AUGUST 28, 2017

5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

27 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

David Remnick on Trump and the far right;
eclipse addicts; the arrests of James Cromwell;
the Patreon wars; the comedians’ table.
PERSONAL HISTORY
Ian Frazier 34 Drive Time
The unexpected joys of New York by car.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Jen Spyra 41 Family-Vacation Breakdown
MODERN TIMES
Elizabeth Kolbert 42 The Content of No Content
Are the tech giants eroding democracy?
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Patrick Radden Keefe 46 Trump’s Favorite Tycoon
Carl Icahn’s influence with the President.
PROFILES
Nick Paumgarten 60 Singer of Secrets
What St. Vincent reveals and what she hides.
FICTION
Lauren Groff 68 “Dogs Go Wolf ”
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Louis Menand 75 A new salvo from Freud’s most implacable critic.
BOOKS
James Wood 83 The stories of Gunnhild Øyehaug.
85 Briefly Noted
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 86 “Logan Lucky,” “Marjorie Prime.”
POEMS
Craig Morgan Teicher 56 “Son”
Rae Armantrout 72 “Project”
COVER
David Plunkert “Blowhard”

DRAWINGS David Borchart, Will McPhail, Roz Chast, Liam Francis Walsh, Edward Steed,
Maddie Dai, Julia Suits, David Sipress, P. C. Vey, Harry Bliss, Barbara Smaller, Carolita Johnson, Joe Dator
SPOTS Anthony Russo
 CONTRIBUTORS
Patrick Radden Keefe (“Trump’s Favor-
ite Tycoon,” p. 46), a staff writer, is an
Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at
New America and the author of “Chat-
ter” and “The Snakehead.”
Elizabeth Kolbert (“The Content of No
Content,” p. 42) is a staff writer and the
author of “The Sixth Extinction: An
Unnatural History,” which won a Pu-
litzer Prize for nonfiction in 2015.

Lauren Groff (Fiction, p. 68) is the au-
thor of, most recently, the novel “Fates
and Furies.” Her short-story collection
“Florida” will come out next summer.
Ian Frazier (“Drive Time,” p. 34) pub-
lished “Hogs Wild: Selected Report-
ing Pieces” last year and is working on
a book about the Bronx.
Jen Spyra (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 41), a
former senior writer for the Onion, is
a staff writer for “The Late Show with
Stephen Colbert.”
Nick Paumgarten (“Singer of Secrets,”
p. 60) has been writing for the maga-
zine since 2000.
Michael Schulman (The Talk of the Town,
p. 30), a contributor since 2006, is the
author of “Her Again: Becoming Meryl
Streep.”
Rae Armantrout (Poem, p. 72) has pub-
lished, most recently, “Partly: New and
Selected Poems” and “Entanglements,”
a chapbook of poems in conversation
with physics.

James Wood (Books, p. 83) teaches at
Harvard University. “The Nearest Thing
to Life” is his latest book.
Craig Morgan Teicher (Poem, p. 56) is
the author of the poetry collection “The
Trembling Answers,” which came out
this year.
Louis Menand (A Critic at Large, p. 75)
has been a staff writer since 2001. Last
year, he was awarded the National Hu-
manities Medal by President Obama.
David Plunkert (Cover) is an illustrator
and graphic designer. This is his first
cover for The New Yorker.

NEWYORKER.COM
Everything in the magazine, and more.

DAILY SHOUTS PODCAST

Miss Lasko-Gross illustrates a On this week’s episode, Lauren Groff
scavenger hunt of things to see in reads “Dogs Go Wolf,” her short
New York City this summer. story from the issue.

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2 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
 THE MAIL
WHEN TO REMOVE A CHILD
Larissa MacFarquhar’s article shines a
light on the tragedy of children in the
foster-care system by giving a voice to
mothers, caseworkers, judges, and attor-
neys (“The Separation,” August 7th &
14th). But what about the voice of the
children? Although preserving families
is a noble goal, and reunification should
be a top priority for social workers, ad-
vocates, and courts, it is not always in
the best interest of the child. Parents in
the court system, who are often victims
of abuse and neglect themselves, may be
unable to provide even a minimal level
of safety for their children. Children may
be abused or neglected. Families may
have food insecurity, and no access to
adequate health care or to safe and sta-
ble housing, and a child without those
necessities is likely to form psychologi-
cal and physical scars that can last a life-
time. The services offered to parents in
support of reunification are often inad-
equate or ineffective. Some parents are
able to make slow progress, but a few
years in the life of a child is an eternity.
The heartbreaking truth is that termi-
nation of parental rights is sometimes in
the best interest of the child.
Jean Domanico
Durham, N.C.
MacFarquhar’s article seems to portray
caseworkers as setting unrealistic stan-
dards for parenting. When I was an at-
torney representing caseworkers in Cali-
fornia dependency courts, I was consis-
tently impressed by their commitment
to helping parents reunite with their chil-
dren. It was the caseworkers who thought
up the services, such as parenting classes,
counselling, and anger-management
groups, that were designed to help par-
ents address their issues and get their
children back. They arranged for the
children’s counselling, medical services,
and educational support; drove them
to and from school when no one else
would; and lined up placements with
family members, using foster care only
as a last resort. Whenever possible, they
used any reasonable means to leave chil-
dren safely with parents. Often, the chil-
dren were never even separated from par-
ents or were returned to them after only
a brief period. In those instances, the
caseworker provided close supervision,
personally checking on the families
several times a week and giving the
court frequent updates. Confidentiality
laws don’t allow caseworkers to speak
about their cases; however, I wish Mac-
Farquhar—who captured the unique
challenges inherent in dependency cases—
had done more to give them a voice.
Cynthia G. Inda
Irvine, Calif.
I worked as a hearing officer and then
as an attorney/guardian ad litem repre-
senting children for twenty-five years.
MacFarquhar’s sympathy for Mercedes
led her to depict the child-welfare sys-
tem as routinely removing children from
their parents without justification. In fact,
there is significant pressure on agencies
to keep the number of foster-care place-
ments low. Children can sustain years of
neglect and abuse before an agency pe-
titions for court intervention. One need
look no further than Mercedes’s story
for an example of the lifelong repercus-
sions of exposing children to neglect
rather than removing them from the
home. Brought up in a violent environ-
ment, Mercedes ended up homeless, preg-
nant at fourteen, and the victim of se-
vere physical abuse by boyfriends—as
well as by her father—all of which lim-
ited her opportunities and perpetuated
the cycle. MacFarquhar sees a system
that’s rigged against parents. Rather, it
is a system that, day in and day out, be-
lieves parents’ denials and excuses, spends
taxpayer dollars to provide services for
problems that are largely intractable, and
fails to protect children.
Cathy Badal
Reading, Pa.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 3
 AUGUST 23 Ð 29, 2017

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Beautiful natural vistas, drama, and history come together at Boscobel House and Gardens, home of the
Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, about ninety minutes north of the city. Exciting unplanned confluences,
such as a convoy of helicopters flying over “Macbeth,” occur regularly. “A Week of Revolution” (Aug. 27-Sept. 4)
will include reënactments, picnics, hikes, and a staging of Richard Nelson’s play “The General from America,”
about Benedict Arnold, who tried to hand his command of West Point—visible across the river—over to the British.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CAIT OPPERMANN


THE THEATRE
“The Band’s Visit” follows an Egyptian police orchestra stranded overnight in the Negev Desert.
Fall Preview
Musicals, like ocean liners, are built for
bigness, but some of the best works of
recent years have found poignancy in
going small: the fragile family dynamics
of “Fun Home,” the Canadian kindness
of “Come from Away.” “The Band’s
Visit,” which ran at the Atlantic Theatre
Company this past winter, tells the story
of an Egyptian police orchestra in pow-
der-blue uniforms that gets stranded
overnight in a tiny town in the Negev
Desert. Based on a 2007 Israeli film, the
musical, by David Yazbek and Itamar
Moses, doesn’t hammer away at Middle
East politics, or even mention them; it’s
about boredom and disappointment,
tricky topics for any art form. The wistful,
idiosyncratically funny tale moves to
Broadway this fall (starting previews
Oct. 7, at the Barrymore), with David
Cromer’s production retaining its Off
Broadway leads: Tony Shalhoub, as the
group’s conductor, and Katrina Lenk, as
a world-weary local.
“Once on This Island” (starting Nov. 9,
at the Circle in the Square) is also gem-
size. Michael Arden’s revival of the 1990
musical fable, by Lynn Ahrens and Ste-
phen Flaherty, traces star-crossed lovers
from opposite ends of a Caribbean island.
Other Broadway fare goes for big names
and big concepts. Amy Schumer and Kee-
gan-Michael Key star in Steve Martin’s
“Meteor Shower,” about a dinner party
interrupted by falling space debris (Nov. 1,
6 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
Booth). The Pulitzer-winning playwright
Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”) tackles the
“greed is good” era in “Junk,” with Steven
Pasquale as an investment banker at-
tempting a takeover of a manufacturing
company (Oct. 5, Vivian Beaumont). Beau
Willimon, the creator of “House of
Cards,” grapples with the larger-than-life
politics of the Trump age in “The Parisian
Woman,” starring Uma Thurman as a
Washington socialite (Nov. 7, Hudson).
And there’s nothing remotely small about
“SpongeBob SquarePants,” based on the
anarchic cartoon, directed by Tina Landau
and featuring songs by the likes of Sara
Bareilles, John Legend, Cyndi Lauper,
and David Bowie (Nov. 6, Palace).
Off Broadway brings new works that
reinvent the old. Elevator Repair Service,
best known for “Gatz,” its six-hour take
on “The Great Gatsby,” returns to the
Public with “Measure for Measure,”
infusing Shakespeare’s jaundiced parable
with—of all things—Marx Brothers-style
slapstick (Sept. 18). Kate Hamill, who
adapted and acted in the Bedlam com-
pany’s kinetic “Sense and Sensibility,”
hot-wires another Austen novel, “Pride
and Prejudice,” playing Elizabeth Ben-
net in the Primary Stages production
(Nov. 7, Cherry Lane). And Moisés
Kaufman directs “Torch Song,” a con-
densed version of Harvey Fierstein’s
“Torch Song Trilogy,” starring Michael
Urie as a drag queen in Koch-era New
York City (Sept. 26, Second Stage).
—Michael Schulman
1 OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
On the Shore of the Wide World
This new play by Simon Stephens (“Heisenberg”),
directed by Neil Pepe and featuring Blair Brown,
follows a family in Stockport, England, over nine
eventful months. (Atlantic Theatre Company, 336
W. 20th St. 866-811-4111. In previews.)
Prince of Broadway
Manhattan Theatre Club stages a musical celebration
of the Broadway director-producer Harold Prince,
whose six-decade career includes “Cabaret,” “Com-
pany,” “Evita,” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” Prince
directs, with co-direction and choreography by Susan
Stroman; the cast features Karen Ziemba, Chuck Coo-
per, and Emily Skinner. (Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th
St. 212-239-6200. In previews. Opens Aug. 24.)
The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B.
Matthias
Michael Yates Crowley’s dark comedy, directed by
Tyne Rafaeli for the Playwrights Realm, is about a
young sexual-assault survivor navigating lawyers,
guidance counsellors, and Wikipedia. (The Duke
on 42nd Street, 229 W. 42nd St. 646-223-3010. Pre-
views begin Aug. 25.)
The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A & In the Blood
Suzan-Lori Parks modernizes “The Scarlet Letter”
in two plays. “Fucking A,” directed by Jo Bonney, re-
casts Hawthorne’s heroine as an abortionist trying
to free her son from jail. “In the Blood,” directed by
Sarah Benson, centers on an impoverished mother
of five desperately seeking help from friends and
1
former lovers. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480
W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. In previews.)
NOW PLAYING
The Terms of My Surrender
Michael Moore’s mostly one-man show (special guests
make appearances) is filled with good will toward the
audience, and lots of self-regard. Over two or so inter-
missionless hours, the liberal filmmaker talks about
how our democracy ended up in the toilet, why Amer-
icans in general were ready for Trump, and why the
folks on either coast weren’t, and still aren’t. He’s a
rousing, everyday kind of guy, filled with tremendous
need—a need to be seen and heard. That’s touching
at first, as are the stories he tells about his activism,
and how it has led, in some cases, to potential phys-
ical harm. But then Moore and the show run out of
steam, because, for the most part, he’s preaching to
the converted. (Belasco, 111 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.)
Van Gogh’s Ear
True to the company’s m.o., Ensemble for the Ro-
mantic Century’s latest production pairs a dramatic
structure—this one centering on Vincent van Gogh’s
inner torments—with elegant projections and live
classical music. The program includes eight pages
of musicological notes explaining the relationship
between art and sound. It’s an interesting read, and
a useful distraction when the action onstage starts
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI
dragging, which is often. Van Gogh (a bland Carter
Hudson, from FX’s “Snowfall”) soliloquizes on art
and on his fragile mental state. At regular intervals,
he interrupts his Provençal thoughts so that a cham-
ber ensemble can perform a piece by Debussy, Fauré,
Franck, or Chausson, but the music and the story are
merely juxtaposed, and don’t illuminate each other.
While Eve Wolf’s script is drawn from van Gogh’s
own letters, the production’s genteel veneer stifles
the intensity of the artist’s ruminations. (Pershing
Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)

CLASSICAL MUSIC
Sondra Radvanovsky takes the title role in the Met’s new production of Bellini’s “Norma.”
Fall Preview
In a fall season bustling with innovation,
musical titans of the past cast looming
shadows. Most familiar to New Yorkers
will be that of Leonard Bernstein, for
whom centenary celebrations will begin
this year. During Bernstein’s lifetime, the
sheer force of his powers as a conductor,
an educator, and a media personality out-
shone his music, but, as time passes, it is
his music we treasure most. Carnegie
Hall’s opening-night concert (Oct. 4), an
evening with the Philadelphia Orchestra
and its music director, Yannick Nézet-
Séguin, features the Symphonic Suite
from the film “On the Waterfront” and
the Symphonic Dances from “West Side
Story.” Lenny’s old band, the New York
Philharmonic, will go deeper, offering a
survey of Bernstein’s three symphonies in
a trio of programs (Oct. 25-Nov. 14) con-
ducted by Alan Gilbert and Leonard
Slatkin. Even the Chamber Music Society
of Lincoln Center takes part, presenting
the composer’s uninhibited late song cycle
“Arias and Barcarolles” (Oct. 29).
The crystalline music of Anton We-
bern, the most controversial of the three
great composers of the Second Viennese
School, is often ignored. Leave it to the
adventurous conductor Julian Wachner
to take up the cause, leading the musical
forces of Trinity Church Wall Street in
the first phase (Sept. 12-14) of a two-
season retrospective of Webern’s complete
works. Wachner’s superb Choir of Trin-
8 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
ity Wall Street plays an important role in
“The Psalms Experience,” a sequence of
twelve concerts (Nov. 2-11), presented by
Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival,
which highlights the spiritual expressions
of composers from the medieval era to
the present day. But the reigning deity of
White Light will be Claudio Monteverdi,
whose three extant operas will be pre-
sented, in matchless style, by the conduc-
tor John Eliot Gardner and his Mon-
teverdi Choir and English Baroque
Soloists (Oct. 18-21).
The Metropolitan Opera’s opening-
night production will be a new staging (by
David McVicar) of Bellini’s “Norma,”
featuring two of the company’s power
divas, Sondra Radvanovsky and Joyce
DiDonato (Sept. 25-Dec. 16). But the Met
will also innovate, presenting the Amer-
ican première of Thomas Adès’s “The
Exterminating Angel,” a work based on
the 1962 film by Luis Buñuel (Oct. 26-Nov.
21). New York City Opera strikes a similar
balance, opening its season with Puccini’s
“La Fanciulla del West” (Sept. 6-12) but
also presenting chamber operas by Tobias
Picker and Dominick Argento. BAM, as
ever, champions the new: its fall season
includes the New York première of the
composer-conductor Matthew Aucoin’s
opera about Walt Whitman, “Crossing”
(Oct. 3-8), and “Road Trip,” a burst of fresh
material from the composers of Bang on a
Can which celebrates the collective’s thir-
tieth anniversary (Oct. 27-28).
—Russell Platt
1 CONCERTS IN TOWN
Metropolitan Opera “Summer HD” Festival
For the ninth year running, the company puts
out three thousand seats on Lincoln Center
Plaza for a week and a half of grand-opera movie
nights. This year’s schedule includes screenings
of its productions of “Rigoletto,” “Il Barbiere di
Siviglia,” and “Roberto Devereux”; the series be-
gins with a showing of Ingmar Bergman’s film
version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Aug.
25-26 and Aug. 28-29 at 8 and Aug. 27 at 7:45.
(Through Sept. 4. No tickets required.)
Bargemusic
The superb pianist Steven Beck, a mainstay at
the floating chamber-music series, returns to kick
off the weekend’s concerts, performing a single,
towering work: Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations.”
Aug. 25 at 8. (Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn. For
tickets and complete listings, see bargemusic.org.)
Locrian Chamber Players
This hardy ensemble has secured a spot in the
New York scene by devotedly performing music
that is less than a decade old. Its longtime strat-
egy is sound, with each concert anchored by
a major composer—in this case, John Luther
Adams, whose works “Untouched” and “Little
Cosmic Dust Poem” will be showcased alongside
recent pieces by Aaron Alter, Andrew Lovett,
David Macdonald, and Adrienne Albert (for-
merly a mezzo-soprano, renowned for her col-
laborations with Igor Stravinsky). The venue, at
the Riverside Church, is pleasant, and tickets are
free. Aug. 25 at 8. (10th Floor Performance Space,
Riverside Church, 91 Claremont Ave.)
Taka Kigawa
This quietly industrious pianist, who has shown
a consistent knack for conveying the most chal-
lenging works in the modern repertoire with an
understated zeal, turns his attention to a long-
time specialty, Messiaen’s “Catalogue d’Oiseaux”
(1956-58). This sublime thirteen-part cycle not
only compiles the distinct songs of specific birds
but also evokes their natural traits, and the par-
1
ticular French provinces where they thrive. Aug.
28 at 7. (Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St. lpr.com.)
OUT OF TOWN
Tanglewood
The supreme music festival of the summer wraps
up its classical offerings this weekend in grand
style. The last sweep begins on an intimate note,
however, with the commanding baritone Simon
Keenlyside joining the redoubtable pianist
Emanuel Ax in Schubert’s final song collection,
“Schwanengesang”; Impromptus for solo piano by
Schubert and Samuel Adams adorn the concert’s
first half. Aug. 23 at 8. • Three superb singers—
the soprano Kristine Opolais, the bass-baritone
Bryn Terfel, and the tenor Russell Thomas—
are out front in an imaginary night at the opera
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI
at the Tanglewood Shed with the Boston Sym-
phony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival
Chorus. Andris Nelsons, the B.S.O.’s music di-
rector, leads them in vocal and instrumental ex-
cerpts from such beloved works as “Rusalka,”
“Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” and “Porgy
and Bess,” in addition to all of Act II from Puc-
cini’s “Tosca.” Aug. 26 at 8. • Nelsons and his or-
chestra and chorus return for the festival’s tradi-
tional closing concert, a traversal of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony. The high level of quality shared
 CLASSICAL MUSIC

by the vocal soloists—Katie Van Kooten, Tamara

Mumford, Thomas, and John Relyea—is not sur-
prising, but the opening number is: “The Housa-
tonic at Stockbridge,” the third and final move-
ment of Ives’s “Three Places in New England.”
ART
Aug. 27 at 2:30. (Lenox, Mass. bso.org.)

Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival

This longtime East End festival, directed by the
flutist Marya Martin, has flourished by offering
concerts both effervescent and distinguished.
In the final programs at the series’ home base,
Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, old and new
words convivially collide. On Wednesday evening,
John Harbison’s Schubert elegy, “November 19,
1828: Hallucination in Four Episodes,” is nestled
between two of Schubert’s own works for piano
trio, the Notturno (D. 897) and the Trio No. 1
in B-Flat Major. On Saturday night, Beethoven
takes charge, in a concert featuring the Sonata for
Violin and Piano in F Major, Op. 24 (“Spring”),
and the Sonata for Horn and Piano; the Sun-
day-afternoon finale includes Kevin Puts’s “Seven
Seascapes,” along with classics by Mozart (the So-
nata in E Minor for Violin and Piano, K. 304),
Suk, and Dvořák (the String Quintet with Bass Ai Weiwei’s public project is a riposte to Trump’s proposed wall and a comment on the refugee crisis.
in G Major, Op. 77). Martin’s outstanding col-
leagues include the hornist Stewart Rose, the pi-
anist Gilles Vonsattel, and the violinist Anthony
Marwood. Aug. 23 and Aug. 26-27 at 6:30. (Bridge- Fall Preview massacre as its jumping-off point and
traces the radical cultural transforma-
hampton, N.Y. bcmf.org.)
With the White House intent on roll- tions that followed through a hundred
Maverick Concerts ing back civil rights, the New Museum’s and fifty pieces—paintings, photo-
Two of America’s greatest composers of lyrical “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a graphs, sculptures, performances, films,
vocal and instrumental works have milestone
birthdays coming up: Dominick Argento will turn Weapon” could not be more timely. It land art, and more—by seventy artists
ninety in October, and Ned Rorem will be ninety- features recent works by forty artists, and collectives. Overseen by the sea-
five next year. Anticipating those occasions, the born between 1950 and 1990, from the soned Asian-art curator Alexandra
conductor Alexander Platt, the Maverick Cham-
ber Players, and assorted guests gather on Satur- Hugo Boss Prize-winning conceptual- Munroe, the show shares its title with
day night for a program that features Argento’s ist Anicka Yi to the up-and-coming a 1993 installation by Huang Yong Ping,
“Six Elizabethan Songs,” Rorem’s “After Read- painter and printmaker Tschabalala Self. a tortoise-shaped cage housing thou-
ing Shakespeare,” and arrangements by Wolfgang
Renz of Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and The show was conceived by Johanna sands of live scorpions, beetles, and
Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Sun- Burton, one of the brightest curatorial other insects that play out a brutal
day afternoon belongs to Trio Solisti, long a favor- minds at work today; expect an exhibi- power dynamic—eat or be eaten—in-
ite group at the Maverick Hall, performing clas-
sic piano trios by Dvořák and Schubert (No. 1 in tion in which the political and the plea- side the museum’s High Gallery. Opens
B-Flat Major) as well as a recent trio by the Pu- surable are intertwined. Opens Sept. 27. Oct. 6.
litzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon MOMA last organized a major show The Chinese artist, activist, and for-
(“Color Through”). Aug. 26 at 6 and Aug. 27 at 4.
(Woodstock, N.Y. maverickconcerts.org.) about clothes in 1944—millennia ago mer political prisoner Ai Weiwei, whose
in the fast-forward cycles of fashion. work is also on view at the Guggen-
Berkshire Opera Festival: Now it devotes the entire sixth floor to heim, débuts the most expansive out-
“Ariadne auf Naxos”
Following last year’s inaugural presentation playing catch-up. “Items: Is Fashion door project of his career, “Good Fences
of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” the fledging Modern?,” organized by the always in- Make Good Neighbors,” a meditation
opera festival stays within the confines of early- ventive Paola Antonelli, takes a typo- on boundaries that alludes to both the
twentieth-century Romanticism for its second
production. The company’s general director, Jona- logical approach to the wide-ranging global refugee crisis and President
thon Loy, sets Richard Strauss’s meta-opera, about subject, breaking it down into a hundred Trump’s plan to build a wall along the
two competing theatre troupes putting on a show and eleven categories. Among the three border between the U.S. and Mexico. A
for a Viennese parvenu, in the present day; Brian
Garman conducts. Aug. 26, Aug. 29, and Sept. 1 at hundred and fifty wearable items on variety of sculptural installations, all
7:30. (Pittsfield, Mass. berkshireoperafestival.org.) view are flip-flops and stilettos; blue- made from metal security wire, occupy
jeans and little black dresses; hijabs and sites across the five boroughs—from a
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI

Music Mountain
The Daedalus String Quartet, an American en-
semble of enduring distinction, gets the next
Sunday-afternoon slot at this festival’s hall, a
whitewashed shoebox design with acoustics
that give bright and clear support to the mellow
sounds of strings. Its program offers quartets by
Beethoven (including Op. 95, “Serioso”) and the
Piano Quintet in F Minor by Brahms (with the
pianist Tanya Bannister). Aug. 27 at 3. (Falls Vil-
lage, Conn. musicmountain.org.)
10 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
headphones; red lipstick and sunscreen;
a down jacket and a fur coat (the latter
on loan from the archives of PETA).
Opens Oct. 1.
The most ambitious show of the
season is the Guggenheim-filling “Art
and China After 1989: Theater of the
World,” which takes the Tiananmen
low fence around the Unisphere, in
Flushing Meadows-Corona Park,
Queens, to a fifty-foot-high structure
under the arch in Washington Square
Park. The project is produced by the
Public Art Fund, which turns forty this
year. Opens Oct. 12.
—Andrea K. Scott
1 MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Metropolitan Museum
“Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter
of the Baroque”
The most noteworthy aspect of “Moses and
the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of
Jesus” isn’t that it’s twenty-eight feet high, or
that this is the first time it has been exhibited
outside Mexico’s Puebla Cathedral, where it
was installed when de Villalpando finished it,
in 1683—it’s the painting’s sheer pictorial den-
sity. Combining scenes from the Gospels and
the Book of Numbers, it ascends, with novelis-
tic detail, from a crowd of writhing, grimacing,
snake-afflicted Israelites at the bottom of the
scene, each one gesturing in a different direc-
tion, to a white-robed Christ, addressing three
amazed apostles on Mt. Tabor. His cross is set
off to one side, echoing Moses’ serpent-wrapped
staff; in case these Biblical references are in-
sufficient, two angels hold placards with scrip-
tural citations. In ten smaller paintings, which
round out the exhibition, de Villalpando—one
of viceregal Mexico’s more successful home-
grown painters—revels in the hallmarks of the
European Baroque: the slick and bloodless flesh,
the melting eyes, and, especially, the overdeter-
mined, more-is-more aesthetic. Around a blue-
winged, martially dressed angel holding out the
bitter cup to Jesus in “The Agony in the Gar-
den,” for example, flutter three separate satin
ruffs, in pink, green, and red. Through Oct. 15.
Museum of Modern Art
“Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends”
While creating the universe, did God have in
mind that, at a certain point, a stuffed goat with
a car tire around its middle would materialize
to round out the scheme? It came to pass, in
New York, with Rauschenberg’s “Monogram”
(1955-59)—goat, tire, and also paint, paper,
fabric, printed matter, metal, wood, shoe heel,
and tennis ball—now on view in an immense
retrospective of the protean artist, who died in
2008, at the age of eighty-two. Rauschenberg’s
work, in mediums that range from painting
and photography to a big vat of bubbling gray
mud (“Mud Muse,” 1968-71), is uneven, and it
lost point and drama in his later decades. For
a great artist, he made remarkably little good
art. But the example of his nimble intelligence
and zestful audacity has affected the thoughts
and motives, doubts and dreams of subsequent
generations, to this day. The show’s lead curator,
Leah Dickerman, has incorporated first-rate
works by other artists—collaboration was a
regular elixir for Rauschenberg. He was a
performance artist, first and last. You respond to
his works not with an absorption in their quality
but with a vicarious share in his brainstorming
excitement while making them. For a time,
momentously, what he did caught a wave of
history and drove it farther inland than could
otherwise have been the case. Through Sept. 4.
Whitney Museum
“Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium”
This retrospective of the sorely under-known
Brazilian artist is a revelation. Oiticica died
in 1980, of a stroke, at the age of forty-two,
after early success in Rio de Janeiro, a brush
with fame in London, obscurity during seven
years in New York, and a return to Rio that,
at one opening, occasioned a riot. Along
the way, he turned from superb abstract
painting to innovative work in sculpture, film,
12 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
ART
writing, political action, and participatory
installation, much of which remains as fresh
as this morning. The sand, huts, potted
plants, caged parrots, and inscribed poetry
of his sprawling “Tropicália” (1968) await
your barefoot delectation, should you choose
to park your shoes in the rack provided. So
do the multifarious love nests (mattresses,
straw, chopped-up foam rubber, water) of a
more austere faux beach, “Eden” (1969). Works
that he made in New York (and, at the time,
showed only privately) exalt sex, drugs, and
rock and roll—delirium aplenty, yet managed
with acute aesthetic intelligence. Oiticica
was a great one for planning. His buoyant
writings in English, displayed in vitrines and
seductively recited through earphones, hatch
intricate utopian schemes, often architectural
in character. In 1971, he proposed one that
involved labyrinthine spaces, for construction
in Central Park, called “Subterranean Tropicália
Projects.” Had he lived longer, we would
likely be blessed with a number of landmark
achievements in public art. Through Oct. 1.
Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design
Museum
“Esperanza Spalding Selects”
The Grammy Award-winning jazz musician
and composer is the latest guest curator to un-
earth treasures from the museum’s archive.
Her lively pairings include a Nigerian silk-
and-cotton robe featuring Islamic calligraphy
styles, made around 1900, in conversation with
the designer Sheila Bridges’s cheery, satirical
wallpaper design Harlem Toile de Jouy, from
2006. The salon-style installation is accompa-
nied by recordings Spalding made in collabo-
ration with the pianist and composer Leonardo
Genovese. The four versions of “Love Songs of
the Nile” represent the show’s themes: evolu-
tion, deconstruction, cross-pollination, and re-
cycling. With a keen eye for the cultural shifts
charted by design trends, Spalding documents
the progression of jazz-album covers from bla-
tantly racist caricature to the nuanced imagery
of a more integrated society; the aesthetic ex-
change between European colonizers and the
peoples they colonized; and the more recent ad-
vent of ingenious, socially critical works, such
as a glittering necklace made of pharmaceuti-
cal blister packs. Through Jan. 7, 2018.
New Museum
“Kaari Upson: Good Thing You Are Not
Alone”
The Los Angeles-based artist’s large-scale,
graphite-and-ink drawings—chaotic kaleido-
scopes, swirling with images and fragments of
text—introduce viewers to her defining preoc-
cupations, but it’s the three-dimensional works
in this show that succeed in recasting the ev-
eryday in a strange new light. Tract housing,
Costco fare, domestic interiors, and the artist’s
mother are prominent subjects. In one room,
tinted urethane casts of well-worn furniture
hang from the walls like misshapen parachutes
or abandoned reptile skins. In the center of the
gallery, soft-drink cans, cast in aluminum, bare
“teeth” made of crystals. The cans and the fangs
are part of Upson’s ongoing multimedia series,
“MMDP (My Mother Drinks Pepsi),” which
she started in 2014—a psychological explora-
tion of consumerism that splits the difference
between humor and horror. In “Idiot’s Guide
Womb Room,” a related installation work, com-
pleted this year, a dark gallery furnished with
shelving units displays arrangements of how-to
books from the “Idiot’s Guide” franchise, enig-
matic urethane forms, and looping videos. The
main event, though, is an avalanche of dummies,
1
dressed in Upson’s mother’s androgynous uni-
form of plaid shirt and jeans. Through Sept. 10.
GALLERIES—UPTOWN
Cameron Martin
To make his elegant abstract drawings—which
may surprise those who recall the Brooklyn art-
ist’s restrained paintings of rocks and trees—
Martin covered sheets of paper with rows of
closely set, not quite vertical lines in colored
marker. In one instance, the complex inter-
sections create patterns reminiscent of the vi-
sual buzz of TV static. Scores of ghostly dark
quavers, interrupted by glimmers of yellow
and red, descend diagonally across the page of
another work. In a looser example, the effect
brings to mind wood grain, albeit in a psyche-
delic strain of purple. Each one presents its own
optical challenge, creating the curious sensa-
tion of looking at still pictures of rolling film.
1
Through Aug. 25. (Van Doren Waxter, 23 E. 73rd
St. 212-445-0444.)
GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN
Heather Dewey-Hagborg and
Chelsea E. Manning
The harsh sentencing of Manning and the sub-
sequent, high-profile public announcement of
her gender identity, in 2013, gave the suppres-
sion of her image while imprisoned a special
significance: the circulation of outdated pho-
tos was an additional punishment. Dewey-
Hagborg, an interdisciplinary artist who de-
veloped an algorithmic system for generating
facial portraits from DNA samples, collabo-
rated with Manning before her pardon and re-
lease, using cheek swabs and strands of hair to
create a surprisingly diverse array of possible
appearances. In the gallery, a group of thirty
masklike, 3-D-printed faces float, suspended
from fishing line, in dispassionate solidarity
with the incarcerated source of their genomic
data. “Probably Chelsea” (2017), as the haunting
sculpture is titled, challenges cultural assump-
tions about genetic sex and casts doubt on sim-
plistic practices of DNA profiling. Moreover, as
Manning’s poignant wall text notes, the project
ingeniously granted her the representation she
was long denied, providing a method for smug-
gling self-portraits into the world. Through Sept.
4. (Fridman, 287 Spring St. 212-620-0935.)
“The World Without Us”
Aside from the haughty blonde looking out of
Autumn Ramsey’s small oil painting “The Face”
and a group of naked figures in Akira Ikezoe’s
canvas “Coconut Heads—Happy Go Lucky,” the
works in this ten-person show portray a menag-
erie that suggests childhood fantasies trapped
in a murky world of adult innuendo. “Upside
Down Dog,” by the young sculptor Nicholas
Sullivan, is a twelve-foot-high steel outline of
Snoopy, which leans, inverted, against a wall;
black epoxy clay has been added to replicate
Schulz’s wobbly lines. Ten little clay-and-plaster
duck and bunny heads, by Bill Adams, suggest
the traumatized survivors of a barnyard trag-
edy. Through Aug. 25. (Brennan & Griffin, 122
Norfolk St. 212-227-0115.)

NIGHT LIFE
Goldie, Harry Styles, and Jay-Z set off an autumn season of big-ticket tours and cult-icon one-offs.
Fall Preview
While recording his self-titled solo
album, Harry Styles unearthed an inner
rock star—or, at least, buried his past
as a member of the boy band One Di-
rection. The result, released in May, was
an impressive collection of ballads and
bops that aspire to Prince and Bowie,
whose shoes no one can be faulted for
wanting to fill; Styles arrives at Radio
City Music Hall on Sept. 28. For scuz-
zier riffs, the prism-rock songwriter Ariel
Pink performs at Le Poisson Rouge on
Nov. 4, in support of an upcoming LP,
“Dedicated to Bobby Jameson.”
The English d.j. Clifford Joseph
Price, known to clubbers and subculture
junkies as Goldie, left a deep imprint
on U.K. club music with his founda-
tional electronic productions. In 1995,
Goldie canonized the drum-and-bass
sound with his airy, sweeping début,
“Timeless”; the album’s central single,
“Inner City Life,” is as alluring as ever.
The producer’s steadfast craftsmanship
and loud personal style made him an
early celebrity d.j., who would likely
shudder at that classification; he’ll
deliver a rare Stateside set at Output,
on Sept. 14, a show to prioritize. On
Oct. 25, the club invites Lee (Scratch)
Perry, another bass technician, to per-
form, with the Subatomic Sound Sys-
tem band—the legendary reggae pro-
ducer has brought his innovative spin
on recording to multiple generations
14 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
of artists, from Bob Marley to the
Beastie Boys.
Jay-Z is still nursing his newborn
album, “4:44” (his thirteenth);
throughout the record, he vamps with
newfound transparency on fiscal re-
sponsibility, urbanism, identity, and,
naturally, marriage. He performs at
the Meadows festival at Citi Field on
Sept. 15, before headlining at Barclays
Center on Nov. 26-27—expect bold
statements on par with recent music
videos that winkingly skewer “Friends”
and vintage Disney. Two of hip-hop’s
most enigmatic figures, Ms. Lauryn
Hill and Nas, join forces for a co-head-
lining tour this November. The latter
titled his last single “Nas Album
Done,” but a year later he has yet to
deliver said album, and fans have lov-
ingly joked about the likelihood of the
former showing up to half of the
dates—but career quirks like these
have only shored up their following.
One of the oddest shows on this sea-
son’s calendar stars the impish perfor-
mance artist Poppy, a meta-meme con-
coction dreamed up by the Nashville
actress and singer Moriah Pereira (who
portrays her) and the visual artist Ti-
tanic Sinclair. Poppy’s profile has risen
through her surrealist YouTube videos,
with titles like “I Am Not in a Cult” and
“Am I Okay?” Her set on Nov. 15, at
Music Hall of Williamsburg, should fall
somewhere between song and sermon.
—Matthew Trammell
1 ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check
in advance to confirm engagements.
Afropunk
This annual festival has swaggered boldly into ad-
olescence, growing from an über-niche concept
show into a two-day marathon of artists who’ve
dished out subversive takes on pop across long
and short careers. This year’s highlights include
U.K. torchbearers like Dizzee Rascal, a pioneer
of grime, and Soul II Soul, who translated Lon-
don’s sound-system culture into international hits;
Kaytranada, Sango, and Serpentwithfeet, club
kids who have restitched dance music into manic
new silhouettes; and a cross-section of R. & B.
progressives like Solange and Willow Smith, two
free minds from famous families who share a ded-
ication to tradition that anchors their forward-
churning ideas and aesthetics. (Flushing Ave. at
N. Elliot Pl., Brooklyn. afropunkfest.com. Aug. 26-27.)
The Four Tops and the Temptations
It’s hard to overstate just how influential the golden
era of Motown Records has been on both popular
music and the public consciousness. The label pro-
duced countless hits, including dozens featuring
the heavenly harmonies of the Four Tops and the
Temptations. Some fifty years after classics like
“I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)”
and “My Girl” first topped the Billboard charts and
became standards, the two groups are joined by
Mary Wilson, of the Supremes, for a summer ex-
travaganza at Coney Island, another time-tested
institution that has yet to run short on thrills.
(Ford Amphitheatre at Coney Island Boardwalk, 3052
W. 21st St., Brooklyn. 718-954-9933. Aug. 24.)
Show Me the Body
Julian Cashwan Pratt, the lead singer of this Queens
hardcore outfit, steps on photographers—but only
the ones who have it coming. At the ripping gigs
that Show Me the Body has played since 2014, the
band reserves the pit for fans only, with Pratt giv-
ing deadpan directions to his flock between shrieks.
The group puts an original twist on the hardcore
sound (banjos and rap verses haven’t always had
a spot in the genre) and shares a refreshing dedi-
cation to the punk tenets of inclusivity and bull-
headed productivity. They headline a long after-
noon at MOMA PS1, following sets from Wiki,
Actress, and Laurel Halo. (22-25 Jackson Ave., Long
Island City. momaps1.org. Aug. 26.)
Nicky Siano
Born in Brooklyn, Siano helped fertilize the blos-
soming dance-music community of nineteen-
seventies Manhattan, opening the formative Gal-
lery night club, in Chelsea, with his brother Joe, and
later becoming a resident d.j. at Studio 54. The self-
anointed Master of Disco Soul was an indispensable
character downtown: he helped launch the careers
of Grace Jones and Frankie Knuckles, and clocked
studio time with Arthur Russell. In 2011, Siano re-
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI
turned to d.j.’ing, and he now hosts the ongoing Na-
tive New Yorker party series, extending his legacy
1
and keeping disco thumping in the city. (Good Room,
98 Meserole Ave., Brooklyn. 718-349-2373. Aug. 25.)
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
Nels Cline
Earlier this month, the guitarist Cline fronted
a jazz orchestra in Prospect Park, in a vivid
 NIGHT LIFE

presentation of his sweeping double CD “Lov-

ers.” This residency finds the audacious impro-
viser—and part-time rock-guitar hero, owing
to his membership in Wilco—in settings less
lush but no less ambitious, collaborating with
MOVIES
a slew of like-minded sonic adventurers, includ-
ing Zeena Parkins, Erik Freidlander, Taylor Ho
Bynum, and his fellow-guitarists Mary Halvor-
son, Elliott Sharp, and Julian Lage. (The Stone,
Ave. C at 2nd St. thestonenyc.com. Aug. 22-27.)

Eddie Palmieri
Leading a compact, percussion-powered outfit,
Palmieri transforms his club performances into
highly personal musical affairs, spinning out ex-
tended and idiosyncratic solo piano pieces and
retrieving favored older works from his storied
past. He’s not just a living link to a glorious tra-
dition of Afro-Caribbean jazz—he’s a still thriv-
ing master of the genre. (Blue Note, 131 W. 3rd St.
212-475-8592. Aug. 28.)

