity and the double The months slid past. Wait a few more weeks,
L E G A L A I D E A G L E E Y E
takes he provoked around town. For his part, he Boochani was told. And then a few more weeks, S C A P U L A O N E T O N S E N S E S
was offended by small and seemingly insignificant and still more. Boochani wrote some short sto- Q U A L I F Y I N G R O U N D S T I R S

exchanges, and he told these stories one night over ries. Bought some new clothes. Took up biking. U P L A S T N G O C U R E O R S O
I R A T E P L O A C H I E V E
whiskey in a pub. ‘‘Something happened to me Then, on July 23, Boochani’s birthday, he finally S O R T F E A R O F M I S S I N G O U T
here,’’ he leaned forward and lowered his voice. got word from his lawyer: His application had H U G E A N T I P O D E S T O O P T O
‘‘If this happened to you, you would cry.’’ He was been accepted. Boochani could stay in New Zea- Y S E R T H E A T E R S Y E S I S E E

walking alone late one night, he said, when he land. He was free. On the phone, he let out a wild
crossed paths with a group of young people. and incredulous laugh. Of course! When else? It KENKEN
Someone called out to him, ‘‘Aren’t you that writ- had been his birthday, too, the day he was lifted
er who was on TV?’’ Boochani replied, ‘‘Yeah.’’ He from the sea and taken into Australian custody.
paused. A tense silence gathered over the table, Hearing him laugh like that, I remembered one of
heavy with all the violent and demeaning conclu- his stories: When he was born, his parents asked a
sions this story might reach. visiting cousin who knew how to read to choose a
‘‘He took out his wallet,’’ Boochani concluded name for the baby. The cousin opened a book and
dolefully, ‘‘and he tried to give me $200.’’ There was poked his finger onto the page at random, strik-
a beat of silence. Miles-Mojab’s face twitched with ing the word ‘‘Behrouz’’ — Farsi for ‘‘fortunate.’’
smothered laughter. ‘‘Did you take it?’’ she asked. Literally, ‘‘good day.’’
‘‘No. I said: ‘Keep your money. Probably I am Boochani rode his bike from his house to the ACROSTIC
richer than you. My book is in many countries.’ ’’ sea. He looked at the expanse of ocean, these (PHIL) COUSINEAU, THE PAINTED WORD — The
This is the complication and the delicacy of Boo- waters that had almost killed him, the sea he sus- English language is studded with terrific group nouns,
chani: His most famous work was derived from the pected of absconding with years of his life, the . . . a crash of rhinoceros, a parliament of owls, a
considerable suffering he endured at the hands of waves that crashed now on the mineral grains of skulk of foxes, . . . a zeal of zebras. . . . [C]oinages include
. . . a couch of video game players and a cuddle of
the state. He is proud, even cocky at times. And yet this new land he called home. He looked at the homecoming queens.
this pride must wrestle with the dehumanization ocean, at all of that past and all of that future, the
he has endured. His existence was controlled by churn of time and destiny, and he smoked a cig- A. Colossus I. Umbrella Q. Traffic
B. Ozone hole J. Tomcat R. Engrossed
a hostile bureaucracy for years; now his days were arette. Just one cigarette. One cigarette and the
C. Unpacked K. High-low S. Deadlock
arranged by benevolent well-wishers. sea in his eyes. And then he rode home again. D. Sheriff L. Ex officio T. Wagons
E. Ideogram M. Philomel U. Orpheus
F. Nonesuch N. Assuaged V. Regatta

KENKEN
Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined
G.
H.
Equalizer
Avifauna
O. Infancy
P. Nuisance
W. Dodgers

box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box.
A 5x5 grid will use the digits 1–5. A 7x7 grid will use 1–7.
DOUBLE OR NOTHING GAS LINES

MA LI
FU LT ON
LI SA
SE QU EL
LA VA
GE OR GE

Answers to puzzle on Page 44

in your score.
dictionary words in the beehive, feel free to include them
pizzazz), pizza, zinnia. If you found other legitimate
minima, panama, panini, paparazzi, piazza, pizazz (or
mamma, manana, mania, manna, marina, marinara,
Marzipan (3 points). Also: Airman, amain, apian, impair,
SPELLING BEE

KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. © 2020 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved. 41
Sweatpants
(Continued from Page 33)
minimalism of countless Celine copycats; the
maximalism of brands like Gucci; the full gamut of
streetwear, from Supreme to Vetements. He want-
ed to do something that felt like a palate cleanser.
Sternberg took meetings with Target and Ama-
zon fashion and pitched Superproduct, a line of
well-designed basics that he hoped could be what
the Gap once was. When neither went anywhere,
he decided to do it on his own.
Entireworld was born in 2018 as a D.T.C.
(direct-to-consumer) line, with no seasons, no
shows, no novelty. ‘‘I wanted complete freedom
from that,’’ he said. You probably know what D.T.C.
is even without knowing it. Reformation, Everlane,
Outdoor Voices, Warby Parker, Allbirds — all those
sans-serif, venture capital-funded brands that have
proliferated so much in the last decade that you’re
probably wearing one of them right now. Have you
ever bought clothes from an Instagram ad? That’s
D.T.C. Entireworld is sort of post-D.T.C., which is to
say that there is no Silicon Valley boardroom trying
to solve a problem for you. It’s just Sternberg, a
fashion-industry refugee, feeling his way through it.
‘‘I’m incredibly business-minded,’’ Sternberg
said. ‘‘But we’re design-driven. I come out of fash-
ion. I’m not coming out of a PowerPoint deck.’’
Most styles in his line are perennial. There are
pleated trousers that are sort of the cooler version
of what your ’80s dad might wear, and a ‘‘Giant
Shirt’’ inspired by Ralph Lauren’s ‘‘Big Shirt’’ of the
’90s. The sweatsuit, made of fabric that Sternberg
developed from scratch, feels like the sartorial ver-
sion of a hug. Something about its combination of
color, fabric and fit makes it feel OK to wear not only
to bed but also out. (In January, I saw a woman in
New York wearing it under a Burberry coat.) Unlike
Band’s slim fit, most things by Entireworld are
roomy and wide. Its slogan is ‘‘The stuff you live in.’’
In recent years, the collapse of the fashion
industry has pushed other runway designers, like
Thakoon Panichgul and the shoe designer Tamara
Mellon, to redefine themselves as D.T.C. compa-
nies. Those who haven’t are now being nudged in
that direction. Take Batsheva Hay, for instance,
who in April had more than half of her whole-
sale orders slashed and $100,000 owed to her by
retailers. When I reached her, she was packaging
web orders from a lake house in upstate New
York and selling face masks via Instagram. She
estimated that before the pandemic D.T.C. was
about 10 percent of her business. ‘‘But now, it’s
kind of all my business,’’ she said.
Emily Adams Bode, a men’s-wear designer
who won a C.F.D.A. award last year, was until
recently sold in 120 stores worldwide, with
e-commerce accounting for less than 10 percent
of her sales. In May, Bode was at her fiancé’s par-
ents’ home in Canada, rushing to put her spring/
summer collection online. ‘‘Stores that we’ve had
in our Excel sheets on the probability of getting
42 8.9.20
paid at 90 percent now call us and say they’re
closing,’’ she told me. ‘‘We have to completely rely
on our own selling, because at the end of the day,
I don’t know how many stores are going to be
able to carry the weight in another six months.’’
Last November, just as everyone declared that
retail was dead, Bode opened her own brick-and-
mortar store on the Lower East Side. The store,
which is sort of the old-school version of D.T.C.,
ended up saving her. What she projected to sell
in a month she started selling in a day. ‘‘I don’t
think we’d be here without the store,’’ she said.
Hay was also looking at store space just as the
crisis began, and planned to again. ‘‘There’s going
to be a ton of empty retail space,’’ she said, ‘‘I’m
sure I can find an amazing deal.’’
The pandemic has also forced a correction of
the calendar. With factories shut down and deliv-
eries delayed, many of this year’s fall collections
will, for the first time in a long while, actually
arrive in season. Some in the industry have even
talked about pushing the unseen and unsold 2020
collections to 2021 to avoid losses. ‘‘Which, by the
way, is not a bad idea,’’ Sternberg said. ‘‘It’s what
the clothing industry has over the food industry:
In the food industry, the aged inventory rots.’’ The
fascinating part is that in order to do that — to
give that aged inventory value again — requires
literally killing fashion, that nebulous deity that
says something is ‘‘in’’ this year and not the next.
In May, two separate groups of designers
banded together to put forth proposals on how
to change the industry. Each essentially pushed
for the same thing: later deliveries, delayed mark-
downs, fewer collections. ‘‘I think a lot of us are
aligned on this idea that seasons have to go back
to what they were,’’ Joseph Altuzarra, who signed
both proposals, told me. The only person who
didn’t think fashion had been moving too fast
was the designer Virgil Abloh, even though he
had to skip his own fashion show in Paris last
September, reportedly because of exhaustion.
(Abloh juggles his streetwear label, Off-White,
with Louis Vuitton men’s wear, as well as col-
laborations with Nike, Ikea, Evian, Jimmy Choo
and others.) ‘‘I work at the pace of my ideas, and
those come often,’’ he told me. ‘‘The consumer
today is a hyper being. I’m not one to say, Let’s go
back to the old days when we had rotary phones
or something.’’ He called revising the delivery
schedule an ‘‘obvious fix, more so than a pro-
found idea or anything.’’
What does all of this mean for the shows?
‘‘There will definitely be something, but
nothing resembling fashion week as we knew
it,’’ Wintour told me.
Abloh announced that he will no longer show
on a seasonal schedule, or base his shows in one
place. The Belgian designer Dries Van Noten will
not show until 2021. Chanel premiered a virtual
resort show the week that the George Floyd pro-