Charlie Parker Jazz Festival

It’s startling to think that Parker, the bebop ava-
tar who achieved immediate mythic status upon
his untimely death, in 1955, might still be among
us, at the age of ninety-seven, if the vagaries of
his life hadn’t caught up with him so quickly. This
year, the annual celebration of the jazz genius in-
cludes three uptown events, with performances
by, among others, Anat Cohen, Terri Lyne Car-
rington, Charanee Wade, and Lee Konitz, who,
at eighty-nine years old, is one of the last sur-
viving major players from the bop era. Another
benchmark saxophonist, the ninety-year-old Lou
Donaldson, joins Joshua Redman to close out the
festivities downtown. (Marcus Garvey Park, 18
Mt. Morris Park W. Aug. 24-26. Tompkins Square
Park, 165 Ave. A. Aug. 27.)
Dafnis Prieto
Many gifted and resourceful jazz musicians har-
bor a dream of leading a big band, but it’s a rev-
erie that doesn’t always reach fruition. The drum-
mer and composer Prieto, a 2011 MacArthur fellow
whose music explores the Afro-Caribbean jazz leg-
acy, gets his shot here, taking charge of a full-bod-
ied seventeen-piece ensemble whose section mates
include Chris Cheek, Mike Rodriguez, and Alan
Ferber. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St. 212-576-
2232. Aug. 25-27.)
Kurt Rosenwinkel
With its Brazilian and rock flavoring, “Caipi,”
Rosenwinkel’s latest recording, is a bit of a left turn
for the imaginative guitarist, who has taken his
place among the most gifted players in the gener-
ation that followed such visionary six-string giants
as Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell. A trim trio setting,
with the drummer Greg Hutchinson and the bass-
ist Dario Fromit, will effectively showcase Rosen-
winkel’s fretboard wizardry. (Village Vanguard, 178
Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. 212-255-4037. Aug. 22-27.)
Steve Turre Band
Since 1984, the trombonist Turre has been a fa-
Jennifer Lawrence stars in “Mother!,” Darren Aronofsky’s first intimate drama since “Black Swan.”
Fall Preview
The new season’s movies show the past
and the present merging in a variety of
genres. Darren Aronofsky’s psychological
horror film “Mother!” (opening Sept. 15)
stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bar-
dem as a couple in an isolated house
whose lives are thrown into disorder by
the arrival of two strangers (Ed Harris
and Michelle Pfeiffer). Todd Haynes
directed the fantasy “Wonderstruck”
(Oct. 20), based on a novel by Brian Selz-
nick, about an orphan (Oakes Fegley)
who, in 1977, runs away from Minnesota
to New York and meets a woman ( Juli-
anne Moore) whose experiences half a
century earlier may shed light on his or-
igins. Millicent Simmonds, Michelle
Williams, and Tom Noonan co-star. In
“Faces Places” (Oct. 6), Agnès Varda
teams up with the photographer and mu-
ralist JR for a journey through small towns
and hidden corners of France, where they
bring overlooked professions and activities
to the fore, and where Varda seeks traces
of her own personal and artistic past.
Richard Linklater’s comic drama “Last
Flag Flying” (Nov. 3) is a sequel to Hal
Conflicts of the past find contempo-
rary echoes in new movies about politics,
too. In “Marshall” (Oct. 13), Chadwick
Boseman stars as Thurgood Marshall,
the N.A.A.C.P. attorney who eventually
became the first black Justice of the Su-
preme Court. The historical drama, di-
rected by Reginald Hudlin, tells the story
of a 1941 Connecticut court case in which
a black man (played by Sterling K.
Brown) was accused of raping a white
woman (Kate Hudson). As an out-of-
state lawyer, Marshall couldn’t represent
the defendant, and the drama centers on
his uneasy partnership with a local white
lawyer ( Josh Gad), as well as on the re-
lentless menace of violent racism that
weighed heavily on the proceedings and
its participants. Theo Anthony’s inventive
documentary “Rat Film” (Sept. 15) con-
siders the rodent infestation of Baltimore
from journalistic, analytical, and personal
perspectives; Anthony’s incisive and
far-reaching archival investigation links
it to the enduring effects of legal and
social segregation. “Battle of the Sexes”
(Sept. 22) is a comedic dramatization of
the 1973 tennis match between the fifty-
five-year-old former pro Bobby Riggs
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI

miliar face on television, seen when the camera

pans the band during airings of “Saturday Night
Live.” A virtuoso horn player, Turre also has few,
if any, peers when it comes to extracting cogent
jazz from seashells. With horns and nautical ac-
coutrements in tow, he will be joined by two nota-
ble hard-bop practitioners, the saxophonist Javon
Jackson and the drummer Jimmy Cobb, who might
as well have “the last surviving player on ‘Kind
of Blue’” printed on his business card. (Iridium,
1650 Broadway, at 51st St. 212-582-2121. Aug. 26-27.)
Ashby’s 1973 film “The Last Detail.” The
new movie, set in 2003, stars Bryan Cran-
ston, Laurence Fishburne, and Steve
Carell, as Navy veterans who travel to Iraq
to recover the body of a soldier killed in
combat. Like the earlier film, it’s based on
a novel by Daryl Ponicsan, who co-wrote
the script with Linklater.
(Steve Carell) and the twenty-nine-year-
old Billie Jean King (Emma Stone),
which was instigated by Riggs, who
hoped to prove the inferiority of females
in the sport. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie
Faris directed; Elisabeth Shue, Alan
Cumming, and Sarah Silverman co-star.
—Richard Brody

16 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017

 MOVIES
1 NOW PLAYING
Le Amiche
In his fourth feature film, from 1955, Michelan-
gelo Antonioni turns a glossy romantic melo-
drama of modern prosperity inside out to reveal
the essence of modernity itself. Clelia (Ele-
onora Rossi Drago) moves to Turin to open a
new branch of the high-fashion boutique that
she managed in Rome. When Rosetta (Made-
leine Fischer), a flighty bourgeoise in the adjoin-
ing hotel room, attempts suicide, Clelia takes
her under her wing, joins her circle of friends,
and gets caught up in their frivolous, desperate
games of love. What makes this conventional
drama enigmatically original is the details: the
architectural contours of the film’s myriad loca-
tions seem to determine the action of the people
who traverse them, and the assortment of por-
traits, reflections, sketches, and eye-catching
clothing have more reality than the empty, mis-
erable characters to whom they lend identities.
Antonioni’s quietly audacious attempt to con-
vey the inner workings of modern life is also
a standard-issue romance—of exactly the sort
that fills his heroines’ minds. In Italian.—Rich­
ard Brody (Metrograph, Aug. 23, and streaming.)
Beach Rats
Eliza Hittman’s second feature, like her 2013
début, “It Felt Like Love,” is set in South Brook-
lyn, centered on an adolescent’s sexual conflicts,
and directed with a vigorous and tremulous
intimacy. This time, the landscape is broader,
the action rowdier. The story concerns Frankie
(Harris Dickinson), a brash and smart-mouthed
Sheepshead Bay teen-ager dissipating the sum-
mer with drugs, handball, and vaping, mostly
in the company of three cronies he won’t deign
to call friends. He gets picked up at a Coney
Island fireworks show by a girl named Simone
(Madeline Weinstein), but he pursues the rela-
tionship with a callous halfheartedness. Frankie
is secretly gay; he connects with men online and
sneaks off to desolate roadside areas for fur-
tive sexual encounters. But, when his pals de-
tect hints of his secret life, he considers drastic
and ugly action to keep it covered up. Hitt-
man, working with the cinematographer Hélène
Louvart, conjures a palpable sense of climatic
and emotional heat, pressing close to faces and
bodies in brazen sunlight, humid shadows, and
neon haze. Her vision of a homogeneous en-
clave’s crushing insularity is as richly textured
as her tactile sense of the allure and the danger
of youthful energy.—R.B. (In limited release.)
Boxing Gym
The director Frederick Wiseman has made the
performing arts a specialty, and, in this 2010 doc-
umentary, about Richard Lord’s Boxing Gym,
in Austin, Texas—which trains pros and ama-
teurs, men and women, children and the elderly,
of all ethnicities and from all social strata—he
reveals the sport of boxing to be one of them.
The word that seems to crop up most often in
the course of the film is “rhythm,” and Wise-
man fills the screen with it. His eye for the di-
verse rites of training—whether it’s pounding
the heavy bag, jumping rope, or practicing foot-
work, slugging tires with a sledgehammer or tat-
tooing the speed bag—highlights their contra-
puntal choreography. Wiseman captures these
staccato polyrhythms both visually and soni-
cally. There’s not a lot of hitting here; he clearly
delights in the sport’s balletic beauty. The only
serious fighting comes near the end, and a jolt-
ing cut from a lumbering battle in the ring to
an elegant speed-bag session suggests that the
competitive aspect of boxing is not only beside
the point—it’s a degradation of the sport’s pure
forms.—R.B. (Anthology Film Archives, Aug. 26.)
Columbus
The title of the visual artist and video-essayist
Kogonada’s intellectually passionate first fea-
ture refers to the Indiana city that’s home to a
surprising abundance of modern architectural
masterworks. Those buildings fire the imagi-
nation of his protagonist, a twentyish woman
named Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), who’s
stuck in place. Spurning college to care for her
mother (Michelle Forbes), who’s a recovering
drug addict, Casey works in the local library.
When Jin (John Cho), an architectural histori-
an’s son, comes to town, he abets her outpouring
of pent-up ideas and enthusiasms about architec-
ture and tries to help change her life. Richard-
son infuses her hyperalert performance with a
rare dialectical ardor; her avid gaze at the city’s
landmarks is matched by Kogonada’s own im-
ages, which capture the virtual libido of aesthetic
sensibility. Filming Casey and Jin on location in
the presence of the buildings that inspire them,
he revels in the power of contemplative com-
panionship—of looking, talking, thinking to-
gether—and unfolds the wonder of an artistic
coming of age. With Rory Culkin, as Casey’s
ironic grad-student colleague, and Parker Posey,
as Jin’s longtime friend.—R.B. (In wide release.)
Dunkirk
The new Christopher Nolan movie is set in
1940, during the mass evacuation of British and
French troops from northern France to the rel-
ative safety of England. The saga, an essen-
tial chapter in the British wartime narrative, is
not widely known elsewhere, and what Nolan
delivers is neither a history lesson nor even
much of a war film. A good deal of it strikes
the senses, not to mention the nerves, as an ex-
ercise in high tension and near-abstraction, as
men (there are almost no women to be seen)
are perilously poised between land and water,
water and air, darkness and light. Mark Ry-
lance, dourly determined, plays the skipper of
the Moonstone, one of the innumerable “Little
Ships” that went to the aid of those who were
trapped on the beaches. Overhead, Tom Hardy
is in typically phlegmatic form as a Spitfire pilot
who must protect the naval vessels from Ger-
man bombers. The movie feels old-fashioned
whenever it seeks to stir up British pride; as a
fable of survival, though, with its quicksilver
editing and an anxious score by Hans Zimmer,
it amazes and exhausts in equal measure. With
Kenneth Branagh, Fionn Whitehead, and Harry
Styles.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
7/31/17.) (In wide release.)
Girls Trip
This warmhearted, occasionally uproarious
comedy doesn’t quite sustain the heights of its
performers’ inspirations. Ryan (Regina Hall), a
best-selling author, is chosen to deliver the key-
note address at the Essence Festival, in New
Orleans, and she invites her three longtime best
friends to join her for a sentimental and hard-
partying reunion. Sasha (Queen Latifah), a jour-
nalist who’s now on the celebrity beat, has money
trouble; Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith), a nurse and
divorced mother of two young children, is lonely;
and Dina (Tiffany Haddish), an outrageously
brazen pleasure-seeker, seems oblivious of the
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 17

consequences of her actions. Meanwhile, Ryan
learns that Stewart (Mike Colter), her husband
and business partner, is having an affair with
a younger woman (Deborah Ayorinde). These
women’s problems have substance even though
their characters are thinly written, and the film’s
comedic flourishes offer a refreshing frankness
about sex from women’s perspectives. The view
of middle-class African-American women’s lives
behind closed doors, despite its antic exaggera-
tion, has a lived-in specificity. Malcolm D. Lee’s
direction doesn’t offer much style or vigor, but
Haddish delivers a wild yet precise performance
of verbal and gestural fury that puts her at the
forefront of contemporary comedy.—R.B. (In
wide release.)
Good Time
A headlong new movie from Josh and Benny
Safdie. The latter also stars as Nick, a shy soul
with learning difficulties, who is dragged into
crime by his brother, Connie (Robert Pattinson).
They rob a bank; Nick is arrested, and Connie
spends the rest of the film trying to spring him
from custody, or to raise enough money—by
any means, fair or foul—to bail him out. Much
of the story unrolls in the course of one night.
Though Connie’s adventures border on farce,
as he hatches a plan to smuggle a patient out of
the hospital and blunders around an amusement
park, the mood remains sleepless and crazed,
compounded by a nagging neon glow and the
throb of the soundtrack. For the Safdies, rest-
lessness comes with the territory, often to scat-
tershot effect; this, however, is their most coher-
ent work to date, largely because of Pattinson,
whose energy drives the tale along. Connie is a
thief, a sponger, and sometimes a real jerk, but
you can’t get him out of your head. With Jen-
nifer Jason Leigh, as a weary friend who’s seen
it all before.—A.L. (8/21/17) (In wide release.)
Ingrid Goes West
Aubrey Plaza’s fiercely committed performance
nearly rescues this dubious contrivance from
absurdity. The drama, directed by Matt Spicer,
is the latest entry in the picturesque-mental-
illness genre. Plaza plays the title character, a
young woman whose violent outbursts lead to
a spell in an institution. When Ingrid gets out,
instead of receiving therapy and taking medica-
tion, she moves to Los Angeles in order to stalk
an Instagram celebrity named Taylor (Eliza-
beth Olsen) and insinuate herself into Taylor’s
private life and social-media feeds. Ingrid ma-
nipulates Dan (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.), her new
neighbor and quasi-landlord, for help with her
schemes; indifferent to the pain she causes, Ing-
rid is speeding toward disaster and determined
not to crash alone. Yet Spicer’s empathetic view
of Ingrid’s tangle of misery is outweighed by his
satirical critique of online stardom, Hollywood
hustling, and conspicuous consumption; he pre-
sents Ingrid’s maladies as the results of the social
ills of the times. The action devolves into wan
op-ed commentary. With Billy Magnussen, as
Taylor’s dissolute yet deeply loyal brother, and
Wyatt Russell, as her trophy boyfriend.—R.B.
(In limited release.)
Lemon
Janicza Bravo co-wrote her first feature with her
husband, Brett Gelman, who stars as a sad-sack
actor named Isaac who’s failing and flailing at
work and in love. Ramona (Judy Greer), his girl-
friend of ten years, who is blind, leaves him. He
teaches an acting class where he mostly berates
18 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
MOVIES
his students—especially the women—but fawns
over one named Alex (Michael Cera), whose
successes he envies and resents. Isaac’s career
is reduced to public-service ads about diseases;
at one studio shoot, he meets Cleo (Nia Long),
a makeup artist, and they begin to date. Bravo
is black and Gelman is white, and Bravo makes
derisive comedy out of Isaac’s oblivious and of-
fensive attitudes and remarks regarding race, and
out of his stereotyped suburban Jewish family
(headed by Fred Melamed and Rhea Perlman).
Isaac veers between mistakes, disasters, and hu-
miliations in rigid tableaux and graphic styliza-
tions that fuse comedy and pathos, but Bravo’s
sense of style is strained. The movie declares its
intentions with a bland simplicity and reduces
its characters’ substantial experiences to a se-
ries of empty gestures.—R.B. (In limited release.)
Nocturama
Arriving in the wake of terrorist incidents in
France, Bertrand Bonello’s new film risks—or
maybe courts—controversy. A group of young
men and women, hailing from varying classes
and races, and linked only by their disaffection
with society, carry out coördinated attacks across
Paris on a single day. That evening, they take ref-
uge in a department store, after hours, and have
time to savor some of the finer fruits of capital-
ism: designer clothes, televisions, food and wine.
Mustering outside, meanwhile, are the forces
of the law. The approach throughout is hyper-
controlled, fending off any hint of the reckless;
both the editing and the cinematography keep
careful pace with the tightly plotted crimes, and
many of the performers patrol the scenes in an
under-reactive daze. Bonello, like John Carpen-
ter, provides his own electronic score, and, in
the end, you are less likely to be outraged by the
movie’s political provocation than numbed by
its hypnotizing style. In French.—A.L. (8/21/17)
(In limited release.)
Patti Cake$
Geremy Jasper’s hardscrabble New Jersey fan-
tasy has a heart—but an artificial one. It’s the
story of the twenty-three-year-old Patricia Dom-
browski (Danielle Macdonald), who lives with
her mother, Barb (Bridget Everett), an alcoholic,
and her ailing grandmother (Cathy Moriarty).
Patti—who’s overweight and has long endured
the nickname Dumbo—works as a waitress at
a grim bar while dreaming of hip-hop stardom
under the name Killa P. Although she can out-
rap her fellow-locals in a street-corner contest,
her musical partnership with Hareesh (Sid-
dharth Dhananjay), a pharmacist whose rap
name is Jheri, is going nowhere. But she even-
tually meets a taciturn loud-core anarchist who
calls himself Basterd the Antichrist (Mamoudou
Athie), a sort of musical genius, whom she lures
into the group, sparking romance and success.
There are hiccups along the way—debt, work,
insult, injury, illness, death—and Patti’s forceful,
confident pugnacity takes some blows. She has
to accept her family identity while attempting
to forge an artistic one—and trying to recon-
cile with Barb, a former singer who put her
own dreams aside. Jasper hits every note of
sentimental manipulation in a tale that’s as
fleetingly affecting as it is insubstantial and
mechanical.—R.B. (In wide release.)
Planetarium
The director Rebecca Zlotowski turns the real-
life story of the Paris-based producer Ber-
nard Natan, whose career was torpedoed in
the nineteen-thirties, by a scandal fuelled by
anti-Semitism, into an iridescent drama about
the mystical lure of movies. Emmanuel Salin-
ger plays a Jewish producer, André Korben,
based on Natan, whose control of a Paris stu-
dio is threatened—and who wants to use his
power and his money to film the unfilmable.
He sees a stage performance by two Ameri-
can mediums, the sisters Laura and Kate Bar-
low, and decides, first, to make Laura (Natalie
Portman) a star, and, then, to film Kate (Lily-
Rose Depp) summoning spirits. To that end,
he invests in the invention of a camera that can
capture metaphysical phenomena. Portman,
acting in French and English, brings a mask-
like command to her role as an accidental ac-
tress for whom performing is just a business,
and Salinger is calm yet forceful as a vision-
ary who, in the face of an anti-Semitic cam-
paign, risks his business for his personal pas-
sion. Zlotowski, recapturing the past with a
glossy, abstracted sense of wonder, displays
the cinema’s glorious myths and monstrous
realities.—R.B. (In limited release.)
War for the Planet of the Apes
If only Darwin were alive to see this film. Cae-
sar, incarnated by Andy Serkis, is living proof
that the highest human virtues—valor, compas-
sion, a keen intelligence, and a gift for leader-
ship—are most credibly combined in a monkey.
In this latest chapter of the simian saga, Caesar
plans to lead his freedom-loving comrades to
a promised land; first, however, there is a mil-
itary lunatic (Woody Harrelson) to contend
with, and murders to be avenged. What fol-
lows is often cruel, and hard to classify as en-
tertainment; we see a labor camp in full spate,
and—surely a cinematic first—some form of
ape crucifixion. Matt Reeves’s film takes itself
extremely seriously, and, without a glimmer of
irony, adds a touch of religious allegory to both
the dialogue and the highfalutin images with
which the story concludes. Still, the technical
achievement marches on, and there appears to
be no challenge that cannot be met and over-
come by the magi of the digital craft. (Do orang-
utans really cry?) The most affable character,
new to the franchise, is a chimp who, after a
long spell in a zoo, speaks English—voiced by
Steve Zahn—rather better than he gibbers or
howls.—A.L. (7/24/17) (In wide release.)
Whose Streets?
A new documentary, directed by Sabaah Fo-
layan and Damon Davis, about the 2014 kill-
ing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri,
at the hands of the police, and about the wide-
spread anger that ensued. Indeed, the film is
still fired up; if it makes no effort to take a bal-
anced view, that is because the time for bal-
ance—to judge by the opinions expressed with
such vehemence here—is long gone. Few mod-
erate voices are heard, and the movie seems des-
tined to become part of the activist movement
that it portrays. In lieu of a narrator who might
shepherd us calmly through the fractious events
in Missouri, we are treated to a busy collage of
interviews, archival footage, and tweets, plus a
load of cell-phone-video clips, freshly caught
from the flow of the streets. One of the most
appealing—and most forthright—figures we
encounter is Brittany Ferrell, who instructs
her six-year-old daughter in the art of public
protest. On that basis, Ferguson is in no dan-
ger of being forgotten.—A.L. (8/7 & 14/17)
(In wide release.)

DANCE
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch returns to BAM with “Café Müller,” from 1978.
Fall Preview
In the eight years since Pina Bausch’s
sudden death, her company, Tanztheater
Wuppertal Pina Bausch, has soldiered
on, performing her emotionally strenuous
dance-theatre works. At BAM (Sept. 14-24),
the troupe presents two scorchers, “Café
Müller” and “The Rite of Spring,” both
made in the seventies, before a hint of
gentleness began to creep into Bausch’s
world view. The first is set in a chair-
strewn room, where nightmarish personal
dramas play out to the music of Purcell.
The other takes place on a dirt-covered
stage, a sombre setting for a hair-raising
ritual of immolation.
A redemption of sorts can be found in
“A Love Supreme” (New York Live Arts,
Sept. 27-30), Anne Teresa De Keers-
maeker’s collaboration with Salva San-
chis, a former member of De Keers-
maeker’s company, Rosas. With a mix of
choreographed movement and improvi-
sation, Sanchis and De Keersmaeker have
conjured a physical counterpart to John
Coltrane’s famous 1964 album. It is danced
by four men, each of whom closely scans
a musical line played by a different mem-
ber of Coltrane’s legendary quartet.
Alexei Ratmansky’s affinity for the
music of the contemporary Russian
composer Leonid Desyatnikov has pro-
duced some of his most original ballets,
including “Russian Seasons” and “Old
Women Falling Out.” His newest work
for American Ballet Theatre (the season
20 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
runs Oct. 18-29, at the David H. Koch)
premières on Oct. 18, with a score by the
same composer, “Bukovinian Songs,” a
suite for solo piano based on Ukrainian
folk tunes. Ratmansky’s other recent
Desyatnikov ballet, “Odessa,” will be part
of New York City Ballet’s fall season
(Sept. 19-Oct. 15, at the David H. Koch).
Ask any dancer her favorite dance film,
and she’s likely to name the 1948 surreal-
ist melodrama “The Red Shoes,” about
a ballerina (played by Moira Shearer)
driven to self-destruction by her love of
dance. Who better to adapt this gory tale
for the stage than the British choreogra-
pher Matthew Bourne, who brought us
a danced version of “Edward Scissor-
hands”? At City Center (Oct. 26-Nov. 5),
the role of the aristocratic, tenderhearted,
and obsessive heroine will be performed
alternately by Ashley Shaw, of Bourne’s
London-based company New Adven-
tures, and N.Y.C.B.’s own drama queen
Sara Mearns.
An impossible love story drawn from
Persian myth lies at the heart of “Layla
and Majnun,” a 1908 opera by the Azer-
baijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli. In
Mark Morris’s version (in the White
Light Festival, at the Rose Theatre,
Oct. 26-29), the singers and players—
members of the Silk Road Ensemble—sit
in the center of a tiered stage, as, all
around them, dancers from the Mark
Morris Dance Group reënact the story
of the star-crossed lovers.
—Marina Harss
Drive East
Since 2013, this festival has been packing an amaz-
ing quantity of high-quality classical Indian dance
and music into one week of August. Along with the
usual assortment of soloists and groups in various
classical forms, this year’s dance selections include
the novelties of a combination of kathak and Korean
drumming, some circuslike folk dancing from the
deserts of Rajasthan, and, most exciting, a kathak
recital (by Rachna Nivas and Rina Mehta) with
an incendiary guest: the unsurpassed American
tap dancer Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards. (Dixon
Place, 161A Chrystie St. driveeastnyc.org. Aug. 23-27.)
Beach Sessions Dance Series
For the final program in this annual series, which
combines a day at the beach with a taste of exper-
imental dance, the choreographer Madeline Hol-
lander matches dancers with beach-rake trucks in
“Arena,” a littoral meditation on the ephemeral-
ity of her art. First, the dancers, encased in cos-
tumes that resemble beekeeping suits, follow the
rakes, leaving traces of their motions in the freshly
combed sand. Then the trucks follow the danc-
ers, covering their tracks, erasing evidence of the
1
dance. (Beach 110th St., Rockaway Beach, Queens.
beachsessionsdanceseries.com. Aug. 26.)
OUT OF TOWN
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
The Washington Ballet—under the artistic direc-
tion of Julie Kent, the former American Ballet The-
atre star who took the helm last year—has been
thriving, especially in classic works. But the pro-
gram for the troupe’s first Pillow appearance since
1980 (at the Ted Shawn) is a mixed bag of newer
stuff: the meretricious eroticism of Jiří Kylián’s
“Petite Mort” and the clever flash of Annabelle
Lopez Ochoa’s “Sombrerisimo,” a dance for six sexy
men and their hats, offset by the elegance and elo-
quence of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Seven Sonatas.” • A
collaboration between the choreographer John
Heginbotham and the illustrator Maira Kalman
would seem to risk an excess of whimsy. Yet “The
Principles of Uncertainty” (débuting at the Doris
Duke), jumping off from Kalman’s online column
turned book of the same name, also promises wel-
come wit in the face of mortality, and light-footed,
pleasure-giving interaction with live music by the
Knights. (Becket, Mass. 413-243-0745. Aug. 23-27.)
ABOVE &
BEYOND
Jazz Age Lawn Party
Michael Arenella and his Dreamland Orches-
tra, who perform nineteen-twenties dance
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI
music as if the past ninety years had never
happened, present a Gatsby-esque affair on
Governors Island. It is billed as the world’s
largest Prohibition-era-inspired gathering,
just without the Prohibition; a menu includes
a period-appropriate spread of food and drink.
There will also be dance lessons, a Charleston
contest, a display of antique gramophones,
a “Bathing Beauties and Beaus” promenade,
and a pie-baking contest. (jazzagelawnparty.
com. Aug. 26-27.)
 ABOVE & BEYOND

Long Island City Boathouse Paddle

Hallet’s Cove is as tucked away as it sounds, nestled
at the border between Astoria and Ravenswood.
There, on weekends, the Long Island City boat-
house hosts regular canoeing and kayaking trips off
the shore of Socrates Sculpture Park; these “weekly
paddles” provide stunning views of Roosevelt Is-
land, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. Weather
permitting, all ages are invited to take part in an
afternoon row through the cove on Saturday and
Sunday—participants must be able to swim, and
singles may be paired up. (31-2 Vernon Blvd., Asto-
ria, Queens. licboathouse.org. Aug. 26-27.)

Hudson River Stargazing

The Amateur Astronomers Association, founded
in 1927, has hosted atmospheric lectures and events
around the city for decades; this summer’s schedule
has included talks on how astronomers took the uni-
verse’s “baby picture” by capturing millennia-old
light, and on potential alternatives to dark matter.
This week, the club offers participants a chance to
study the sun up close, without a pesky solar eclipse
sweeping into their line of sight. Using special tele-
scopes designed to safely focus on the sun, attend-
ees can examine the star’s pulsing surface and iden-
tify sunspots and prominences. (Pier I, 500 W. 70th
St. riversideparknyc.org. Aug. 27 at 1.)
1 READINGS AND TALKS

Strand Bookstore
Nancy Davidoff Kelton describes the good and
bad habits of memoir writers as the difference
between “Ah-ha!” and “Oy vey!” Personal writ-
ing lends itself to self-indulgence, but memoir-
ists, Kelton says, should aspire to revelation, not
absorption. The New School professor, who has
written six books, including, most recently, “Find-
ing Mr. Rightstein,” hosts this writing workshop,
offering techniques for effective self-exploration,
tips for structuring one’s work and establishing
productive habits, and other fundamental tools
for aspiring scribes. (828 Broadway. 212-473-1452.
Aug. 23 at 6:30.)

Just a Show
Harris Mayersohn is a staff writer for “The Late
Show with Stephen Colbert” and also hosts a reg-
ular comic variety show at Sunnyvale, a remote
Bushwick bar that fittingly takes its name from
the wacky mockumentary series “Trailer Park
Boys.” On the last Sunday of each month, May-
ersohn gathers fellow standup performers and
yuckster writers from the city’s bustling comedy
community for an unpredictable night of antics
and pranks. This edition features the bright come-
dians Sasheer Zamata, Paige Weldon, Rae Sanni,
Tom Thakkar, and Joe Kwaczala. (1031 Grand St.,
Brooklyn. sunnyvalebk.com. Aug. 27 at 6.)

Riverside Church
This week, Bernie Sanders is set to publish
a how-to guide for budding revolutionaries,
aimed at those below voting age but inundated
with the issues of the adult world. “Bernie Sand-
ers Guide to Political Revolution” presents his
background and policies in easy-to-absorb lan-
guage and infographics: he recounts his early
exposure to socialism and his initial political
ambitions, draws on the hindsight gained from
his Presidential campaign, and lays out the
stakes for the future. He appears on the eve of
the book’s release for a talk co-hosted by Harp-
er’s and Book Culture. (490 Riverside Dr. book-
culture.com. Aug. 28 at 7.)