tests began and came off as mostly tone-deaf. Ales-
sandro Michele, the Gucci designer, has reduced
the number of shows from five to two, doing away
with seasons and gender altogether. There has also
been talk of virtual reality and films accompanied
by fabric samples. In New York, the C.F.D.A. will
still be the official scheduler of New York Fash-
ion Week in September, though it’s unclear why
mostly digital shows would have to be scheduled.
‘‘I think fashion week is over,’’ Hay said. ‘‘I’m
pretty sure it’s over forever.’’ If not the shows, then
certainly the collective circus that travels from
New York to London to Milan to Paris twice a year.
The more important question is whether peo-
ple will buy clothes that aren’t sweatpants in the
near future. Some are already designing with that
uncertainty in mind. Altuzarra, who makes the
opposite of homebody clothes, told me he was
adding softer fabrics and more relaxed silhou-
ettes to his spring ’21 collection. ‘‘Not necessar-
ily like loungewear or athleisure,’’ he said. ‘‘But
I think after spending months in sweatpants,
people are going to want to feel comfortable.’’
Hay, meanwhile, was pivoting from party dresses
to housedresses. ‘‘I’m just like, OK, we’re home
more, but why does that have to be sweatpants?’’
she said. ‘‘Can it be a dress? A housedress is com-
pletely easy. You can throw it on, zip it off, what-
ever. Maybe I’m going too far imagining a future
where we’re constantly in and out of quarantine,
but businesswise, I’m sort of preparing for that.’’
And if that’s the case, what happens to design-
ers like Jacobs? When asked about online shop-
ping, Jacobs told Business of Fashion: ‘‘I love to
go to a shop. I like to see everything. I like to
touch it. I like to try it on. I like to have a coffee. I
like to have a bottle of water. I like to get dressed
up.’’ He raised his eyebrows for emphasis. ‘‘But
ordering online, in a pair of grubby sweats, is not
my idea of living life.’’
Incidentally, Jacobs’s fall 2020 show, in Feb-
ruary, was among his very best. The clothes ref-
erenced a pre-internet New York while modern
dancers charged at unsuspecting audience mem-
bers seated at cafe tables in a way that now feels
prescient. In 2008, Sternberg used to sneak into
Jacobs’s shows at the Lexington Avenue Armory,
as everyone did then. (‘‘I’m a huge Marc Jacobs
fan,’’ he told me.) That was the year that Santigold
and M.I.A. played on every runway, and there was
a magic to the way that the music, the stomping
models and the fabric in motion gave fashion
its heartbeat. The incredible talent of someone
like Jacobs is that his clothes didn’t even have to
be produced or worn to have influence. He’s all
about starting a conversation that then threads its
way through the system, eventually landing in a
consumer’s hands via a perfume or an accessory,
if at all. ‘‘So what happens to Marc?’’ Sternberg
asked. ‘‘Where does he end up?’’
He answered his own question. ‘‘I guess in the
Mercer Hotel wearing pearls.’’
In June, I stopped by Sternberg’s garage, where
he keeps a personal archive of Band of Outsiders
designs. There are crates labeled ‘‘turbs,’’ for the
turbans he sent down the runway for fall 2013 —
a collection inspired by Billie Holiday and Atari
video games — and ‘‘SS12’’ for spring/summer
2012, which referenced Peter Weir’s ‘‘Picnic at
Hanging Rock.’’ There are also polos from his
‘‘This is not a polo shirt’’ line; fur jackets (before
he got off fur) from the show that opened with
mountain climbers rappelling from the ceiling;
and bandage skirts stitched out of suspenders. ‘‘I
made that, yay me,’’ Sternberg said flatly. ‘‘This
is some ugly print that Rashida Jones wore on
‘Good Morning America,’ ’’ he said. (Sternberg
loves Jones; it’s his own work he’s ambivalent
about.) ‘‘What do you do with all this [expletive]?
You don’t want to throw it out. Give it away?
Should someone be wearing it? It’s not art, for
God’s sake.’’
Going through this stuff, Sternberg was a bit
like a musician revisiting the hits he made before
he got sober. He loves them, he really does, but
the excess of it weighs on him — all those ideas
that never became anything, all those materials,
all that waste. Like the shoes: lace-up Manolo
Blahniks and golf-cleat Oxfords and platforms
with watch bands as straps, all developed just
for the shows, at 30 pairs per show, and never
even produced. ‘‘And it’s season after season,’’
he said. ‘‘It’s not like you’re making an iPhone,
where you’re going to mass-produce it and then
iterate on it.’’
Last year, Sternberg let his C.F.D.A. member-
ship lapse. He saw it as a largely New York Fashion
Week-centric institution. ‘‘They don’t offer any-
thing for what I’m doing,’’ he said. ‘‘They should
be trying to figure out what all this is and how
they could support it.’’ The C.F.D.A. subsequent-
ly reached out to Sternberg. ‘‘They were sort of
like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I just said: ‘This
is what I’m doing. What are you doing? When
you’re in my zone, let’s talk.’ ’’ When I asked Kolb
if the C.F.D.A. could do more to support D.T.C.
companies, he said: ‘‘I think that’s a big question.
That’s not an answer I have.’’ It was ultimately
up to the board, he added. ‘‘But I know we have
those conversations all the time.’’
Whatever tensions there may be, everyone I
spoke to praised Sternberg’s reinvention, in the
way that fashion people praise things, which is
to say with a tiny bit of shade. ‘‘Love Scott,’’ Anna
Wintour said. ‘‘It seems very honest to me and
very realistic. I understand not everyone can afford
Marc Jacobs or Chanel.’’
Kolb told me, ‘‘I think Scott is a brilliant mar-
keter,’’ adding, ‘‘It works really well with a basics
brand.’’ But he also credited him with anticipating
this moment. ‘‘Whatever happened between him
and the investors and however he got out of that
maybe at the time was painful, but it enabled him
to start over. I think brands that are in it now, it’s
much harder to make that change.’’