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 21


TABLES FOR TWO
Gloria
401 W. 53rd St. (212-956-0709)
For Broadway habitués and Hell’s
Kitchen residents, the opening of this
pescatarian restaurant, on the fringes of
the theatre district, is very good news.
Gloria infuses the neighborhood—
where margarita happy hours and loaded
tater tots are honored traditions—with
downtown cool bolstered by an élite
seafood pedigree. The chef, Diego Gar-
cia, and the manager, Phil Johnson, met
under the auspices of Eric Ripert—Gar-
cia was a sous chef at Ripert’s fish tem-
ple, Le Bernardin, and Johnson a som-
melier at his haute wine bar, Aldo Sohm.
After a stint together at Contra, a Lower
East Side mecca of the innovative
affordable tasting menu, the two decided
to strike out on their own. The concept
for Gloria, Johnson said, began as a chal-
lenge: “Can we do this without any meat
at all?” The answer: “Yes, we can.”
The minimalist menu, stocked with
sustainable fish and seafood from the
Atlantic Ocean, keeps things mysterious,
with descriptions like “squid, walnut, ink,
cauliflower.” The first item is the sim-
plest: cornbread, a crunchy-moist round
that telegraphs “we’re humble and ca-
sual,” while the accompanying cultured
butter says, “but it’s going to be amaz-
ing.” Many of the dishes are meticulously
staged, arranged in neat circles garnished
22 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
F§D & DRINK
with wild tangles of green tendrils or
magenta radish spirals. They’re also de-
licious—Garcia, who was born in Mex-
ico and grew up in Napa, has a knack
for getting to the essence of flavors.
Chopped scallops, slightly cooked to
bring out the sweetness, get kicked into
hyperdrive with a bright-green purée of
asparagus and kale; a copious amount
of Jonah crab is covered with a luscious
saffron-scented bouillabaisse sabayon,
the richness cut with peppery nasturtium
leaves.
If you look closely, you will discover
an open secret: the menu is entirely
gluten-free. Johnson says that about one
out of four diners asks for gluten-free
options, so they just went with it. In main
dishes like wild striped bass with a red-
wine-butter emulsion, and fried whole
snapper served with a little copper pot
of lobster sauce, neither gluten nor meat
is missed. The most unassuming dish, a
bowl of Rancho Gordo beans—tender
and saline in a mussel broth with a basil
pistou—is a sleeper hit.
Care is taken everywhere: vases of
wildflowers, low lighting that echoes the
glow of evening’s magic hour, bathroom
signs that read “Whichever.” What neigh-
borhood wouldn’t welcome a beautifica-
tion project? When Johnson was planting
a maple tree in front of the restaurant, a
local passerby voiced his approval: “Love
the tree.” (Entrées $18-$39.)
—Shauna Lyon
1 BAR TAB
Et Al.
191 Chrystie St.
The nastiest bouncers in New York these days
are probably those at the Public, Ian Schrager’s
new hotel. (“Not on the list? Get the fuck out
of line.”) The prize for the nicest has to go to
Hugh, a doorman about a block down on Chrys-
tie Street, who greets guests with a handshake
and a warm welcome at Et Al., the friendliest
trendy bar in town. That’s not to say that walk-
ing in isn’t a touch intimidating: low-intensity
PHOTOGRAPH BY YUDI ELA FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
club beats whose backing vocals seem to have
been imprinted on the lips of the attending
cognoscenti at birth, décor that is strictly rave-
bondage-meets-future-Tokyo. All of this is
appropriate for a spot that is remembered by
devotees, albeit blearily, as the site of the long-
lost Experimental Cocktail Club. Witness the
words “anything” and “everything” projected
onto a wall near the front, Teddy bears hand-
cuffed to metal poles in the back, and a twisting
polyhedral light fixture above the bar. Here
eighteen-dollar cocktails are the order of the
day. Try a Fuck You Steve, which radiates with
mezcal, pineapple, and Campari, or a similarly
bromelain-laden Love Blake, with tequila re-
posado and cinnamon. Or, if you like your
drinks strong, go for a Starring Angelo, in which
oodles of Campari are mixed with bourbon and
Italian vermouth. The other night, a peal of
laughter rose from a packed table as someone
exclaimed, “They were a polyamorous couple!”
Sure, the crowd veers a smidgen older than the
rest of Chrystie Street—even though the oldest
are probably only in their mid-thirties—but
that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to have
fun.—Nicolas Niarchos
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
THE DIVIDER
arly last November, just before
E Election Day, Barack Obama was
driven through the crisp late-night
gloom of the outskirts of Charlotte, as
he barnstormed North Carolina on
behalf of Hillary Clinton. He was in
no measure serene or confident. The
polls, the “analytics,” remained in Clin-
ton’s favor, yet Obama, with the unique
vantage point of being the first African-
American President, had watched as,
night after night, immense crowds
cheered and hooted for a demagogue
who had launched a business career
with blacks-need-not-apply housing
developments in Queens and a polit-
ical career with a racist conspiracy the-
ory known as birtherism. During his
speech in Charlotte that night, Obama
warned that no one really changes in
the Presidency; rather, the office “mag-
nifies” who you already are. So if you
“accept the support of Klan sympa-
thizers before you’re President, or you’re
kind of slow in disowning it, saying,
‘Well, I don’t know,’ then that’s how
you’ll be as President.”
Donald Trump’s ascent was hardly
the first sign that Americans had not
uniformly regarded Obama’s election
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
as an inspiring chapter in the country’s
fitful progress toward equality. Newt
Gingrich, the former Speaker of the
House, had branded him the “food-
stamp President.” In the right-wing
and white-nationalist media, Obama
was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the
Antichrist, a “liberal fascist,” who was
assembling his own Hitler Youth. A
high-speed train from Las Vegas to
Anaheim that was part of the economic-
stimulus package was a secret effort to
connect the brothels of Nevada to the
innocents at Disneyland. He was, by
nature, suspect. “You just look at the
body  language, and there’s some-
thing going on,” Trump said, last sum-
mer. In the meantime, beginning on
the day of Obama’s first inaugural, the
Secret Service fielded an unprecedented
number of threats against the Presi-
dent’s person.
And so, speeding toward yet another
airport last November, Obama seemed
like a weary man who harbored a burn-
ing seed of apprehension. “We’ve seen
this coming,” he said. “Donald Trump
is not an outlier; he is a culmination,
a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and
tactics of the Republican Party for the
past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What
surprised me was the degree to which
those tactics and rhetoric completely
jumped the rails.”
For half a century, in fact, the lead-
ers of the G.O.P. have fanned the lin-
gering embers of racial resentment in
the United States. Through shrewd po-
litical calculation and rhetoric, from
Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to
the latest charges of voter fraud in
majority-African-American districts,
doing so has paid off at the ballot box.
“There were no governing principles,”
Obama said. “There was no one to say,
‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what
we stand for.’ ”
Last week, the world witnessed
Obama’s successor in the White House,
unbound and unhinged, acting more
or less as Obama had predicted. In
2015, a week after Trump had declared
his candidacy, he spoke in favor of re-
moving the Confederate flag from
South Carolina’s capitol: “Put it in the
museum and let it go.” But, last week,
abandoning the customary dog whis-
tle of previous Republican culture war-
riors, President Trump made plain his
indulgent sympathy for neo-Nazis,
Klan members, and unaffiliated white
supremacists, who marched with
torches, assault rifles, clubs, and racist
and anti-Semitic slogans through the
streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. One
participant even adopted an isis ter-
ror tactic, driving straight into a crowd
of people peaceably demonstrating
against the racists. Trump had declared
an “America First” culture war in his
Inaugural Address, and now—as his
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 27
poll numbers dropped, as he lost again
and again in the courts and in Con-
gress, as the Mueller investigation
delved into his miserable business his-
tory, as more and more aides leaked
their dismay—he had cast his lot with
the basest of his base. There were some
“very fine people” among the white
nationalists, he said, and their “culture”
should not be threatened.
Who could have predicted it? Any-
one, really. Two years ago, the Daily
Stormer, the foremost neo-Nazi news
site in the country, called on white
men to “vote for the first time in our
lives for the one man who actually
represents our interests.” Trump never
spurned this current of his support.
He invited it, exploited it. With Ste-
phen Bannon, white nationalism won
prime real estate in the West Wing.
Bannon wrote much of the inaugural
speech, and was branded “The Great
Manipulator” in a Time cover story
that bruised the Presidential ego. But
Bannon has been marginalized for
months. Last Friday, in the wake of
Charlottesville, Trump finally pushed
him out. He is headed back to Breit-
bart News. But he was staff; his de-
parture is hardly decisive. The culture
DEPT. OF SUPERLATIVES
TOTALLY
n Monday, people in a seventy-
O mile-wide swath of the United
States will witness one of nature’s great
spectacles: the total solar eclipse. The
event will attract swarms of eclipse
chasers—or, as some of them prefer to
be called, “umbraphiles,” derived from
“umbra,” the technical term for the
darkest part of the moon’s shadow. New
York City will not be a prime destina-
tion; here, the moon will obscure only
seventy-two per cent of the sun. But
the city is distinguished neverthe-
less: three men currently claiming
the record for the most total solar
eclipses seen (thirty-three) are all New
Yorkers.
“I’m not out for record-setting. It’s
28 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
of this White House was, and remains,
Trump’s.
When Trump was elected, there
were those who considered his history
and insisted that this was a kind of na-
tional emergency, and that to normal-
ize this Presidency was a dangerous il-
lusion. At the same time, there were
those who, in the spirit of patience and
national comity, held that Trump was
“our President,” and that “he must be
given a chance.” Has he had enough
of a chance yet? After his press con-
ference in the lobby of Trump Tower
last Tuesday, when he ignored the
scripted attempts to regulate his im-
pulses and revealed his true allegiances,
there can be no doubt about who he
is. This is the inescapable fact: on No-
vember 9th, the United States elected
a dishonest, inept, unbalanced, and im-
moral human being as its President
and Commander-in-Chief. Trump has
daily proven unyielding to appeals of
decency, unity, moderation, or fact.
He is willing to imperil the civil peace
and the social fabric of his country
simply to satisfy his narcissism and to
excite the worst inclinations of his core
followers.
This latest outrage has disheartened
just something that happens,” Glenn
Schneider, one of the triumvirate, said
by phone, from Tucson, Arizona, where
he is an astronomer at the Steward
Observatory. Eclipses and the sun are
not his field, just a passion. “It will
change your life,” he said of viewing
a total solar eclipse. “I warn people
about that. When I give talks about
eclipses, my first slide is like the label
on a cigarette pack—a warning of
addiction.”
Schneider, who grew up in the
Bronx, saw his first total solar eclipse
in 1970, when he was fourteen. He took
a bus down to Greenville, North Car-
olina, with the Amateur Observers’ So-
ciety of New York to see it. “I had pre-
pared exactly what I was going to do
for every second of that totality,” he
recalled. “I knew it was going to be
two minutes and fifty-four seconds. I
set up telescopes and cameras and had
it all scripted, spent months practic-
ing.” Then the moment came. “The
word ‘mesmerized’ understates,” Schnei-
Trump’s circle somewhat; business ex-
ecutives, generals and security officials,
advisers, and even family members have
semaphored their private despair. One
of the more lasting images from Trump’s
squalid appearance on Tuesday was that
of his chief of staff, John Kelly, who
stood listening to him with a hangdog
look of shame. But Trump still retains
the support of roughly a third of the
country, and of the majority of the Re-
publican electorate. The political figure
Obama saw as a “logical conclusion of
the rhetoric and tactics of the Repub-
lican Party” has not yet come unmoored
from the Party’s base.
The most important resistance to
Trump has to come from civil society,
from institutions, and from individu-
als who, despite their differences, be-
lieve in constitutional norms and have
a fundamental respect for the values of
honesty, equality, and justice. The im-
perative is to find ways to counteract
and diminish his malignant influence
not only in the overtly political realm
but also in the social and cultural one.
To fail in that would allow the death
rattle of an old racist order to take hold
as a deafening revival.
—David Remnick
der said. “I couldn’t move. I just stood
there, with the binoculars hanging
around my neck.”
Jay Pasachoff, a solar astronomer at
Williams College, claims to have wit-
nessed more eclipses, total or other-
wise, than anyone else alive: sixty-five.
He, too, is from the Bronx. He saw his
first total eclipse during his freshman
year at Harvard, in 1959, from an air-
plane off the Massachusetts coast. “It
was beautiful,” he said. “But seeing one
from an airplane is nothing compared
with what it’s like being outdoors.”
John Beattie, a proofreader in Man-
hattan, also tied for the record, declined
to be interviewed. Schneider said, “De-
spite being an extroverted eclipse chaser,
John eschews press notoriety and is a
rather private person.”
Schneider and Beattie were among
a group of umbraphiles who experi-
enced the longest totality ever viewed
from a civilian aircraft, in 2010: nine
minutes and twenty-three seconds. The
pair also witnessed a “hybrid” eclipse
(don’t ask) that occurred between
Greenland and Iceland in 1986. They
rented a private jet and flew over a
one-kilometre-wide patch of the North
Atlantic.
In general, umbraphiles are not a
boastful or a rivalrous bunch; in the
face of grand celestial alignments, the
human ego shrinks. “Before the 2002
eclipse, in Australia, we were sitting
around with half a dozen people, in-
cluding Glenn and John, and my wife
thought people were being competi-
tive,” Pasachoff admitted. (His wife
has accompanied him to thirty-nine
eclipse viewings.)
The umbraphile’s life inevitably in-
volves disappointment. Newtonian
physics makes it possible to plan for
an eclipse centuries in advance, but
not for unexpected disasters. Pasachoff
missed one in Eastern Europe in 1968
because Russia had invaded Czecho-
slovakia. “That still bothers me,” he
said. Schneider missed one in Antarc-
tica in 1985 because he couldn’t find a
plane or an icebreaker to take him into
the path of totality.
Why are the most accomplished
umbraphiles New Yorkers? “We’ve been
talking about that a lot lately,” Pasa-
choff said. “The Hayden Planetarium
is definitely a link.” Pasachoff took trips
there while he was a student at P.S. 114
and, later, at the Bronx High School
of Science. He built telescopes in the
planetarium’s basement. Schneider was
also a regular visitor.
For this week’s eclipse, Schneider
will be in Madras, Oregon, and Pasa-
30 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
choff will lead a group of three hun-
dred gazers, including students and
researchers, a hundred miles away, in
Salem. According to Schneider, Beat-
tie plans to be near an airport in the
path of totality, so that in the case of
bad weather he can hop on a plane
and see the eclipse from above the
clouds. If the weather in Oregon doesn’t
coöperate, might the strategy put him
in first place, ahead of his fellow-
umbraphiles? Pasachoff didn’t think
so: “I think just being in the zone of
1
totality should count.”
—Jason Kersten
OFFSTAGE
DISOBEDIENT
he first time James Cromwell got
T arrested was in 1971. “I sort of—
he thought I did, I didn’t think I did—
assaulted a police officer on a subway
train who was hassling a woman,” he
recalled recently. He was taken to a
station house beneath Times Square,
where a sergeant asked what he did for
a living. “I said, ‘I’m an actor.’ He went,
‘You working on anything now?’ Like,
You’re unemployed, you’re a fucking actor.
I said, ‘Yeah, I’m doing a play.’ ‘What’s
the play called?’ I said, ‘AC/DC,’ which
is a wonderful English play, very ab-
struse. Of course, he thought it meant
bisexuality.” Cromwell was let off with
a warning.
He was arrested again a few months
later, at the May Day protests in Wash-
ington, D.C., along with thousands of
other people. Confronting a cop, he
felt a baton against his throat, was
tossed into a paddy wagon, and spent
the night in jail. From his hotel room
the next morning, he saw a chaotic
scene—tear gas, anarchists clashing
with police—that came to mind this
past January, when he was protesting
Donald Trump’s Inauguration. “It was
like the seventies,” he said. “Nothing’s
changed.”
Cromwell’s penchant for civil disobe-
dience may seem out of character. With
his woolly voice and “American Gothic”
look, the six-feet-seven actor is often cast
as salt-of-the-earth types (“Babe”) or as
flinty authority figures (“L.A. Confiden-
tial”). But this summer he’s been in the
news for rabble-rousing. In July, he was
arrested at SeaWorld San Diego for in-
terrupting an orca show wearing a T-shirt
that said “SeaWorld Sucks.” Days ear-
lier, he served three days at the Orange
County Correctional Facility, after re-
fusing to pay a fine stemming from a
2015 sit-in at a new power plant in
Wawayanda, New York. He spent his
prison time on a hunger strike, and read
five hundred pages of “The Pickwick
Papers.”
“One of the questions people ask
you when you go in is ‘Are you anxious
about being raped?’ ” Cromwell, who is
seventy-seven, recalled. “I said, ‘Not un-
less they’re a whole lot hornier than I
think they are.’” He was at a hotel in Al-
bany, about to speak at a rally against the
Wawayanda power plant, which would
run on fracked gas piped in from Penn-
sylvania. (Governor Cuomo has banned
fracking in New York State, but protest-
ers were demanding that he deny the
plant a water permit.)
The actor’s father, the Hollywood
director John Cromwell, was black-
listed in the fifties, but James didn’t
become politicized until 1964, when,
at twenty-three, he joined the Free
Southern Theatre and toured Missis-
sippi and Louisiana, playing Pozzo in
a mixed-race production of “Waiting
for Godot.” After the Kent State shoot-
ings, in 1970, Cromwell recalled, “I said
to myself, ‘Why the fuck am I doing
crappy Shakespeare?’ ” He joined a
defense committee for the Black Pan-
thers, and at one point used his father’s
apartment, on East Fiftieth Street, as
a safe house for Elbert (Big Man) How-
ard. Restless, he hitchhiked around the
world and wound up in India, where
he became a disciple of Neem Karoli
Baba. (“This is all illusion,” Cromwell
said, tapping on a wooden post.) He
returned to California, intending to
become a parole officer, and was cast
in “All in the Family.” But his career
didn’t take off until 1995, when he played
a pig farmer in “Babe” and was nomi-
nated for an Oscar. Working with pigs
got him into animal rights. In 2001, he
was arrested while occupying a Wendy’s
in Virginia.
Cromwell’s phone rang (the ringtone
was him saying,“That’ll do, pig”), and
he headed to the protest. On the way,
he ran into another speaker, Dennis
Kucinich. “I gotta go check on the sound
system,” Cromwell told him.
“You need a sound system?” Kucinich
said with a laugh.
Several hundred people had gath-
ered in West Capitol Park, with signs
that said “Protect NY Water” and
“Make Earth Great Again.” An ac-
tivist named Pramilla Malick intro-
duced Cromwell, saying, “He is never
afraid to speak truth to power.”
“You really are beautiful,” Cromwell
told the crowd. He mentioned a statis-
tic that he’d just read: “Do you know
what has the most impact in reducing
our carbon footprint?”
“Going vegan!” someone yelled.
“Unfortunately, it’s not,” he said.
“This is what it is: don’t have children.
Can you believe we are saying to the
people of this world that in order to
James Cromwell
be able to live in it you have to give
up your children?” There were tenta-
tive cheers.
Cromwell and Kucinich led the
crowd to deliver a petition to Cuomo’s
office. “Second floor, to the War Room,”
Cromwell instructed from the lobby.
He recently finished shooting “Juras-
sic World: Fallen Kingdom,” in which
he plays a scientist who warns of tech-
nology run amok. While filming his
big speech, he sneaked in a jab at the
fossil-fuel industry: “When they see it
32 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
at the studio, they can say, ‘He can’t say
that!’ It’ll be gone like that. And then
my character will really serve no pur-
1
pose at all.”
—Michael Schulman
SCREEN WARS
GATEKEEPERS
enerally speaking, anyone can say
G anything online. But, lately, things
have started to get complicated. Last
week, after neo-Nazis and white suprem-
acists descended on Charlottesville, the
neo-Nazi blog the Daily Stormer disap-
peared from the Internet. GoDaddy, the
registrar of the site’s domain, had dis-
continued its service. The Daily Stormer
switched its domain to Google, which
promptly shut it down as well. The site
is now back up, on the dark Web, with
its publisher pleading victimhood on so-
cial media. (“I am being unpersoned.”)
What happened to the Daily Stormer
wasn’t a violation of the First Amend-
ment—private companies are allowed to
stifle speech—but it enraged people on
the right, many of whom were already
deeply skeptical of the puppet masters
in Silicon Valley. Before any of this hap-
pened, a pro-Trump activist named Jack
Posobiec was organizing a multicity
“March on Google,” calling the com-
pany “an anti-free-speech monopoly.”
(Last week, Posobiec announced that the
march had been postponed, citing threats
from the “alt-left.”)
Jack Conte is not an alt-right activ-
ist—he’s a bald, bearded musician from
San Francisco—but he, too, once re-
sented the titans of Silicon Valley. A few
years ago, Conte was trying to make a
living on YouTube. His music videos—
funk covers of pop songs, homemade ro-
bots playing percussion pads—often went
viral. “I made a video that took many,
many hours and cost me thousands of
dollars,” Conte said. “My fans loved it.
It got more than a million views. And I
made a hundred and fifty bucks from it.
I realized, Clearly, there is a problem
with how stuff on the Internet—what
we now call ‘content,’ what used to be
called ‘art’—gets monetized.” Conte co-
founded his own tech company, Patreon,
a Web site that allows artists and activ-
ists to get paid directly by fans and sup-
porters. A creator posts a description of
what she intends to make—a comic strip,
a podcast—and patrons sign up to fund
it, each chipping in a few dollars a month.
Patreon takes a five-per-cent cut. The
company now has about eighty employ-
ees and a hundred-and-fifty-million-
dollar valuation—big enough that many
Web denizens consider Conte a new
kind of puppet master.
Last month, Lauren Southern, a right-
wing activist and pundit who was earn-
ing a few thousand dollars a month on
Patreon, received an e-mail from the
company’s Trust and Safety team. “Here
at Patreon we believe in freedom of
speech,” it read. “When ideas cross into
action, though, we sometimes must take
a closer look.” Southern, a videogenic
Canadian in her early twenties, whose
book was blurbed by Ann Coulter, was
known for videos like “White Privilege
Is a Dangerous Myth.” Her Patreon page
now reads “This page has been removed.”
Southern had participated in an
anti-immigration action in the Medi-
terranean Sea, in which a motorboat
tried to prevent a ship from bringing
refugees to Europe. In an apologetic
YouTube video, Conte insisted that
Southern had been banned not for her
politics but for her risky behavior. “I
didn’t expect to convince everyone, and
that’s O.K.,” he said.
Predictably, Southern’s fans were not
pleased. “You’re an idiot and a beta
cuck,” one commented. Some called
for lawsuits. Others linked to a copy-
cat site called Hatreon. (Motto: “A plat-
form for creators, absent thought po-
licing.”) Southern set up her own site,
patreonsucks.com. “Big liberal silicon
valley companies want me to become
a friendly little vlogger that spouts all
the right lines,” she wrote. “I won’t let
that happen.” She made a YouTube
video directing followers to her new
site, adding, “As for Patreon, you guys
can suck my balls.”
Then came Charlottesville. Jason Kess-
ler, the organizer of the “Unite the Right”
rally, had a Patreon page (three backers,
generating thirty-three dollars a month).
It was swiftly removed for violating
Patreon’s rule against “affiliations with
known hate groups.” Meanwhile, another
Patreon user, the progressive activist
Logan Smith, began sharing photos of
the torch-wielding mob on his Twitter
handle @YesYoureRacist. He urged peo-
ple to help him identify the participants:
“I’ll make them famous.” Online vigi-
lantes complied, and several marchers
lost their jobs. A few people were incor-
rectly identified, causing nonparticipants
to receive death threats. Doxing—pub-
lishing someone’s private information
online—is against Patreon’s rules. Smith
claims that his activism wasn’t doxing.
“If these people are so proud of their be-
liefs, then they shouldn’t have a problem
with their communities knowing their
names,” he said last week.
Patreon disagreed, and Smith’s page
was removed. “It doesn’t matter who the
victim is,” Conte said. “It could be a con-
victed murderer. If someone is releasing
private information that an individual
doesn’t want to be made public, then
that’s doxing. And we don’t allow it.”
(One person tweeted at Patreon, “He is
identifying nazis and you are
stopping him at the request of
nazis.”) Conte went on, “We’ve been
getting it from all sides—of course. I get
it. Taking away someone’s income is a
hugely onerous thing, and we don’t take
it lightly.” He sighed. “We’ve dealt with
a huge range of stuff in the past few years,
a wider variety than I ever would have
imagined. But the fact that we’re talking
about swastika flags right now? It just
1
makes me sad.”
—Andrew Marantz
FURNISHED DEPT.
TABLE TALK
ne Saturday night last year, Noam
O Dworman and the comedian Chris
Rock sat at the back table in the Olive
Tree, a restaurant on MacDougal Street,
in Manhattan, that Dworman owns. The
table is permanently reserved for come-
dians who perform at the Comedy Cel-
lar, a club in the Olive Tree’s basement,
which is also owned by Dworman. The
comedians’ table had recently been moved,
to make space for a kitchen extension.
Rock was not happy. Dworman recalled
their conversation: “Chris said to me,
‘This is not the table where Robin Wil-
liams sat, this is not where Ray Romano
sat, this is not where Jon Stewart sat.’ He
rattled them off, and each one was like
a punch in the gut.”
“The table” is actually two slate ta-
bles pushed together, with a banquette
on one side and wooden chairs on the
other. It was installed by Noam’s father,
Manny, who opened the Cellar in 1981.
Manny came to love the company of co-
medians like Dave Attell, Louis C.K.,
and Colin Quinn. “Once you get used
to hanging out with comedians, you re-
ally can’t hang out with anybody else,”
Noam said. In the late nineties, one of
the regulars, Nick Di Paolo (“Louie”),
lobbied Manny to give the comedians
their own space. The next night, Manny
left a sign on a back table: “This Table
Is Reserved for Comedy Cellar Co-
medians Only.”
“Any time a civilian would come over
and sit down and start talking, we would
slowly push that sign in front of their
face, and keep pushing it in front of
them until they got the fuck up and
left,” Robert Kelly (“Sex&Drugs&
Rock&Roll”) recalled recently. Regu-
lars also defended the table against co-
medians who didn’t do standup at the
Cellar, were hacks, or were dressed badly.
The atmosphere was combative. “Me
and Keith Robinson would start yell-
ing and arguing about race, or whatever,
and we would forget that we were in
a restaurant,” Di Paolo said. Another
ringleader, Rich Vos (“Women Aren’t
Funny”), said, “When we left the table,
we left shattered and beaten down.”
Manny loved it. He hosted fierce de-
bates at the table, and started a book
group. (He once handed out copies of
Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Is-
rael.”) In 2003, Manny died, of cancer.
(When Di Paolo phoned Manny on his
deathbed, he asked, “Who gets the
Lexus?”)
After Noam took over, a new gen-
eration of comedians changed the tone
at the table: less hazing and more cell
phones, but the same desire for sanc-
tuary. “It feels like a backstage area,”
Michael Che (“Saturday Night Live”)
said. “People will look over, and they’ll
instantly know, O.K., we shouldn’t
bother them.”
By April, 2016, Dworman had opened
two new performance spaces, on West
Third Street, and he extended the kitchen
at the Olive Tree so that a proper chef
could cook steak and fish rather than the
usual falafel. Dworman claims that his
only stipulation to the architect was “The
comedian table cannot be moved at all.”
Yet the table was moved. The come-
dians were shifted to a temporary table,
which ruffled feathers. Rachel Feinstein
(“Crashing”), who often stopped by the
table to see her friends Nikki Glaser and
Amy Schumer, said, “That is our home.
You just want it to feel just like it’s sup-
posed to.” Mark Normand (“Inside Amy
Schumer”) announced on his podcast
that he’d spoken to Rock about the ta-
ble’s being moved, and Rock had told
him, “This place is over.”
Dworman grew worried. The reno-
vation took about six months, and cost
about three hundred thousand dollars.
When it was finished, the table had been
permanently relocated and extra ban-
quette space had been added. “More com-
ics could sit there, but it wasn’t the table,”
Kelly said. Bill Burr (“The Heat”) ranted,
on another podcast, “What did Noam
do to the table down here? He literally
fucked with the whole aura of this place!”
Dworman texted Burr, “Yo, we moved
the table over 4.5 ft in order to double
the size of the kitchen, so the fucking
comics can have steak and pasta instead
of falafel every night. Lol.”
Dworman later calculated that the
table had been moved thirty-three inches.
But it was closer to the bar, where fans
could eavesdrop on the comedians. “I
think there’s just some magical distance,
which is what we consider personal space,
and I violated that,” he said. After his
summit with Rock, Dworman got the
message: he paid twenty thousand dol-
lars to re-renovate. The kitchen became
hard to access, but the table was resur-
rected. “Technically, it’s not the exact
spot,” Quinn said. The Cellar’s general
manager, Elizabeth Furiati, clarified by
e-mail: “The table is MAYBE a few inches
off from where it was previously.”
Rock and Dworman sat down at it
again, and Rock gave his approval. “No
harm, no foul” was Dworman’s assess-
ment. Quinn offered consolation: “Noam
took a chance. Everybody’s, like, ‘Whoa,
whoa,’ but guess what? We do the same
shit in our act, and sometimes it fails.”
—Andrew Hankinson
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 33
 the security photos of me that the
PERSONAL HISTORY staff behind front desks take before I
go into office buildings in Manhat-

DRIVE TIME
The surprising pleasures of driving in New York.
BY IAN FRAZIER
y two cars have enough miles
M between them to circle the earth
ten times at the equator. I prefer the
older one, a 2000 Honda Civic that
used to belong to my mother-in-law.
It has racked up most of its miles in
New Jersey, where I live, and in New
York City. Nothing about it stands
out—not its tan color, or its shape, or
the small yellow-and-white 2004 park-
ing decal from the College of Staten
Island on its left rear window. If you
asked people to draw a car, my Honda
is probably about what they would
come up with. It has been through a
lot. Last year, while driving absent-
mindedly, I let it get overheated. I had
not paid attention to the greenish
stain on the pavement where I parked
34 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
it. All the coolant had leaked out
through a hole in the radiator. I started
smelling strange smells, steam and
smoke came from under the hood,
and I pulled over next to a Baptist
church on Route 3 whose occupants
immediately emerged to ask if they
could help. I had “melted” the engine,
my mechanic said later; extreme heat
had wrecked it beyond repair. He put
in a used engine to replace it.
In eighteen years, the car’s exterior
has accumulated some dents. I haven’t
noticed them, growing accustomed to
them over time. The result is that the
car looks different to me from the way
it does to other people, just the way
my face looks different in my bath-
room mirror from the way it does in
tan. I mean that I do not think of my
car as a junker.
Recently, I was in a seven-car pileup
on the Garden State Parkway. No one
was badly hurt, though the multiple
collisions totalled several cars. I got hit
on the left rear bumper, which was
smashed in, along with the tail-light.
The plastic part of the bumper was
hanging down. A state policeman who
assessed the various damages came
over to my Honda with his clipboard.
He walked around the car, taking it all
in. Then he stopped at the trashed
bumper, pointed to it and the tail-light,
and asked, “Was it like this before?”
Some people say that they hate to
drive in the city and that driving in
New Jersey is even worse. It’s true that
New Jersey can be a bit of a puzzle. I
think the state has decided that pro-
viding the kind of road signs that ac-
tually explain where you should go
would do more harm than good, slow-
ing traffic flow at crucial junctures. So
the policy seems to be that the driver
will learn by trial and error. In com-
plicated places, of which there are
many, you make the mistake once or
twice or three times and then you learn.
The misconception people have about
driving in New Jersey is that we Jer-
sey drivers think we are driving. In
fact, we are swarming. Freeways are
nice, but if you have to redirect down
a puddled two-lane road between tall
reeds that’s fine, too. Anyplace where
you can drive is acceptable, basically.
And you have to be able to switch
quickly from driving-swarming to
merely sitting, when you find yourself
in a traffic jam. Then it’s best just to
chill out, count how many hot, idling
trucks within your field of vision have
“Logistics” in their company names,
and enjoy the temporarily reduced risk
of major accident.
My mother-in-law mainly drove
the Honda in Staten Island, where
she was a professor of economics at
C.S.I. She gave it to my wife and me
when she went into an assisted-living
place. When we lived in SoHo, and
then in Park Slope, owning a car
seemed to be more trouble than it was
worth, and I travelled mostly on foot
ILLUSTRATION BY YANN KEBBI
 and by subway. We did have a car—
another handed-down Honda—but
I always got into it with fear. Now
something about the Staten Island
origins of my current vehicle, and my
status as a longtime resident of New
Jersey, lets me relax and become a part
of the traffic flow. I’m a local person
in an indigenous car and need apol-
ogize to nobody.
When that moment of acceptance
first happened, I crossed through the
mental boundary that separates pe-
destrian from driver. This is a huge
transition. It cleaves the human per-
sonality, because driver and pedes-
trian are not friends. Objects in mo-
tion have disdain for objects that move
more slowly or not at all, and your
surroundings appear different de-
pending on which side of the divide
you’re on. Most descriptions of New
York City are from the point of view
of someone who is not driving. You
hear less about how the city looks to
drivers for a simple reason: almost
nobody wants more drivers. And, once
you make the crossover, New York
turns out to be a good city to drive
in. Starting with what Robert Moses
did to New York in the middle of the
last century, the city has remade it-
self to favor drivers. Those past
changes cannot be easily reversed, and
today the driver still enjoys the sub-
stantial advantages they created. In
terms of public weal, the fewer peo-
ple who know this the better.
Four years ago, a young bond trad-
er named Adam Tang, trying for a
personal record, drove the almost-
circumference of Manhattan, a dis-
tance of 26.5 miles, in twenty-four
minutes. His route included the
F.D.R. Drive and the West Side High-
way. Even stopping for red lights, he
averaged sixty-six miles per hour. Had
he been content to keep the feat to
himself, he might have escaped any
consequences, but he posted his dash-
board-camera video online. When it
came to the attention of the author-
ities, Tang was arrested for reckless
driving and reckless endangerment.
He hadn’t hit anybody, though the
video showed a number of near-misses
that could have been fatalities. After
a jury found him guilty, the judge sen-
tenced him to the maximum jail time,
36 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
plus a big fine. Tang, a Canadian cit-
izen, fled to Canada. In 2014, one
year A.T. (After Tang), Mayor Bill de
Blasio lowered the speed limit on
New York City streets to a wishful
twenty-five miles per hour.
The fact that somebody drove that
fast for twenty-four minutes in one
of the most densely populated places
on Earth demonstrates what’s possi-
ble with New York driving. I eschew
this kind of craziness, and I hope Tang
never comes back. I drive mainly when
I have to, for work or to do errands.
Most of the time, I still use public
transportation.
or me, the dreamy part of metro-
F area driving happens when the
traffic is light and every highway on my
phone’s congestion map glows green.
This occurrence is rare. Say that sun-
rise on a Saturday in June is 5:24 a.m.,
and it’s light by five. For something
I’m writing, I want to make a quick
tour of city infrastructure. I am out of
the house and driving by five-fifteen.
The sun comes up a notch or two
north of the Empire State Building
and shoots rays split by the city’s can-
yons across the New Jersey Meadow-
lands. On the roads are almost no cars
at all. I reach the George Washing-
ton Bridge in twenty minutes.
I listen to songs on the radio—it’s
not important which ones. In my
mind, I have just rescued a number
of people from a foreign catastrophe
(probably somewhere in Russia) and
am somehow driving them back to
New York while being pursued. This
type of scenario seems to be a popu-
lar fantasy worldwide. For example,
the “Fast and Furious” movies are
about driving daringly and skillfully
in order to save individual people and
also the world. The most recent in
the series, “The Fate of the Furious,”
has a scene in which good guys driv-
ing fast and a bad guy driving fast on
New York City streets vie for a brief-
case of nuclear codes that is being
transported in a limo that also car-
ries the Russian Minister of Defense.
The movie has grossed $1.2 billion,
in dozens of countries, since its re-
lease, in April. A lot more happens in
it. Thanks to that movie, tens of mil-
lions of people around the world have
imagined themselves as beautiful,
grease-streaked male and female driver-
daredevils trying to out-race an im-
probably speedy nuclear submarine
that is also attacking them by occa-
sionally smashing up though the ice
they’re driving on.
In a few minutes, I’m over the
bridge and weaving among the pil-
lars that hold up the elevated tracks
of the 4 train in the Bronx. The slanted
early-morning sun amid the pillars
colors the sides of bread trucks mov-
ing slowly on their deliveries. At five-
fifty on a Saturday morning, the bread
trucks, and not much else, are what’s
out there. I cross the Harlem River
on the Madison Avenue Bridge, one
of the city’s lesser known crossings,
and then I’m in Manhattan, on the
F.D.R. Drive heading south, cruising
by the high-rises and the hospitals of
the Upper East Side and under the
tower of the United Nations. On my
left, the East River opens out, pleated
by tugboats. The Fifty-ninth Street
Bridge (now the Ed Koch Queens-
boro Bridge) and the Roosevelt Is-
land aerial tramway pass above.
An automotive mnemonic for the
downtown bridges is “BMW ”—
Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williams-
burg, reading from south to north. I
choose the B, maybe the most glori-
ous bridge in the world, its cables ra-
diating from their junction points at
the top of its towers like beams of
light. Continuing to Atlantic Avenue,
in Brooklyn, I pass the Barclays Cen-
ter’s immense rust-colored bicycle
helmet; then I bear right at Grand
Army Plaza so I can go by 152 Pros-
pect Park West, where my wife and I
lived when our children were little.
Another right, and six blocks down-
hill to Third Avenue; left on Third,
and up the ramp to the Brooklyn-
Queens Expressway, an elevated road.
Again, there are few cars and the road
is open.
Before the end of Sunset Park, the
B.Q.E. divides from the Belt Park-
way. I curl around the far end of
Brooklyn on the Belt, with the lower
bay on my right, past the joggers on
the pathway through Owl’s Head Park
and the fishermen leaning on the
metal railing. My goal this morning
isn’t Coney Island or any parks or
beaches. Instead, I drive through the
abundant construction up ahead, cross
a small drawbridge, keep going, and
eventually take the exit for J.F.K. Air-
port. In normal daytime traffic, J.F.K.
lies far from my house, a two-hundred-
dollar-plus and two-hour-plus cab ride
away; it’s satisfying to be among its
terminals and huge jets just ninety min-
utes after leaving my door.
I cruise J.F.K., then return to the
Belt Parkway and go back toward
Brooklyn. After eighteen miles, I
exit onto the ramp for the Verrazano-
Narrows Bridge, whose towers are in
a haze of mist at this hour. Under-
neath, a piled-high container ship is
departing the harbor. To her starboard
are two man-made islands, Hoffman
and Swinburne, with a few small sport-
fishing boats near them. I wonder if
my friend Frank is fishing there this
morning. At the far side of the bridge,
I join the Staten Island Expressway;
in twelve minutes, I’m across the is-
land and on the brand-new Goethals
Bridge, leading to New Jersey. Once
over the Goethals, I exit left, take the
New Jersey Turnpike, and merge onto
its northbound lanes.
Here is the best part of the route,
because when the landing patterns
at Newark Airport are configured in
a certain way the planes coming in
fly parallel to the turnpike and di-
rectly above it. If everything is in
synch, I can be motoring up the high-
way among lanes of cars and trucks
(the turnpike is busy at any hour)
with the freight-train tracks on the
right and all the earthbound vectors
lining up as an incoming jet roars
overhead, outdistances everybody,
diverges to the left, and sets down
on a shimmery runway. The music
on the radio can be helpful here; I’ve
found that a big, anthemic prog-rock
song makes a good accompaniment.
Every tristate-area driver should ex-
perience this cool convergence once
in a while.
From the turnpike, it’s I-78 west,
Garden State Parkway north to Exit
151, then west on Watchung Avenue,
south on Grove Street, and I’m home—
five boroughs, four major bridges, two
airports, two states, and back in time
for breakfast.
lot of the driving in and around
A New York takes you under things,
through various limbos where dim-
ness surrounds you amid artificial il-
lumination and red tail-lights reflected
off shiny surfaces. When you’re en-
closed like that, the sounds of other
engines get louder, the bass notes of
the music in the cars next to you beat
like hearts, and your own car’s un-
treated brake problems echo nerve-
rackingly off the nearest wall. The
highway subterrains have a Stygian
quality—as in the so-called (by me)
Forest of Columns that brings traffic
onto and off the G.W.B. on the Man-
hattan side. It’s always twilight in the
Forest of Columns. I have been in
backups there at all hours as traffic
sorts itself out with reverberant, souls-
of-the-damned honking. You get to
know these inhuman places inch by
inch if you drive them a lot. In a tube
of the Lincoln Tunnel, as I crawl along,
I always keep my eye out for the road
sign, stored in a gloomy niche, that
says “Police Training in Progress.” It’s
been there for years but I’ve never seen
it used. And once in a great while
there’s the fun-house thrill of seeing
a Port Authority person go whizzing
by in a “catwalk car”—the vehicle
slightly bigger than a skateboard that
runs on a track along the tunnel’s wall.
Passing through the tunnels I think
of the fish and the keels of ships just
a few dozen feet above. While work-
men were blasting out the Holland
Tunnel, in 1924, the protective layer of
clay deposited over the blast area to
keep the explosions from blowing a
hole in the river bottom and causing
disaster to the tunnel-diggers rose high
enough that it impeded ships. A glass-
topped tunnel would be a great idea,
with lights aimed so that you could
look upward, as in one of those aquar-
iums where you walk under the tanks.
But that would probably only heighten
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 37
 my fear that I’m going to be in a tun-
nel someday when a wall of water comes
screaming down it. During Hurricane
Sandy, both tubes of the Brooklyn Bat-
tery Tunnel (now the Hugh L. Carey
Tunnel) did take on water, but no ve-
hicles were in them. Five years later,
neither tube is fully repaired.
The longest trip I’ve ever made re-
turning to New Jersey from my sister
Maggie’s apartment in Brooklyn—al-
most three hours to cover the twenty-
three miles—included about an hour
stopped in the middle tube of the Lin-
coln Tunnel. My wife and I were sit-
ting there listening to the 1010 WINS
traffic reports every ten minutes. After
forty minutes or so, the traffic guy said
that because of construction the mid-
dle tube of the Lincoln Tunnel had
been closed for the night. Immediately,
as one, all the drivers in the tunnel
leaned on their horns. Then as far as
we could see in either direction peo-
ple jumped out of their cars and began
shouting and waving their arms and
hollering into their cell phones. They
wandered up and down talking to one
another, opened their car doors, yelled
some more, re-honked their horns. The
next WINS report made a correction:
the middle tube had not been closed
for the night, merely blocked by an ac-
cident in Jersey. We got back in our
vehicles, still fuming but mollified.
In New Jersey, we need more tun-
nels; more bridges, too, though I don’t
know where we’d put the bridges, with
the ones we have already occupying the
best spots for overwater crossings. The
whole region needs new infrastructure,
with the Long Island Railroad having
more problems and delays each year,
and the L train scheduled to be out of
commission for fifteen months, and
the subways in general no longer keep-
ing up at rush hour.
Today’s mess has a particular his-
tory in our state. All political buffs
should make a point of checking out
the toll-booth entry lanes to the G.W.B.
in Fort Lee—the lanes that two of
Governor Chris Christie’s allies re-
cently received jail terms for closing,
back in 2015. These are the most con-
sequential toll-booth lanes in the world.
I am always looking for new places in
need of historic markers, and the Fort
Lee lanes take the top spots in that
38 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
category. When the Christie allies shut
down the lanes in order to create mis-
ery among drivers—misery that, they
hoped, would be turned to anger at
the mayor of Fort Lee, a Christie non-
supporter—the deed injected deliber-
ate malice into the everyday headaches
of getting back and forth.
And, once the idea that the traffic
jams might be trying to drive us crazy
on purpose entered the public con-
sciousness, the system was in trouble.
A free-for-all mentality took over and
any sense of common interest vanished.
Billboards that advertise huge S.U.V.s
motoring like tanks over potholed roads
implied that each of us should be fight-
ing the transit demon individually—
Hey, get your own S.U.V.! Get your
own highway! It didn’t help that Chris-
tie had vetoed the building of a new
railroad tunnel under the Hudson lead-
ing to Manhattan. Today, if you are
quiet on a delayed New Jersey Transit
train waiting to get into the existing
tunnel, and you listen to the ambient
conversation noise among the passen-
gers, you will hear “Christie!” muttered
over and over.
e have become a frantic coun-
W try. On the day I got into the
pileup, I could feel a static of rage and
desperation in the air. As I stopped for
gas that morning, I thought that the
last thing I needed was to get into an
accident. My wife had been sick for
five months and was slowly recovering.
Conservatively, almost wincingly, I
pulled onto the Garden State Parkway,
on my way to see how construction was
progressing on the Bayonne Bridge, a
project I’d been keeping track of. Traffic
was bumper to bumper and moving at
sixty-five or seventy. Drivers tailgated
one another and changed lanes like
mad. I maintained the usual three car
lengths between my front bumper and
the car ahead, but that space kept filling
up with lane-changers. At top speed,
traffic approached the interchange
where I-78 goes off to the east and to
the west. I-78 east leads to Bayonne.
The exit lanes are narrow here, with
a concrete retaining wall and a steep
slope close on the right, and no room
to change your mind if you get in the
westbound exit by mistake. A driver
perhaps four cars ahead of me suddenly
decided to stop. I hit the brakes. A low-
slung red car a few feet off my rear
bumper swerved to the right and some-
how made it through the narrow space
between the right lane and the wall,
and sped away. A car behind the red
car hit me and spun across the three
lanes. Several cars hit that car, on both
sides, while other cars were colliding
farther back, the instantaneous con-
cussive noises made both softer and
harder by the popping of the air bags
and the shattering of the windows. Bro-
ken glass flew by me as if shot from a
fire hose. Standing on the brakes, I
skidded to a stop without hitting the
car in front of me, which caused it not
to hit the car in front of it. In a half
second, smashed cars came to rest all
over the highway like rolled dice.
After that, I went Elsewhere for a
while. I guess I just sat there. Looking
around inside, I found nothing broken,
on me or in the car’s interior. Even the
windows had remained intact, though
glass from someone else’s windows
strewed my hood and trunk. The car
in front of me had no mark on it. The
driver, a woman, got out and lit a cig-
arette. I could not see people in the
smashed-up cars, because the popped
air bags blocked where the windows
used to be.
My car, still running, had been
knocked into neutral. I turned it off. In
the vicinity, I heard no sirens or honk-
ing, just a strange quiet. A few cars up
ahead, a woman had got out and lain
down on the shoulder, and someone
was leaning over her. I took out my
phone and almost called my wife, then
decided not to. A couple of months be-
fore, thieves had boosted my wallet on
a trolleybus in Russia and I had called
her right afterward to tell her, even
though it was four-thirty in the morn-
ing in New Jersey. With a little restraint,
the shock of that call could have been
avoided. As I was thinking about this,
I noticed that the highway had filled
with police cars, ambulances, and fire
trucks. I got out and saw that aside
from the smashed bumper my car was
basically O.K., with no leaking fluids
or compromised tires. When I turned
the key, it started. A helicopter hov-
ered overhead. First responders kept
coming up and asking if I was hurt.
Thankfully, I wasn’t.
Neither was the woman in the car
in front of me. She stood there kind of
hugging herself and shaking. “I’m on
my third cigarette already,” she said.
She worked as a car-service dispatcher
at Newark Airport and was on her way
to that job. She had very long finger-
nails and wore a low-cut top. She told
me she was glad I was all right and I
told her I was glad she was all right.
The driver of the car behind me, a
grandmother with several grandchil-
dren headed to the Jersey Shore for the
weekend, had applied her brakes so
hard that they locked, and now they
wouldn’t unlock. Nobody had hit her
and she hadn’t hit anybody. She put
her grandchildren up on the concrete
wall, where they sat and watched. Fig-
uring out who had hit whom gave the
police a challenge. They walked all over
the fifty-yard-long crash site trying to
make sense of it, holding their clip-
boards horizontally and sketching on
them. Meanwhile, E.M.S. workers put
injured people in neck and back braces
and transferred them from the wrecks
onto gurneys and into ambulances. Sev-
eral of the injured were young women
who seemed stunned and in pain as
they were wheeled by.
A man with a long beard was walk-
ing the crash site and sweeping up
the glass and plastic and metal frag-
ments with a push broom and then
consolidating the smaller piles into
bigger piles. A state policeman took
my driver’s license and registration.
People were photographing the dam-
age with their phones. On the other
side of the chain-link fence that sep-
arated the highway from a neighbor-
hood street, a crowd of people gath-
ered. A woman there offered a very
detailed description of what had hap-
pened that didn’t coincide with what
I’d seen, but I wasn’t sure what I’d
seen. A man in a white T-shirt asked
me, through the chain links, “Are you
all right?” I said I was. He said, “Man,
I’m glad you’re all right.”
The ambulances took five or six peo-
ple in all. Some had to wait until the
Irvington Fire Department pried the
doors of their cars open. Then the rest
of us stood around and waited. As the
stunned feeling wore off, we were talking
to one another and to the cops and the
firemen. It was unusual to have the
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 39
 width of the Garden State’s three lanes
to stroll around in. At the edge of our
clearing, beyond the flashing police
lights, the immense traffic jam we’d
caused stretched who knew how far.
The frantic feeling had subsided and
we were just neighbors commiserating
and passing the time. I stood with a
few other people listening to a fireman
who was retiring in one week; he said
that he hoped this would be his last ac-
cident. Continuing not to call my wife
increased my private sense of rightness,
and not being injured felt wonderful.
The police told us that we had to
stay until the hospital called with infor-
mation about the people the ambulances
had taken. If any of them died or had
suffered major injury, the accident be-
came a possible crime scene, and a more
detailed investigation would be required.
The state cop brought back my driver’s
license and registration and looked again
at my car’s front. After about an hour,
I saw a cop talk on his cell phone and
then walk over to the head fireman,
and the fireman nodded and smiled.
Then the cop walked among the wait-
ing drivers saying that the hospital had
reported nobody seriously hurt. We all
cheered the news, giving one another
the thumbs-up. Those of us who didn’t
need tow trucks made ready to leave.
The cop I’d talked to earlier checked
out my car a last time and said, “Looks
O.K. to me. You can go.” Evidently, the
collision had loosened the muffler be-
cause the car made a racket as I drove
off. It was great to be moving again.
F ifty years ago, when I was in high school
in Ohio, I ran sprints on the track team.
Back then, construction crews were still
putting in the interstate highways and
had just completed a section of I-480
near my house. The smooth white pave-
ment stretched through a bulldozed mud
corridor with earthmoving equipment
parked alongside—empty new road all
the way to the horizon. I thought that
would be a good place to train. I stepped
onto pavement so fresh it still didn’t have
lines painted on it and began to run
sprints of fifty and a hundred yards. My
soul collapsed at my feet. The massive-
ness of the road and the puniness of my
efforts almost made me give up running
permanently. The Olympic hundred-
metre champion Bob Hayes himself
40 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
would have thought he was nothing if
he ran on that highway.
Speed affects you only if you have
something to compare it to. The whole
planet is moving around the sun at sev-
enty thousand miles an hour, but, with
our lack of perspective, the thrill is wasted
on us. Some time after the downer of
running on the new highway, I had the
experience of doing sprints in one of
the halls of the school athletic building
on a day that was too rainy for us to
practice outside. The walls, just inches
away on either side, gave the illusion
that we were going blazingly fast. The
office of the athletic director, Mr. Hel-
wig, observed the hall through a large
interior window, and we thundered by
the window in a blink while Mr. Hel-
wig sat at his desk and didn’t look up. I
never felt so fast or so strong in my life.
The truest basis of comparison, of
course, is with other runners. It’s the
purest exhilaration to be running fast
with fast people. Once, in a big meet, I
did the hundred-yard dash in ten and
two-tenths seconds, finishing second to
Gene Thomas, who did a ten-flat. Now-
adays, I look at the numbers on the
“Walk” sign blinking down as I approach
a New York City crosswalk and wonder
if ten seconds will be enough. That is
how life goes. I still remember running
in a pack with Gene and a bunch of
other guys. We won our prep-league in-
terstate championship in 1968. Our shoes’
long, narrow, sharp spikes went into the
track crisply, cinders flew out with each
step; and once, during a quarter-mile
race, a little boy playing in the pole-vault
pit rolled into the first lane right in front
of us. Gene jumped over the boy effort-
lessly, and the rest of us avoided him
somehow. The boy got up untouched as
we sped on. His name was Fred Harris.
He must be about sixty years old now.
Sometimes when I’m out on a walk
in my neighborhood in the early morn-
ing, I go to a nearby bridge over the Gar-
den State Parkway and I look at the cars
that fill it bank to bank. Most are prob-
ably headed for the bridges and tunnels;
since the New Jersey Transit train ser-
vice has deteriorated (“Christie!”), I could
swear that the number of vehicles has
doubled. Six-fifteen on a Monday morn-
ing and the traffic is roaring. We may be
a divided country, but we’re all out there
on the same road. 
 actually buy anything at the Publix—
SHOUTS & MURMURS Ryan Kass: Nope. Didn’t even get out of
the car. He just wanted us to look at it.
Mike Cooper (Pro Trip Talk): Let’s turn
to one of the strongest moments of
the vacation: when you perfectly timed
out Jill’s mom bringing the kids to
the library and her dad’s CVS run to
have sex.
Jill Kass: That was just an instance of
clearheaded thinking, where you know
what needs to get done and you exe-
cute. It also helped that we’d run a ver-
sion of that play at home, when Max
went to speech therapy and Chloe
started a new episode of “Peppa Pig.”
Stefanie Delgado (Vacation Machine): The
Weinbaums took an early lead on the
first night, when they offered to pay for
Chloe’s private school. Looking back,
is that the moment things started to
get away from you?
Ryan Kass: Yeah, that definitely gave
them the upper hand. And, I have to

FAMILY-VACATION
admit, it’s a beautiful play. We were so
grateful that we didn’t even argue when,