Even Virgil Abloh, the designer of Vuitton
men’s wear, was excited when I brought up
Sternberg’s name. ‘‘Oh, I loved Band of Outsid-
ers!’’ he said. ‘‘My question is, where did he go?’’
By June, U.S. clothing sales rebounded, but
they were still down overall from the year before.
Market analysts predicted that with infections
soaring again and stimulus money running out,
that uptick might be temporary. The anomalies
have been mostly athleisure companies, like Lulu-
lemon, the purveyor of bougie leggings, whose
shares have surged in recent months.
Entireworld is still tiny. But in its second year,
Sternberg says its revenue is already eight times
that of Band of Outsiders by the same point,
and that’s while selling much more product ($15
underwear and socks, $32 tees, $88 sweatshirts).
Despite the recent good sales, Sternberg has still
had to scale back. In February, he expected to
get a round of financing from investors in Korea,
but then the virus hit there first, and that evap-
orated. The same week that the sweatsuits were
selling out, he laid off three of his nine employ-
ees and cut styles he planned to add in the fall.
Even before the pandemic, persuading investors
to bet on clothing brands had become a drag.
‘‘This is the shmatte business,’’ he told me. ‘‘It’s
no longer sexy. Investors want something dis-
ruptive. When they’re with their investor friends
they want to say they invested in, like, flavored
water or an operating system that changes the
way we walk.’’
Investors that do pump money into D.T.C.
brands are after swift returns, pushing compa-
nies to grow big and fast in a way that’s unsus-
tainable. One such casualty was Outdoor Voices,
the athletic-apparel company that reportedly
took in $60 million of venture-capital money and
faltered in February, with its C.E.O. ousted and
its valuation plummeting. After what happened
to Band, the last thing Sternberg wants is to
grow too fast for his own good. ‘‘Investors are
only interested in, like: ‘Billion-dollar company!
Unicorns!’ ’’ Sternberg said. Sternberg doesn’t
want to be a unicorn. He just wants to be prof-
itable by next year. ‘‘The second Band tried to
grow, that’s when we stopped being profitable,’’
he said.
Sternberg wouldn’t remember this, but we
met briefly a long time ago, when I covered his
spring show in September 2008, mere weeks
before the financial crash. He seemed different
now — sort of softer around the edges, which
also happens to be how he describes his new
line. ‘‘I’m much lighter as a person,’’ he said. ‘‘I
know that whatever I’m doing for work is not
the end-all, be-all of my life. That doesn’t mean I
don’t emotionally invest in all this and want it to
thrive. But my identity and sense of self-worth
isn’t tied to its success or failure. Would I like this
to work? Sure. But is it going to ruin me? No.’’
The last week, Sternberg admitted, had been
rough. Though Schiff, his managing director,
had recovered from Covid-19, a billionaire seed
investor informed Sternberg that he would not
be investing any more money. ‘‘And it’s not like
we haven’t hit our numbers,’’ Sternberg said. In
a way, if it weren’t for the pandemic, this might
have been the end of Entireworld. When the pan-
demic hit, he had maybe six weeks of runway
left. The sales boom has extended that to at least
the end of the summer. Still, he had to get more
product up on the website, and for that, he had
to pay his factories.
He found the whole thing depressing. Here
he was, perhaps the only one in fashion who
couldn’t sell merchandise fast enough in a pan-
demic, and no one was interested in investing.
‘‘It’s a slog,’’ Sternberg said. ‘‘It’s a constant series
of disappointing conversations.’’
He thought it was indicative of where the
industry was now. Someone like Marc Jacobs
would probably be OK, because he was backed by
LVMH. But what would happen to the upstarts?
If the wholesale model could no longer be relied
on to fund young designers, and private equity
and venture capitalists pushed them to expand so
quickly that they inevitably imploded, was there
any hope for brands to grow slowly and thought-
fully over time? If not, fashion might go the way of
other industries, like film, in which there are the
blockbusters and the tiny indies and nothing in
between. ‘‘Band didn’t need to be a $100 million
brand,’’ Sternberg said. ‘‘But is there a place for
a $30 million brand that can self-sustain and be
around year after year? Certainly not with big
backers, because that’s not interesting to them.
Wholesale used to be able to support that, but it
also ultimately killed it.’’
Fashion is, by definition, unpredictable. Peo-
ple buy clothes for illogical, emotional reasons.
The challenge, as Sternberg saw it, was to build
a brand that could be immune to trends and nov-
elty and whatever dystopian disaster was coming
next. ‘‘The trick with fashion is that we’re not sell-
ing toilet paper,’’ he said, ‘‘which of course during
Covid, toilet-paper sales go up. But ultimately it
will level out, because there’s only so many butts
in the world. That hasn’t changed — people are
just hoarding. Fashion is really different. You have
to assume the cycle will change even if you’re
doing commodity. And how will you keep up with
that? How do you build a business that can sustain
those fluctuations over time?’’
That was his pitch, anyway. But so far, no one
seemed to be listening. One investor suggested
that maybe Sternberg should turn Entireworld
into a TV show that would advertise the clothes.
(Sternberg: ‘‘Sounds easy!’’) Another told him,
‘‘Wow, it’s great that you’re doing well, but I’m
actually looking into distressed assets now.’’
Instead of investing into a young business that
was actually making money, the investor was
looking to swoop in and pick off bigger brands
that were now on the brink of bankruptcy. Reviv-
ing a corpse was easier than tending to a new-
born. As this investor saw it, that, in the end, held
the promise of a bigger payoff.
The New York Times Magazine 43
Puzzles

SPELLING BEE SWITCHBACKS GAS LINES

By Frank Longo
How many common words of 5 or more letters can
you spell using the letters in the hive? Every answer
must use the center letter at least once. Letters may
be reused in a word. At least one word will use all 7
letters. Proper names and hyphenated words are not
allowed. Score 1 point for each answer, and 3 points
for a word that uses all 7 letters.
By Patrick Berry
Answers in this grid proceed in two long, winding paths.
Path A starts in the upper-left corner and winds left
and right, taking hairpin turns at the curved ends. Path
B starts in the same place but winds up and down.
Each path contains a series of answers placed end to
end, one letter per space (including each loop on the
sides), clued in order of appearance.
By Thinh Van Duc Lai
Connect each home (circled number) to a gas utility
(black circle) by a line that follows the dots. The line
must have the number of straight segments indicated.
No lines can touch.
Ex.

Rating: 7 = good; 13 = excellent; 19 = genius Path A Westward migration vehicle (2 wds.) •

Wet behind the ears • Evelyn who wrote “Brideshead
>
Revisited” • Threaten to tip over while turning
Path B Jointly run, as a meeting (hyph.) • Have
difficulty swallowing (2 wds.) • Budget offering at Burger
I King (2 wds.) • Erode (2 wds.)

Z M B

A A

R N
P
A

Our list of words, worth 21 points, appears with last week’s answers. B Next week: Introducing “Yin Yang”

CROSS TIES
By Will Shortz
Complete each miniature crossword grid with a set of words or names that are all in the same category. In the example, BLUE, GREEN, BEIGE, UMBER and TAN are all colors.
Some letters are given to start you off.

Ex. 1. 2. 3. 4.