BREAKDOWN
BY JEN SPYRA
Andrea Lewis (Vacation Nation): Jill, Ryan, Jill Kass: No doubt about it, the P. F.
thank you for taking the time for this Chang’s misstep set us back. We tried
press conference. You guys just came to appease the kids, and we ended up
off an eight-day visit with Jill’s parents playing their game instead of ours,
in Florida. You went into this vacation which is more Wendy’s drive-through.
with high hopes. It seemed like you’d The banana spring rolls ate valuable
put the Disney cruise behind you and minutes off the clock, and that left
had addressed some holes in your game, us tired going into the series with
in terms of prioritizing Chloe’s nap my parents.
time and making Jill’s mom feel appre- Scott Kendall (Tripologist): Speaking of
ciated. But you came up short. Can you Jill’s parents, they seemed to be tougher
talk a little bit about what went wrong, competition than usual—especially her
and about your plan going forward? dad. What did Stu Weinbaum do differ-
Ryan Kass: I mean, honestly, this one’s ently, and was it hard to adjust to his
gonna hurt for a while. We’ll rest level of play?
up, and then Jill and I will huddle, Ryan Kass: Look, S-Dub’s got a lot of
we’ll entertain the fantasy of staying ways he can hurt you. For instance, we
in a hotel next time, and we’ll take it know he’ll burst into our room and yell
from there. “Waffle time!” at 7 A.M. But he brought
Andrea Lewis: Looking at some num- new heat on this trip, and it was hard
bers here, you finished Friday with four to adjust. At the end of the day, you
door-slams, one meltdown at a Tommy can go over strategy again and again,
Hilfiger outlet, and one screaming match but until you’re actually in the car with
at a P. F. Chang’s. Obviously not the Stu and he’s insisting on driving sev-
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
the next morning, they suggested vis-
iting the Chihuly exhibit we’d already
been to three fucking times.
Jill Kass: From there on out, we were
playing catch-up.
Andre Gaines (Trip Daddy): It seemed
like the parents broke it open on night
four, with the surprise visit from the
Lassers. Bob and Rhonda stayed for
seventy-four minutes, thirty-eight of
which were spent discussing water dam-
age to their condo. Ryan, you asked a
follow-up question around minute nine-
teen that some folks are saying cost you
the conversation.
Ryan Kass: That’s on me. Jill had been
doing a great job of making little sym-
pathetic noises that were polite but
showed no real interest. In that situa-
tion, it’s all about shutting down the
attack with one-word responses. We
know surprise friend visits are a part of
the Weinbaums’ game.
Lois Halberstatt (Real Clear Vacay): Jill,
what’s your message to your teammate
after this kind of loss?
Jill Kass: Just get focussed on Thanks-
giving. We’re better than this. And we’re
going to have to really buckle down

game plan you had drawn up. How did
the drive down to Fort Lauderdale affect
your mind-set going into the matchup
against Mr. and Mrs. Weinbaum?
enteen miles out of the way to show
you the brand-new Publix, you don’t
know how you’ll react.
Scott Kendall: Just to clarify, you didn’t
and get to work if we want to be ready
for Christmas with Ryan’s parents. Joyce
and Alan are the defending champs for
a reason. 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 41

MODERN TIMES
THE CONTENT OF NO CONTENT
Is Big Tech too powerful?
BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
n the night of November 7, 1876,
O Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy,
took to her bed with a headache. The
returns from the Presidential election
were trickling in, and the Hayeses,
who had been spending the evening in
their parlor, in Columbus, Ohio, were
dismayed. Hayes himself remained up
until midnight; then he, too,
retired, convinced that his
Democratic opponent, Sam-
uel J. Tilden, would become
the next President.
Hayes had indeed lost the
popular vote, by more than
two hundred and fifty thou-
sand ballots. And he might
have lost the Electoral Col-
lege as well had it not been
for the machinations of jour-
nalists working in the shady
corners of what’s been called
“the Victorian Internet.”
Chief among the plotters
was an Ohioan named Wil-
liam Henry Smith. Smith ran
the western arm of the Asso-
ciated Press, and in this way
controlled the bulk of the copy
that ran in many small-town
newspapers. The Western A.P.
operated in tight affiliation—
some would say collusion—
with Western Union, which
exercised a near-monopoly
over the nation’s telegraph
lines. Early in the campaign,
Smith decided that he would
employ any means necessary to assure a
victory for Hayes, who, at the time, was
serving a third term as Ohio’s governor.
In the run-up to the Republican National
Convention, Smith orchestrated the re-
lease of damaging information about the
Governor’s rivals. Then he had the West-
ern A.P. blare Hayes’s campaign state-
ments and mute Tilden’s. At one point,
an unflattering piece about Hayes ap-
peared in the Chicago Times, a Demo-
42 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
cratic paper. (The piece claimed that
Hayes, who had been a general in the
Union Army, had accepted money from
a soldier to give to the man’s family, but
had failed to pass it on when the soldier
died.) The A.P. flooded the wires with
articles discrediting the story.
Once the votes had been counted,
attention shifted to South Carolina, Flor-
ida, and Louisiana—states where the re-
sults were disputed. Both parties dispatched
emissaries to the three states to try to in-
fluence the Electoral College outcome.
Telegrams sent by Tilden’s representatives
were passed on to Smith, courtesy of West-
ern Union. Smith, in turn, shared the con-
tents of these dispatches with the Hayes
forces. This proto-hack of the Democrats’
private communications gave the Re-
publicans an obvious edge. Meanwhile,
the A.P. sought and distributed legal
opinions supporting Hayes. (Outraged
Tilden supporters took to calling it the
“Hayesociated Press.”) As Democrats
watched what they considered to be the
theft of the election, they fell into a funk.
“They are full of passion and want
to do something desperate but hardly
know how to,” one observer noted. Two
days before Hayes was inaugurated, on
March 5, 1877, the New York Sun ap-
peared with a black border on the front
page. “These are days of humiliation,
shame and mourning for every patriotic
American,” the paper’s editor wrote.
History, Mark Twain is supposed to
have said, doesn’t repeat itself, but it does
rhyme. Once again, the Pres-
ident of the United States is
a Republican who lost the
popular vote. Once again, he
was abetted by shadowy agents
who manipulated the news.
And once again Democrats
are in a finger-pointing funk.
Journalists, congressional
committees, and a special
counsel are probing the de-
tails of what happened last
fall. But two new books con-
tend that the large lines of
the problem are already clear.
As in the eighteen-seventies,
we are in the midst of a tech-
nological revolution that has
altered the flow of informa-
tion. Now, as then, just a few
companies have taken con-
trol, and this concentration
of power—which Americans
have acquiesced to without
ever really intending to, sim-
ply by clicking away—is sub-
verting our democracy.
hirty years ago, almost no
T one used the Internet for
anything. Today, just about everybody
uses it for everything. Even as the Web
has grown, however, it has narrowed. Goo-
gle now controls nearly ninety per cent
of search advertising, Facebook almost
eighty per cent of mobile social traffic,
and Amazon about seventy- five per
cent of e-book sales. Such dominance,
Jonathan Taplin argues, in “Move Fast
and Break Things: How Facebook, Goo-
gle, and Amazon Cornered Culture and
ILLUSTRATION BY NISHANT CHOKSI
Undermined Democracy” (Little, Brown),
is essentially monopolistic. In his ac-
count, the new monopolies are even
more powerful than the old ones, which
tended to be limited to a single prod-
uct or service. Carnegie, Taplin suggests,
would have been envious of the reach
of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.
Taplin, who until recently directed
the Annenberg Innovation Lab, at
the University of Southern California,
started out as a tour manager. He worked
with Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, and the
Band, and also with George Harrison,
on the Concert for Bangladesh. In “Move
Fast and Break Things,” Taplin draws
extensively on this experience to illus-
trate the damage, both deliberate and
collateral, that Big Tech is wreaking.
Consider the case of Levon Helm. He
was the drummer for the Band, and,
though he never got rich off his music,
well into middle age he was supported by
royalties. In 1999, he was diagnosed with
throat cancer. That same year, Napster
came along, followed by YouTube, in 2005.
Helm’s royalty income, which had run to
about a hundred thousand dollars a year,
according to Taplin, dropped “to almost
nothing.” When Helm died, in 2012, mil-
lions of people were still listening to the
Band’s music, but hardly any of them were
paying for it. (In the years between the
founding of Napster and Helm’s death,
total consumer spending on recorded
music in the United States dropped by
roughly seventy per cent.) Friends had to
stage a benefit for Helm’s widow so that
she could hold on to their house.
Google entered and more or less im-
mediately took over the music business
when it acquired YouTube, in 2006, for
$1.65 billion in stock. As Taplin notes,
just about “every single tune in the world
is available on YouTube as a simple audio
file (most of them posted by users).”
Many of these files are illegal, but to
Google this is inconsequential. Under
the Digital Media Copyright Act, signed
into law by President Bill Clinton shortly
after Google went live, Internet service
providers aren’t liable for copyright in-
fringement as long as they “expeditiously”
take down or block access to the mate-
rial once they’re notified of a problem.
Musicians are constantly filing “take-
down” notices—in just the first twelve
weeks of last year, Google received such
notices for more than two hundred mil-
lion links—but, often, after one link is
taken down, the song goes right back
up at another one. In the fall of 2011,
legislation aimed at curbing online copy-
right infringement, the Stop Online
Piracy Act, was introduced. It had bi-
partisan support in Congress, and back-
ing from such disparate groups as the
National District Attorneys Association,
the National League of Cities, the As-
sociation of Talent Agencies, and the
International Brotherhood of Team-
sters. In January, 2012, the bill seemed
headed toward passage, when Google
decided to flex its market-concentrated
muscles. In place of its usual colorful
logo, the company posted on its search
page a black rectangle along with the
message “Tell Congress: Please don’t
censor the web!” The resulting traffic
overwhelmed congressional Web sites,
and support for the bill evaporated. (Sen-
ator Marco Rubio, of Florida, who had
been one of the bill’s co-sponsors, de-
nounced it on Facebook.)
Google itself doesn’t pirate music; it
doesn’t have to. It’s selling the traffic—
and, just as significant, the data about the
traffic. Like the Koch brothers, Taplin
observes, Google is “in the extraction in-
dustry.” Its business model is “to extract
as much personal data from as many peo-
ple in the world at the lowest possible
price and to resell that data to as many
companies as possible at the highest pos-
sible price.” And so Google profits from
just about everything: cat videos, behead-
ings, alt-right rants, the Band perform-
ing “The Weight” at Woodstock, in 1969.
“ I wasn’t always so skeptical,” Franklin
Foer announces at the start of “World
Without Mind: The Existential Threat
of Big Tech” (Penguin Press). Franklin,
the eldest of the three famous Foer broth-
ers, is a journalist, and he began his ca-
reer, in the mid-nineties, working for Slate,
which had then just been founded by Mi-
crosoft. The experience, Foer writes, was
“exhilarating.” Later, he became the editor
of The New Republic. The magazine was
on the brink of ruin when, in 2012, it was
purchased by Chris Hughes, a co-founder
of Facebook, whose personal fortune
was estimated at half a billion dollars.
Foer saw Hughes as a “savior,” who
could provide, in addition to cash, “an
insider’s knowledge of social media” and
“a millennial imprimatur.” The two men
set out to revitalize the magazine, hir-
ing high-priced talent and redesign-
ing the Web site. Foer recounts that he
became so consumed with monitoring
traffic to the magazine’s site, using a
tool called Chartbeat, that he checked
it even while standing at the urinal.
The era of good feeling didn’t last. In
the fall of 2014, Foer heard that Hughes
had hired someone to replace him, and
that this shadow editor was “lunching
around New York offering jobs at The
New Republic.” Before Hughes had a
chance to fire him, Foer quit, and most of
the magazine’s editorial staff left with him.
“World Without Mind” is a reflection on
Foer’s experiences and on the larger forces
reshaping American arts and letters, or
what’s nowadays often called “content.”
“I hope this book doesn’t come across
as fueled by anger, but I don’t want to
deny my anger either,” he writes. “The
tech companies are destroying some-
thing precious. . . . They have eroded
the integrity of institutions—media,
publishing—that supply the intellec-
tual material that provokes thought and
guides democracy. Their most precious
asset is our most precious asset, our at-
tention, and they have abused it.”
Much of Foer’s anger, like Taplin’s, is
directed at piracy. “Once an underground,
amateur pastime,” he writes, “the bootleg-
ging of intellectual property” has become
“an accepted business practice.” He points
to the Huffington Post, since shortened
to HuffPost, which rose to prominence
largely by aggregating—or, if you prefer,
pilfering—content from publications like
the Times and the Washington Post. Then
there’s Google Books. Google set out to
scan every book in creation and make the
volumes available online, without both-
ering to consult the copyright holders.
(The project has been hobbled by law-
suits.) Newspapers and magazines (in-
cluding this one) have tried to disrupt the
disrupters by placing articles behind pay-
walls, but, Foer contends, in the contest
against Big Tech publishers can’t win; the
lineup is too lopsided. “When newspa-
pers and magazines require subscriptions
to access their pieces, Google and Face-
book tend to bury them,” he writes. “Ar-
ticles protected by stringent paywalls
almost never have the popularity that
algorithms reward with prominence.”
Foer acknowledges that prominence
and popularity have always mattered in
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 43
publishing. In every generation, the pri-
mary business of journalism has been
to stay in business. In the nineteen-
eighties, Dick Stolley, the founding
editor of People, developed what might
be thought of as an algorithm for the
pre-digital age. It was a formula for
picking cover images, and it ran as fol-
lows: Young is better than old. Pretty
is better than ugly. Rich is better than
poor. Movies are better than music.
Music is better than television. Televi-
sion is better than sports. And anything
is better than politics.
But Stolley’s Law is to Chartbeat what
a Boy Scout’s compass is to G.P.S. It is
now possible to determine not just which
covers sell magazines but which articles
are getting the most traction, who’s e-mail-
ing and tweeting them, and how long in-
dividual readers are sticking with them
before clicking away. This sort of detailed
information, combined with the pressure
to generate traffic, has resulted in what
Foer sees as a golden age of banality. He
cites the “memorable yet utterly forgetta-
ble example” of Cecil the lion. In 2015,
Cecil was shot with an arrow outside
Hwange National Park, in Zimbabwe, by
a dentist from Minnesota. For whatever
reason, the killing went viral and, accord-
ing to Foer, “every news organization” (in-
cluding, once again, this one) rushed to
get in on the story, “so it could scrape some
traffic from it.” He lists with evident scorn
the titles of posts from Vox—“Eating
Chicken Is Morally Worse Than Killing
Cecil the Lion”—and The Atlantic’s Web
site: “From Cecil the Lion to Climate
Change: A Perfect Storm of Outrage.”
“He’s at that awkward age—too old to be cute, but not dead yet.”
(In July, Cecil’s son, Xanda, was shot,
prompting another digital outpouring.)
Donald Trump, Foer argues, rep-
resents “the culmination” of this trend.
In the lead-up to the campaign, Trump’s
politics, such as they were, consisted of
empty and outrageous claims. Although
none deserved to be taken seriously,
many had that coveted viral something.
Trump’s utterances as a candidate were
equally appalling, but on the Internet
apparently nobody knows you’re a dem-
agogue. “Trump began as Cecil the Lion,
and then ended up president of the
United States,” Foer writes.
oth Taplin and Foer begin their books
B with a discussion of the early days of
personal computers, when the Web was
still a Pynchonesque fantasy and lots of
smart people believed that connecting the
world’s PCs would lead to a more peace-
ful, just, and groovy society. Both cite
Stewart Brand, who, after hanging out
with Ken Kesey, dropping a lot of acid,
and editing “The Whole Earth Catalog,”
went on to create one of the first virtual
networks, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic
Link, otherwise known as WELL.
In an influential piece that appeared
in Rolling Stone in 1972, Brand proph-
esied that, when computers became
widely available, everyone would be-
come a “computer bum” and “more em-
powered as individuals and co-opera-
tors.” This, he further predicted, could
enhance “the richness and rigor of spon-
taneous creation and human interac-
tion.” No longer would it be the editors
at the Times and the Washington Post
and the producers at CBS News who
decided what the public did (or didn’t)
learn. No longer would the suits at the
entertainment companies determine
what the public did (or didn’t) hear.
“The Internet was supposed to be a boon
for artists,” Taplin observes. “It was sup-
posed to eliminate the ‘gatekeepers’—the big
studios and record companies that decide
which movies and music get widespread
distribution.”Silicon Valley, Foer writes, was
supposed to be a liberating force—“the dis-
ruptive agent that shatters the grip of the
sclerotic, self-perpetuating mediocrity that
constitutes the American elite.”
The Internet revolution has, indeed,
sent heads rolling, as legions of bookstore
owners, music critics, and cirrhotic edi-
tors can attest. But Brand’s dream, Tap-
lin and Foer argue, has not been realized.
Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple—
Europeans refer to the group simply as
GAFA—didn’t eliminate the gatekeep-
ers; they took their place. Instead of be-
coming more egalitarian, the country
has become less so: the gap between
America’s rich and poor grows ever wider.
Meanwhile, politically, the nation has
lurched to the right. In Foer’s telling, it
would be a lot easier to fix an election
these days than it was in 1876, and a lot
harder for anyone to know about it. All
the Big Tech firms would have to do is
tinker with some algorithms. They have
become, Foer writes, “the most impos-
ing gatekeepers in human history.”
This is a simple, satisfying narrative,
and it allows Taplin and Foer to focus
their ire on GAFA gazillionaires, like Zuck-
erberg and Larry Page. But, as an account
of the “unpresidented” world in which we
live, it seems to miss the point. Say what
you will about Silicon Valley, most of its
major players backed Hillary Clinton. This
is confirmed by campaign-finance filings
and, as it happens, by the Russian hack of
Democratic National Committee e-mails.
“I hope you are well—thinking of all of
you often and following every move!”
Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl
Sandberg, wrote to Clinton’s campaign
chairman, John Podesta, at one point.
It is troubling that Facebook, Goo-
gle, and Amazon have managed to
grab for themselves such a large share
of online revenue while relying on
content created by others. Quite pos-
sibly, it is also anti-competitive. Still,
it seems a stretch to blame GAFA for
the popularity of listicles or fake news.
Last fall, some Times reporters went
looking for the source of a stream of largely
fabricated pro-Trump stories that had run
on a Web site called Departed. They traced
them to a twenty-two-year-old computer-
science student in Tbilisi named Beqa
Latsabidze. He told the Times that he had
begun the election season by pumping out
flattering stories about Hillary Clinton,
but the site hadn’t generated much inter-
est. When he switched to pro-Trump non-
sense, traffic had soared, and so had the
site’s revenues. “For me, this is all about
income,” Latsabidze said. Perhaps the real
problem is not that Brand’s prophecy failed
but that it came true. A “computer bum”
sitting in Tbilisi is now so “empowered”
as an individual that he can help turn an
election halfway around the world.
Either out of conviction or simply out
of habit, the gatekeepers of yore set a cer-
tain tone.They waved through news about
state budget deficits and arms-control
talks, while impeding the flow of loony
conspiracy theories. Now Chartbeat al-
lows everyone to see just how many (or,
more to the point, how few) readers there
really are for that report on the drought
in South Sudan or that article on mo-
nopoly power and the Internet. And so
it follows that there will be fewer such
reports and fewer such articles. The Web
is designed to give people what they want,
which, for better or worse, is also the
function of democracy.
cluding those for search algorithms, cell-
phone operating systems, self-driving
cars, smart thermostats, advertising ex-
changes, and virtual-reality platforms.
“It would seem that such a licensing
program would be totally in line with
Google’s stated ‘Don’t be evil’ corporate
philosophy,” Taplin writes. At the same
time, he urges musicians and filmmak-
ers to take matters into their own hands
by establishing their own distribution
networks, along the lines of Magnum
Photos, formed by Robert Capa, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, and others in 1947.
“What if artists ran a video and audio
streaming site as a nonprofit coopera-
tive (perhaps employing the technol-
ogy in some of those free Google pat-
ents)?” he asks at one point. “I have no
illusion that the existing business struc-
tures of cultural marketing will go away,”
he observes at another. “But my hope
is that we can build a parallel structure
that will benefit all creators.”
Foer prefers the model of artisanal
cheesemakers. ( “World Without Mind”
apparently went to press before Amazon
announced its intention to buy Whole
Foods.) “The culture industries need to
present themselves as the organic alterna-
tive, a symbol of status and aspiration,” he
writes. “Subscriptions are the route away
from the aisles of clickbait.” Just after the
election, he notes, the Times added more
than a hundred thousand new subscrib-
ers by marketing itself as a fake-news an-
tidote. And, as an act of personal resis-
tance, he suggests picking up a book. “If
the tech companies hope to absorb the
totality of human existence,” he writes,
“then reading on paper is one of the few
slivers of life that they can’t fully integrate.”
These remedies are all backward-
looking. They take as a point of refer-
ence a world that has vanished, or is
about to. (If Amazon has its way, even
artisanal cheese will soon be delivered
by drone.) Depending on how you look
at things, this is either a strange place
for meditations about the future to end
up or a predictable one. People who
worry about the fate of democracy still
write (and read) books. Those who are
determining it prefer to tweet. 

ost-Cecil, post-fact, and mid-Trump,

P is there anything to be done? Taplin
proposes a few fixes. To start, he wants
the federal government to treat compa-
nies like Google and Facebook as mo-
nopolies and regulate them accordingly.
(Relying on similar thinking, regulators
in the European Union recently slapped
Google with a $2.7-billion fine.)
Taplin notes that, in the late nine-
teen-forties, the U.S. Department of Jus-
tice went after A.T. & T., the Google of
its day, for violating the Sherman Anti-
trust Act. The consent decree in the case,
signed in 1956, compelled A.T. & T. to li-
cense all the patents owned by its re-
search arm, Bell Labs, for a small fee.
(One of the technologies affected by the
decree was the transistor, which later
proved essential to computers.) Google,
he argues, could be similarly compelled
to license its thousands of patents, in-
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 45

TRUMP’S FAVORITE TYCOON
The Washington misadventures of Carl Icahn.
ne day in August, 2016, the finan-
O cier Carl Icahn made an ur-
gent phone call to the Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency. Icahn is
one of the richest men on Wall Street,
and he has thrived, in no small mea-
sure, because of a capacity to intimi-
date. A Texas-based oil refiner in which
he had a major stake was losing money
because of an obscure environmental
rule that Icahn regarded as unduly oner-
ous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any gov-
ernment regulation that constrains his
companies. So he wanted to speak with
the person in charge of enforcing the
policy: a senior official at the E.P.A.
named Janet McCabe.
Icahn works from a suite of offices,
atop the General Motors Building, in
midtown, that are decorated in the oak-
and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in
a nineteen-eighties film. During that
decade, Icahn made his reputation as
one of the original corporate raiders, pi-
oneering the art of the hostile takeover
and establishing himself as a human jug-
gernaut—a pugnacious deal machine,
all avarice and swagger. By the time he
called the E.P.A., he was eighty, and
long since unburdened of any personal
or dynastic need to make money; ac-
cording to Forbes, he is worth approxi-
mately seventeen billion dollars. Plenty
of titans who are not as old and not as
rich as Icahn have opted to devote their
remaining years to spending their money,
or to giving it away. Not Icahn. A tall
man with a shambling manner, he re-
cently grew a white beard, which soft-
ens his round face, giving him the cud-
dly appearance of an elderly Muppet.
But he has not lost his taste for the kill.
A few years ago, he sold his mega-yacht,
because cruising on it bored him. He
has engaged in philanthropy, building
charter schools and a stadium on Ran-
dall’s Island that bears his name. But the
charity circuit is a snooze. What Icahn
loves beyond all else is to rise late each
46 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
A REPORTER AT LARGE
BY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
morning, and then to spend the rest of
the day and much of the night working
the phone, making deals. Years ago, a
reporter asked Icahn why he kept mak-
ing money when he already had more
than he could ever spend. “It’s a way of
keeping score,” he said. He is one of the
wealthiest individuals not just in the
world but in the history of the world—a
man who takes pride in many things,
not the least of which is his ability to
get just about anybody on the phone.
“She’s on vacation,” McCabe’s assis-
tant said, flatly.
For how long?
Two weeks.
To Icahn, there was something that
simply did not compute about going on
vacation and leaving one’s work behind.
Surely, he insisted, McCabe could inter-
rupt whatever leisure activity she was en-
gaged in to take a pressing phone call
from Carl Icahn?
No, McCabe’s assistant informed him.
She couldn’t.
The old conundrum about whether
it is better to be loved or feared has
never posed much of a dilemma for
Icahn. In “King Icahn,” a 1993 biogra-
phy, the author, Mark Stevens, described
his subject as a “germophobic, detached,
relatively loveless man,” and quoted one
contemporary saying, “Carl’s dream in
life is to have the only fire truck in town.
Then when your house is in flames, he
can hold you up for every penny you
have.” When the biography was pub-
lished, Icahn stocked his office with
copies to give to visitors. These days,
he bristles at the term “corporate raider,”
favoring the euphemism “activist inves-
tor,” but the reality is that when Icahn
targets a company the response from
management is generally terror. He has
a volatile temper and a vindictive streak.
Everyone makes time to take his calls.
Incredulous that Janet McCabe might
not do so, Icahn asked, “What if the
world’s falling apart?”
The refiner that he was worried about
is CVR Energy, which is based in Sugar
Land, Texas. In 2012, Icahn acquired a
controlling stake in the company, with
the intention of making it more profitable
and then selling it at a higher price. But
under the Renewable Fuel Standard—a
law passed, under George W. Bush, to
promote the use of ethanol and other
biofuels—refiners like CVR are forced
either to blend ethanol into their prod-
ucts or to purchase credits, known as Re-
newable Identification Numbers, from
refiners that do. CVR did not make
sufficient investments to blend ethanol
into all its products, choosing to buy
credits instead. When Icahn bought his
shares in the refiner, rins were cheap—
about a nickel each—so it was reason-
ably affordable for the company to com-
ply with the law. But in 2013 the price of
rins, which had been stable, began fluc-
tuating, and by 2016 the company was
spending two hundred million dollars a
year on credits. When Icahn called Mc-
Cabe, CVR’s stock had dropped seventy
per cent from the previous year. This
incensed him.
“Look, I’m too old to be politically cor-
rect,” he told CNBC, on September 13th.
“This woman, Janet McCabe . . . she’s
never run a business.” Icahn pointed out
that, “at the risk of being immodest,” he
had made a great deal of money in his
career. “The government shouldn’t run
things, because they aren’t trained to run
things,” he continued. This is a core el-
ement of Icahn’s philosophy. Jimmy Wil-
liams, a former in-house lobbyist for
Icahn, told me, “Carl is a man who thinks
that business should be unfettered and
that government should not be involved
in the free-market economy. With every
fibre in his body, that is what he truly
believes.”
When Icahn couldn’t reach McCabe,
he wrote a blistering open letter to the
E.P.A., in which he demanded that the
rules be changed so that other parties,
After Icahn became a special adviser to the President, one of his associates called it “the cheapest takeover Carl’s ever done.”
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN JONES THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 47

¥ ¥
and not refiners, would be responsible
for blending ethanol or purchasing cred-
its. “At the risk of being immodest,” he
wrote, “most respected experts involved
in markets and the way they function
would agree there are few in the coun-
try that understand investing in markets
better than I do.”
One person who was listening to Icahn
was the Republican Presidential nomi-
nee, Donald Trump. Icahn and Trump
have known each other for decades, and
Icahn supported his friend’s aspirations
for the White House at a time when
they still looked quixotic. Trump has long
boasted about his association with more
successful businesspeople, dropping ref-
erences to potentates the way kids dec-
orate their school binders with the names
of their favorite pop stars. But, in real-
ity, many New York financiers consid-
ered him a buffoon. In 2015, Lloyd Blank-
fein, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs,
greeted the suggestion that Trump might
run for President by remarking that the
notion of the former star of “The Ap-
prentice” having his “finger on the but-
ton blows my mind.” In this context, an
endorsement from Icahn was a precious
credential. On the campaign trail, Trump
bragged about his “very dear friend Carl
Icahn,” the name functioning as a by-
word for boundless prosperity.
If Icahn was willing to be enlisted
in this fashion, he was also prepared to
48 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
drop Trump’s name when it served his
interest. Appearing on Bloomberg TV
on August 16, 2016, he vowed that Trump
would put an end to “these crazy reg-
ulations” on his first day in office. In
fact, Icahn continued, he had spoken
with Trump about the E.P.A. rule oblig-
ing his refiner to purchase renewable-
fuel credits. If elected, Trump “will stop
that,” Icahn promised. “That’s a hun-
dred per cent.”
Several weeks after Trump’s victory,
Icahn tweeted, “I’ve agreed to serve as a
special advisor to the president on issues
relating to regulatory reform.” In a press
release, Trump said, “Carl was with me
from the beginning and with his being
one of the world’s great businessmen,
that was something I truly appreciated.
He is not only a brilliant negotiator, but
also someone who is innately able to pre-
dict the future, especially having to do
with finances and economies.” He added
that Icahn would help him address reg-
ulations that were “strangling” Ameri-
can business.
Icahn’s role was novel. He would be
an adviser with a formal title, but he
would not receive a salary, and he would
not be required to divest himself of any
of his holdings, or to make any disclo-
sures about potential conflicts of inter-
est. “Carl Icahn will be advising the Pres-
ident in his individual capacity,” Trump’s
transition team asserted.
In the months after the election, the
stock price of CVR, Icahn’s refiner, nearly
doubled—a surge that is difficult to ex-
plain without acknowledging the ap-
pointment of the company’s lead share-
holder to a White House position. The
rally meant a personal benefit for Icahn,
at least on paper, of half a billion dollars.
There was an expectation in the mar-
ket—an expectation created, in part, by
Icahn’s own remarks—that, with Trump
in the White House and Icahn playing
consigliere, the rules were about to
change, and not just at the E.P.A. Icahn’s
empire ranges across many economic
sectors, from energy to pharmaceuticals
to auto supplies to mining, and all of
them are governed by the types of reg-
ulations about which he would now po-
tentially be advising Trump.
Janet McCabe, who left the E.P.A.
in January, and now works at the Envi-
ronmental Law and Policy Center, told
me, “I’m not naïve. People in business
try to influence the government. But the
job of the government is to serve the
American people, not the specific busi-
ness interests of the President’s friends.
To think that you have somebody with
that kind of agenda bending the Presi-
dent’s ear is troubling.”
Conflicts of interest have been a
defining trait of the Trump Administra-
tion. The President has not only refused
to release his tax returns; he has declined
to divest from his companies, instead
putting them in a trust managed by his
children. Questions have emerged about
the ongoing business ties of his daugh-
ter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and
Jared Kushner, who, since Trump took
office, have reaped nearly two hundred
million dollars from the Trump hotel in
Washington, D.C., and from other in-
vestments. Although Trump promised
to “drain the swamp,” he has assembled
a Cabinet of ultra-rich Americans, in-
cluding two billionaires: Betsy DeVos,
the Secretary of Education, and Wilbur
Ross, the Secretary of Commerce.
But Icahn is worth more than the
Trump family and all the members of
the Cabinet combined—and, with no
constraint on his license to counsel the
President on regulations that might help
his businesses, he was poised to become
much richer. Robert Weissman, who runs
the watchdog group Public Citizen, told
me, “This kind of self-enrichment and
influence over decision-making by an
individual mogul who is simultaneously
inside and outside the Administration
is unprecedented. In terms of corrup-
tion, there’s nothing like it. Maybe ever.”
In conversations with me, financiers who
have worked with Icahn described his
appointment as a kind of corporate raid
on Washington. One said, “It’s the cheap-
est takeover Carl’s ever done.”
Ihavefalike.
you squint, Trump and Icahn look
Both grew up in Queens and
an outer-borough chip on their
shoulders. Both first came to tabloid
prominence against the gaudy backdrop
of the nineteen-eighties. Both are brash,
plainspoken street fighters, examples of
an American archetype: the populist rich
guy. But Trump comes from the wealthy
enclave of Jamaica Estates, whereas Icahn
grew up in a lower-middle-class family
in Bayswater. His mother, Bella, was a
schoolteacher; his father, Michael, was a
failed opera singer who, even though he
was an atheist, became the cantor in a
local synagogue, because he loved the
music. Carl was an only child, born to-
ward the end of the Depression, in 1936.
Throughout his youth, his father railed
against the robber barons, condemning the
concentration of extreme wealth. Icahn
told Mark Stevens, “The social juxtapo-
sition of a tiny group of people living
in great splendor and many more living in
abject poverty was anathema to him.”
As a boy, Icahn was bright and am-
bitious. When he was offered a scholar-
ship to Woodmere Academy, an expen-
sive private school on the South Shore
of Long Island, his parents toured the
campus and met with teachers. But they
worried about the values that their son
would be exposed to there, so they sent
him to public high school instead. The
sting of that reversal lingered. Half a
century later, in the heat of a high-stakes
negotiation, Icahn would occasionally
digress to inform his adversaries that al-
though he attended public school instead
of Woodmere Academy, he still went on
to become a billionaire. Icahn is an old
man now, with an old man’s penchant
for repeating stories; he frequently re-
turns to the theme that his parents un-
derestimated him. “My father was never
able to accomplish anything,” he once
said, adding, “I never respected him.”
In 1960, after studying philosophy
at Princeton (where he wrote a thesis
titled “The Problem of Formulating an
Adequate Explication of the Empiricist
Criterion of Meaning”) and a stint in
medical school (he was a hypochondriac,
which did not help his bedside manner),
Icahn shifted to Wall Street. For a time,
he worked as an arbitrageur, but he even-
tually established himself as a takeover
artist, orchestrating high-profile raids on
companies such as Texaco, RJR Nabisco,
and Phillips Petroleum. His method was
straightforward: he identified businesses
whose assets were worth more than their
stock; he acquired enough of that stock
to force changes in the company which
drove up the stock price; then he sold
the stock. Implicit in Icahn’s approach
was the conviction that he was smart
enough to know more about how to make
money in a given business than the ex-
ecutives who actually ran the business.
He regarded the management at the
companies he targeted with contempt.
Unlike Trump, Icahn was not one to in-
sinuate himself into the sort of club that
would not accept him as a member; he
preferred to storm the clubhouse with a
pitchfork. One of Icahn’s oft-repeated
bromides is that the average C.E.O. is
like a fraternity president: a nice guy to
have a beer with, but maybe not too bright.
Corporations, seeing Icahn coming,
often tried to fight him off. His reputa-
tion grew so fearsome that some com-
panies paid him to go away by buying
his shares back at a premium—a prac-
tice known as “paying greenmail.” Marty
Lipton, a corporate lawyer whose firm
has often been hired by companies that
were looking to thwart an Icahn take-
over, wrote a memo four years ago in
which he described raiders like Icahn as
engaging in “a form of extortion.” In Lip-
ton’s view, such investors “create short-
term increases in the market price of
their stock at the expense of long-term
value.” In the nineties, when Icahn was
fighting for control of Marvel Comics,
the company’s C.E.O., a veteran of the
Israeli Army, likened dealing with him
to negotiating with terrorists.
Icahn prefers to describe himself in
more righteous terms, as a warrior for
stockholders who have been disenfran-
chised by inattentive corporate boards
and myopic executives. He sees himself
as a champion of “shareholder rights,”
an advocate for the little guy. By going
after lacklustre management, he argues,
he has generated “billions and billions”
of dollars for shareholders, while man-
aging to make out just fine himself. “I’m
like a gunfighter you hire to save the
town,” he once remarked. “That gunfight-
er is there to do good. He knows he’s on
the right side, and he’s proud of it, but
he’ll only do what he does if he knows
he’ll get paid for it.”
It is true that Icahn has increased the
value of many companies that he has in-
vested in, but there are also numerous
instances in which, in the aftermath of
a raid, he emerges as a winner and ev-
eryone else seems to lose. In 1985, he
seized control of the airline T.W.A. Ac-
cording to the Times, Icahn celebrated
by donning a T.W.A. flight jacket and
strutting around his office, exclaiming,
“We’ve got ourselves an airline!” He took
the company private, pocketing nearly
half a billion dollars, then sold off its as-
sets. He also waged a bitter fight against
the flight attendants’ union. Because most
attendants were women, Icahn insisted,
they were not “breadwinners,” and should
not expect compensation commensurate
with that of male employees. At one
point in the negotiations, he reportedly
suggested that if the flight attendants
were having such trouble making ends
meet they “should have married a rich
husband.” (Icahn denied having made
sexist comments.) C. E. Meyer, the com-
pany’s chief executive, described Icahn
as “one of the greediest men on earth.”
T.W.A. eventually went out of business.
Like Trump, Icahn adheres to a sim-
ian dominance code in which every
deal—and possibly every human inter-
action—is a zero-sum contest. Only the
alpha prevails. Yet, among Trump’s pan-
oply of wealthy boosters, Icahn is dis-
tinctive, if not unique, because of the
President’s willingness to play the beta
role and genuflect before him. When
they met, during the eighties, Trump
was an eager supplicant, perhaps in part
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 49
because Icahn really is what Trump has
always pretended to be: a genuine mas-
ter dealmaker, and a legitimately self-
made man. Icahn started out with much
less than Trump did, and ended up with
vastly more. In 1988, Trump paid eleven
million dollars to host a heavyweight
title fight between Mike Tyson and
Michael Spinks, at Boardwalk Hall, in
Atlantic City. Before the fight, Trump
took Icahn backstage to meet Tyson.
The bout started late, and
the announcer was obliged
to recite an attenuated roll
call of famous guests, among
them Trump’s “good friend”
Carl Icahn.
Two years later, Trump
unveiled the Taj Mahal,
a spangled confection on
the boardwalk. It had been
financed entirely with junk
bonds, and by the time construction was
complete it was already imperilled by
debt. When Trump needed to make an
interest payment on the loans, his father,
Fred, sent a lawyer to another Trump ca-
sino, the Trump Castle, to buy $3.3 mil-
lion in chips. Not long afterward, Trump
was bailed out once again—this time by
Icahn. One of Icahn’s specialties is in-
vesting in distressed debt, and he pur-
chased the Taj’s outstanding bonds at a
steep discount. Rather than oust Trump,
Icahn negotiated with the other bond-
holders to allow Trump to retain equity
in the casino, as well as his place on the
board. Years later, when Trump named
Icahn a special adviser, the Democratic
National Committee released a state-
ment that alluded to the Atlantic City
episode, suggesting that the White House
appointment was “a quid pro quo twenty-
five years in the making.” Icahn, how-
ever, had already been handsomely re-
munerated for his investment: he sold
the bonds, in 1993, for more than dou-
ble what he had paid for them.
Icahn and Trump maintained a loose
friendship during the ensuing decades,
one that was hardly as intimate as
Trump likes to make it sound. The very
notion of a relationship that transcends
mercenary self-interest may be alien
to Icahn. Once, in a court proceeding,
he said, “If the price is right, we are
going to sell. I think that’s true of ev-
erything you have, except maybe your
kids and possibly your wife.”
50 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
“Possibly?” the judge asked.
“Possibly,” Icahn said, adding, “Don’t
tell my wife.” (Icahn’s first marriage ended
in an acrimonious divorce. He is now
married to his former assistant, Gail
Golden, who manages his charitable in-
terests.) When Oliver Stone was doing
research for his 1987 film, “Wall Street,”
he paid a visit to Icahn, and borrowed
one of his observations for the charac-
ter Gordon Gekko: “If you need a friend,
get a dog.” Trump’s almost
canine subservience to the
older financier is such that,
for years, Icahn, who is a ten-
nis fan, has enjoyed droit-du-
seigneur access to Trump’s per-
sonal box at the U.S. Open.
In 2010, Trump again
found himself in trouble in
Atlantic City. But this time
Icahn was his antagonist.
Along with a Texas banker, Icahn was
trying to gain control of three Trump
casinos. When a lawyer asked, during
a deposition, whether Icahn intended
to rebrand the casinos, he said that a
consultant had deemed the Trump name
a “disadvantage.” In an interview, Trump
shot back, “Everybody wants the brand,
including Carl. It’s the hottest brand in
the country.” But in Icahn’s opinion the
only real downside to shedding the
Trump name was the expense that would
be associated with changing all the sign-
age. Trump expressed dismay at Icahn’s
slight, telling the Times, in 2011, that he
was a “loyalist” who prioritized friend-
ship, whereas “with Carl the friendship
stops where the deal begins.” (Icahn re-
sponded that he did not consider the
two of them to be close, adding, point-
edly, that he had not been invited to
Ivanka Trump’s wedding.) In court pa-
pers, Icahn’s lawyers suggested that
Trump’s name was no longer “synony-
mous with business acumen, high qual-
ity, and style.” Icahn told the Wall Street
Journal, “I like Donald personally, but
frankly I’m a little curious about the big
deal about the name.” If the Trump
brand carried such cachet, he asked,
why did Trump properties keep going
bankrupt?
Even after Icahn started supporting
Trump’s Presidential run, he often sea-
soned his praise with a dash of disdain.
“I’m not here to say Donald’s a great
businessman,” he told the Washington
Post. “But I will say he’s a consensus
builder.” When Trump first announced
his candidacy, in June, 2015, he appeared
on “Morning Joe,” and said, “I would like
to bring my friend Carl Icahn” into the
government, suggesting that Icahn might
make a good Treasury Secretary. Icahn
replied, in a post on his personal Web
site, “I am flattered but do not get up
early enough in the morning to accept
this opportunity.”
hen Icahn initially made a take-
W over bid for CVR Energy, in Feb-
ruary, 2012, the company hired Wachtell,
Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the formidable
New York law firm, to deflect him. But
Icahn prevailed, acquiring an eighty-two-
per-cent stake in the refiner. CVR had
never built enough of its own ethanol-
blending facilities to comply with the
Renewable Fuel Standard, buying rin
credits instead. This was a bad bet. “Up
until 2013, the conventional wisdom was
that there would be no volatility in rin
prices,” Tristan Brown, a professor at
the State University of New York’s Col-
lege of Environmental Science and For-
estry, who has studied the rin market,
told me. But that year prices started to
climb. The rin market is much less trans-
parent than the stock market, and some
players appeared to be hoarding credits,
which drove up their price. Icahn wor-
ried that CVR’s competitors, knowing
that the company was in trouble, were
deliberately manipulating the price,
subjecting his refiner to a so-called “short
squeeze.” (Icahn is no stranger to this
tactic, having attempted to put a short
squeeze on the investor Bill Ackman by
driving up the price of Herbalife, a stock
that Ackman was betting against.)
During the 2016 Presidential cam-
paign, Icahn—who owns twenty or so
companies and has investments all over
the world—raised the issue of renewable-
fuel credits at every opportunity, speak-
ing of the “insane” perfidy of the E.P.A.
and the plight of his refiner. “This is
something that Carl does,” a former Icahn
employee told me. “He becomes fixated
on something, even something that rep-
resents a small part of his portfolio. He
gets obsessed.”
Trump’s bid for the Presidency may
have seemed like a long shot, and Icahn
professed to have misgivings about the
“negativity” of his chosen candidate.
But he believed that Trump would slash creating a Big Oil “oligopoly” that would like Carl Icahn. When the press asked
regulation and, specifically, would make cause gas prices to skyrocket. whether the fact sheet signalled Trump’s
the change that Icahn wanted on bio- Whatever sympathy Trump may have intention to adjust the rule—at the risk
fuel credits—shifting the so-called felt for Icahn’s predicament, he had an of inflaming Corn Belt voters—a spokes-
“point of obligation” so that other par- important interest of his own: he needed man responded that an “incorrect” ver-
ties, closer in the supply chain to the states like Iowa on his side in order to sion of the fact sheet had been posted.
gas pump, would be compelled to pur- win the Presidency. At a June, 2016, rally The bullet point disappeared.
chase rin credits, instead of merchant in Cedar Rapids, he pledged his support
refiners like CVR. for the Renewable Fuel Standard, and s an investor, Icahn likes to zig where
Even if Trump was elected, there were
reasons to believe that Icahn’s objective
promised to save the ethanol industry,
which was “under siege.”
A others zag. It is not clear how much
confidence he had in Trump’s prospects
might be difficult to achieve. The etha- That September, however, something in 2016, or whether, on Election Night,
nol industry opposed shifting the point curious happened. The Trump cam- he was as surprised as the rest of the
of obligation, and was represented by ex- paign—which had not distinguished it- country. But Icahn attended the im-
perienced lobbyists. In August, 2016, Bob self for the wonky exactitude of its white promptu victory party at the Hilton in
Dinneen, who runs a leading ethanol papers—issued a fact sheet on economic midtown, where nobody seemed to have
trade group, the Renewable Fuels Asso- policy that, amid generic promises of arranged for balloons, though a cake had
ciation, told the Houston Chronicle that “unbridled economic growth,” contained been fashioned into a bust of a scowling
the Renewable Fuel Standard functions a surprisingly detailed bullet point about Trump. Supporters wearing “Make
basically as it should, providing incen- the E.P.A.’s rin program. “These re- America Great Again” hats celebrated,
tives to refiners that blend ethanol and quirements have turned out to be im- in a daze. Icahn left the party after mid-
penalizing those which do not. Chang- possible to meet and are bankrupting night. The global markets were tanking
ing the regulation, Dinneen said, would many of the small and midsize refiner- on the news of Trump’s win, so he went
simply reward “folks who haven’t done ies in this country,” the passage read. home and made a billion dollars’ worth
what the law said they should do.” “These regulations will give Big Oil an of investments.
The Renewable Fuel Standard had oligopoly.” This did not sound especially Within days of the victory, according
passed with support from an improba- like Donald Trump. It did sound a lot to people familiar with the situation,
bly diverse coalition: environmentalists,
who wanted to curb greenhouse-gas
emissions; national-security hawks, who
wanted to reduce reliance on foreign oil;
and farm-state lawmakers, who wanted
to boost the corn industry. (Most etha-
nol is made from corn.) Senator Chuck
Grassley, the Iowa Republican, opposed
shifting the point of obligation. So did
the American Petroleum Institute, one
of the most powerful lobbying groups in
Washington, because some integrated
oil giants, such as BP and Shell, were
now producing so much blended fuel
that they were generating surplus cred-
its, which they sold to smaller refiners
like CVR. Because the petroleum indus-
try and the ethanol industry tend to see
in one another an existential threat, there
are few policy issues on which they agree.
The point of obligation for rin credits
is one of them.
This daunting array of forces only
intensified Icahn’s ire, reinforcing his
sense of himself as an aggrieved out-
sider. In his open letter to the E.P.A.,
he fumed that the rin market was
“rigged,” giving Big Oil a windfall at
the expense of smaller refiners such as
CVR. Without a policy change, he
warned, the regulation would soon
bankrupt small and mid-sized refiners,

“What do you think of the new cubicles?”
• •
Trump had enlisted Icahn to help him
staff major government agencies. Icahn
employees began reviewing the refer-
ences and résumés of potential Cabinet
appointees. It has frequently been re-
marked that Trump has stacked his Ad-
ministration with plutocrats. Less often
acknowledged is the degree to which
many of these appointments bear Icahn’s
fingerprints. On November 15th, Icahn
tweeted, “Spoke to @realDonaldTrump.
Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross are
being considered for Treasury and Com-
merce. Both would be great choices.” He
added, “Both are good friends of mine
but, more importantly, they are two of
the smartest people I know.” Two days
later, Icahn told the Fox Business Chan-
nel that he had just had dinner with
Mnuchin, and had “urged Donald to
consider him.” He continued, “I’m not
going to be the one to announce it, but
I do believe he will get the job.” On No-
vember 30th, Mnuchin did.
When potential Cabinet secretaries
visited Trump Tower to meet with the
President-elect, they were sometimes
sent for a second interview—with Icahn.
On the day that Jay Clayton was an-
nounced as Trump’s choice to head the
Securities and Exchange Commission,
he stopped by Icahn’s office for a meet-
ing. Appearing on CNBC in December,
Icahn defended his role as a talent spot-
ter for the Trump Administration. “Over
52 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
the years, you develop instincts for pick-
ing the right C.E.O.,” he said. “Is there
anything wrong with me saying, ‘This
guy is the right guy for this job at this
time’? It doesn’t mean Donald is going
to take my advice, necessarily.”
When Scott Pruitt visited Trump
Tower to discuss the top job at the E.P.A.,
the President-elect concluded the inter-
view by instructing him to walk two
blocks uptown to meet with Icahn.
Trump, according to a Bloomberg News
account, told him, “He has some ques-
tions for you.” Pruitt was precisely the
sort of candidate that Icahn might favor.
A fierce opponent of environmental reg-
ulation, Pruitt had spent years, as the at-
torney general of Oklahoma, suing the
agency that he was now in talks to over-
see. Even so, Pruitt knew that Icahn
would likely want to discuss one partic-
ular issue—rin credits—and as Pruitt
and an aide headed up Fifth Avenue they
searched the Internet for information on
the credits system and its impact on
Icahn’s refiner.
Pruitt was nominated on Decem-
ber 8th. The next day, Icahn said in an
interview with Bloomberg News, “I’ve
spoken to Scott Pruitt four or five times.
I told Donald that he is somebody who
will do away with many of the problems
at the E.P.A.” He continued, “I do think
he feels pretty strongly about the absur-
dity of these obligations, and I feel that
this should be done immediately.” One
reason that the rin market is so unsta-
ble is that the price of the credits is ex-
tremely sensitive to developments in the
news that might affect their future value.
On the day that Pruitt was appointed,
the price of rins plunged—a welcome
outcome for Icahn, because it would cost
CVR less to purchase the credits that it
needed to fulfill its regulatory obligation.
On December 22nd, the day after
Icahn was formally declared to be an ad-
viser to the President, rin prices dropped
again. It was hardly lost on Wall Street
that the famously single-minded inves-
tor might leverage his new role to advo-
cate for his own investments. Barron’s
asked, “Has Carl Icahn been appointed
Secretary of Talking His Own Book?”
The Web site Dealbreaker, noting Icahn’s
lack of conflict-of-interest constraints,
proposed an alternative job title: “Secre-
tary of Do Whatever the Fuck You Want.”
ll Presidents seek advice from the
A private sector. Sometimes they have
done so informally, as when Bill Clin-
ton made late-night phone calls to a
“kitchen cabinet” of business leaders. On
other occasions, an Administration has
brought executives into the bureaucracy
on a part-time basis, making them so-
called Special Government Employees,
which requires certain divestments and
disclosures. Between these informal and
formal models lies a third option: Pres-
idents often establish outside advisory
boards of corporate leaders; in such sit-
uations, the business leaders are not ex-
pected to give up any of their holdings,
and may advocate on behalf of their in-
dustries without having to register as
lobbyists. Icahn has likened his sinecure
to this type of arrangement, saying, “I’m
not making any policy. I am only giving
my opinion.”
For any executive, having access to
the Oval Office can be good for busi-
ness. In a new research paper, “All the
President’s Friends,” the University of
Illinois finance professors Jeffrey R.
Brown and Jiekun Huang studied the
share prices at companies whose execu-
tives visited the White House, and found
that the real, or implied, influence of such
encounters boosted the value of the com-
panies in the months after such visits.
Jimmy Williams, Icahn’s former lobby-
ist, told me, “Can Carl Icahn take his
influence with the President and make
deals that benefit him? Any C.E.O. who
has a relationship with the President can
do that, regardless of party.”
Brown and Huang were able to write
their paper only because the Obama
White House made public its visitor
logs—something that Trump has refused
to do. Without such information, it is
impossible to know which executives are
meeting with the Trump Administra-
tion at the White House. And the kind
of outside panels that Icahn considers to
be similar to his role are subject to the
Federal Advisory Committee Act, which
mandates that their meetings must be
held in public. Austan Goolsbee, who
served as the chairman of Obama’s Coun-
cil of Economic Advisers, told me,
“The Obama Administration established
clear disclosure and full transparency
about what advice people were giving
and when they were giving it. You can
be an outside adviser or a government
employee. The rules are clear for each.
With Icahn, they seem to be trying to
invent a kind of Guantánamo Bay situ-
ation, in which you’re simultaneously
both and neither.”  who went to prison for insider trading;
Norm Eisen, who served as Obama’s
Special Counsel for Ethics and Govern-
ment Reform, argues that Icahn is “not
just an outside kibbitzer” but a formal
adviser who should be subject to con-
straints. “He gets a title,” Eisen said. “He
gets a broad policy portfolio. He’s in-
volved in personnel decisions, in policy
discussions. To me, all of that adds up to
him being a Special Government Em-
ployee.”The blitheness with which Icahn
and the Trump White House sidestepped
the federal requirements is evidence,
Eisen contends, that “this is a lawless Ad-
ministration.” Immediately after Icahn’s
appointment was announced, shares in
Icahn Enterprises surged. Forbes esti-
mated that his stake in the company rose
in value from $6.8 billion to $7.3 billion—
an increase of five hundred and ten mil-
lion dollars, in a day.
IFuelsnDinneen,
early February, Icahn contacted Bob
the head of the Renewable
Association. Icahn proposed that
they meet to discuss Dinneen’s opposi-
tion to shifting the point of obligation
for RINs. Dinneen took the train from
Washington to New York and went to
the offices of Icahn Enterprises. Icahn,
as a younger man, hopped on planes to
visit companies he was investing in, but
now he mostly has people come to him.
His offices are full of reminders, as if ar-
ranged by a set decorator, that Icahn is
a conqueror: the walls are lined with oil
paintings depicting famous battles, as
well as framed stock certificates and other
trophies from companies that he has sub-
dued. A pair of antique duelling pistols
adorn his desk.
Icahn is known for his stamina and
deviousness as a negotiator. Connie
Bruck, in her 1988 book, “The Predators’
Ball,” describes his passion for all-night
negotiation sessions, and notes that some
of his interlocutors suspect that he de-
liberately prolongs these encounters, not
just as a tactic but “because he is having
such a good time.” Icahn is a serious
chess player; as a young man, he consid-
ered becoming a chess master but de-
cided not to, because there was no money
in it. He paid his way through Prince-
ton, in part, with poker earnings, and he
has played the game with Leon Black,
the founder of Apollo Global Manage-
ment; Sam Waksal, the ImClone founder,
and the onetime junk-bond king Mi-
chael Milken, who has also done time
for white-collar crime. “Waksal, Milken,
Ivan Boesky,” the former Icahn employee
said. “Carl has never got into trouble.
But he’s played with everyone who did.”
In his business dealings, Icahn is a mas-
ter of the bluff. “Carl views the legal
norms as a starting point for a negotia-
tion, rather than a moral compass,” a
financier who has faced off against him
told me. “He’s not afraid to cross the line
if he thinks he’s on firm ground. ‘Per-
haps the law says that this is wrong. But
I know better, and I am willing to sue or
be sued.’ It’s a rare breed of person who
will do that. Carl lives in that breach.”
On February 27th, the news leaked
that Dinneen and Icahn had struck a deal:
the Renewable Fuels Association would
end its long-held opposition to changing
the point of obligation, and side with
Icahn in his push to shift the obligation
away from refiners like CVR. This was a
surprising development. There had been
no ambiguity about Dinneen’s position,
and earlier that month the Renewable
Fuels Association had made a submission
to the E.P.A. objecting to such a change.
What was behind this abrupt reversal?
Some speculated that Dinneen had
been influenced by Valero, a refiner whose
biofuels subsidiary had recently joined
his association, and which had sent a
representative to join Dinneen at his
meeting with Icahn. Like CVR, Valero
had not sufficiently invested in blending
infrastructure and was spending huge
sums on RIN credits. But, after reporters
hounded Dinneen, he offered a differ-
ent explanation: in a statement, he ex-
plained that he had “received a call from
an official with the Trump Administra-
tion, informing us that a pending exec-
utive order would change the point of
obligation.” In other words, the policy
was going to change by Presidential fiat,
whether the industry liked it or not. “I
was told in no uncertain terms that the
point of obligation was going to be
moved,” Dinneen said. The executive
order would be “non-negotiable.”
Confronted with this fait accompli,
Dinneen apparently felt that his only op-
tion was to secure whatever concessions
he could for his industry. One long-
standing priority for Dinneen and other
biofuel advocates has been to change
laws so that gas blends containing fifteen
per cent ethanol can be sold year-round.
(Such blends cannot legally be sold during
the summer, the peak driving season;
Dinneen contends that the prohibition,
meant to alleviate smog, is outdated.) So
Dinneen pressed for that adjustment, in
exchange for his acquiescence on the
point of obligation.
Many ethanol-industry watchers I
spoke with were flabbergasted by this
turn of events. When I called Dinneen,
he told me that the only Trump Admin-
istration official he had been speaking
with was Icahn. “I’m old-school,” Din-
neen said. “If I get a call from a special
adviser to the President, I’m going to
take it.” Dinneen explained that although
Icahn never said explicitly that he was
speaking on behalf of the President, he
did say that he had discussed the point
of obligation with Trump, and that he
was confident that a change in policy
was coming soon. Normally, Dinneen
pointed out, any negotiation between the
government and private industry would
take place with “an army of people” as-
sembled on opposite sides of a confer-
ence table: a phalanx of lawyers, techni-
cal specialists, and other advisers. This
was different. Then again, he noted, with
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 53
a dry chuckle, “This whole town is differ-
ent now.” Now he was cutting deals, mano
a mano, with Icahn: a friend of Trump,
the owner of a refiner, and a special ad-
viser to the President. If this was the new
reality, Dinneen figured, he needed to
find a way to work with it. To do other-
wise would be malpractice, he said, add-
ing, “Icahn had a title I couldn’t ignore.”
Dinneen insisted to me that he and
Icahn never struck a conclusive deal; they
simply came to an agreement that he
would propose to his board
that the association end its
opposition to shifting the
point of obligation. But,
after a phone call with Din-
neen on February 23rd,
Icahn spoke with the Pres-
ident and relayed the sub-
stance of this agreement.
Icahn, who had been out
walking his dog, talked to
Trump from the lobby of
his apartment building. Bloomberg News
later reported that, according to Icahn,
“Trump seemed receptive.” Trump in-
structed Icahn to telephone Gary Cohn,
his senior adviser on economic issues.
Cohn handed the matter to an aide on
the National Economic Council, a for-
mer oil lobbyist named Mike Catanzaro,
who spent an hour going through the
details with Icahn. When, four days later,
Bloomberg News broke the story that an
executive order was imminent, corn and
gasoline prices went berserk.
It was not hard to believe that the
Trump White House had shifted policy
at the behest of an industry crony. The
Administration had devoted itself, in its
early days, to dismantling the regulatory
state, in close consultation with business
interests. The White House established
deregulation teams at various federal
agencies. Administration officials have
refused to disclose the names of team
members, but reporting by ProPublica
and the Times suggests that many of
them have come from the regulated in-
dustries themselves.
Efforts at health-care reform, an in-
frastructure bill, and tax cuts have all
stalled, stymied by the infighting, indis-
cipline, and incompetence of the Trump
Administration. But deregulation has
been a quiet success, and nowhere more
so than at the E.P.A. Pruitt has not made
it a habit to meet with senior career
54 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
officers at the agency; he does, however,
meet regularly, behind closed doors, with
industry executives. Some observers fear
that the E.P.A. is now run like a Senate
office, where representatives meet with
constituents and do constituent services—
except that the constituent is industry.
For example, under the Obama Admin-
istration the E.P.A. moved to ban chlor-
pyrifos, a pesticide manufactured by Dow
Chemical, after agency scientists found
that it caused neurodevelopmental dam-
age in children. Dow lob-
bied against the ban, and
Pruitt recently tabled it, cit-
ing “uncertainty” about the
scientific evidence that it is
hazardous to kids.
Icahn could scarcely have
asked for a more business-
friendly figure at the E.P.A.
But, when news leaked
about a policy shift on the
point of obligation, the eth-
anol industry protested. Jeff Broin, the
C.E.O. of Poet, a large ethanol producer,
complained, “This was a back-room ‘deal’
made by people who want out of their
obligations.” One group, Fuels America,
declared that Dinneen’s Renewable Fuels
Association was “no longer aligned with
America’s biofuel industry,” and severed
ties with it. Emily Skor, who runs Growth
Energy, another trade group, objected
that Dinneen had been negotiating with-
out consulting other stakeholders in the
ethanol industry. “This is no deal for any-
one but Carl Icahn,” she said. Senator
Joni Ernst, of Iowa, also derided the deal,
pointing out that it would benefit only
a “select few.”
n February 28th, Kelly Love, a
O spokeswoman for the White House,
denied that there was any plan to shift
the point of obligation, telling Reuters,
“There is no ethanol executive order in
the works.” In an interview with Bloom-
berg, Stefan Passantino, the White House
lawyer in charge of ethics and compli-
ance, questioned any characterization of
Icahn as a government official, saying,
“He is simply a private citizen whose
opinion the President respects and whom
the President speaks with from time to
time.” In subsequent conversations with
industry representatives, Pruitt distanced
himself from Icahn’s efforts. Two people
who spoke with Pruitt in the aftermath
of the news reports about the executive
order told me that he had assured them,
“I was not consulted on this.”
Brooke Coleman, the executive direc-
tor of the Advanced Biofuels Business
Council, pointed out to me that these
events unfolded just a month into the
Trump Administration. Many staffers
had not arrived yet, and there was no real
policymaking apparatus. The point-of-
obligation rule was a relatively obscure
agenda item, a top priority for almost no-
body but Icahn. “This was a middle-of-
the-night quick strike,” Coleman said. “In
the middle of the night, Icahn said, ‘Sign
this.’ But it didn’t work. He got caught.”
Those were heady times for executive or-
ders, with the President seeming to sign
a new one each day. But several people
told me that the point-of-obligation
change could not have been made sim-
ply by executive prerogative. “It’s a regu-
lation,” Janet McCabe said. “So the reg-
ulation would have to be changed, and
there is a whole process for that.” In 1946,
the Administrative Procedure Act estab-
lished a protocol for rule-making that in-
volves interagency coördination and input
from interested parties.
“Icahn was always talking about an
‘executive order’—that was his vernacu-
lar,” Dinneen recalled. An official in the
Trump Administration told me that re-
ports about an impending executive order
were “not true,” because “there was no
organic executive-order process that
would be normal for something like that.”
There was a draft executive order, the
official acknowledged, but it did not orig-
inate in the White House: “It was some-
thing Icahn sent to us.”
“Icahn is very sophisticated,” Brooke
Coleman said. “But maybe not about
Washington.” Senator Chuck Grassley
not only represents corn growers; he also
chairs the Judiciary Committee, which
helps confirm Trump’s appointments of
judges. This is the reason that traditional
policy negotiations are so overcrowded.
Washington is a city of vying constitu-
encies, many of which happen to be very
powerful. Coleman believes that “some-
one probably walked into Trump’s office
and said, ‘Here’s why you need Chuck
Grassley more than you need Carl Icahn.’ ”
Did Icahn think that he could bluff
his way to a change in federal regu-
lation? One thing is clear: whatever
the White House might say, Dinneen
believed that Icahn was negotiating on quently reported that, when the price of ergy sector, pointed out that “if an in-
behalf of the Trump Administration. RINs was high, CVR sold millions of the dividual has influence over expectations
Icahn has boasted to associates in New credits. The company would eventually in this market, he can end up moving
York about his access to the President. need to turn over its quota of credits to prices.” When rin prices dropped, it
On March 1st, in a filing to the Securi- the E.P.A., yet in the months before its afforded CVR an opportunity to cover
ties and Exchange Commission, Icahn annual deadline it was quietly selling them its short, buying back the rins it needed
Enterprises made a point of mentioning off. This was extremely unusual. “To my to meet its regulatory obligation at a
that “Mr. Icahn is currently serving as a knowledge, this is the first time you had steep discount.
special advisor to President Donald J. someone taking a short position in the Because CVR will not comment on
Trump on issues relating to regulatory RIN market,” Tristan Brown, the SUNY the trades, it is impossible to know how
reform.” Such a disclosure could indi- professor, told me. many credits were bought during this pe-
cate merely that Icahn is being transpar- To short a stock or a commodity is to riod. Normally, the refiner posted a loss
ent with his shareholders. But it is also, make a bet that the price will drop. And for the sum that it spent on RINs each
unequivocally, a signal: I have the ear of in this instance it was extremely risky: if quarter, and those losses had lately
the President. the deadline arrives and a refiner does amounted to as much as sixty million
Richard Painter, who served as the not have the required quota of credits, dollars. But, on a shareholder call in April,
chief ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, the E.P.A. can enforce fines of $37,500 a a CVR representative said that in the
told me that it was irrelevant whether or day for each RIN owed until the refiner first quarter of the Trump Administra-
not Icahn received a salary or had an complies—a figure that would climb into tion the company had experienced a “neg-
office in the West Wing. “When you give the billions of dollars immediately. “You’re ative” loss of six million dollars—that is,
someone a title, you make him your agent,” essentially gambling,” Brown said. “And, a profit. Tristan Brown told me that the
Painter said. He pointed out that Icahn’s if you’re wrong, the penalty is pretty much notion of a profit resulting from compli-
title stood out amid the arid nomencla- unlimited.”This was, Brown said, not the ance with the Renewable Fuel Standard
ture of official Washington, where “spe- sort of speculative play one might antic- was unheard of for a merchant refiner
cial advisers” proliferate but only a cho- ipate from a mid-sized refiner like CVR. like CVR. When I asked a longtime rin
sen few can append the words “to the Rather, it was the kind of gamble that a trader about this gambit, he said, “Either
President.” “With a title like that, he has bold Wall Street investor might make. Icahn was extremely lucky or he knew
the authority to represent the President’s In the near term, at least, Icahn’s bet something that other people didn’t.”
views. If he goes out and says ‘The Pres- paid off. As soon as the news broke that
ident thinks this,’ that means something.” an executive order on the point of ob-
If Icahn’s objective was to shift the ligation was imminent—and that Icahn
, what are you doing?” Icahn
“ S oasked me when I called him for
point of obligation, his bluff failed. This and Dinneen had reached a deal—prices this story. For all his brusque qualities,
would appear to be an instance in which of rins plummeted. Jim Stock, a pro- Icahn is an engaging interlocutor, his
the same lattice of vested interests that fessor at Harvard who studies the en- voice a raspy staccato, his accent a time
can cause dysfunction in Washington
actually led to a proper result; it pre-
vented a hasty change in policy that was
designed primarily to assist one person.
“The process worked, at the end of the
day,” the Trump Administration official
told me. “We made the right decision.”
Mark Stevens, Icahn’s biographer, re-
called, “Carl once told me, ‘I don’t be-
lieve in the word fair. It’s a human con-
cept that became conventional wisdom.’ ”
To Icahn, it may have seemed that the
roadblocks he faced were not a sign of a
sound bureaucracy but, rather, evidence
of a power play by more formidable spe-
cial interests, in the form of the ethanol
lobby and Big Oil.
But Icahn’s first foray as a Presiden-
tial adviser was by no means a complete
failure. Icahn had spent the second half
of 2016 complaining bitterly about CVR’s
obligation to buy rins. But, when CVR
released an earnings report in April, 2017,
it emerged that the company had actu-
ally been selling them. Reuters subse-
capsule of old New York. In the course
of three phone calls, we spoke for nearly
four hours. Icahn has given hundreds of
interviews over the decades. He is a great
raconteur. But, on the subject of his role
as an adviser to Trump and his effort to
change the E.P.A. regulation, he pre-
ferred to talk almost entirely off the re-
cord. A lawyer joined him for each call.
Icahn insisted to me that he does not op-
pose all regulation, and feels, for exam-
ple, that “some Wall Street regulation is
necessary.” Notwithstanding the title that
Trump had conferred on him, Icahn de-
scribed his advisory role as “unofficial,”
and said, “I have only ever made sugges-
tions that I believed would benefit all
companies in particular industries, never
any one particular company.” Beyond
that, he would say little on the record.
Icahn was less guarded when his
appointment originally generated
controversy. “I own a refinery,” he told
Bloomberg News, in March. “Why
shouldn’t I advocate?” He later added, “I
have a right to talk to the President like
any other citizen. . . . And, yeah, it helps
me. I’m not apologizing for that.” With
me, he was more calibrated, insisting
that his role has been overstated, and
that he has spoken to Trump only “a
handful” of times since the election.
Confronted with Dinneen’s account
of their interactions, Icahn deferred to
his lawyer, Jesse Lynn, who disputed sev-
eral points. Although Dinneen was ad-
amant that Icahn had assured him an ex-
ecutive order was in the works, and had
spoken of discussing the matter with
Trump, Lynn told me that Icahn had
merely expressed “hope” that Trump
would come around to his view. Lynn
also denied the White House’s account,
maintaining that the draft executive order
was not prepared by Icahn.
I spoke to someone who has seen the
draft executive order, and he told me that
it looked conspicuously like something
that had been prepared by someone with
no experience in Washington: “It was like
‘I, the President, instruct Scott Pruitt to
move the point of obligation.’ It was al-
most amateurish. Any policy person or
lawyer would understand that this thing
was never going to fly.”
Several sources in Washington who
have discussed the matter with Mike
Catanzaro, the Trump Administration
official who dealt with Icahn, told me
56 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
SON
I don’t even know where my father lives.
I know his number, and whenever
I call he answers and gives
the usual update about getting together
with the stepkids and their kids,
about the latest minor crises
with his health, about what he did
with Maryanne for their anniversary.
He lives somewhere in Connecticut,
near where he lived before.
It’s been easy not to go there, but
I know I should—there won’t always be more
time. There will always be less.
I don’t even know my father’s address.
—Craig Morgan Teicher
that, once he and Gary Cohn had con- These assurances notwithstanding,
cluded that Icahn was attempting to hi- Icahn could be in legal jeopardy. “He’s
jack the policy process, they put a stop walking right into possible criminal
to it. One of the sources said, “I think charges,” Richard Painter, the Bush Ad-
Icahn thought if he told his pal Don, ministration ethics lawyer, said. He cited
‘This is a bad thing,’ and explained why a federal statute that makes it illegal for
it was stupid, Don would say, ‘God damn executive-branch employees to work on
it, Carl, you’re right!’—and then the law any matter in which they may have a di-
would change. That’s not how it works rect financial interest. The President and
down here. We have this thing called the the Vice-President are exempted from
Administrative Procedure Act.” Another this statute. Unpaid White House advis-
source said, “Mike had to make clear that ers are not. Painter suggested that the
the government is not a vending ma- public-integrity division of the Justice
chine—that it’s not here to profit the Department should be investigating. “If
President’s friends.” He added, “Not ev- I were Icahn’s private lawyer, I would tell
erybody in this Administration neces- him that he shouldn’t have accepted the
sarily sees it that way.” special-adviser title,” he said. Jesse Lynn
Icahn would not acknowledge having told me that he has reviewed the rele-
directed CVR to short rins. Jesse Lynn vant law, and that it does not apply to
said that CVR’s strategies on rins are Icahn: “Unlike a government employee,
decided by its board of directors. (He did Mr. Icahn has no official role or duties
not mention that the chairman of the and he is not in a position to set policy.”
board is Icahn.) On the question of Painter disagrees. “That is clearly an
whether Icahn had exploited his prox- official title,” he said. “If he was advising
imity to the President to make bets in on a matter where he had an interest,
the marketplace, Lynn said, “Any sugges- then Icahn was in direct violation of the
tion that we had access to information criminal statute.”
that others didn’t is unequivocally false.” The Trump Justice Department may
Neither Icahn nor Lynn would comment be unlikely to initiate an investigation.
further on the trading of rins, but Icahn But Eliot Spitzer, the former prosecutor
told me, “I have a decades-long, impec- and New York governor, told me that
cable record of creating literally hundreds Icahn’s activities in Washington should
of billions of dollars of value for share- also draw scrutiny in New York. “At a
holders. I’ve lived through many turbu- minimum, it looks improper,” he said. “If
lent times but I’ve never had any prob- I were sitting downtown at 120 Broad-
lems with the government.” He added way, where I used to be the state attor-
that he has “a great respect for the law,” ney general, and somebody presented this
and that he and his associates “cross every fact pattern to me, I would say, ‘Let’s take
‘t’ and dot every ‘i’ in our activities.” a hard look at this.’ Giving policy advice
as a formal government adviser while at
the same time trading on the potential
impact of that advice violates our notions
of transparency in government work. It
seems problematic on its face.”
In March, Icahn published an article
in The Hill, defending himself against
any suggestion that, as a private citizen
lobbying the Administration on behalf
of his own business interests, he might
be expected to register as a lobbyist. “I
have vetted my activities with a number
of lawyers and it is clear that no registra-
tion is required,” he wrote. He argued
that it was not merely refiners like CVR
that were suffering under the current
point of obligation; so were mom-and-
pop gas stations, many of which were
“minority owned.” Icahn argued, with a
straight face, that he was actually fight-
ing this battle on behalf of minority com-
munities. The investor who has negoti-
ated with Icahn told me, “Carl confuses
the personal good and the social good in
a very profound way.”
Following the reports that Icahn was
negotiating with Dinneen and urging
Trump to shift the point of obligation,
Icahn acknowledged, in March, that he
had not been buying RINs. Jesse Lynn
insisted that there was “nothing unusual
or inappropriate about any rins trad-
ing that may have been conducted.”
Icahn had no ability to influence pol-
icy at the White House, Lynn insisted.
All that his title and his relationship
with the President afforded was “an op-
portunity to express his views.”
ne recurring feature of the Trump
O Presidency has been an acute col-
lective sensation, shared by a substantial
portion of the electorate, of helpless wit-
ness. Dismayed Americans wait, like spec-
tators at a game that has turned suddenly
dangerous, for a referee to step in and cry
foul. But one reason that Trumpism is so
transfixing to watch is that it is about the
upending of norms, the defiance of ta-
boos, the destabilization of institutions.
School’s out forever. What this means in
practice is a serious deficit of account-
ability. Whom can you call when the au-
thorities are the ones breaking the rules?
Since Icahn’s appointment, Senators
Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, and
Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island,
along with several of their Democratic
colleagues, have written a string of let-
ters to the White House and to various
agencies to protest the nature of Icahn’s
role, and to seek clarity on the question
of what he has actually been doing.
Whitehouse told me that, because of the
“definitional murk” surrounding Icahn’s
appointment, it is important to answer a
series of baseline questions. How often
has he consulted with Trump or others
at the White House? Has his position
provided access to confidential govern-
ment information that might affect his
investments? How broad an array of reg-
ulations has Icahn offered advice on, and
how have his recommendations dove-
tailed with his own portfolio?
I asked several people who know
Icahn whether he even has policy inter-
ests beyond his own investments. They
noted Icahn’s commitment to educa-
tion—he has built eight charter schools
in the Bronx—but struggled to offer
other examples. Someone who used to
work for Icahn told me, “Carl has zero
interest in the details of regulation. He
has a general feeling that he doesn’t want
regulations to affect him, but it’s not like
he’s going to be consulting the Federal
Register and making policy recom-
mendations. It’s ludicrous.” When a
Bloomberg reporter pressed Icahn about
sectors beyond oil refining where he
felt that regulation was excessive, he
spoke of railcars and liquid natural gas—
two heavily regulated industries in
which Icahn has extensive holdings.
In May, after the revelations about the
rin trading by CVR, the senators wrote
to the heads of the S.E.C., the E.P.A.,
and the Commodities Futures Trading
Commission, calling on them to inves-
tigate. But it could not have escaped the
senators’ attention that two recipients of
their letter—Jay Clayton and Scott
Pruitt—had met with Icahn in the con-
text of securing their jobs. The Senate
Democrats cannot issue subpoenas to
agencies unless they get the Republican
majority to sign on—an unlikely out-
come. In May, the C.F.T.C. replied to the
senators’ letter: the agency would not be
investigating Icahn or CVR, because rins,
even though they are commodities, do
not trade on a futures market, and the
agency therefore had no jurisdiction to
look into the matter. By this logic, the
fifteen-billion-dollar market for renew-
able-fuel credits is not regulated by any
government agency.
In the absence of disclosures about
what Icahn has and has not advised on,
any investment that he makes in a regu-
lated industry can come to seem suspi-
cious. In February, he acquired a stake in
the pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers
Squibb. During Jay Clayton’s confirma-
tion hearings, Elizabeth Warren noted
that Icahn had made this move after as-
suming his role as a special adviser to the
President. The value of a company like
Bristol-Myers would be affected by Food
and Drug Administration decisions, pat-
ent determinations, and policies that affect
Medicare and Medicaid, she pointed out.
It is almost impossible to imagine, she
argued, that Icahn did not “have some
inside information about how these pol-
icies would affect a company like Bris-
tol-Myers.” Warren posed a hypothet-
ical to Clayton: If Icahn had inside
information about federal regulatory pol-
icy that would affect Bristol-Myers, and
he chose to buy shares in the company
based on that information, would that
not be a violation of securities laws?
Clayton demurred, saying that it
would depend on an analysis of the “facts
and circumstances.”
“We are talking about an Adminis-
tration that just has conflicts everywhere,”
Warren pressed. “It is very difficult to de-
termine whether someone is actually
working in the interests of the American
people or they are just lining their own
pockets.”The public should not be forced
to “guess” whether its government is serv-
ing its interests or that of the President’s
cronies, she continued. “And when Carl
Icahn is influencing policy that will affect
companies and then he is investing in
those companies . . . that creates a conflict
of interest that is just beyond what we
are even talking about everywhere else.”
In his conversation with me, Icahn
expressed indignation about the effort
to hold him accountable, which he has
described, in conspicuously Trumpian
language, as “fake news” and “a witch
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 57
hunt.” He told me that any criticism of
his role is “both politically motivated and
motivated by certain large business in-
terests,” and is “completely without merit.”
When I asked Icahn about the nature
of his special-adviser role, he maintained
that what had initially appeared to be a
broad policy portfolio was, in practice,
much more limited. “The only sugges-
tions I have ever made throughout this
whole period were on the rins issue,” he
said. No railcars? No liquid natural gas?
Icahn says that he has not had a single
conversation with anyone in the Admin-
istration about regulations in these in-
dustries, or in any others in which he has
holdings. He acknowledges advocating
on the rins issue. But he maintains that
this was not problematic, because, though
the refiner he owns might benefit from
a shift in the point of obligation, it would
not be the only company that would wel-
come such a change. In Icahn’s telling,
this makes him practically disinterested.
The White House official who would,
in theory, police Icahn’s status is Stefan
Passantino, the deputy counsel to the Pres-
ident for compliance and ethics. Passan-
tino was responsible for “counselling”
Kellyanne Conway, the Presidential ad-
viser, after she sparked an outcry by pro-
moting Ivanka Trump’s apparel line during
a Fox News interview. In the view of
Trump Administration officials, Passan-
tino laid to rest the Icahn controversy with
his February declaration that Icahn was
“simply a private citizen.” Kelly Love, the
White House spokeswoman, said, “Mr.
“ You’re allowed to keep collecting the teeth, but we’re going to
call you a fairy to make it sound less terrifying.”
Icahn does not have a position with the
Administration, nor a policymaking role.”
It is ironic for Passantino to rule on
the controversy surrounding Icahn’s con-
flicts of interest—because Passantino has
a conflict of his own. On June 28th, Wal-
ter Shaub, the head of the Office of Gov-
ernment Ethics, wrote a letter pointing
out that Passantino, in his mandatory
disclosures as a full-time White House
employee, noted that before joining the
Administration he had been a corporate
lawyer. He listed the clients for whom
he had done work in the two years prior
to joining the government. One of them
was Icahn. At the time that Passantino
was initially queried about the propriety
of Icahn’s position, he made no mention
of this relationship.
Two weeks after Shaub sent his let-
ter, he resigned, saying that he could no
longer meaningfully perform the func-
tion for which the Office of Government
Ethics was designed. Shaub warned that
the United States was facing a “historic
ethics crisis.” The White House released
a statement lashing out at Shaub, dis-
missing his concerns as “grandstanding.”
For all of President Trump’s fulmina-
tions about the danger of leaks, his White
House has a bizarre habit of authorizing
spokespeople to talk with the press on
the condition that their names not be
mentioned. When I asked the White
House for an interview with Passantino,
to discuss how he had vetted Icahn’s po-
sition, a spokeswoman replied that Pas-
santino had been “recused on any mat-
ters related to Carl Icahn,” because Icahn
was a former client. This was the first I
had heard of any recusal, and I asked when
it had happened. On the first day of the
Administration, the spokeswoman replied.
If the White House spokeswoman was
correct, then at the time that Passantino
issued the Administration’s judgment that
Icahn’s role posed no ethical conflicts he
was already recused from offering legal
advice on precisely that question. “That’s
not how recusal works,” Shaub told me.
“Recusing yourself means not delivering
the White House’s legal theories about
whether Icahn is an employee.” The
spokeswoman maintained that, when Pas-
santino made his declaration, he wasn’t
making a legal judgment, but “merely re-
iterating a fact.” Richard Painter, who
used to hold Passantino’s job, told me that
the White House’s repeated assertion that
Icahn is simply a private citizen is “bogus,”
adding, “The ethics shop in this White
House is not very good.”
If Passantino never weighed in on the
terms of Icahn’s unusual appointment,
surely some other White House lawyer
looked into the matter. I asked who that
was. The spokeswoman responded that
it “wasn’t necessary” to perform any such
legal vetting of Icahn’s role.
or the moment, Icahn’s push on the
F point of obligation appears to have
stalled. But, in July, CVR announced its
most recent quarterly results, and once
again the firm was spending a great deal
of money to purchase RINs. On a call
with investors, CVR’s chief executive,
John Lipinski, cited the volatility of RIN
prices. “When there’s news in the mar-
ket, it goes up and it goes down,” he said.
Lipinski complained, several times, about
speculators who were “manipulating” the
price of the credits. When he was asked
about CVR’s own speculative trading of
RINs, he said that he didn’t “intend to
go into any detail” on such questions.
RIN prices, which hit a low of thirty
cents following the news of Icahn’s deal
with Dinneen, have since tripled. In the
coming weeks, the E.P.A. is expected to
issue a formal rejection of proposals to
shift the point of obligation. According
to Reuters, some investors on Wall Street
are now betting against Icahn—by short-
ing CVR stock.
Dinneen, for one, does not anticipate
that Icahn will simply let the issue go.
“He doesn’t seem like a man who will
quit easily,” he said.
Jeff Hauser, who runs the Revolving
Door Project, a nonprofit focussed on
government corruption, told me that
Icahn’s relationship with Trump is a par-
ticularly bald example of a kind of clien-
talist politics that has been more typical,
historically, of banana republics, but which
is on the rise in the United States. “Once
there is an acquiescence that this sort of
corruption is acceptable, then you just
see the demise of representative govern-
ment,” Hauser said. “We will essentially
become a feudal state, with people cre-
ating their own fiefdoms and extracting
rents from the public.”
On August 14th, I asked the White
House to confirm that Icahn was still a
special adviser to the President. The
spokeswoman e-mailed me back: “Icahn
is NOT ‘a special adviser to the presi-
dent for regulatory reform.’ ” This was
certainly news. In my conversations with
Icahn and his lawyer, I had not devel-
oped any impression that his status had
changed. Was the Administration cut-
ting him loose?
I wrote back to the spokeswoman,
asking when Icahn had been let go. She
replied, “There was no ‘effective’ end date,
because there was never a formal appoint-
ment or title after January 20.” This was
transparently false; Icahn had been named
a special adviser to “the President,” not
to “the President-elect.” On March 1st,
Icahn’s company told the S.E.C. that he
was “currently” a Trump adviser. And why
had the White House lawyer, Stefan Pas-
santino, recused himself on January 20th
from “any matters related to Carl Icahn”
if, as of that very day, Icahn had no role
in the Administration?
Instead of simply breaking off a ques-
tionable liaison, the White House seems
intent on going further, insisting that the
liaison never happened in the first place.
But, in the event that state or federal in-
vestigators do examine the legality of
Icahn’s role in the early days of the Trump
Administration, this heedless revision-
ism is unlikely to withstand scrutiny. After
all, if Icahn had really been dismissed on
the first day of the Administration, it
might have behooved the White House
to tell Bob Dinneen, or the senators who
wrote all those letters. Or Icahn.
On Friday, August 18th, four days after
the White House disavowed Icahn to me,
he tweeted, “Today, with President Trump’s demands from casino employees for bet-
blessing, I ceased to act as special advisorter pay and health benefits. Eventually,
to the President on issues relating to reg- Icahn shuttered the casino. “The great
ulatory reform.” In a letter posted to his dealmaker would rather burn the Trump
Web site, Icahn explained that he had Taj Mahal down just so he can control
spoken with Trump that day. His resig- the ashes,” Bob McDevitt, the president
nation came during a week when numer- of the local union, said at the time. “It’s a
ous private-sector advisers distanced them- classic take-the-money-and-run—Icahn
selves from Trump, in response to his takes hundreds of millions of dollars out
equivocal comments in the aftermath of of Atlantic City and then announces he
a white-supremacist rally in Charlottes- is closing up shop.” The casino’s demise
ville. But Icahn made no mention of these put three thousand people out of work.
events, claiming instead, “I chose to end In March, 2017, Icahn found a buyer: Hard
this arrangement,” and citing “the insin- Rock International. One day earlier this
uations of a handful of your Democratic summer, former employees queued up
critics.” He insisted, “I never had access alongside treasure hunters and curious
to nonpublic information or profited from passersby on the boardwalk outside the
my position, nor do I believe that my role beleaguered casino. A liquidator had ar-
presented conflicts of interests.” ranged a fire sale of the items inside. Peo-
In our conversations, Icahn was un- ple carted home used bed linens and
failingly polite about President Trump. scuffed armchairs and statuary of fake
But it struck me that it must vex him that gold. They looked for souvenirs bearing
Trump—the lesser intellect, the lesser the Trump name, but there weren’t any.
businessman, the little-brother tagalong— For many years, an odd structure stood
may now be too busy to take his phone down the boardwalk from the Taj Ma-
calls, and would jettison him from his po- hal—a three-story rooming house. It had
sition as a White House special adviser been bought, in 1961, by an eccentric local
without so much as a heads-up. If Icahn’s woman named Vera Coking, who ran it
raid on Washington has proved unsuc- in the manner of a boarding house in a
cessful, he cannot blame the scrupulous- Hitchcock film: cheap rooms for rent,
ness of the Trump Administration. The with a shared bathroom down the hall.
aging takeover artist may have flown a When the casino boom swept Atlantic
little too close to the sun in his pursuit City, in the eighties, many suitors came
of a particular political objective, but histo Coking, hoping to buy her building
failure was itself an illustration of the for the valuable land that it sat on. But
power of transactional politics in Wash- Coking, who was stubborn, refused to
ington. Trump may want to govern like sell. Donald Trump was one of those suit-
a businessman. But Washington is a club ors. “He’d come over to the house, prob-
like any other, with some codes and pro- ably thinking, If I butter her up now, I’ll
tocols that even the brashest arrivistes get her house for a good price,” she told
cannot ignore. Trump needed the farm- the Daily News, in 1998. “Once, he gave
ers of Iowa to win the Presidency, and he me Neil Diamond tickets. I didn’t even
would need them to win it again. To a know who Neil Diamond was.” Trump,
businessman like Icahn, it may have the great negotiator, could not get Cok-
seemed that, in the pay-for-play politics ing to sell. He enlisted the State of New
of Washington, everything has a price. Jersey to invoke eminent domain in order
But reëlection is priceless. to oust her from her property, but Cok-
ing fought in court and prevailed. She
cahn eventually succeeded in gaining derided the future President as “a mag-
I control of the Trump Taj Mahal casino. got, a cockroach, and a crumb.”
In 2014, a bankruptcy-court judge ex- Finally, in 2014, the house went up
pressed concern that Icahn Enterprises for auction. Trump had, by that time,
would just close the place, and insisted walked away from Atlantic City, and was
that company executives testify that they preparing to run for President. Coking
had no plans to shut the casino down. Ini- was living in a retirement home in Cal-
tially, Icahn promised to invest a hundred ifornia. The property sold to an unnamed
million dollars in the ailing facility. But buyer, for five hundred and thirty thou-
he ended up embroiled in yet another bit- sand dollars. The buyer was Carl Icahn.
ter union fight, and refused to yield on He knocked the house down. 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 59