B L U E S B T P
E M T E T R H I W
I B A D M D
G R E E N E F H A M L
E R F T N R

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

P P M O
S L I I R
A N A E N B
K R P T C O I T
E T T T R

44
Doctors
(Continued from Page 27)
studies that the W.H.O. cited, for example, were
largely not randomized and controlled; other rel-
evant institutions like the Society of Critical Care
Medicine, whose doctors treat the most ill patients,
and the European Society of Intensive Care Medi-
cine did recommend the use of steroids for venti-
lated Covid-19 patients with ARDS. Also, in Kory’s
own clinical experience, corticosteroids could be
lifesavers. He did not see them as a wild-card drug
for this disease, like hydroxychloroquine; he used
them for non-Covid-19 patients who were facing
cytokine storms or ARDS. He was surprised by the
heat with which colleagues challenged him when
he made the recommendation, and he believed
that his own leadership role in conference calls
subsequently diminished. He and Jarjour, he said,
had more disagreements in three days than they
had in the previous five years.
On April 7, Kory’s colleague Ellie Golestanian
sent an email to Kory and others, at 1:32 a.m., in
response to another colleague’s call for the use of
corticosteroids and anticoagulants: ‘‘In patients
with severe Covid-19, we are fumbling in the
dark, clutching at anything that might work.
But as you are well aware, just because a therapy
‘should’ work, or we desperately ‘want’ it to work
— it does not follow that it ‘will’ work.’’
‘‘When I hear stuff like corticosteroids described
as experimental and unproven, I want to jump out
a widow,’’ Kory told me later that month. ‘‘They
make it sound like we are experimenting on peo-
ple. I want to be respectful of my colleagues, but I
feel like they are getting it 100 percent wrong. I’ve
never seen smarter people get a problem more
wrong. Because they are running hypotheses in
a lab and so many of them fail, they think when I
approach a patient, I am testing out a hypothesis.
It’s not like a hypothesis, but more like a problem,
and I have to figure out how to fix it with a couple of
decades of experience to back me up. It’s a stretch
to call it a hypothesis. It’s just me doctoring.’’
Kory was so frustrated about the hospital’s
approach that in May he resigned, taking a job
instead at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Mil-
waukee. ‘‘Our differences were so far apart, I felt
I couldn’t be a part of it,’’ said Kory, who foresaw,
in April, a ‘‘catastrophe’’ if doctors at any hospital
could apply only supportive care. A colleague of
his in New York, an I.C.U. doctor affiliated with
a major medical center, confirmed that he, too,
resigned from his hospital, in part because of ten-
sions around his decision to try an F.D.A.-approved
medication off-label and outside a trial. In May,
Kory, following his disagreement in Wisconsin,
spent several weeks in New York treating patients,
often with steroids.
In June, Oxford posted a preliminary report for
its Recovery trial of more than 6,000 patients who
received either standard care or dexamethasone,
a steroid similar to the ones that Kory and other
I.C.U. doctors had been advocating. At least when
administered to patients who were already on
oxygen or ventilators, the drug saved lives.
Kory sees, in the Oxford results, a story of
triumph. He believes that he successfully treat-
ed patients with steroids and that the Recovery
trial results prove it. And yet if patients did not
respond, he would go further, increasing the
dose, in a few instances, to a level 10 times as
strong as that in the trial. Did the higher dosage
increase the risk? The answer to that question, a
research purist like Kevin Tracey would point out,
is still unknown. Despite the enthusiasm for the
Recovery trial, Tracey maintains that even one
stellar randomized, controlled trial does not set-
tle the question of the use of steroids for patients
with Covid-19. ‘‘It needs to be replicated,’’ he said.
Given the long, complicated history of steroid
studies, he predicts that sometime down the
road another statistically powerful randomized,
controlled trial will yield contradictory findings.
In Tracey’s reservations, Kory sees not rational
evaluation but bias. ‘‘That’s a 6,000-person trial
he’s discrediting,’’ Kory said. ‘‘That’s a person who
will never be convinced.’’
Kory is also part of a group of critical-care
doctors who widely disseminated a protocol for
treating Covid-19 that includes anticoagulants
and steroids but also other treatments — includ-