SINGER OF SECRETS
nnie Clark, the songwriter and
A multi-instrumentalist known as
St. Vincent, has an apartment
in the East Village. She’s rented it since
2009. But last winter and spring, while
she was in town recording a new album,
she didn’t stay there. If she wanted some-
thing, she sent someone to get it. “I need
to not have to worry about the plumb-
ing and the vermin,” she said. “Also, the
trinkets and indicators of my actual life.”
She was immersed instead in the filtra-
tion of that actual life into song. She was
in a hermetic phase: celibate, solitary,
sober. “My monastic fantastic,” she called
it. A stomach bug in March left her un-
able to stand even the smell of alcohol,
and, anyway, there were so many things
she wanted to get done that she didn’t
have the time to be hungover. She ab-
stained from listening to music, except
her own, in order to keep her ears clear.
She was staying at the Marlton Hotel,
in Greenwich Village, a block away from
Electric Lady Studios, one of the places
where she was making the record. Most
days, she got up at sunrise, took a Pi-
lates class, and then headed to Electric
Lady, to work past sundown. She had
dinner in the studio, or else alone at a
nearby restaurant, or in her room. A
book or an episode of “The Handmaid’s
Tale,” and then early to bed. Not exactly
“Hammer of the Gods.”
It had been more than three years
since the release of her last album, which
she’d named “St. Vincent,” as though
it were her first under that name, rather
than her fourth—or fifth, if you in-
clude one she made with David Byrne,
in 2012. All these were well regarded,
and with each her reputation and fol-
lowing grew. The music was singular,
dense, modern, yet catchy and at times
soulful, in an odd kind of way.
Still, the self-titled album was widely
considered to be a breakthrough, a con-
summation of sensibility and talent, a
fulfillment of the St. Vincent conceit—
60 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
PROFILES
Art, songs, gossip, and St. Vincent.
BY NICK PAUMGARTEN
this somewhat severe performer who
was both her and not her. The act
was a blend of rock-goddess bloodlet-
ting and arch performance art, self-
expression and concealment. (She says
that she got the name from a reference,
in a Nick Cave song, to the Greenwich
Village hospital where Dylan Thomas
died.) The ensuing tour was called “Dig-
ital Witness,” named for a creepy/peppy
song on the album about our culture of
surveillance and oversharing. Her life
was a whirlwind. There was a Grammy,
some best-album acclaim and time on
the charts, and a binge of attention from
the music and fashion press, and, even-
tually, from the gossip industrial com-
plex, too, when she began a relationship
with the British actress and supermodel
Cara Delevingne. The Daily Mail, strug-
gling to take the measure of this Amer-
ican shape-shifting indie rocker, called
Clark “the female Bowie.” (The paper’s
stringers doorstepped Clark’s family.)
When that romance came to an end,
after more than a year, she began to be
photographed with Kristen Stewart, an-
other object of fan and media obsession,
and so the St. Vincent project took on
a new dimension: clickbait, gossip fod-
der. This bifurcation, as Clark called the
split between her public life as an artist
and the new one as a tabloid cartoon,
was disorienting to her, and even sad.
But there was a way to put it all to work:
write more songs. Clark, quoting her
friend and collaborator Annie-B Par-
son, the choreographer, told me one day,
“The best performers are those who have
a secret.”
or the new album—it comes out this
F fall, although Clark has not yet pub-
licly revealed its name—she hooked up
with the producer Jack Antonoff, who, in
addition to performing his own music,
under the name Bleachers, has co-writ-
ten and produced records for Taylor Swift
and Lorde. This has led people to sup-
pose that Clark is plotting a grab for pop
success. In June, she released a single called
“New York,” and on the evidence the sup-
position seems fair. It is—by her stan-
dards, anyway—a fairly straight-ahead
piano ballad, lamenting lost love, or ab-
sence of a kind. “You’re the only moth-
erfucker in the city who can handle me,”
she sings. Fans immediately began spec-
ulating that it was about Delevingne, or,
if you thought about it differently, David
Bowie, who died last year. “It’s a compos-
ite,” Clark told me, though of whom she
wouldn’t say. She objects to the idea that
songs should automatically be interpreted
as diaristic, especially when the songwriter
is a woman. “That’s just a sexist thing,”
she said. “ ‘Women do emotions but are
incapable of rational thought.’ ”
A few weeks before the release she
told me, “It’s rare that you get to say
‘This song could be someone’s favor-
ite.’ But this might be the one. Twenty
years of writing songs, and I’ve never
had that feeling.” It was May, at Elec-
tric Lady. She was in the studio with
Antonoff.“We’re doing the flavor-
crystally bits,” Clark said. This essen-
tially meant adding or removing pieces
of sound to or from the sonic stew they’d
spent months concocting. “There’s a lot
of information on this album,” she said.
Clark, who is thirty-four, was sitting
cross-legged on a couch. She had on
studded leather loafers, a suit jacket, and
black leggings with bones printed on
them, in the manner of a Halloween
skeleton costume. Her hair was black
and cut in a bob. (In the past, she has
dyed it blond, lavender, or gray, and has
been in and out of curls, its natural state.)
She wasn’t wearing much makeup. When
she performs, she puts on the war paint,
and usually goes in for fanciful costumes
and serious heels. For the “Digital Wit-
ness” tour, she wore a tight, perforated
fake-leather jumpsuit with a plunging
neckline, and smeared lipstick. Last year,
she did a show while attired in a purple
Annie Clark shreds on guitar, but not in a wanky way. “I don’t love it when the guitar sounds like a guitar,” she said.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARILYN MINTER THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 61

“She stood me up. I hosed off my Crocs for nothing.”
• •
foam toilet. Parson, who is responsible
for the rigid postmodern dance moves
that Clark has embraced in recent years,
referred to her aspect as “wintry,” which
doesn’t quite encompass her tendency to
throw herself around the stage or dive
off it to surf the crowd.
Now she seemed slight, fine-boned,
almost translucent—it was hard to
imagine her surviving a sea of fore-
arms, iPhones, and gropey hands. She
has a sharp jawline, a few freckles, and
great big green eyes, which can proj-
ect a range of seasons. She thinks be-
fore she speaks, asks a lot of questions,
and has a burly laugh.
On a coffee table in front of her were
a Chanel purse and containers of goji
berries, trail mix, and raw-almond mac-
aroons. She stood occasionally, to play
slashing, tinny lines on an unamplified
electric guitar of her own design—a red
Ernie Ball Music Man, from her signa-
ture line, that retails for upward of fifteen
hundred dollars—which, on playback,
sounded thick and throbby.
She shreds on electric guitar, but not
in a wanky way. It often doesn’t sound
like a guitar at all. Her widely cited fore-
bears are Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew,
of King Crimson. “I don’t love it when
the guitar sounds like a guitar,” she said.
“The problem is, people want to recog-
nize that it’s a guitar. I have facility, and
so I feel like I should use it more. I don’t
have any other ‘should’ in my music.” (It
62 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
can be funny, if dispiriting, to read, in
the comments sections of her perfor-
mances on YouTube, the arguments that
guitar nerds get into about her chops.)
When she listens to a playback, she
often buries her head in her arms, as
though she can hardly bear to hear her-
self, but, really, it’s just her way of listen-
ing hard. Once, during a mixing session,
while she was at the board and I was
behind her on a couch, surreptitiously
reading a text message, she picked up
her head, turned around, and said, “Did
I lose you there, Nick? I can feel when
attention is wandering.” Her cheery use
of the name of the person she is address-
ing can seem to contain a faint note of
mockery. There’d be times, in the fol-
lowing months, when I’d walk away from
a conversation with Clark feeling like
a character in a kung-fu movie who
emerges from a sword skirmish appar-
ently unscathed yet a moment later starts
gushing blood or dropping limbs.
Part of this is a function of Clark’s
solicitousness, her courteous manner.
“She’s created a vernacular of kindness
in her public life,” her close friend the
writer and indie musician Carrie Brown-
stein told me. “But the niceness comes
through a glass case.” Clark has ob-
served, of the music industry in this era,
that good manners are good business.
Clark and Antonoff had met casu-
ally around New York but hardly knew
each other until they somehow wound
up having what he described as an emo-
tionally intense dinner together at the
Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. “She was
very open about the things in her life,”
Antonoff said. “That’s what I was in-
terested in. Continuing to reveal more
and more. I said, ‘Let’s go for the lyrics
that people will tattoo on their arms.’ ”
lark has eight siblings, some half,
C some step. She’s the youngest of
her mother’s three girls. Clark’s parents
divorced when she was three. This was
in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, from a
Catholic family with eleven kids, was a
stockbroker and a prodigious reader who
could recite passages from “Ulysses”; for
a while, he had the girls convinced that
he was a Joycean scholar. When Clark
was ten, he gave her “Lucky Jim” for
Christmas. At thirteen, she got “Vile
Bodies.” She acquired a knack for punch-
ing up: in junior high, she toted around
the Bertrand Russell pamphlet “Why I
Am Not a Christian.”
By then, Clark’s mother, a social
worker, had remarried and moved to
the suburbs of Dallas. Clark was reared
mostly by her mother and stepfather,
and considers herself a Texan. Her fa-
ther remarried and had four kids, with
whom Clark is close. In 2010, he was
convicted of defrauding investors in a
penny-stock scheme, and was sentenced
to twelve years in prison. She has never
publicly talked about this, although she
told me, “I wrote a whole album about
it,” by which she meant “Strange Mercy”
(2011), her third. When I asked her if
she felt any shame about his crimes,
she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t
do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.”
As a child, Clark was shy, quiet, stu-
dious. She played soccer. (There’s a
charming video from a few years ago of
her demonstrating the mechanics of the
rainbow kick, while keeping her hands
in the pockets of her overcoat.) Her
nickname was M.I.A., because she was
so often holed up in her bedroom, lis-
tening to music. She was a classic-rock
kid—Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Je-
thro Tull—but the real gateway was Nir-
vana. “Nevermind” hit when she was
nine, and she was precocious enough to
notice. Like a lot of kids, she found a
mentor behind the counter of the local
record store, who turned her on to stuff
like Stereolab, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave.
Also like a lot of kids, she started play-
ing guitar when she was twelve. Her first
live performance was at age fifteen, at a
club in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighbor-
hood—she sat in with her guitar teacher
on “The Wind Cries Mary.” She played
bass in a heavy-metal band and guitar
in a hardcore outfit called the Skull Fuck-
ers: riot grrrl, queercore, Big Black.
Clark’s uncle—her mother’s brother—
is Tuck Andress, a jazz-guitar virtuoso
who, since 1978, has performed with his
wife, the singer Patti Cathcart, as the duo
Tuck & Patti. When Clark was a teen-
ager, she spent summers as their roadie
on tours of Asia and the United States.
After graduating from high school, she
worked as their tour manager in Europe.
It was a lean outfit, so she handled pretty
much everything, from settling with the
clubs to fetching towels and water—an
aspiring rock star’s mail room. The great-
est lesson, though, may have been wit-
nessing the power that music could have
over strangers. “I’d watch Tuck & Patti
bring people to tears,” she said.
“We knew she was serious about
this music thing,” Cathcart told me.
“You couldn’t keep her from it,” An-
dress said. “But, until you hit the road,
you have no idea. Of course, now she
travels in a dramatically more luxuri-
ous way than we do.”
Clark went to Berklee College of
Music, in Boston, but dropped out after
two and a half years, itchy to write and
record her own music rather than train
to be a crack session hire, which is how
she saw the program there. The best
thing she got from it, she says, is a love
of Stravinsky. She still can’t read music.
She moved to New York, but after three
months ran out of money and retreated
to Texas, where a friend who played
theremin with the Polyphonic Spree,
a big choral-rock band out of Dallas,
encouraged her to audition. She toured
with them as a singer and a guitar player
for a while.
Later, she hired on with Sufjan Ste-
vens, the orchestral-folk artist. He first
saw her at the Bowery Ballroom, where
she was performing solo as the warmup
act for a band she also played in, the Cas-
tanets. “She was up there with a guitar,
standing on a piece of plywood for a kick
drum, two microphones, one of them dis-
torted, and two amps,” Stevens told me.
“Obviously, she had talent.” Off she went
with another giant band. “At that time,
there were a dozen musicians touring in
my band, and there was always a mo-
ment in the set where people could ‘take
a solo,’ ” Stevens went on. “All the men
usually just played a lot of notes really
fast. But, when Annie’s turn came, she
refused to do the obvious white-male
masturbatory thing on the guitar. Instead,
she played her effects pedals. She made
such weird sounds. It was like the Loch
Ness monster giving birth inside a silo.”
At the time, Clark had her first
album, “Marry Me,” in the can, and
sometimes she performed solo before
her sets with Stevens. “I didn’t have
that performance character she has,”
he said. “I kind of wish I had. It’s both
personal and protective. To get atten-
tion as a woman, in a heteronormative
context where sex appeal sells, and to
sell yourself instead by emphasizing
your skill, ingenuity, and work ethic is
an incredible feat.”
The first song on “Marry Me,” “Now,
Now,” had her singing, “I’m not any,
any, any, any, any, any, any, anything,”
which, intentionally or not, sounds like
“I’m not Annie, Annie. . . .” You might
say that it was the opening salvo in
St. Vincent’s still unfolding act of con-
cealment and disclosure.
“This scaffolding that she has been
so deliberate in constructing has allowed
her to take more risks,” Brownstein said.
“She presents this narrow strand of vis-
ibility. She can mess around with the
whole thing of her being called doe-eyed
or a gamine. There’s a classic kind of pro-
fessionalism in the act, sort of like the
old country stars—Loretta Lynn, Johnny
Cash. They let you know when you have
access to their world. It’s a contrivance.”
he new album, by Clark’s own reck-
T oning, is the gloomiest one she’s
made: “It’s all about sex and drugs and
sadness.” It ends with a song about sui-
cide, which she sings in a husky voice
that is downright frightening. (“Like
any red-blooded American, I’ve con-
sidered suicide,” she told Marc Maron,
on his “WTF” podcast.) She says that
she wrote it on a tour bus en route from
Lithuania to Latvia. Sure, sometimes
the Baltics can bring you down, but,
beyond that, there’s clearly some seri-
ous heartbreak and darkness underly-
ing this new project.
Around the release of the “St. Vin-
cent” album, Clark had been on tour
more or less perpetually for ten years.
“I was running hard. There were fam-
ily things, illness,” she said. “I’m a lit-
tle like a greyhound. Get me running
in a direction, and I’ll run myself into
the ground.” Among other things, her
mother had a health crisis, which Clark
doesn’t like to talk about.
“I was hurling myself into crowds,
climbing the rafters,” she said. “I felt
like, if I’m not bruised and bloody
when I come offstage, I haven’t done
it right.”
There’s a song on the new album
called “Pills.” “Pills to grow, pills to
shrink, pills, pills, pills and a good stiff
drink / pills to fuck, pills to eat, pills,
pills, pills down the kitchen sink.” (As
it happens, those lines are sung by De-
levingne, who will be credited, for the
benefit of the British gossip press, as
an underground sensation named Kid
Monkey.) “I was trying to hold on,”
Clark recalled. “I didn’t have coping
mechanisms for tremendous anxiety
and depression. I was trying to get
through pharmaceutically.”
Clark may resent the assumption
that everything she writes about is per-
sonal, that the protagonist is always
her. “You couldn’t fact-check it,” she
said. To questions about sexuality, she
insists on fluidity. “I’m queer,” she said.
But “the goal is to be free of heteronor-
mativity. I’m queer, but queer more as
an outlook.”
Yet there is just one narrator on this
album. “The emotional tones are all
true,” she said. “The songs are the most
coherent expression of them. Songs are
like prophecies. They can be stronger
than you are.”
One day, during a mixing session
at Electric Lady, Clark told me that
her favorite lyric on the album was
“Teen-age Christian virgins holding
out their tongues / Paranoid secretions
falling on basement rugs.” Later, she
texted me to say that her favorite was
actually “ ‘Remember one Christmas
I gave you Jim Carroll / intended it as
a cautionary tale / you said you saw
yourself inside there / dog-eared it
like a how-to manual.’ Cause Christ-
mas—carol—Emanuel.” That’s from
a song about a hard-luck old friend
or lover named Johnny, who hits the
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 63
singer up for money or support. “You
saw me on movies and TV,” she sings.
“Annie, how could you do this to me?”
I asked her one day who Johnny was.
“Johnny’s just Johnny,” she said.
“Doesn’t everyone know a Johnny?”
s Clark neared the end of record-
A ing, she turned some attention to
the next phases—packaging, publicity,
performance. She has observed that,
when she makes the rounds to local
media outlets or on cattle-call press jun-
kets, she is repeatedly asked the same
questions, many of them dumb ones.
“You become a factory worker,” she said.
“When you have to say something over
and over, there’s a festering self-loath-
ing. No better way to feel like a fraud.”
She’d made what she was calling an
interview kit, a highly stylized short
film, which consists of her answering
typical questions. She sits in a chair with
her legs crossed, in a short pink skirt
and a semitransparent latex top before
a Day-Glo green backdrop, with a cam-
era and a sound crew of three female
models in heels, dog collars, dominatrix
hoods, and assless/chestless minidresses.
A screen reads, “Insert light banter,” and
then Clark reappears, saying, with a
strained smile, “It’s good to see you again.
Of course I remember you. Yah, good
to see you. How’s—how’s your kid?”
There follows a series of questions
and answers, with the former presented
as text onscreen—generic placeholders:
Q. Insert question about the inspi-
ration for this record.
A. I saw a woman alone in her car
singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,”
and I wanted to make a record that
would prevent that from ever happen-
ing again.
Q. Insert question about how much
of her work is autobiographical.
A. All of my work is autobiograph-
ical, both the factual elements of my
life and the fictional ones.
Q. Insert question about being a
woman in music.
A. What’s it like being a woman in
music? . . . Very good question.
The camera cuts to her interlaced
fingers. She wears paste-on finger-
nails, each with a letter. They spell out
“F-U-C-K-O-F-F.”
There are more—What’s it like to
play a show in heels? What are you
64 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
reading? What album would you want
on a desert island?—and her answers
are mostly but not always sardonic.
They were written by Brownstein. Clark
shot another film, a kind of surreal press
conference, with a similar deadpan ge-
stalt and Day-Glo color scheme and
trio of kinky models. In this version,
in reply to the woman-in-music ques-
tion, she performs a “Basic Instinct”
uncrossing of her legs, as the camera
zooms in on her crotch, accompanied
by the echo of a drop of water in a cave.
These videos don’t quite serve the util-
itarian function that Clark had put
forth—that of saving her time and en-
ergy by furnishing her interrogators with
workable answers—but they do convey
a sensibility that suits the brand: cheeky,
sexy, a little Dada. (They’re more on mes-
sage, perhaps, than her recently announced
role as a star of the new ad campaign for
Tiffany.) She’d prefer to embody certain
ideas than to have to verbalize them, when
the context comprises dubious, inherited,
unexamined assumptions about gender,
sexuality, songwriting, and celebrity. She
prefers gestures to words. She sent me a
photo of herself from a video shoot and
wrote, “Me performing gender.”
Meanwhile, she was having a cos-
tume made for her solo performance:
a “skin suit” that would give her the
appearance of being naked onstage.
One morning, I met her in downtown
Los Angeles, at the L.A. Theatre, an
old movie palace. She arrived alone
in a black BMW M-series coupe. The
costume’s designer, Desmond Evan
Smith, met her outside, to take advan-
tage of the sun. He had swatches of
latex, to compare with her skin. One
was too pink, another too yellow.
“This is me with a slight tan,” Clark
said. “I’m pretty pale.” She had on cutoff
jean shorts, a Western-style shirt knot-
ted above her navel, and the studded
loafers. Smith led her to a gilded hall-
way on the second floor to size her up
with a tape measure.
“What do you need me to do?” Clark
asked.
“I just need you to stand there and
look pretty,” Smith said.
“Done and done.”
He read out her neck, waist, and
bust numbers.
“Hear that?” Clark said. “Perfect
babe measurements.”
He peeled down her shorts to mea-
sure her hips. “Cheetahkini,” she said.
“Is that a portmanteau?”
“Spread for me,” Smith said. “Your
legs.”
“Comedy gold, Nick,” she said.
Later, when she’d started calling me
Uncle Nick or Nicky boy, I’d find my-
self wondering if this skin-suit episode
hadn’t been an elaborate setup, a prov-
ocation or even a trap laid by someone
known to be in command of her pre-
sentation in the world. Or maybe it
was just show biz, the same old meat
market now refracted through self-
aware layers of intention and irony.
“Should we get someone to volun-
teer to be my body?” Clark asked. “To
add a little pizzazz? I could choose my
own adventure here. I could get a cus-
tom crotch.” She began referring to
this as her “perfect pussy.” “I’ll scroll
through Pornhub and find one.”
fter the skin-suit sizing, Clark drove
A across town, to a coffee shop off
Melrose called Croft Alley, to have lunch
with her creative director, Willo Per-
ron. Perron, who is from Montreal, does
visual and brand work for a variety of
pop stars—Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar,
Rihanna. He helps them conceptual-
ize music videos, album covers, and
stage shows.
Perron, who is forty-three, wore
white jeans and a light-gray T-shirt
and black-and-white leopard-print
skater shoes from Yves Saint Laurent.
(“They may be a bit too rad dad,” he
said.) He had a droll, weary air; his ex-
pertise was assured but lightly worn.
He drives a Tesla. His girlfriend was
the waitress at Croft Alley.
He wanted to discuss the album
cover. There’d been a shoot in Los An-
geles, on the same set they used to film
the satirical interview kit. “Did you
look at the photos?” he asked Clark.
“Can we just do it? It’s good. It’s bold,
too. It’s the one that stood out.” He
was talking about a photograph I’d first
seen on the home screen of Clark’s cell
phone: an image of her research assis-
tant, a photographer and model named
Carlotta Kohl, with her head stuck
through a pinkish-red scrim. Really, it
was a picture of Kohl’s legs and rear
end, in hot-pink tights and a leopard
thong bodysuit. “This is not my ass,”
Clark had said. “This is my friend Car- “The best ideas are the ones that for there to be some physical obstacle
lotta’s ass. Isn’t it a nice ass?” might turn out to be terrible ideas,” to overcome, to help me focus. It’s about
Perron explained to me, “It all started, Clark said. manufacturing your strength. You’re
well— There hasn’t been a female lead They got into Perron’s Tesla and headed wondering why I came to you. It’s be-
who’s been able to be both absurdist and to his office, on the second floor of a house cause you worked with David Blaine.”
sexual. Sultriness but in a New Wave on a residential street nearby. A few as- Perron said nothing. “It should feel ba-
character. The energy of ‘Pee-wee’s Play- sistants worked quietly at laptops. There nanas, not pretentious,” Clark went on.
house,’ ‘Beetlejuice,’ the Cramps, the was a rack of file boxes, with the names Then Perron said, “Do we want to
B-52s, with some chips of Blondie. Think of clients: Drake, the xx, Bruno Mars, make a decision on this cover art?”
of Poison Ivy, from the Cramps: absurd Coldplay, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga. “Let me look again,” Clark said. “Op-
but hot.” They watched a rough cut of the tion one: Carlotta’s ass. Two, one of my
“Manically happy to the point of interview-kit press conference. “There selects. A head shot.”
being scary,” Clark said. are moments where you seem really “That gives me the last two or three
“We built these Day-Glo canvases pretentious,” Perron said. “But then, records,” Perron said. “I want this one
and had people sticking limbs and heads the brand should be ‘absurdist.’ ” to be more aggressive. Let’s move away
through the canvases. Then we found Clark said, “Yes, there are moments from that thing.”
that the most entertaining thing was where people will be, like, ‘Is she just “You mean that kooky thing?”
the back of the canvas: Carlotta os- a pretentious dickhead?’ ” “That sedated thing.”
triched into the wall, just her ass.” They discussed possible music-video Clark said, “Let’s do Carlotta’s ass.”
“Can we do it?” Clark said. directors and brought examples of their “The label will give us some push-
“It says everything that we want to work up onscreen. (One was a duo back,” Perron said. “But, honestly, I
say,” Perron said. called We Are from L.A., who are from think it’s great.”
“But will people assume that it’s my France.) Then they talked about the After a few moments, Clark said cheer-
ass? I’m doing all these body-double solo show, with the skin suit. ily, “Fun fact: Carlotta has scoliosis.”
things.” She went on, “I was thinking “Remember when I said the only
a photo of my face that encapsulates
the entire record—but maybe that’s a
ideas worth doing might be terrible
ideas?” Clark said. “This might be one.
“ I t’sandbeen a generative time, creatively,
I would like for it to set the
bit of a fool’s errand.” She mentioned Me solo with the guitar, and other char- stage for a broader vision,” Clark told
an image from the shoot of herself with acters who are shambolically me. It’s me one day, with uncharacteristic career-
some stylists around her. high-tech Tracy & the Plastics. I want oriented self-seriousness. Talk like this,
“It’s too ‘1989,’ ” Perron said. Carrie to write the dialogue.” out of rock-and-roll people, usually
“Too on the nose?” Clark said. “There’s dialogue?” Perron said, means projects, sidelines, interdisciplin-
“It’s a single cover, not an album wearily. ary schemes. For example, Clark had an
cover.” “Yes, I’m putting aside postmodern idea to take old Mussolini speeches and
Clark and Perron hooked up four choreography for this round. But I like make Mad Libs out of them. She’d have
years ago, when she was working on
the “St. Vincent” album. “That thing
was near-future cult leader,” he said.
“We were talking about media and
paranoia and blah, blah. Annie refer-
enced ‘Black Mirror.’ It had only been
on the BBC. And the films of
Jodorowsky. We were working with a
1970 psychedelic aesthetic, plus post-
modernist Italian, but in Memphis
style.” The cover showed Clark sit-
ting on a pink throne, with her gray
hair in a kind of modified Bride of
Frankenstein.
“One of the early conversations we
had was about how indie rock always
does the unintentional thing, so that it
doesn’t have an opportunity to fail,”
Perron said. By this, he meant, say, a
band in T-shirts, looking tough, stand-
ing in the back of a warehouse—au-
thenticity as a euphemism for the ab-
sence of an idea. “But we wanted
pop-level intention.”

• •
her nieces and nephews fill in the miss-
ing words and phrases; then, in an art
gallery in Italy, Isabella Rossellini would
sit and recite the Mad Libs (the script
delivered to her by Clark via an earpiece,
to add a layer of awkwardness) to a
soundtrack of chopped-up, sort-of-
recognizable Verdi and a monitor play-
ing clips of Mussolini himself.
Or motion pictures. Last year, Clark
co-wrote and directed a short film called
“The Birthday Party,”for “XX,” an an-
thology of horror films directed by
women. In it, a suburban mother hides
her dead husband’s body inside a large
panda suit at her young daughter’s birth-
day, and it keels over into the cake, pro-
viding the film’s subtitle: “The Mem-
ory Lucy Suppressed from Her Seventh
Birthday That Wasn’t Really Her Mom’s
Fault (Even Though Her Therapist Says
It’s Probably Why She Fears Intimacy).”
At one point, Clark had a development
deal to write and direct another film,
called “Young Lover,” which is also the
name of a song on the new album. A
writer in her twenties has a sadomas-
ochistic affair with an older married
woman—“ ‘Swimming Pool’ meets ‘Bit-
ter Moon’ meets ‘Blue Velvet’ ” is how
Clark pitched it. Recently, Lionsgate,
mining properties out of copyright, ap-
proached Clark with the idea of direct-
ing a film based on “The Picture of
Dorian Gray,” with a female protago-
66 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
nist. The writer is David Birke, who
wrote the screenplay for “Elle,” with Is-
abelle Huppert, which had become an
obsession of Clark’s. (In the film, Hup-
pert’s character’s father is in prison.)
Birke, it turned out, had taken his daugh-
ter to see a show during the “Marry Me”
tour, ten years ago. So, here was mutual
admiration, a chance to play together
in the sandbox of success.
The “Dorian Gray” treatment called
for six historical settings. “It would be
an expensive film to make,” Clark said.
She reckoned twenty-five million dol-
lars. “The likelihood of making this film
is, like, two per cent. But I don’t care,
because it’s fun. Worst-case scenario is
I get seen as a hardworking person with
ideas in a medium I’m interested in. I
sort of subscribe to the idea of the bus-
ier you are, the busier you are.”
he day after her session with Per-
T ron, we drove up to Laurel Can-
yon, to Compound Fracture, which is
what she calls the house that serves as
her studio and working space. Techni-
cally, it is not a residence. There is a live
room in the den (good for recording
drums), a studio in the garage, and, just
inside the front door, a white grand
piano, with a book on the music rack of
the complete Led Zeppelin (tablature
for intermediate guitar), and, next to it,
some lyrics scribbled on stationery from
the Freehand hotel in Chicago: “Doing
battle in the shadows / Baby you ain’t
rambo (rimbaud).” She keeps a neat,
sparse house. She’s a born de-clutterer.
The art work is eclectic: a Russ Meyer
nude, paintings made by people in ex-
treme mental distress, and a photo mural
of the high sage desert of West Texas.
There’s a downstairs sitting room—“If
musicians want to take a break,” Clark
emphasized—with a stocked bar, Wil-
liam Scott busts of Janet Jackson and
CeCe Winans, and some show-and-
tellable mementos. She took one down:
“I was on an ill-fated surfing trip to Bar-
bados, in my 90 S.P.F., and I looked
down and there was this cock and balls
made of coral.” This had survived the
purges. So had a brass heart sent by the
surviving members of Nirvana. In 2014,
when the band was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Clark
played Kurt Cobain’s part in a live per-
formance of “Lithium.” There was a
plaque in recognition of her inclusion,
in 2014, on Vanity Fair’s international
best-dressed list. “I’ve been wearing ath-
leisure ever since,” she said.
For a while, her friend Jenny Lewis,
the singer-songwriter, had slept on the
couch down here. “She’s like a tree,” Clark
said. “I would take shade in her. She
made me eat food, because I forgot.”
Lewis told me, “I would go upstairs,
make a quesadilla, cut it in half, and leave
a half there. Maybe the little mouse would
come. I’d come up later, see the half gone,
and think, My work is done here.”
“As an adult, I haven’t cohabitated
with another human,” Clark said. “Jenny
and I have been on tour so long, we
know the ways to not annoy people.”
When they first got to be friends,
years ago, “we Freaky Fridayed,” Lewis
said. Clark, eager to get away from New
York, moved to Los Angeles, and Lewis,
escaping some personal rubble in Cal-
ifornia, moved into Clark’s East Vil-
lage apartment.
“We shared so much,” Lewis said.
“The sacrifices you make for your music,
not having a family. Some things unique
to being a woman on the road, silly
stuff like removing your makeup in
filthy sinks around the world. Just being
a woman out there trying to keep it
together. Also, being a woman in charge,
and the nuances of that.”
They also both had fathers who had
been incarcerated. Lewis’s had been in
prison for two years—“Everyone in my
family goes to jail or prison,” she said—
and then was diagnosed with colon
cancer and died soon after.
lark wanted to go for a hike in the
C midday heat. Every day, she tries
to put herself in what she calls a stress
position—some kind of physical diffi-
culty, to force herself to persevere. We
made the short drive from her house
to a ridgeline with a view in the direc-
tion of Burbank, and began descend-
ing a trail through scrub and poison
oak. She had on some flats that she
called tennis shoes. The dryness made
the steeper pitches slick, and she ap-
proached them with great care. At one
point, a hum of bees caused her to shriek
and run. I was reminded of her song
“Rattlesnake,” which is about an en-
counter with a rattler while she was
hiking naked in the Texas desert. “I’m
afraid of everything,” she said. “I’m al-
most inured to it. Same with shame. I
figured out years ago that, if everything
is absurd, then there is nothing to be
afraid or ashamed of.”
Despite her stress-position talk, Clark
is a creature of habit, a curator of rou-
tine. Brownstein recalled insisting that
they go on a different hike from this
one, a couple of miles away. “She asked
that I never drag her anywhere unfa-
miliar again,” Brownstein told me.
An hour later, we were back at the
house. A mixing engineer named Cath-
erine Marks arrived, to listen to some
of the mixes on the new album. Clark
wanted a fresh set of ears. (The prin-
cipal mixer, back at Electric Lady, was
Tom Elmhirst, an eminence who has
worked with Adele, Lorde, Bowie, and
Beck.) Marks, a tall Australian, was
wearing a tank top that read “La La
La.” Clark had showered and changed
into a Pink Floyd “The Wall” T-shirt.
They talked about the low end on
one of the songs. “I want to give it more
balls,” Marks said, which had a good
ring to it, in the Aussie accent. “Tom
is a genius, obviously.”
“Best idea wins,” Clark said. They
talked for a bit about how unprepared
each of them had been for how hot
Elmhirst is. They went out to the ga-
rage studio, which was full of wonder-
ful toys—racks of guitars, various mikes,
and an array of vintage synthesizers.
Check it out, an E-mu Emulator II.
Marks sat down at the console.
“Smells nice in here. It doesn’t smell
like dudes.”
“It’s this Japanese incense.”
A Pro Tools session in the dying
light of a Laurel Canyon afternoon.
Marks got to work checking out the
mixes. It was easy to imagine Clark in
here alone for hours, days, weeks, thick-
ening and pruning the sound as it
scrolled by onscreen. Outside, you could
hear a neighbor playing drums and the
occasional honk of a lost Uber. Inside,
Marks was listening to a track that
Clark wanted to reimagine. “The vo-
coder’s not working for me,” Clark said.
“I like the guitar better. If you need to
sleaze it up, add Gary Glitter tuning.
Just add glam guitar.”
“I can’t turn off what turns me on,”
Clark’s voice was singing, while Clark
herself stood behind Marks, checking
her phone.
“Oh, my God,” she said, eyes suddenly
wide. “This is so stupid. Oh, my God.”
She typed a response, put her phone
down on a preamp, and began pacing in
anticipation of a reply. “It’s so convo-
luted.” She scooped up the phone and
read a new text. Typing a reply, she was
shaking her head. “What?” Marks asked.
“It’s a cuckold situation,” Clark said.
“I can’t talk about it.” This was more
than just hot goss. It was the most ex-
cited I’d ever seen her. Another exchange
of texts, more pacing, head-shaking, the
burly laugh. “It’s the first time I’ve felt
glee all day.”
ast month, Clark went into a stu-
L dio, in midtown Manhattan, with
her friend the producer, composer, and
pianist Thomas Bartlett, to record an al-
ternative version of the new album: just
her voice and his piano, a chance to hear,
and to preserve, the songs stripped down
to their bones. She had signed off on
the final masters of the record the day
before they started. “I took a whole night
off,” she said. She was wearing a leop-
ard-print bodysuit. “Now I’m done with
my emotional anorexia, my monastic
fantastic. It’s so good to just play music.”
It went like this: An engineer, Pat-
rick Dillett, played a track from the rec-
ord, then Bartlett spent a few minutes
learning it and vamping on an electric
piano, and then they went into the re-
cording studio and laid down a few takes,
him on a grand piano and her cross-
legged on a couch, singing into a mike.
After the first take, Dillett said, “It
sounds pretty. Is it supposed to?”
“Will I be ashamed of myself ?” she
asked him.
“I hope so. Isn’t that the point?”
They recorded in sequence and got
through several songs a day.
Later that week, she and Bartlett
invited a dozen or so friends to hear
her perform the album. Among them
were David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens, and
the singer Joan As Police Woman, who
was celebrating her birthday at the stu-
dio afterward. They sat in folding chairs.
Clark was on the couch, made up and
dressed fashionably in a long jacket
and pants.
“Now I can feel the feelings,” she
said. She made a show of unbuttoning
her pants in order to sing.
“The acceptance of beautiful mel-
ody is sometimes difficult for a down-
town New York musician,” Byrne had
told me earlier in the day. But here was
Clark, without all the sonic tricks—the
jagged guitar and the scavenged beats—
accepting her melodies, feeling the feel-
ings. She told me later, “I didn’t realize
the depth of the sorrow on the album
until I performed it that night.” The
next day, she was shelled and had to
cancel appointments. “It turns out that
that was crucial to my being done with
the experience of making it. Now I need
to do what I need to do as a performer:
I need to be able to disassociate.”
The final song on the album, the
one about suicide, concludes with her
repeating “It’s not the end,” in a voice
that makes you want to bring her hot
soup. On the night of the studio per-
formance, she finished singing and
sheepishly accepted the applause of her
friends. Then she buttoned up her pants
and said, “Party time, everyone.” 
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 67
 FICTION