ing Pepcid and intravenous vitamin C — whose
efficacy is hotly contested among doctors.
Should Kory and his colleagues have been
administering steroids when they did? Were
they right? Kory thinks so. But Eric Rubin, the
editor of The New England Journal of Medicine,
thinks it’s not so clear-cut. ‘‘You could also say
he was lucky,’’ Rubin said.
At times, over the course of several conversa-
tions, Rubin defended the bond between doctors
and patients, the need for physician autonomy,
the necessity of making judgments in the absence
of evidence, especially when mortality rates were
so high; at other times he seemed frustrated that
doctors were still relying on treatments for which
there was no evidence, concerned that a lack of
equipoise had possibly muddled the course of
research. ‘‘I know I seem to be saying opposite
things,’’ he admitted. ‘‘And I agree with myself.’’
Rubin is an infectious-disease doctor at
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and
like many doctors in that specialty, he had strong
reservations about steroids. He advised col-
leagues against using them. ‘‘And I was wrong,’’
he said. He also acknowledges that he was less
opposed to the use of tocilizumab, although that,
too, was untested and could also increase the risk
of infection. I asked him whether perhaps there
was something about tocilizumab’s novelty, even
its scarcity, its high price, that may have given it a
sheen of credibility? In the absence of evidence,
we are all susceptible to predictable irrational
biases. ‘‘We know less about toci,’’ is how Rubin
said he thought about it at the time: It left open
the possibility that it could be helpful, although of
course that means it also left open the possibility
that it could do more harm than supportive care,
more harm even than steroids. Unlike steroids,
tocilizumab was not yet the devil he knew. Rubin
could see, months later, his decision-making pro-
cess with humility. ‘‘I can’t argue that I was super
rational either,’’ he finally said.
At the peak of the surge, Rubin was far from
the only doctor whose usual commitment to
evidence faltered. ‘‘There would be a physician
that would have said, ‘No, no, no,’ and all of the
sudden, it’s his mother,’’ Aberg, the Mount Sinai
doctor, told me. ‘‘All of a sudden, let me tell you,
they wanted everything. We had some of our own
physicians admitted, and people were just crazed
about what they wanted to do to those individu-
als.’’ Kevin Tracey, the Feinstein researcher, says
that overwhelming uncertainty was driving peo-
ple’s reactions: ‘‘We just lived through a plague.
It was life and death. Fear. Ignorance. You were
seeing raw human behavior in survival mode, a
classic reaction to threat.’’
In recent months, a relative calm has set in.
Since that tense mid-May meeting between the
researcher Spyropoulos and his colleagues on
the ground at Long Island Jewish Medical Cen-
ter, clinicians and researchers have forged more
compromise through a series of conversations.
Looking back at that time, one critical-care doc-
tor mentioned that Spyropoulos, when he called
in by videoconference that day, seemed tired
and stressed; perhaps, the critical-care doctor
thought, that accounted for why Spyropoulos had
spoken so harshly to the group.
Spyropoulos, the director of the anticoagulation
program at Northwell, had in fact been working
19-hour days to try to get the trial up and running
at breakneck speed. He also mentioned to me in
passing, during an interview, that both he and his
wife had been sick with Covid-19, his wife more
so than him. Perhaps, like many doctors, he was
laboring under the additional stress of having not
just a professional but a deeply personal struggle
with the power of the disease. In response to a
text I sent asking about the extent of his wife’s
illness, Spyropoulos wrote back on July 11. ‘‘My
wife was very sick and bedridden for 3 days (I was
mildly symptomatic) but she responded well to
hydroxychloroquine,’’ he wrote.
His casual certainty about the cause and effect
of her recovery was surprising. His wife had been
ill, taken hydroxychloroquine and recovered.
Whether the second event caused the third was
at best unknown but statistically unlikely, given
the now-significant body of research showing that
the drug does not help. As if even Spyropoulos
recognized that his comment was less than ratio-
nal, he went on to rehearse the argument he made
to his colleagues at Long Island Jewish about the
importance of relying on research. Anything else,
he repeated, was witchcraft.
The New York Times Magazine 45
Puzzles Edited by Will Shortz