LETTERING BY BRIAN REA

68 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY ROSE CROMWELL

 he storm came and erased the
T quiet.
Well, the older sister thought,
an island is never really quiet. Even with-
out the storm, there were waves and
wind and air-conditioners and genera-
tors and animals moving out there in
the dark.
What the storm had erased was the
silence from the other cabin. For hours,
there had been no laughing, no bottle
caps falling, none of the bickering that
the girls had grown used to over the
past two days.
This was because there were no
more adults. They’d been left alone
on the island, the two little girls. Four
and seven. Pretty little things, strang-
ers called them. What dolls! Their
faces were exactly like their mother’s.
Hoochies- in-waiting, their mother
joked, but she watched them anxiously
from the corner of her eye. She was a
good mother.
The fluffy white dog had at least
stopped his yowling. He had crept close
to the girls’ bed, but when they tried
to stroke him he snapped at their hands.
The animal was torn between his ha-
tred of children and his hatred of the
wild storm outside.
he big sister said, Once upon a
T—princess,
time, there was a—
the little sister said.
Rabbit, the big sister said.
Rabbit princess, the little sister said.
Once upon a time, there was a tiny
purple rabbit, the older sister said. A
man saw her and scooped her up in
his net. Her family tried to stop him,
but they couldn’t. The man went into
the city and took the rabbit to a pet
store and put her into a box in the win-
dow. All day long people stuck their
hands in to touch the purple rabbit.
Finally, a girl came in and bought the
rabbit and took her home. It was bet-
ter there, but the rabbit still missed her
family. She grew and slept with the
girl in her bed, but most days she stared
out the window all sad. She began to
forget that she was a rabbit. One day,
the girl put a leash on the rabbit and
they went out into the park. The rab-
bit looked up and saw another rabbit
staring at her from the edge of the
woods. They looked at each other long
enough for her to remember that she
was not a girl but a rabbit, and the
other rabbit was her own sister. The
girl was kind to her and gave her food,
but the rabbit looked at her sister and
she knew that this was her only chance.
She slipped out of the collar and ran
as fast as she could over the field, and
she and her sister hopped into the for-
est. The rabbit family was so happy to
see her. They had a party, dancing and
singing and eating cabbage and car-
rots. The end.
The little sister was asleep. The two
fishing cabins rocked on their stilts, the
dock ground against the shore, the wind
spoke through the cracks in the win-
dow frames, the palms lashed, the waves
shattered and roared. The older girl
held her little sister.
All night, she and the island were
awake, the island because it never
slept, the girl because she knew that
only her ferocious attention would keep
them safe.
efore they were left alone in the
B fishing camp on the island in the
middle of the ocean, there had been
Smokey Joe and Melanie. They were
strangers to the girls. He wore a red
bandanna above his eyebrows. Her
shirts couldn’t hold in all her flesh.
The older girl knew that the two
adults were nervous, because they
didn’t stop smoking and arguing in
hushed voices while the girls watched
“Snow White” over and over. It was
the only tape they’d brought. In the
afternoon, Smokey Joe took the girls
on a walk to the pond at the center
of the island. It was a weird place. Be-
yond the sandy bay where the dock
and the cabin were, the land grew
rough with a kind of spongy stone
and the trees seemed shrunken and
bent by the wind.
Watch out, he told them. A Holly-
wood movie had been made here a long
time ago and some monkeys had es-
caped. You come close, they’ll rip your
hair out and steal your food from your
bowl and throw poop at your head. He
was joking, maybe. It was hard to tell.
They didn’t see any monkeys, though
they did see huge black palmetto bugs,
a rat snake sunning itself on the sandy
path, long-necked white birds that
Smokey Joe called ibises.
In the cabin, Melanie gave them
hamburger patties without ketchup or
buns and told them not to touch the
dog because he was a mean little sucker.
The younger sister didn’t listen, and
suddenly her forearm was bleeding.
Melanie shrugged and said, Told you.
The older girl got one of their moth-
er’s Maxi Pads from her dopp kit and
wrapped it, sticker side out, around her
sister’s arm.
Smokey Joe sat outside all afternoon
under the purple tree with its nubby
green-banana fingers. He was listen-
ing to his CB radio. Then he stood up
and shouted for Melanie. Melanie ran
out, her breasts and belly moving in all
kinds of directions under her shirt. The
older sister heard Smokey Joe say, Safer
to leave ’em.
Melanie poked her head into the cabin.
She was pale under her orangey tan.
She said, Stay here. If someone
shows up, don’t you go with no man.
Girls, listen to me. Stay here, be good.
I’ll send a lady to get you in a few
hours.
The girls went outside and watched
Smokey Joe and Melanie running down
the dock. Melanie was screaming for
the dog, but the dog stood still and
didn’t follow her. And then Joe threw
off the lines and Melanie jumped into
the boat, almost missing it. One leg
dangled in the water, then she lifted
it over the side and they took off at
full speed.
Before that, exactly one day before
Smokey Joe and Melanie left the girls
alone on the island, their mother had
come to them in their own cabin, and
she was dressed all fancy and smelled
like a garden. Her boyfriend Ernesto
and she were going out in Ernesto’s
boat, she said. We’ll only be gone for
an hour or two, honey bears. She pressed
them close to her, her face made up
with blue eyeshadow, her eyelashes so
thick and long that it was a wonder
she could see. She left red kisses on
their cheeks.
But the hours clicked by and she
didn’t come back at all. When night
fell, the girls had to sleep on the
floor in Melanie and Smokey Joe’s
cabin, and Melanie and Smokey Joe
whispered behind their bedroom door
all night.
And, two days before that, their
mother had come into the girls’ room
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 69
in Fort Lauderdale in the middle of
the night and thrown a few of their
things into a bag and said, We’re going
on a boat ride, pretties! Ernesto’s going
to make us rich, and she laughed. Their
mother was so beautiful she just glinted
off light. Before the sun was even up,
they were on Ernesto’s boat, going fast
through the dark. And then they’d come
to this little island, and the adults had
talked all day and all night
in the other cabin, and
their mother had seemed
wild on the inside, flushed
on the outside.
And before Ernesto,
many nights before him,
their mother would come
home very late, jangling.
She usually made dinner
for the girls, then left the
older girl in charge of get-
ting her sister’s teeth brushed and read-
ing her to sleep. The older girl never
slept in her own bed, always just stayed
beside her sister until their mother was
home. Sometimes, when the mother
came in, she would get the girls up in
their nightgowns, the night still in the
windows, and sprinklers spitting in the
courtyard, and she’d smell of vodka and
smoke and money, and would put music
on too loud and they’d all dance. Their
mother would smoke cigarettes and fry
up eggs and pancakes that she’d top
with strawberry ice cream. She’d talk
about the other women she worked
with. Idiots, she called them. Skanks.
She didn’t trust other women. They
were all backstabbing bitches who’d
rob you sooner than help you. She liked
men. Men were easy. You knew where
you were with men. Women were too
complicated. You always had to guess.
You couldn’t give them an inch or they’d
ruin you, she said.
Before they came to Fort Lauder-
dale’s blazing sun they had been in Tra-
verse City, where the older girl remem-
bered only cherries and frozen fingers.
Before Traverse City, San Jose with
its huge aloe plants and the laundro-
mat below their apartment chugging
all day.
Before San Jose, Brookline, where
the little sister came to them in a tiny
blanket of blue and pink stripes, a
cocked hat.
Before Brookline, Phoenix, where
70 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
they lived with a man who may have
been the little sister’s father.
Before Phoenix, she was too small to
remember. Or maybe there was nothing.
he morning was painfully clear.
T Once, at Goodwill, the mother
had found a glass that she rang with
a fingernail, and the glass sang in a
high and perfect voice. The sunlight
was like that after the
storm.
There was nobody
to tell them not to, so
they ate grape jelly with
spoons for breakfast. They
watched “Snow White”
on the VCR again.
The dog whimpered
at the door. He had a lit-
tle pad in the bathroom
where he did his business.
Melanie’s so damn lazy, their mother
had muttered when she first saw the
pad. What a lazy bitch. But maybe, the
older sister thought, the dog just needed
a little air. She got up and put his pink
leash on, and let him out. The dog went
down the steps so fast that he pulled
the leash out of her hand. He looked
back at the girl, and she could see the
gears turning in his head, then he sped
off into the woods. She called for him,
but he wouldn’t come.
She went inside and didn’t tell her
sister what had happened. It wasn’t
until dinner—tuna fish and crackers
and cheese—that the little sister looked
around and said, Where’s the dog?
The older sister shrugged and said,
I think he ran off.
The little sister started crying, and
both girls went outside with a bowl of
water and a can of tuna and opened it
and called and called for the dog. He
trotted out of the forest. There were
sticks in his fur and mud on his belly,
but he looked happy. He wouldn’t come
near the girls, only growled until they
went inside, and then watched them
through the screen door as he gulped
down his food. The older sister lunged
out the door and tried to grab his leash,
but he was too fast and disappeared
again.
The little girl stopped crying only
when her sister brought out Melanie’s
cookies. Don’t you touch my damn
Oreos, she’d said to them, but she wasn’t
around to yell now. They ate them all.
Late at night, there was a terrible
grinding sound and the girls went
outside with flashlights and looked
at the air-conditioning unit, and saw
that a brown snake had fallen into it
from the palm trees; with every turn
of the blade, a millimetre more of the
snake was being eaten by the fan.
They watched the snake dissolve bit
by bit until the skin fell all the way
through and lay, empty of meat, on
the ground.
he girls woke up sticky and hot.
T The air-conditioning had died
sometime before dawn.
The older one thought the snake
had gummed things up, but nothing
was working—no lights, no water pump,
no refrigerator—and then she under-
stood that it was the generator. She
went out back and kicked it. She found
a hole where the gas went in and looked
inside with her flashlight.
We runned out of gas, she told her
sister, who was sucking her fingers
again, the way she had when she was
a baby.
Fix it, the little sister said, I’m so
hot. But they looked and looked and
there was no more fuel. When the older
sister tried to flush the toilet, it wouldn’t
flush. When the cabin started to smell
from the toilet and the dog’s pad, they
moved back to the other cabin, where
their mother’s stuff was still in the clos-
ets and on the dresser. They began going
to the bathroom outside.
There was no food in their cabin,
so they took everything they could find
from Melanie and Smokey Joe’s. Fro-
zen peas, which they ate like popcorn,
one Hungry-Man TV dinner, which
they opened and left out for the dog.
A block of cheese and yellow mustard.
White bread, more cheese in a spray
can, a can of beans. Bourbon and ci-
gars that smelled like a spice drawer.
In the afternoon, they put on their
mother’s clothes, her makeup. They
looked like tiny versions of her, both
of them, though the little sister didn’t
need to go in the sun to be tanned.
The older sister read everything she
could to her little sister. There was one
fat book, yellow and swollen, on Mel-
anie’s nightstand. It had a man on the
cover with an axe over his shoulder
but no shirt. She read the cereal box
she dug out of the garbage. She read
the old magazines on the coffee table.
The older girl understood that there
was no more water only when they
were thirsty and she tried to turn on
the faucet. She ignored her thirst for a
long time, until her throat felt stuffed
with cotton and the little girl wouldn’t
stop complaining.
It was going to be dark in a half
hour or so. The sun was burning at the
edge of the ocean.
The older sister sighed. I think we
have to walk to the pond, she said.
The little sister started to cry. But
the monkeys, she said.
We’ll make lots of noise. They won’t
bother us if we’re together, the older sis-
ter said, and they walked very fast, hand
in hand, to the pond, and it was twilight
when they got back. The girls saw a
white flash in the woods, and the little
one was so frightened that she dropped
her bucket and spilled half her water,
and she ran all the way back to the cabin,
slamming the door. The older sister cried
with rage and carried the buckets back
by herself. Out of meanness, she wouldn’t
let her little sister drink the water until
she’d put it in a saucepan and set it over
the charcoal grill to boil, which took a
very, very long time, until the moon was
fat and bright in the sky.
the magazine, but the younger sister
made the noises the mother made when
she was in her bedroom with her boy-
friends. Then she started crying. At
first she only shook her head when her
sister asked her why. Finally she said,
I miss the dog.
Nobody could miss that dog, the
older sister thought.
How could Melanie leave him? the
little sister said.
Then the older sister thought, Oh.
Let’s go on a dog hunt, she said.
They took the steak knife, binocu-
lars, an old whiskey bottle with the last
of their boiled water, and a giant pan-
ama hat they’d found in a closet, which
the older sister wore because she burned
to blisters all the time. They took the
rest of the crackers and sprayed them-
selves with the last of Melanie’s Skin
So Soft bug spray.
The little sister was happy again. It
was early afternoon. There was no wind,
and the heat of the clearing cooled
when they went into the forest. They
sang the dog’s name, walking. The older
sister nervously scanned the branches
for monkeys.
The pond held a great gray heron,
unmoving, like a sculpture. There were
cypress knees, like stalagmites, in the
shallows.
On the far side of the pond, there
was a small wooden rowboat turned
upside down. It was a flaking blue. The
older sister kicked it, wondering how
to drag it through the forest toward
the cove and the dock. Then she won-
dered how she would make sure, once
they’d launched it, that they floated
toward land, and not into the deep-
blue sea. Maybe it was best just to wait
for the lady Melanie was supposed
to send.
When she looked up, her little sis-
ter had vanished. Her heart dropped
out of her body. She called her sis-
ter’s name, then screamed it over and
over.
She heard a laugh from below, and
her sister slid out from under a lip of
rock that made a shallow invisible cave.
That was so mean, the older sister
yelled, and the little sister shrugged
and said, Sorry, though she wasn’t.
There could’ve been snakes there,
the older sister said.
But there weren’t, the little one said.
They walked all the way across the

Ione’snoutthehair
morning, the older girl took
her sister’s braids and the little
fluffed out into a beautiful
dark cloud.
They took the only knife, a steak
knife, and whittled points into the ends
of sticks, and they went into the chilly
shallow water to fish, because they’d
have to find food soon. But the water
was so nice and the fish were so little
that they abandoned the spears and
swam all morning.
They painted their fingernails with
polish they found in Melanie’s medi-
cine cabinet. Then they painted their
toenails, then tattoos of hearts on their
biceps, which made their skin itch until
they scratched the hearts off.
They found a candy bar in a night-
stand, then a dirty magazine under
Smokey Joe’s bed. A woman was lick-
ing a pearl off another woman’s pink
private skin.
Yuck, the older sister said and threw
island and found a yellow-sand beach
on the other side. Their dresses were
soaked with sweat when they got back
to the pond and filled the whiskey bot-
tle up with green water.
Back in the fishing camp, the dog
was waiting on the steps. The girls
poured out unboiled water for him,
and the dog lapped it up, watching
them with his angry black-button
eyes. Even though the little sister sang
softly to him in her voice that their
mother always said would knock the
angels out of Heaven, the dog wouldn’t
come near, and backed into the for-
est again.
he girls’ clothes were so dirty that
T they put on Smokey Joe’s last two
clean T-shirts. They swept the path
behind the girls like ball gowns when
they ran, flashes of red and blue through
the green-gold forest.
The little sister carried her bucket
all the way back from the pond with-
out complaining.
They caught three crabs under the
dock with their hands and boiled them,
and the flesh tasted like butter, and the
water they boiled the crabs in they
drank like soup, and afterward they
felt full for a little while.
Then the rest of the food was gone.
The bananas on the tree, Smokey Joe
had said, were not ripe yet and would
make them sick if they tried to eat
them. The older sister had heard of
people eating bugs and there were
plenty of cockroaches everywhere, but
the thought of the crunch under her
teeth made her feel ill.
They ate cherry ChapStick. They
opened an unlabelled can they found
in the back of the cabinet, mandarin
oranges. They ate strange red berries
from the bushes, though the mother
had always said never to do that.
I’m hungry, the little sister said.
Once upon a time, the big sister
said, there was a boy and a girl whose
family had no food at all. You could
see their ribs. The mother had a boy-
friend who didn’t like the kids. One
day, the boyfriend told the mother
that they had to get rid of the kids and
that he was going to take them for a
hike and leave them way out in the
woods. The girl had heard the adults
talking that night, and in the morn-
72 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
PROJECT
Your clock’s been turned to zero,
though there is no zero on a clock.
Your skin is petal soft no matter
how old the starter kit was—
but you will get tired or bored.
That’s when the clock starts up.
Your parents want you happy,
but we also want to set you down,
to get back to our old lives.
How will you turn against us
once you figure this out?
You’re about to discover intention.
There are four stuffed animals
in front of you on strings.
They are targets.
You won’t understand this for a while.
You flail your arms.
Sometimes you make one bounce.
Are humans the only creatures
who must learn
to move with purpose?
Is that why we harp on motive,
why we think of earth
as some god’s handiwork?
—Rae Armantrout
ing she filled her pockets with cereal. lady came out. She was nice to them,
They weren’t starving if they had and she kept giving them cake and
cereal, the little sister said. mini pizzas.
The girl filled her pockets with blue And milk, the younger sister said.
pebbles from the fish tank. And when And apples.
the boyfriend led them out into the There was a television. The lady
woods she dropped the pebbles one didn’t even make them sit down to eat
by one by the side of the path, so that their food; they just lay there and
when he vanished they could find their watched cartoons and ate all day long.
way back. The boy and the girl fol- The boy and the girl got really fat. And
lowed the stones home, and the mother when they were superfat the lady tied
was so happy to see them. But the them up and tried to shove them into
boyfriend grew angry. The next day, the oven like turkeys. But the girl was
he took them out again, but he’d sewn smart. She said, Oh, let me give you
up their pockets so they couldn’t leave one last kiss! And the lady leaned her
a trail. He left them, and they wan- head forward, and the girl took a bite
dered and wandered and found a cave out of her throat. Because she’d become
to hide in for the night. The next a champion eater at the lady’s house,
morning they smelled wood smoke she ate the lady all the way down until
and followed it to find a little cabin there was nothing left, not even blood.
out in the woods, made of cookies and And the boy and the girl stayed all win-
candy. So they ran over and started ter eating the cookie house, and when
taking bites out of the house, because spring came they’d turned into adults.
they hadn’t eaten in a long time. A Then they went to find the boyfriend.
 Why? the little sister said.
To eat him, the older sister said.
People eat people? the little sister
said.
Sometimes you just have to, the big
sister said.
No, the little sister said.
Fine. The lady was made of whipped
cream, then, the older sister said. They
never found the boyfriend. But they
would have eaten him if they had.
he older sister’s head was gentle
T with clouds. The sand of the bay
smelled like almonds to her. She was
sitting alone by the charcoal grill, wait-
ing for the water to boil. Her sister was
inside, singing herself to sleep. She was
happy, the older sister realized. Over-
head was the thinning moon. Across
the water came the squeak and rat-
tle of some big birds with blood-red
throats that were passing on their way
to somewhere colder, somewhere larger,
somewhere better than here.
here’s a man, the little sister said
TThere’s
from the screen door.
no man, the older sister said
dreamily.
He’s in a boat. On the dock, the lit-
tle sister said, and now the big sister
could hear the purr of the motor. She
stood up so fast that her head lost blood
and she fell and then got to her knees
and stood again.
Go, she whispered, and dragged her
sister through the door, down the steps,
into the woods.
They crouched in the ferns, and the
ferns covered them. They were naked,
and the ground beneath their bare feet
could have been full of snakes, lizards,
spiders.
The man’s boots pounded down the
dock. He came into view. He was stocky,
with jeans and a sweaty T-shirt, a thick
gold chain around his neck. The older
sister knew—something whispered
silently to her—that he was in fact a
bad man.
Be quiet, the whisper said. Get away.
He went into the girls’ cabin and
there were crashing noises; he went
into Melanie and Smokey Joe’s cabin
and again there were crashing noises.
When he came out, he kicked over the
grill, and the older girl put her hand
over her sister’s mouth to keep her from
crying out. He turned around slowly,
looking into the woods.
Come on out, he shouted. He had
an accent. I know you’re here.
He waited, and said, We got your
mama with us. Don’t you want to see
your mama? We’ll make you a big old
feast and you can sit in her lap and eat
it all up. Bet you’re hungry.
The older sister struggled to keep
the little one from standing. The man
must have heard, because his head swiv-
elled in their direction.
Run, the older girl said, and they
ran through the woods, the palmettos
lashing at their ankles and making them
bleed. They found the path, they found
the pond.
The older girl slid into the cave near
the boat, then her little sister came in,
and she held her tightly.
Soon they heard the man’s footsteps
crashing and his breath wheezing in
and out, hard. Girls, he said, I saw you.
I know you’re around here.
His boots came into view, so close.
He moved toward the boat, and kicked
it once, twice, then the girls saw the
rotten wood break apart and a hun-
dred frightened bugs ran out.
Fine, he said. Ain’t going to chase
you all day. Starve to death if you like.
The girls were silent, shaking, until
they heard his footsteps fading. After
too long, they heard the boat start up,
then the motor thinned and he was
gone. Still, they waited.
There was a rustling at their feet,
and the little dog slunk out of the cave,
where he must have been hiding all
this time, inches away. The girls watched
him gather the pink leash in his mouth
and trot himself off.
here’s the lady? the little sister
W said. She’s taking a long time.
What lady? the older sister said.
The one to save us, the little sister
said. That Melanie’s sending.
The older sister had forgotten there
was supposed to be a lady. The girls
were deep in their nest. They’d taken
all the pillows and sheets in the camp
and piled them in the middle of the
living room of their cabin, where a
breeze passed over their sweaty bodies
on its way from the screen door out
the window. It was late in the morn-
ing, but the girls’ bones didn’t want to
get up. Lie still, the bones said. Their
hearts made music in their ears.
The older sister could almost see
the lady now, coming down the dock.
She’d wear a blue dress with a skirt so
huge they could hide beneath it; she’d
have their mother’s yellow hair that
was dark at the roots. She’d smile down
at them. Girls, she’d whisper. Come
home with me.
They hadn’t eaten in three days.
Somewhere not too far away, the white
dog had howled all night until his howls
sounded like wind. The older sister had
dreamed of the courtyard of their Fort
Lauderdale apartment, of the fountain’s
turquoise water and the red-dyed cedar
mulch and the tree heavy with sweet
oranges that almost peeled themselves
in your fingers, the golden sun pour-
ing down over everything, all of it
shimmering but untouchable, as if be-
hind glass.
ight came, day came, night came.
N The dog had gone silent. The
little sister’s ribs were sharp beneath
her skin. Her eyes were hot, the way
their mother’s were hot when she came
home from work, wanting to dance,
smoke, sing.
The older sister’s body was made of
air. She was a balloon, skidding over
the ground. The light on the waves in
the bay made her cry, but not with sad-
ness. It was so beautiful, it wanted to
speak to her; it was about to say some-
thing if she only watched hard enough.
The zip of a mosquito near her ear
was a needling beauty. She let the mos-
quito land on her skin, and slowly it
pulsed and pumped and she felt her
blood rising up into the small creature.
It was all so much. Through the
years to come, she’d remember these
days of calm. She’d hold these beauti-
ful soft days in her as the years slowly
moved from terrible to bearable to bet-
ter, and she would feel herself grow-
ing, sharpening. She’d learn the lan-
guage of men and use it against them:
she’d become a lawyer. Her little sister,
so lovely, so fragile, only ever wanted
to be held. For a long time, the older
sister was the one who did this for her.
She was the shell. But then the little
sister met a man who first gave her
love, then withdrew it until she be-
lieved the things he believed. He made
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 73
her give up her last name, which the
older sister had fought their whole
childhood to keep, though their third
foster parents had wanted to adopt
them, because it was the only thing
they had of their mother. And then
one day the older sister stood in the
pews and watched her baby sister get
married to this man. She wore a white
dress with a skirt so giant she could
barely walk, and bound herself to him.
The older sister watched and started
to shake. She cried. An ugly wish spread
in her like ink in water: that she and
her sister had stayed on the island all
those years ago; that they’d slowly van-
ished into their hunger until they turned
into sunlight and dust.
Once upon a time, the older sister
croaked, and the little sister whispered,
No. Shush, please.
Once upon a time, the older sister
said, there were two little girls made
out of air. They were so beautiful that
everyone who saw them wanted to
scoop them up and put them into their
pockets. One day, the god of wind saw
them and loved them so much that he
lifted them up and took them with him
to the clouds to be his daughters. And
they lived there forever with their fa-
ther, and it was full of rainbows and
people singing and good things to eat
and soft beds made of feathers.
The end, the little sister said.
he younger sister dozed in the
T cabin. The older one let her body
float above the path to the pond and
back with water. There was no more
charcoal, so they had to boil it over
sticks she collected on the way back.
Twenty feet from the cabins, she
heard the slightest of sounds. She
peered into the palmettos and saw a
glint of metal. She walked through the
prickles and not one reached out to
scratch her.
It was the dog. He had spun his
leash so tightly around a scrub oak that
his tongue was extended and his eyes
bulged. He was no longer white fluff
but knots of yellow and brown string.
The girl took the steak knife from
her belt and knelt and sawed and sawed.
She had to take breaks, because she
kept getting dizzy. At last the leash
broke and the dog stood and stumbled
off into the underbrush again. There
74 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
he would live forever, the girl knew. He
would stay in that forest, running and
howling and eating birds and fish and
lizards. That dog was too mean to
ever die.
She came back to find her sister
naked outside the cabin, under the ba-
nana tree. Look, the little girl said, suck-
ing her fingers.
The older sister looked but saw
nothing. She did not see the unripe
bananas like stubby fingers hanging
down, which had been there when she
went to get the water; she did not see
the peels, which she would find later
in the garbage.
There was a monkey, the little sis-
ter said. A tiny, tiny monkey. It had
fingers like person fingers. It sat on the
roof and peeled the bananas and ate
them all up.
The older girl looked at the little
sister. She stared back with round eyes.
There was a long silence, and some-
thing in the older sister turned away,
even as she nodded.
All right, then. There was a monkey.
Now, over the wind, all the way
across the pond, from the beach on the
other side of the island, there came a
noise the older sister caught, then lost,
then caught again. It was a song their
mother had often sung along to on the
radio in the car. A song—that meant
a radio. The older girl took her sister’s
face in her hands. We got to get ready
fast, she said. Then we got to run.
hey scrubbed themselves in the
T waves and, wet, put on their moth-
er’s dresses, the only clean things there
were. Shifts in tropical patterns that
came down below the older girl’s knees,
to the younger one’s ankles; on their
mother those dresses were so short
you could sometimes see her under-
wear when she was sitting down. They
poured her perfume all over their wrists
and heads.
Then they ran. They stopped when
they were still among the trees, breath-
ing heavily.
There was a boat anchored not far
out, and a rubber dinghy pulled up on
the wet part of the sand and a fishing
pole buried next to it. A woman lay
on a blanket. She was white, though
her shoulders and thighs were going
pink. She was plump. She was mouth-
ing along to a different song on the
radio, her feet waggling back and forth
in time.
There was a man beside the dinghy
with his swimming trunks down to his
knees. He was peeing, the girls saw. He
didn’t even wash his hands in the waves,
but went over to the woman and
stooped and put them in a cooler for
a minute, then popped them under the
woman’s bikini bottom while she
screamed and swatted at him.
He laughed and took a beer can
from the cooler and opened it and drank
deeply, and picked up a sandwich in
waxed paper. The older sister’s mouth
watered. She was glad when he crum-
pled the paper up and didn’t litter but
put it neatly back into the cooler.
The older girl looked at her sister.
She was wild. You could see all her
bones. The older sister took the brown
leaves out of the little one’s hair, brushed
the dirt off her dress, took out their
mother’s lipstick, which she’d put into
her pocket as they ran out the door.
She put lipstick on her sister’s lips,
then made tiny circles on her cheeks.
Now me, she ordered, and her little
sister’s face pursed in concentration
and the lipstick tickled on her own
cheeks and lips.
She put the lipstick back into her
pocket. She would keep the gold car-
tridge of it long after the makeup in-
side was gone and only a sweet waxy
smell of her mother remained.
Ready? she said. Her sister nodded
and took her hand. Together they
stepped out of the shadows and onto
the blazing beach.
The woman on the blanket looked
up at them, then shaded her eyes with
a hand to see better. Later the woman
would visit the girls once, then dis-
appear after she left the older sister a
gift, a vision of how the sisters had
looked just then: ghost girls in clown
makeup and floral sacks, creeping out
of the dark forest. The woman’s mouth
opened and a cry of alarm stuck in
her throat. She raised her arms in
amazement. The girls took the gesture
for a welcome. Though they were very
tired and felt tiny under the angry
sun, they ran. 
NEWYORKER.COM
Lauren Groff reads her short story.
 THE
HE CRITICS
CRITI

A CRITIC AT LARGE

THE STONE GUEST

Can Sigmund Freud ever be killed?

BY LOUIS MENAND

SJuneigmund Freud almost didn’t make

it out of Vienna in 1938. He left on
4th, on the Orient Express, three
months after the German Army en-
tered the city. Even though the perse-
cution of Viennese Jews had begun
immediately—Edward R. Murrow, in
Vienna for CBS radio when the Ger-
mans arrived, was an eyewitness to the
ransacking of Jewish homes—Freud
ILLUSTRATION
BY ARMANDO VEVE
had resisted pleas from friends that he
flee. He changed his mind after his
daughter Anna was arrested and inter-
rogated by the Gestapo. He was able
to get some of his family out, but he
left four sisters behind. All of them died
in the camps, one, of starvation, at The-
resienstadt; the others, probably by gas,
at Auschwitz and Treblinka.
London was Freud’s refuge, and
friends set him up in Hampstead, in a
big house that is now the Freud Mu-
seum. On January 28, 1939, Virginia and
Leonard Woolf came for tea.The Woolfs,
the founders and owners of the Ho-
garth Press, had been Freud’s British pub-
lishers since 1924; Hogarth later pub-
lished the twenty-four-volume translation
of Freud’s works, under the editorship
of Anna Freud and James Strachey, that
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 75

“We’re looking for an outfit that says we are really
going to buckle down this semester.”
• •
is known as the Standard Edition. This
was the Woolfs’ only meeting with Freud.
English was one of Freud’s many
languages. (After he settled in Hamp-
stead, the BBC taped him speaking,
the only such recording in existence.)
But he was eighty-two and suffering
from cancer of the jaw, and conversa-
tion with the Woolfs was awkward. He
“was sitting in a great library with lit-
tle statues at a large scrupulously tidy
shiny table,” Virginia wrote in her diary.
“A screwed up shrunk very old man:
with a monkey’s light eyes, paralyzed
spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but
alert.” He was formal and courteous in
an old-fashioned way, and presented
her with a narcissus. The stage had been
carefully set.
The Woolfs were not easily im-
pressed by celebrity, and certainly not
by stage setting. They understood the
transactional nature of the tea. “All ref-
ugees are like gulls with their beaks out
for possible crumbs,” Virginia coolly
noted in the diary. But many years later,
in his autobiography, Leonard remem-
bered that Freud had given him a feel-
ing that, he said, “only a very few peo-
ple whom I have met gave me, a feeling
of great gentleness, but behind the gen-
76 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
tleness, great strength. . . . A formida-
ble man.” Freud died in that house on
September 23, 1939, three weeks after
the start of the Second World War.
Hitler and Stalin, between them,
drove psychoanalysis out of Europe,
but the movement reconstituted itself
in two places where its practitioners
were welcomed, London and New York.
A product of Mitteleuropa, once cen-
tered in cities like Vienna, Berlin, Bu-
dapest, and Moscow, psychoanalysis
was thus improbably transformed into
a largely Anglo-American medical and
cultural phenomenon. During the
twelve years that Hitler was in power,
only about fifty Freudian analysts im-
migrated to the United States (a coun-
try Freud had visited only once, and
held in contempt). They were some of
the biggest names in the field, though,
and they took over American psychi-
atry. After the war, Freudians occupied
university chairs; they dictated medical-
school curricula; they wrote the first
two editions of the Diagnostic and Sta-
tistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the
DSM). Psychoanalytic theory guided
the treatment of hospital patients, and,
by the mid-nineteen-fifties, half of all
hospital patients in the United States
were diagnosed with mental disorders.
Most important, psychoanalysis
helped move the treatment of mental
illness from the asylum and the hospi-
tal to the office. Psychoanalysis is a talk
therapy, which meant that people who
were otherwise functioning normally
could avail themselves of treatment. The
greater the number of people who wanted
that kind of therapy, the greater the de-
mand for therapists, and the postwar de-
cades were a boom time for psychiatry.
In 1940, two-thirds of American psychi-
atrists worked in hospitals; in 1956, sev-
enteen per cent did. Twelve and a half
per cent of American medical students
chose psychiatry as a profession in 1954,
an all-time high. A large percentage of
them received at least some psychoan-
alytic training, and by 1966 three-quar-
ters reported that they used the “dy-
namic approach” when treating patients.
The dynamic approach is based on
the cardinal Freudian principle that
the sources of our feelings are hidden
from us, that what we say about them
when we walk into the therapist’s office
cannot be what is really going on. What
is really going on are things that we
are denying or repressing or sublimat-
ing or projecting onto the therapist by
the mechanism of transference, and
the goal of therapy is to bring those
things to light.
Amazingly, Americans, a people ste-
reotypically allergic to abstract systems,
found this model of the mind irresist-
ible. Many scholars have tried to ex-
plain why, and there are, no doubt, mul-
tiple reasons, but the explanation offered
by the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann
is simple: alternative theories were worse.
“Freud’s theories were like a flashlight
in a candle factory,” as she puts it. Freud-
ian concepts were taken up by intellec-
tuals, who wrote about cathexes, screen
memories, and reaction formations, and
they were absorbed into popular dis-
course. People who had never read a
word of Freud talked confidently about
the superego, the Oedipus complex, and
penis envy.
Freud was recruited to the anti-
utopian politics of the nineteen-fifties.
Intellectuals like Lionel Trilling, in
“Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture,”
and Philip Rieff, in “Freud: The Mind
of the Moralist,” maintained that Freud
taught us about the limits on human
perfectibility. Popular magazines equated
Freud with Copernicus and Darwin.
Claims were large. “Will the Twen-
tieth Century go down in history as the
Freudian Century?” asked the editor of
a volume called “Freud and the Twen-
tieth Century,” in 1957. “May not the
new forms of awareness growing out
of Freud’s work come to serve as a more
authentic symbol of our consciousness
and the quality of our deepest experi-
ence than the uncertain fruits of the
fission of the atom and the new chart-
ing of the cosmos?”
rofessors in English departments
P naturally wondered how they might
get in on the action. They did not have
much trouble finding a way. For it is
not a stretch to treat literary texts in
the same way that an analyst treats what
a patient is saying. Although teachers
dislike the term “hidden meanings,” de-
coding a subtext or exposing an implicit
meaning or ideology is what a lot of
academic literary criticism does. Aca-
demic critics are therefore always in the
market for a theoretical apparatus that
can give coherence and consistency to
this enterprise, and Freudianism was
ideally suited for the task. Decoding
and exposing are what psychoanalysis
is all about.
One professor excited about the pos-
sibilities was Frederick Crews. Crews
received his Ph.D. from Princeton in
1958 with a dissertation on E. M. For-
ster. The dissertation explained what
Forster thought by looking at what For-
ster wrote. It was plain-vanilla history-
of-ideas criticism, and Crews found it
boring. As an undergraduate, at Yale, he
had fallen in love with Nietzsche, and
Nietzsche had led him to Freud. By the
time the Forster book came out, in 1962,
he was a professor at Berkeley, and his
second book, “The Sins of the Fathers,”
was a psychoanalytic study of Nathan-
iel Hawthorne. It came out in 1966, and,
along with Norman Holland’s “Psycho-
analysis and Shakespeare,” published the
same year, was one of the pioneering works
in psychoanalytic literary criticism. Crews
began teaching a popular graduate sem-
inar on the subject.
He also got involved in the antiwar
movement on campus, serving as a co-
chair of the Faculty Peace Committee.
Like many people at Berkeley in those
days, he became radicalized, and he
considered his interest in Freud to be
part of his radicalism. He thought that
Freud, as he later put it, “licensed a spirit
of dogmatically rebellious interpreta-
tion.” In fact, Freud was dismissive of
radical politics. He thought that the be-
lief that social change could make peo-
ple healthier or happier was deluded;
that is the point of “Civilization and
Its Discontents.” But Crews’s idea that
Freudianism was somehow liberatory
was widely shared in the sixties (al-
though it usually required some tweaks
to the theory, as administered, for ex-
ample, by writers like Herbert Marcuse
and Norman O. Brown).
In 1970, Crews published an anthol-
ogy of essays promoting psychoanalytic
criticism, “Psychoanalysis and Literary
Process.” But he had started to get cold
feet. He had soured on radical politics,
too—by the early seventies, “Berkeley”
had pretty much reverted to being “Cal,”
a politically quiescent campus—and his
experience with his graduate seminar
had begun to make him think that there
was something too easy about psycho-
analytic criticism. Students would pro-
pose contradictory psychoanalytic read-
ings, and they all sounded good, but it
was just an ingenuity contest. There
was no way to prove that one interpre-
tation was truer than another. From
this, it followed that what was going on
in the analyst’s office might also be
nothing more than a kind of interpre-
tive freelancing. Psychoanalysis was be-
ginning to look like a circular and
self-justifying methodology.
Crews registered his growing disil-
lusionment in a collection of essays that
came out in 1975, “Out of My System.”
He still believed that there were re-
deemable aspects to Freud’s thought,
but he was on his way out, as a second
essay collection, “Skeptical Engage-
ments,” in 1986, made clear. In 1993, with
the publication of a piece in The New
York Review of Books called “The Un-
known Freud,” he emerged as a full-
blown critic of Freudianism and a leader
in a group of revisionist scholars known
as the Freud-bashers.
The article was a review of several
books by revisionists. Psychoanalysis
had already been discredited as a med-
ical science, Crews wrote; what research-
ers were now revealing was that Freud
himself was possibly a charlatan—an
opportunistic self-dramatizer who de-
liberately misrepresented the scientific
bona fides of his theories. He followed
up with another article in the Review,
on recovered-memory cases—cases in
which adults had been charged with
sexual abuse on the basis of supposedly
repressed memories elicited from chil-
dren—which he blamed on Freud’s the-
ory of the unconscious.
Crews’s articles triggered one of the
most rancorous highbrow free-for-alls
ever run in a paper that has published
its share of them. Letters of supreme
huffiness poured into the Review, the
writers lamenting that considerations
of space prevented them from pointing
out more than a handful of Crews’s er-
rors and misrepresentations, and then
proceeding to take up many column
inches enumerating them.
People who send aggrieved letters to
the Review often seem to have missed
the fact that the Review always gives its
writers the last word, and Crews availed
himself of the privilege with relish and
at length. He gave, on balance, better
than he got. In 1995, he published his
Review pieces as “The Memory Wars:
Freud’s Legacy in Dispute.” Three years
later, he edited “Unauthorized Freud:
Doubters Confront a Legend,” an an-
thology of writings by Freud’s critics.
Crews had retired from teaching in
1994, and is now an emeritus professor
at Berkeley.
he arc of Freud’s American repu-
T tation tracks the arc of Crews’s ca-
reer. Psychoanalytic theory reached the
peak of its impact in the late fifties,
when Crews was switching from history-
of-ideas criticism to psychoanalytic crit-
icism, and it began to fade in the late
sixties, when Crews was starting to no-
tice a certain circularity in his graduate
students’ papers. Part of the decline had
to do with social change. Freudianism
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 77
was a big target for writers associated
with the women’s movement; it was
attacked as sexist (justifiably) by Betty
Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique”
and by Kate Millett in “Sexual Politics,”
as it had been, more than a decade ear­
lier, by Simone de Beauvoir in “The
Second Sex.”
Psychoanalysis was also taking a hit
within the medical community. Studies
suggesting that psychoanal­
ysis had a low cure rate had
been around for a while.
But the realization that
depression and anxiety can
be regulated by medica­
tion made a mode of
therapy whose treatment
times reached into the
hundreds of billable hours
seem, at a minimum, ineffi­
cient, and, at worst, a scam.
Managed­care companies and the
insurance industry certainly drew that
conclusion, and the third edition of the
DSM, in 1980, scrubbed out almost
every trace of Freudianism. The third
edition was put together by a group of
psychiatrists at Washington Univer­
sity, where, it is said, a framed picture
of Freud was mounted above a urinal
in the men’s room. In 1999, a study pub­
lished in American Psychologist reported
that “psychoanalytic research has been
virtually ignored by mainstream scien­
tific psychology over the past several
decades.”
Meanwhile, the image of Freud as a
lonely pioneer began to erode as well.
That image had been carefully curated
by Freud’s disciples, especially by Freud’s
first biographer, the Welsh analyst
Ernest Jones, who was a close associ­
ate. (He had flown to Vienna after the
Nazis arrived to urge Freud to flee.)
Jones’s three­volume life came out in
the nineteen­fifties. But the image orig­
inated with, and was cultivated by, Freud
himself. Even his little speech for the
BBC, in 1938, is about the heavy price
he has paid for his findings (he calls
them “facts”) and his struggle against
continued resistance to them.
In the nineteen­seventies, historians
like Henri Ellenberger and Frank Sullo­
way pointed out that most of Freud’s
ideas about the unconscious were not
original, and that his theories relied on
outmoded concepts from nineteenth­
78 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
century biology, like the belief in the in­
heritability of acquired characteristics
(Lamarckianism). In 1975, the Nobel
Prize­winning medical biologist Peter
Medawar called psychoanalytic theory
“the most stupendous intellectual confi­
dence trick of the twentieth century.”
One corner of Anglo­American in­
tellectual life where Freudianism had
always been regarded with suspicion
was the philosophy depart­
ment. A few philosophers,
like Stanley Cavell, who
had an interest in liter­
ature and Continental
thinkers took Freud up.
But to philosophers of sci­
ence the knowledge claims
of psychoanalysis were al­
ways dubious. In 1985, one
of them, Adolf Grünbaum,
at the University of Pitts­
burgh, published “The Foundations of
Psychoanalysis,” a dauntingly thorough
exposition designed to show that, what­
ever the foundations of psychoanalysis
were, they were not scientific.
Revisionist attention also turned to
Freud’s biography. The lead blood­
hound on this trail was Peter Swales,
a man who once called himself “the
punk historian of psychoanalysis.”
Swales never finished high school; in
the nineteen­sixties, he worked as a
personal assistant to the Rolling Stones.
That would seem a hard gig to bail on,
but he did, and, around 1972, he got
interested in Freud and decided to de­
vote himself to unearthing anything
and everything associated with Freud’s
life. (Swales is one of the two figures—
the other is Jeffrey Moussaieff Mas­
son—profiled in Janet Malcolm’s smart
and entertaining report on the Freud
revisionists, “In the Freud Archives,”
published in 1984.)
Swales’s most spectacular claim was
that Freud impregnated his sister­in­
law, Minna, arranged for her to have an
abortion, and then encoded the whole
affair in a fictitious case history—a Sher­
lockian story that was almost too good
to check (though some corroborating
evidence was later dug up). Swales and
other researchers were also able to show
that Freud consistently misrepresented
the outcomes of the treatments he based
his theories on. In the case of one of
the only patients whose treatment notes
Freud did not destroy, Ernst Lanzer—
the Rat Man—it is clear that he mis­
represented the facts as well. In a study
of the forty­three treatments about
which some information survives, it
turned out that Freud had broken his
own rules for how to conduct an analy­
sis, usually egregiously, in all forty­three.
In 1983, a British researcher, E. M.
Thornton, published “Freud and Co­
caine,” in which she argued that Freud,
who early in his career was a champion
of the medical uses of cocaine (then a
legal and popular drug), was effectively
addicted to it in the years before he
wrote “The Interpretation of Dreams.”
Freud treated a friend, Ernst Fleischl
von Marxow, with cocaine to cure a
morphine habit, with the result that
Fleischl became addicted to both drugs
and died at the age of forty­five. Thorn­
ton suggested that Freud was often high
on cocaine when he wrote his early sci­
entific articles, which accounts for their
sloppiness with the data and the reck­
lessness of their claims.
By 1995, enough evidence of the
doubtfulness of psychoanalysis’s scien­
tific credentials and enough questions
about Freud’s character had accumu­
lated to enable the revisionists to force
the postponement of a major exhibition
devoted to Freud at the Library of Con­
gress, on the ground that the show pre­
sented psychoanalysis in too favorable
a light. Crews called it an effort “to pol­
ish up the tarnished image of a business
that’s heading into Chapter 11.” The
exhibition had to be redesigned, and it
did not open until 1998.
That year, in an interview with a Ca­
nadian philosophy professor, Todd Du­
fresne, Crews was asked whether he
was ready to call it a day with Freud.
“Absolutely,” he said. “After almost
twenty years of explaining and illustrat­
ing the same basic critique, I will just
refer interested parties to ‘Skeptical En­
gagements,’ ‘The Memory Wars,’ and
‘Unauthorized Freud.’ Anyone who is
unmoved by my reasoning there isn’t
going to be touched by anything fur­
ther I might say.” He spoke too soon.
rews seems to have grown worried
C that although Freud and Freudian­
ism may look dead, we cannot be com­
pletely, utterly, a hundred per cent sure.
Freud might be like the Commendatore
in “Don Giovanni”: he gets killed in this, was still able to take tea with his wrote to her virtually every day. Some
the first act and then shows up for din- guests. In Yeats’s line, those ancient, fifteen hundred letters survive. Crews
ner at the end, the Stone Guest. So glittering eyes were gay. This is, obvi- makes a great deal of the correspon-
Crews spent eleven years writing “Freud: ously, the reputation the Woolfs car- dence, and he finds much to disap-
The Making of an Illusion” (Metro- ried with them when they went to meet prove of.
politan), just out—a six-hundred-and- Freud in 1939. Who would want to be judged by
sixty-page stake driven into its subject’s As Crews is right to believe, this letters sent to a lover? What the ex-
cold, cold heart. Freud has long outlived psychoanal- cerpts that Crews quotes seem to show
The new book synthesizes fifty years ysis. For many years, even as writers us is an immature and unguarded young
of revisionist scholarship, repeating were discarding the more patently ab- man who is ambitious and insecure,
and amplifying the findings of other surd elements of his theory—penis boastful and needy, ardent and impa-
researchers (fully acknowledged), and envy, or the death drive—they con- tient—all the ways people tend to come
tacking on a few additional charges. tinued to pay homage to Freud’s un- across in love letters. Freud makes re-
Crews is an attractively uncluttered blinking insight into the human con- marks like “I intend to exploit science
stylist, and he has an amazing story dition. That persona helped Freud to instead of allowing myself to be ex-
to tell, but his criticism of Freud is re- evolve, in the popular imagination, ploited by it.” Crews takes this to ex-
lentless to the point of monomania. from a scientist into a kind of poet of pose Freud’s mercenary attitude to-
He evidently regards “balance” as a the mind. And the thing about poets ward his vocation. But young people
pass given to chicanery, and even read- is that they cannot be refuted. No one want to make a living. That’s why they
ers sympathetic to the argument may asks of “Paradise Lost”: But is it true? have vocations. The reason for the pro-
find it hard to get all the way through Freud and his concepts, now converted longed engagement was that Freud
the book. It ought to come with a bulb into metaphors, joined the legion of couldn’t afford to marry. It’s not sur-
of garlic. the undead. prising that he would have wanted to
The place where people interested Is there anything new to say about assure his fiancée that his eyes were
in Freud’s thought usually begin is this person? One of the occasions for ever on the prize.
“The Interpretation of Dreams,” which Crews’s book is the fairly recent emer- Freud mentions cocaine often in the
came out in 1899, when Freud was gence of Freud’s correspondence with letters. He used it to get through stress-
forty-three. Crews doesn’t get to that his fiancée, Martha Bernays. Freud got ful social situations, but he also appreci-
book until page 533. The only subse- engaged in 1882, when he was twenty- ated its benefits as an aphrodisiac, and
quent work he discusses in depth is six, and the engagement lasted four Crews quotes from several letters in which
the so-called Dora case, which was years. He and Martha spent most of he teases Martha about its effects. “Woe
based on an (aborted) treatment that that time in different cities, and Freud to you, little princess, when I come,” he
Freud conducted in 1900 with a woman
named Ida Bauer, and which he pub-
lished in 1905, as “Fragment of an
Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” Crews
touches briefly on the other famous
case histories Freud brought out be-
fore the First World War—the Rat
Man, the Wolf Man, Little Hans, the
analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber, and
the book on Leonardo da Vinci. The
hugely influential works of social psy-
cholog y that Freud went on to
write—“Totem and Taboo,” “The Fu-
ture of an Illusion,” “Civilization and
Its Discontents”—are largely ignored.
The “illusion” in Crews’s subtitle
isn’t Freudianism, though. It’s Freud.
For many years, Freud was written
about as an intrepid scientist who dared
to descend into the foul rag-and-bone
shop of the mind, and who emerged
as the embodiment of a tragic wis-
dom—a man who could face up to the
terrible fact that a narcissus is never
just a narcissus, that underneath the
mind’s trapdoor is a snake pit of de-
sire and aggression, and, knowing all “ You just carpe, carpe, carpe.”