CRAFT SHOW
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

By Ruth Bloomfield Margolin 22 23 24 25

Ruth Bloomfield Margolin, of Westfield, N.J., serves on the 26 27 28 29

boards of several community nonprofit groups. For the past
three years she has given talks at area libraries on crossword 30 31 32 33 34 35

construction — lately adding Zoom presentations to

36 37 38 39
her repertoire. Ruth created a crossword for her son’s July
wedding (now postponed), which included the couple’s 40 41 42 43 44 45 46
favorite board game, Pandemic. Whoops! She’s revising that
47 48 49 50 51 52 53
puzzle now to feature only “fun” things. — W.S.
54 55 56 57 58 59

ACROSS 73 ‘‘Hamilton’’ actor Leslie

60 61 62 63 64
1 Front ____ Jr.
7 Spanish rice 74 Break down, to a Brit 65 66 67 68 69 70

12 Little sucker? 76 Theory

71 72 73 74 75
15 Smallish batteries 77 Sea ____
18 Like a seacoast after a 79 Prefix with -plasm 76 77 78 79 80 81
storm, maybe 80 Piece paid by Pisans for a
piece of pizza, previously 82 83 84 85 86 87
19 Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend
20 ____ B. Wells, civil rights 82 Safe places 88 89 90 91
pioneer 84 Multi-episode narrative
21 ____-mo 92 93 94 95 96 97 98
87 Crucifix inscription
22 S as in soup? 88 Relentlessly question 99 100 101 102 103 104
23 Kind of drawing 90 En ____ (as a whole)
105 106 107 108 109 110 111
25 Icarus’s downfall 91 Having tattoos
26 Skip work for health 92 Event that’s a bit off ? 112 113 114 115
reasons 94 The butler, stereotypically
28 Words after ‘‘Ooh, ooh!’’ 97 It gives Ford an ‘‘F’’: Abbr. 116 117 118 119

29 Beau, to Brigitte
30 Verbal stumbles
31 Baseball catcher
32 Ire
34 Boy band with two
members who previously
starred on ‘‘The Mickey
Mouse Club’’
36 Little suckers
37 Headgear for a tailgater
39 One of the Arnazes
40 ‘‘… but it’s up to you’’
43 Famously green shampoo
45 Rap’s Shakur
47 Pope after Benedict IV
48 Winter vacation
destination
51 Parades
54 Barely beat
55 Goals
56 Silverback gorilla, e.g.
58 Moreno with an Emmy,
Grammy, Oscar and Tony
60 Drag-racing vehicles
62 ‘‘____ trap!’’
63 Meager
65 Tired
66 In perfect order … or, as
two words, what’s formed
by applying the answers
for the five italicized clues
to the circled letters
70 Dined at home
71 More skeptical
99 Buff
100 First Alaskan on a major
U.S. party ticket
101 E-4, E-5 and E-6, in the
U.S. Navy, in brief
102 Successors to LPs
105 Part of Canada above Alta.
and Sask.
106 One of the Gandhis
109 Where to get a mullet
trimmed
112 ‘‘____ get it now!’’
113 Civic center
115 Colored ring
116 Washington’s Sea-____
Airport
117 Non’s opposite
118 Ban … or bandit
119 By and large
120 College entrance exam
org.
121 Hosp. V.I.P.s
122 Author Zora ____ Hurston
123 Son of Aphrodite
DOWN
1 Compete in one leg of a
modern pentathlon
2 Loud, as the surf
3 Chills
4 Not incl.
5 Set the boundaries of
6 Perfect
7 Smart ____
8/9/20
120 121 122 123
8 Painter of the ‘‘Four 44 ‘‘Ba-dum-tss’’ 81 Hoped-for response to an
Freedoms’’ series, 1943 46 Education support grps. SOS
9 Sound from a cheering 83 Lien holder, e.g.
48 ____ Paulo, Brazil
crowd 85 Ahab’s father in the Bible
49 Sea route, e.g.
10 Even 86 Desert’s lack
50 ‘‘Frozen’’ queen
11 Pinnacle 89 Hogwarts professor who
52 Endless YouTube viewing,
12 ____ Chemical Company, was secretly a werewolf
e.g.
onetime maker of 91 ‘‘Awkward Black Girl’’
53 French island off the coast
VapoRub creator and star
of Newfoundland
13 Writer Serwer of The 92 ‘‘Who cares?’’
Atlantic 57 Tropical yellow fruits
93 Slapstick silliness
14 Event planner’s need 59 Writer Rand
95 Gary who created ‘‘The Far
15 Attempts 61 New York city with a Side’’
marina
16 They’re listed by degrees 96 Award to be hung
62 Suffix with tour or Tory 98 Start of a playground joke
17 ____ boom
64 ____-El (Superman’s birth 99 U.S. govt. bond
19 Struck, old-style
name)
24 Bygone Apple messaging 101 Compass letters
65 Conflict during which the
app 102 Unisex fragrance
Lusitania was sunk: Abbr.
27 Members of a blended 103 ____ Street, Perry Mason’s
67 Fateful date
family secretary
68 What’s left at sea 104 Strong ropes used to
33 Move, in Realtor jargon
35 Airport logjam 69 Dig in support masts
36 Rick, Ilsa and Victor had 72 Flat, round bread cooked 107 Verb preceder
on a griddle
one in ‘‘Casablanca’’ 108 Bad things on motorists’
75 Noted congresswoman records, for short
37 First lady between Eleanor
from the Bronx, familiarly 110 ‘‘Dies ____’’ (hymn)
and Mamie
78 After-bath application
38 Fanny 111 Curb, with ‘‘in’’
40 Accented cheer 79 Anatomical sac 114 The Jazz, on scoreboards
41 Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Puzzles Online Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles:
Andy, for two nytimes.com/crosswords ($39.95 a year). For the daily puzzle
42 Restricted zone commentary: nytimes.com/wordplay.

46