“They were only supposed to find truffles, but then they found
Roger—a man who curiously smells a lot like truffles.”
• •
writes in one. “I will kiss you quite red
and feed you quite plump. And if you
are naughty you will see who is stron-
ger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat
or a big wild man with cocaine in his
body.” Crews’s gloss: Freud “conceived
of his chemically eroticized self not as
the affectionate companion of a dear
person but as a powerful mate who would
have his way, luxuriating in the crush-
ing of maidenly reluctance.” (Freud, in-
cidentally, was a small man, five feet
seven inches. He was taller than Mar-
tha, but not by much. The “big wild
man” was a joke.)
Freud would be the last person to
have grounds for objecting to a biog-
rapher’s interest in his sex life, but
Crews’s claims in this area are often
speculation. During his engagement,
for example, Freud spent four months
studying in Paris, where he sometimes
suffered from anxiety. “It is easy to
picture how Freud’s agitation must
have been heightened by the daily pa-
rade of saucy faces and swaying hips
that he witnessed during his strolls,”
Crews observes. Crews is confident
that Freud, during his separation from
Martha, masturbated regularly, “mak-
ing himself sick with guilt over it”
(something he says Freud’s biogra-
phers covered up). He also suspects
80 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
that Freud had sex with a prostitute,
and was therefore not a virgin when,
at the age of thirty, he finally got mar-
ried. Noting (as others have) the homo-
erotic tone in Freud’s letters to and about
men he was close to—Fleischl and,
later, Wilhelm Fliess—Crews suggests
that Freud “wrestled with homosex-
ual impulses.”
Let’s assume that Freud used cocaine
as an anxiolytic and aphrodisiac. That
he had an eye for sexy women. That he
masturbated, solicited a prostitute, shared
he-man fantasies with his girlfriend,
and got crushes on male friends. Who
cares? Human beings do these things.
Even if Freud had sex with Minna Ber-
nays—so what? The standard revision-
ist hypothesis is that the sex took place
on trips that the two took together with-
out Martha, of which, as Crews points
out, there were a surprising number. But
Crews imagines assignations in the fam-
ily home in Vienna as well. He notes
that Minna’s bedroom was in a far cor-
ner of the house, meaning that “the noc-
turnal Sigmund could have visited it
with impunity in predawn hours.” Could
he have? Apparently. Should he have?
Probably not. Did he, in fact? No one
knows. So why fantasize about it? A
Freudian would suspect that there is
something going on here.
One thing that’s going on is straight-
forward enough: this is internecine
business in the Freud wars. Some Freud
scholar floated the suggestion that
since Minna’s bedroom was next to
Freud and Martha’s, there would have
been few opportunities for hanky-
panky. Consistent with his policy of
giving scoundrels no quarter, Crews
is determined to blow that sugges-
tion out of the water. He is on a cru-
sade to debunk what he calls “Freudol-
atry,” the cult of Freud constructed
and maintained by the “home-team
historians.” These include the “house
biographer” Ernest Jones, the “gull-
ible” Peter Gay, and the “loyalists”
George Makari and Élisabeth Rou-
dinesco. (The English translation of
Roudinesco’s “Freud: In His Time
and Ours” was published by Harvard
last fall.)
In Crews’s view, these people have
created a Photoshopped image of su-
perhuman scientific probity and moral
rectitude, and it’s important to take their
hero down to human size—or maybe,
in compensation for all the years of
hype, a size or two smaller. Their Freud,
fully cognizant of his illicit desires, stops
at his sister-in-law’s bedroom door, for
he knows that sublimation of the erotic
drives is the price men pay for civiliza-
tion. Crews’s Freud just walks right in.
(In either account, civilization some-
how survives.)
For readers with less skin in the
Freud wars, the question is: What is at
stake? And the answer has to be Freud-
ianism—the theory itself and its post-
clinical afterlife. Although Freud re-
nounced his early work on cocaine,
Crews examines it carefully, and he
shows that, from the beginning, Freud
was a lousy scientist. He fudged data;
he made unsubstantiated claims; he
took credit for other people’s ideas.
Sometimes he lied. A lot of people in
the late nineteenth century believed
that cocaine might be a miracle drug,
and Crews may be a little unfair when
he tries to pin much of the blame for
the later epidemic of cocaine abuse on
Freud. Still, even starting out, Freud
showed himself to be a man who did
not have much in the way of profes-
sional scruples. The fundamental claim
of the revisionists is that Freud never
changed. It was bogus science all the
way. And the central issue for most of
them is what is known as the seduc­
tion theory.
he principal reason psychoanaly­
T sis triumphed over alternative the­
ories and was taken up in fields outside
medicine, like literary criticism, is that
it presented its findings as inductive.
Freudian theory was not a magic­lantern
show, an imaginative projection that
provided us with powerful metaphors
for understanding the human condi­
tion. It was not “Paradise Lost”; it was
science, a conceptual system wholly de­
rived from clinical experience.
For Freudians and anti­Freudians
alike, the key to this claim is the fate
of the seduction theory. According to
the official narrative, when Freud began
working with women diagnosed with
hysteria, in the eighteen­nineties, his
patients reported being sexually mo­
lested as children, usually by their fa­
thers and usually when they were under
the age of four. In 1896, Freud delivered
a paper announcing that, having com­
pleted eighteen treatments, he had con­
cluded that sexual abuse in infancy was
the source of hysterical symptoms. This
became known as the seduction theory.
The paper was greeted with derision.
Richard von Krafft­Ebing, the leading
sexologist of the day, called it “a scien­
tific fairy tale.” Freud was discouraged.
But, in 1897, he had a revelation, which
he reported in a letter to Fliess that be­
came canonical. Patients were not re­
membering actual molestation, he real­
ized; they were remembering their own
sexual fantasies. The reason was the Oe­
dipus complex. From infancy, all chil­
dren have aggressive and erotic feelings
about their parents, but they repress
those feelings out of fear of punishment.
For boys, the fear is of castration; girls,
as they are traumatized eventually to
discover, are already castrated. (“Castra­
tion” in Freud means amputation.)
In Freud’s hydraulic model of the
mind, these forbidden wishes and de­
sires are psychic energies seeking an
outlet. Since they cannot be expressed
or acted upon directly—we cannot kill
or have sex with our parents—they
emerge in highly censored and distorted
forms as images in dreams, slips of the
tongue, and neurotic symptoms. Freud
claimed his clinical experience taught
him that, by the method of free asso­
ciation, patients could uncover what
they had repressed and achieve some
relief. And so psychoanalysis was born.
This narrative was challenged by
Jeffrey Masson, whose battle with the
Freud establishment is the main sub­
ject of Janet Malcolm’s book. In “The
Assault on Truth,” in 1984, Masson ar­
gued that, panicked by the reaction to
his hysteria paper, Freud came up with
the theory of infantile sexuality as a way
of covering up his patients’ sexual abuse.
But there turned out to be two prob­
lems with the official narrative about the
seduction theory, and Masson’s was not
one of them. The first problem is that
the chronology is a retrospective recon­
struction. Freud did not abandon the se­
duction theory after 1897, he did not in­
sist on the centrality of the Oedipus
complex until 1908, and so on. Various
emendations had to be discreetly made
in the Standard Edition, and in the edi­
tion of Freud’s correspondence with
Fliess, for the record to become consis­
tent with the preferred chronology.
That is the minor problem.The major
problem, according to the revisionists,
is that there were no cases. Contrary to
what Freud claimed and what Masson
assumed, none of Freud’s subsequent
patients spontaneously told him that
they had been molested—those eigh­
teen cases did not exist—and no pa­
tients subsequently reported having Oe­
dipal wishes. Knowing of his reputation
as sex­obsessed, some of Freud’s patients
produced the kind of material they knew
he wanted to hear, and a few appear to
have been deliberately gaming him. In
other cases, Freud badgered patients
into accepting his interpretations, and
they either gave in, like the Rat Man,
or left treatment, like Dora. If your an­
alyst tells you that you are in denial about
wanting to sleep with your father, what
are you going to do? Deny it?
Ever since he stopped teaching his
Berkeley seminar, Crews has com­
plained about the suggestibility of the
psychoanalytic method of free associ­
ation. It replaced hypnosis as a way of
treating hysterical patients, but it wasn’t
much better. That is why Crews wrote
about the recovered­memory cases, in
which investigators seem to have fed
children the memories they eventually
“recovered.” How effective a therapist
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 81
Freud was is disputed—many people
travelled to Vienna to be analyzed by
him. But Crews believes that Freud
never had “a single ex-patient who could
attest to the capacity of the psychoan-
alytic method to yield the specific effects
that he claimed for it.”
One response to the assault on psy-
choanalysis is that even if Freud mostly
made it up, and even if he was a poor
therapist himself, psychoanalysis does
work for some patients. But so does
placebo. Many people suffering from
mood disorders benefit from talk ther-
apy and other interpersonal forms of
treatment because they respond to the
perception that they are being cared for.
It may not matter very much what they
talk about; someone is listening.
People also find appealing the idea
that they have motives and desires they
are unaware of. That kind of “depth”
psychology was popularized by Freud-
ianism, and it isn’t likely to go away. It
can be useful to be made to realize that
your feelings about people you love are
actually ambivalent, or that you were
being aggressive when you thought you
were only being extremely polite. Of
course, you shouldn’t have to work your
way through your castration anxiety to
get there.
Still, assuming that psychoanalysis
was a dead end, did it set psychiatry
back several generations? Crews has
said so. “If much of the twentieth cen-
tury has indeed belonged to Freud,” he
told Todd Dufresne, in 1998, “then we
lost about seventy years worth of po-
tential gains in knowledge while befud-
dling ourselves with an essentially me-
dieval conception of the ‘possessed’
mind.” The comment reflects an atti-
tude present in a lot of criticism of psy-
choanalysis, Crews’s especially: an ide-
alization of science.
Since the third edition of the DSM,
the emphasis has been on biological ex-
planations for mental disorders, and this
makes psychoanalysis look like a detour,
or, as the historian of psychiatry Ed-
ward Shorter called it, a “hiatus.” But it
wasn’t as though psychiatry was on solid
medical ground when Freud came along.
Nineteenth-century science of the mind
was a Wild West show. Treatments in-
cluded hypnosis, electrotherapy, hydro-
therapy, full-body massage, painkillers
like morphine, rest cures, “fat” cures (ex-
82 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
cessive feeding), seclusion, “female cas-
tration,” and, of course, institutionaliza-
tion. There was also serious interest in
the paranormal. The most prevalent
nineteenth-century psychiatric diagno-
ses, hysteria and neurasthenia, are not
even recognized today. That wasn’t “bad”
science. It was science. Some of it works;
a lot of it does not. Psychoanalysis was
not the first talk therapy, but it was the
bridge from hypnosis to the kind of talk
therapy we have today. It did not abuse
the patient’s body, and if it was a quack
treatment it was not much worse, and
was arguably more humane, than a lot
of what was being practiced.
Nor did psychoanalysis put a halt to
somatic psychiatry. During the first half
of the twentieth century, all kinds of
medical interventions for mental disor-
ders were devised and put into practice.
These included the administration of
sedatives, notably chloral, which is ad-
dictive, and which was prescribed for
Virginia Woolf, who suffered from major
depression; insulin-induced comas; elec-
troshock treatments; and lobotomies.
Despite its frightful reputation, electro-
convulsive therapy is an effective treat-
ment for severe depression, but most of
the other treatments in use before the
age of psychopharmaceuticals were dead
ends. Even today, in many cases, we are
basically throwing chemicals at the brain
and hoping for the best. Hit or miss is
how a lot of progress is made. You can
call it science or not.
eople write biographies because they
P hope that lives have lessons. That’s
what Crews has done. He believes that
the story of Freud’s early life has some-
thing to tell us about Freudianism, and
although he insists on playing the part
of a hanging judge, much of what he
has to say about the slipperiness of
Freud’s character and the factitiousness
of his science is persuasive. He is, after
all, building on top of a mountain of
research on those topics.
Crews does bring what appears to
be a novel charge (at least these days)
against psychoanalysis. He argues that
it is anti-Christian. By promulgating a
doctrine that makes “sexual gratifica-
tion triumphant over virtuous sacrifice
for heaven,” he says, Freud “meant to
overthrow the whole Christian order,
earning payback for all of the bigoted
popes, the sadists of the Inquisition, the
modern promulgators of ‘blood libel’
slander, and the Catholic bureaucrats
who had held his professorship hos-
tage.” Freud set out to “pull down the
temple of Pauline law.”
Crews suggests that this is why the
affair with Minna was significant. If it
did happen, it was right before Freud
wrote “The Interpretation of Dreams,”
the real start of Freudianism. Forbid-
den sex could have given him the confi-
dence he needed to take the extreme
step into mind reading. “To possess
Minna,” Crews says, “could have meant,
first, to commit symbolic incest with
the mother of God; second, to ‘kill’ the
father God by means of this ultimate
sacrilege; and third, to nullify the au-
thority both of Austria’s established
church and of its Vatican parent—
thereby, in Freud’s internal drama, free-
ing his people from two millennia of
religious persecution.” Then I guess he
didn’t just walk right in.
It all sounds pretty Freudian! Where
is it coming from? This idol-smashing
Freud is radically different from the
Freud of writers like Trilling and Rieff,
who saw him as the enduring reminder
of the futility of imagining that improv-
ing the world can make human beings
happier. And it is certainly not how
Freud presented himself. “I have not
the courage to rise up before my fellow-
men as a prophet,” he wrote at the end
of “Civilization and Its Discontents,”
“and I bow to their reproach that I can
offer them no consolation: for at bot-
tom, that is what they are all demand-
ing—the wildest revolutionaries no
less passionately than the most virtu-
ous believers.”
Crews’s idea that Freud’s target was
Christianity appears to be a late fruit
of his old undergraduate fascination
with Nietzsche. Crews apparently once
saw Freud as a Nietzschean critic of
life-denying moralism, a heroic Anti-
christ dedicated to liberating human
beings from subservience to idols they
themselves created. Is his current re-
nunciation a renunciation of his own
radical youth? Is his castigation of Freud
really a form of self-castigation? We
don’t need to go there. But since hu-
manity is not liberated from its illusions
yet, if that’s what Freud was really all
about, he is still undead. 

BOOKS
ENTANGLEMENT THEORY
A Norwegian master of the short story.
BY JAMES WOOD
ranslation can be a sluggish tri-
T umph. It has taken thirteen years
for Gunnhild Øyehaug’s collection of
stories, “Knots,” which first appeared
in Norwegian, to arrive in an English
version (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; trans-
lated by Kari Dickson); Øyehaug is
forty-two, but the book represents her
début in this country. Contemporary
Norwegian fiction is astonishingly vital
and various. If some of that vitality is
gradually becoming apparent to non-
Norwegians, it’s partly because of the
success of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My
Struggle,” which may have the effect
of shortening the literary struggles of
a number of his peers. Anglophone
Gunnhild Øyehaug loves to blend light with shade, wit with torment.
ILLUSTRATION BY JUN CEN
readers can encounter fiction by Per
Petterson, Linn Ullmann, Dag Solstad
(three of his novels, jewels from a hoard
of nearly thirty books, have been trans-
lated into English; more are promised),
Roy Jacobsen, Tor Ulven, Jon Fosse,
and Carl Frode Tiller, among others.
Gunnhild Øyehaug joins that group
at a slight angle—as a female (I just
enlisted a platoon of men, apart from
Ullmann), a short-story writer and poet
as well as a novelist, and a writer com-
mitted to literary experiment. Her work
is playful, often surreal, intellectually
rigorous, and brief. She sometimes re-
sembles Lydia Davis, who has read her
in both Norwegian and English, and
has written admiringly about her work.
Like Davis, she moves easily from the
theoretical to the humanely engaged.
(There is a piece in this collection, en-
titled “The Object Assumes an Ex-
alted Place in the Discourse,” that is a
sparkling riff on a phrase of Roland
Barthes’s.) And, like Davis, she can
produce stabs of emotion, unexpected
ghost notes of feeling, from pieces so
short and offbeat that they seem at first
like aborted arias. “Vitalie Meets an
Officer,” for instance, is about a woman,
Anna Bae, who likes reading biogra-
phies. Actually, I’ve made the story
sound more expansive than it is. It is
about a woman who comes across a
sentence, in a biography of Arthur Rim-
baud, about the poet’s mother, who was
named Vitalie: “Although Vitalie’s so-
cial life was confined to the church,
shopping, and occasional games of
whist, she somehow managed to meet
a French army officer in 1852.” The rest
of the story is about Anna’s delighted
response to this single sentence. “SOME-
HOW SHE MANAGED IT!” Anna thinks,
and the story continues:
Sometimes when you read, it’s like certain
sentences strike home and knock you flat. It’s
as if they say everything you have tried to say,
or tried to do, or everything you are. As a
rule, what you are is one simmering, endless
longing. And that was how this sentence struck
Anna Bae’s consciousness, like a quivering
arrow of truth. That said: it’s possible. To
meet a French army officer. Or simply to man-
age whatever it is you are longing for. That
seems impossible to manage. That blankets
you like destiny.
Anna imagines how Vitalie might have
met her officer. She thinks of a song by
Nick Cave “(Are You) The One That
I’ve Been Waiting For,” then of Vitalie’s
longing, and how it lay “like a well-hid-
den egg in her chest and purred unseen
with glorious, secret dreams.” Anna pic-
tures this egg, and then the officer, and
then a woman at a window. The story
ends with the arrival of a U.F.O.—
which, on closer inspection (Anna goes
out into the fields to look at it), might
just be the green sofa she has been sit-
ting on. The piece convincingly com-
bines realism and an ethereal surreal-
ism; it flies up but stays tethered to that
first ingenuous burst of delight: “some-
how SHE MANAGED IT!”
Øyehaug is intensely interested
in consciousness, and in the pictures
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 83
consciousness makes; this emphasis
constantly humanizes her experiments
in abstraction and the fantastical. Her
riff on the line from Barthes—“the ob-
ject in discourse assumes an exalted
place,” from his “Writing Degree
Zero”—could easily have been precious
or tedious, or otherwise annoying. But
Øyehaug proceeds with a simplicity
and a frankness that quickly charm.
“We carefully study a sentence we love,”
she writes, and then goes on to quote
Barthes’s own words. But what is “the
object”? Her narrator insists on visu-
alizing it. She imagines a sailing green
prism, and thinks of “Blade Runner”
and “the small flying cars that Harri-
son Ford uses”: “It is absolutely no sur-
prise that at this point we have the pic-
ture of a luminous green prism sailing
in through the dark and taking an ex-
alted place on our retina, a bit like when
you’ve been staring too hard at a lamp
on the ceiling and then close your eyes!
How strange, we think, that a sentence
that was written to explain an aspect
of modern poetry can have roughly the
same effect on our imagination as sci-
ence fiction.” “The Object Assumes an
Exalted Place in the Discourse” is com-
pact, just over two pages, and perfect:
it makes gentle fun of French theory’s
more sublime pretensions while simul-
taneously paying Barthes’s lyrical work
the lyrical tribute it deserves. It is cir-
cular and self-reflexively postmodern—
Øyehaug’s text enacts what Barthes
theorizes, exalting an “object” that is
itself just a sentence—while also reg-
istering some brief flash of conscious-
ness, some small explosion of longing,
that, like Anna Bae’s discovery in Rim-
baud’s biography, seems true to our
own experience of passionate reading:
jouissance, to be precise.
Øyehaug succeeds, more often than
not, by staying focussed on the object
of her inquiry. Having established her
thought experiment, her area of study—a
woman reading a biography, an actor
about to walk onto the stage for a one-
man avant-garde play (“Compulsion”),
a man buying blinds at IKEA (“Nice and
Mild”), a girl trying to avoid playing the
piano for her oppressively doting grand-
father (“Overtures”)—she presses down
on the exquisite dilemma, and fearlessly
follows the logic of the form she has
chosen. The best example of this fear-
84 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
lessness might be “The Deer at the Edge
of the Forest,” a page-long paragraph
that daringly inhabits an animal’s con-
sciousness. Again, the literary dangers
are obvious enough—whimsy, sentimen-
tality, grating eccentricity—and again
they are short-circuited by Øyehaug’s
appealing, vigorous simplicity:
The deer stood at the edge of the forest and
was miserable. He felt like there was no point
in anything, like he might as well give up. I
walk around here, day in and day out, the deer
thought, and there’s no one who sees me. Am
I invisible, or what? He didn’t think so. I walk
around here and could change people’s lives if
they could only see me, but no one sees me.
Here I am, a hart, and no one cares. The whole
point is that I am supposed to be difficult to
see, I know that, I am supposed to roam around
in the forest and not be seen. But it’s the very
premise of my life that is now making me mis-
erable. I want to be seen. So here I am at the
edge of the forest. I am open to being seen, to
being shot. If someone doesn’t see me soon,
I’m going to do something drastic, I mean it.
Right now it feels like I’m trapped in deerness.
Oh, I would love to change everything, be some-
one else, something completely different.
This might be a sly commentary on Ril-
ke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in
which the poet tries to enter an alien, in-
accessible consciousness, and concludes,
“You must change your life.” What Rilke
makes explicit is here kept beautifully
implicit: do we treat this as a deer think-
ing, or as a person merely projecting
her troubled thoughts onto the deer?
ovely as these brief texts are, Øye-
L haug is at her most captivating in
her longer, slightly more conventional
pieces, where she uses a kind of tightly
controlled, repetitive dramatic mono-
logue to animate a character’s inner tor-
ments. “Nice and Mild” and “Two by
Two,” the stories that begin and end
this collection, are like sparks thrown
off by a furious wheel of suffering. In
both pieces, we are in the midst of do-
mestic anguish, as experienced by a
troubled protagonist, and must do our
best to catch up. In “Nice and Mild,”
an unnamed male narrator has come
to IKEA to buy blinds for his son’s bed-
room. It soon becomes clear that this
is an arduous project, one that has been
deferred for at least six months. Some-
thing is wrong with this obsessive and
astoundingly unconfident man. A clue
may be found in a particular detail: at
home, the DVR is recording a tennis
match between Serena Williams and
Anna Kournikova, and the man thinks,
“The very fact that I’m recording the
match and not watching it live is the
start of the virtuous circle that buying
the blinds was going to start, and what’s
more, I’ve come here and no one—that’s
to say, my wife—knows that I’m here.”
The narrator clings to this detail, re-
turning to it in the way that Thomas
Bernhard’s narrators (or, closer to home,
Knut Hamsun’s) roll the same torment-
ing phrases back and forth, like stress
balls that have morphed into stress gre-
nades. When, a few pages later, we trip
across another mention of that “virtu-
ous circle,” we have a fairly good idea
that this man’s circle is vicious rather
than virtuous. Some kind of depressive
stasis has befallen him; he imagines his
wife, standing at home, crying, “because
she thinks that I can’t breathe, that she
is smothering me, which is why I can’t
face doing anything, why I sit on the
sofa for most of the day and watch TV
and feel that I’m turning into an old
man and that life, in short, is over.”
The story is delicate because the
drama of the man’s entrapment, de-
spite his repetitive, educated verbosity,
seems to allow for only very limited
self-knowledge. As he enters IKEA, he
trips and falls on the stairs, and is seen
by two laughing teen-age girls. In a
distinctly Øyehaugean touch, we get a
reflection on Baudelaire’s theory of
laughter: namely, that it is never the
person who falls in the street who
laughs but the person who witnesses
the accident—unless, she writes, “the
person who falls is a philosopher and
able to reflect on his fall, able to see
himself from the outside. You laugh a
little. You reflect on your fall, and laugh
a little.” It is characteristic of Øyehaug’s
nice sense of irony and human com-
plexity that our protagonist is at once
something of a philosopher and not
philosopher enough: he can see him-
self from outside, but only at this mo-
ment; he opens one door just to find
another, this one apparently locked.
“Two by Two” is written in the third
person, but it occupies its protagonist’s
mind so intently that it resembles a
fierce dramatic monologue. Edel, a book-
seller in a rural community, is waiting
up for her husband to return. It is al-
most one in the morning, and snowing.
Edel is furious, because she thinks that
her husband, Alvin, who should have
been home forty minutes ago, is visit-
ing his mistress. (She’s right.) Full of
rage and revenge, she gathers up their
sleeping son and sets out in her car to
confront the errant spouse. All this is
familiar enough, the ground rail for a
lot of conventional fictional traffic. But
Øyehaug, as ever, does fresh things with
convention. Edel has been taking courses
in English literature at a local college
and, in particular, has been enjoying
“Symbolism in Literature,” which has
convinced her that modern readers are
too quick to disdain symbolism as “an-
tiquated, romantic thought.” On the
contrary, “she believed that something
could stand for something else, a rose
for love, an ocean for life, a cross for
death.” Now, however, as she drives to-
ward the place where she assumes her
husband is, she’s irritated by some vul-
garly obvious symbolism: only her side
of the road has been cleared of snow,
and she immediately thinks, “Is that
how it is, is that what this means, is his
path closed, will he not come back?”
Øyehaug loves to mix her elements:
she is always dabbing light onto shade,
blending wit with torment, driving to-
gether bookishness and life. (Her work
is itself highly bookish, but also in-
tensely life-filled.) So she has some fun
with Edel and her ambivalence toward
literary symbolism, even as she refuses
to turn away from Edel’s acute pain.
And she has another joke in store. Alvin,
on his guilt-racked way back to his
wife, pulls off the road, leaves the car,
and lies in the snow. This is where Edel
eventually finds him, and as she be-
rates him in the expected ways—“You
little shit . . . we’re finished”—Alvin
cuts in with an excuse: his car has bro-
ken down, and that’s why he is so late;
he’s been stuck here for nearly an hour.
It’s an obvious lie, but the car really
won’t start. Alvin may have saved his
bacon; the marriage may live another
day; against all ethical odds, the lie
worked. Or: an invention, a fiction,
mysteriously became “true,” and did so
because Øyehaug wittily decided to
disable the car and thus spare her char-
acters the divorce furnace. The sym-
bol, now appearing as authorial sleight
of hand, determines the rest of the story.
Trust the teller, not the tale. 
BRIEFLY NOTED
Life in Code, by Ellen Ullman (MCD). This “personal history
of technology” by a novelist and former computer program-
mer presents a unique perspective on software, the people who
write it, and the world it has created. Ullman recounts strug-
gles to define herself in the boys’-club atmosphere of technol-
ogy companies and to come to terms with the implications of
her work. Her most trenchant critiques concern the social val-
ues inherent in the “mesh of code that envelops human life.”
Whether considering the atomistic culture of the Internet, the
mechanistic philosophy of mind prevalent in the field of A.I.,
or the “algorithms of the wealthy” that control the movement
of capital, she is generally skeptical about technology. She
hopes to show “that code has biases, that programs are writ-
ten by human beings and can be changed by human beings.”
Behave, by Robert M. Sapolsky (Penguin Press). This mammoth
study by a neuroendocrinologist and MacArthur Fellow ex-
amines our capacity for both good and evil from an evolu-
tionary perspective. Considering topics as diverse as My Lai,
honor killings, and mother-infant bonding in rhesus mon-
keys, Sapolsky argues against a hard distinction between psy-
chology and biology: “Brains and cultures coevolve.” “The
pulling of a trigger or the touching of an arm,” he writes, can
be understood only through the intersection of neuron con-
struction, brain chemistry, evolution, childhood environment,
and societal structure. The book is, at heart, a rejection of easy
conclusions. Sapolsky sees human biology not as determina-
tive but as a field of “potentials, vulnerabilities, predispositions,
proclivities, interactions.”
Fly Me, by Daniel Riley (Little, Brown). Suzy Whitman, the
protagonist of this début novel, set in Southern California in
1972, is a smart recent Vassar grad turned air hostess. After
someone hides cocaine in her carry-on, she gets caught up in
a drug-trafficking scheme, just as there is an uptick in sky-
jackings. Born a year too early for coed matriculation at Yale,
“she was never exactly where she was convinced she should
be,” and soon she is yearning to be a pilot. Riley conjures a
Technicolor vision of seventies California and casts Suzy’s
ambition as a feminist quest for self-determination. Her ex-
ploits build to a climax that suggests the book’s title is not so
much an invitation as a challenge.
The Purple Swamp Hen, by Penelope Lively (Viking). The sto-
ries in this collection by the noted British novelist, now in her
mid-eighties, take the long view of life. Many of the charac-
ters are elderly and reckoning with the past: a narrator has
lunch with the woman for whom her (recently dead) ex-husband
left her, decades earlier; a couple almost broaches the long-
undiscussed subject of the death of their small son; the bird of
the title, a resident of ancient Pompeii, recalls the debauched
days before the eruption of Vesuvius. Covering pregnancy, birth,
love, and death, the stories are compact yet often novelistic in
scope, deftly alighting on the seemingly trivial moments that
determine the direction of relationships and lives.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 85

THE CURRENT CINEMA
HAPPY RETURNS
“Logan Lucky” and “Marjorie Prime.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
he good news about the new her clients that he doesn’t like cell
T Steven Soderbergh film, “Logan
Lucky,” is that, although it’s about a
phones. “You one of those Unabomber
types?” she asks. Jimmy also has a
heist, it contains not a single person brother, Clyde (Adam Driver), who
named Ocean. George Clooney in a lost half an arm in Iraq. Despite being,
well-pressed suit, his bons mots tum- in physical terms, the least plausible
bling like dice, is never going to be an siblings since Danny DeVito and Ar-
eyesore, but even the proudest Las nold Schwarzenegger, in “Twins” (1988),
Vegan will have tired of the spectacle Jimmy and Clyde are conjoined in
by now. That explains why Soderbergh, mental sloth. In the words of one on-
Adam Driver and Channing Tatum star in Steven Soderbergh’s heist movie.
who directed “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001) looker, “You Logans must be as sim-
and its two sequels, begins the latest pleminded as people say.”
movie with so sweaty a statement of Yet the movie doesn’t always bear
intent: Channing Tatum, busy with his out that verdict. For one thing, the
tools, under the hood of a truck. Sit- brothers show a casual proficiency that
ting nearby is his young daughter, Sadie borders on cool. Clyde pours drinks,
(Farrah Mackenzie), who passes him with a conjurer’s grace, at a local bar;
the wrenches that he needs. Caesars Jimmy takes off his hard hat and skims
Palace seems a long way off. it backhanded into a storage locker,
Tatum plays Jimmy Logan, who yards away, like 007 tossing his trilby
lives in Boone County, West Virginia, onto a hat stand. Then there’s the plan.
and drives an excavator at the mine. In Jimmy’s kitchen is what Clyde de-
As befits a lover of country music, he scribes as “a robbery to-do list,” the idea
has an ex-wife named Bobbie Jo (Katie being to steal a cornucopia of cash from
Holmes), who wears a fringed white the Charlotte Motor Speedway, in Con-
top and rhinestone-studded jeans, and cord, North Carolina—or, more pre-
a sister, Mellie (Riley Keough), who cisely, to suck the cash from a vault be-
works as a hairdresser. Stopping by neath the track, through a network of
Mellie’s salon, Jimmy admits to one of tubes. The boys enlist the aid of a safe-
86 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017
blower named Joe Bang (Daniel Craig),
the only hitch being that he’s in jail. No
problem. Clyde gets himself arrested,
by driving briskly through the window
of a store, and thrown into the same
prison. He and Joe must break out for
the day, hook up with Jimmy, pull off
the theft, and break back in without
being missed. All of which sounds wacky
enough, but is it simpleminded?
That question meanders through
“Logan Lucky.” What we have here is
a filmmaker of proven liberal creden-
tials (a few years ago, he made a two-
part, four-and-a-half-hour bio-pic of
Che Guevara) addressing himself to a
patch of America where those creden-
tials don’t mean jack. Such is the mer-
riment of the new movie, and so spir-
ited is its pace, that you barely notice
the wavering of the tone. On the one
hand, Soderbergh and his screenwriter,
Rebecca Blunt, set up various charac-
ters as ninepins—folks like Joe’s broth-
ers, Fish and Sam, played so broadly
by Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson, and
with such raw redneckery, that they’re
begging to be knocked down. Roll up,
the movie cries, watch the hicks toss
toilet seats instead of horseshoes! Lis-
ten to them mangle the lingo of the
modern age! (“All the Twitters, I know
’em.” “I looked it up on the Google.”)
Soderbergh reinforces this overkill with
leering closeups; we’re crotch-side with
Joe as he does pushups in his cell, and
Clyde slides a cocktail so near to the
lens that he might as well be offering
the cameraman a swig.
On the other hand, check out race
day—which, wouldn’t you know it, hap-
pens to be heist day, too. Some of the
speedway footage was shot live during
the Coca-Cola 600, one of the premier
Nascar events of the year, and Soder-
bergh doesn’t just give us the hullaba-
loo that surrounds it. He gives it to us
straight. As LeAnn Rimes sings “Amer-
ica the Beautiful” and fighter jets fly in
formation above, all the spectators (bar-
ring Joe Bang, who needs to stay in-
cognito) bare their heads, and you can
feel the film following suit, as you can
when Sadie, shimmering with hair-
spray and fake tan, carols a John Den-
ver song at a beauty pageant, with her
audience crooning along. What Soder-
bergh implies at such moments is that
for countless Americans this is the life,
ILLUSTRATION BY MARK TODD
and that you mock it at your peril. And
yet, elsewhere, the movie points and
snorts. When historians come to tell
the tale of the Trumpian epoch, and of
confused cultural attitudes toward the
heartland, “Logan Lucky” will be part
of the evidence.
Then again, many people will leave
the cinema with nothing more pro-
found—or more enjoyable—than the
image of Daniel Craig, adorned with
a garish blond buzz cut that makes his
blue eyes madder than ever. In jail, he
wears a traditional inmate’s uniform,
with black and white stripes. Asked by
Clyde and Jimmy how it’s going when
they pay a visit, Joe replies, “I’m sitting
on the other side of the table wearing
a onesie. How d’you think it’s going?”
The laugh that met this line when I
saw the movie seemed to unlock its
good cheer, and so liberated does Craig
appear, on a hollering vacation from
his stern-visaged duties as James Bond,
that his mood exalts the whole enter-
prise. “I’m about to get nekkid,” Joe says,
sprawled on the rear seat of a Mustang
V-8, and he takes great joy in cooking
up explosives from gummy bears and
bleach. Soderbergh refuses to get wonk-
ish about the crime; he drops in a few
rum details—for what possible pur-
pose, you wonder, is Mellie painting
live cockroaches with nail polish?—
and stands back, as if to say, Let the
games begin.
Once they’re done, we get a late
twist that I failed to understand, plus
some wary sleuthing from an F.B.I.
agent (Hilary Swank). Neither addi-
tion is necessary, but, then, “Logan
Lucky” delights in superfluities; it’s
more about the trimmings than the
meat. Not all of them succeed. Seth
MacFarlane isn’t much funnier or more
believable as a British racing driver
than Don Cheadle was as a British
thief in the “Ocean’s” saga; whatever
strange fixation Soderbergh has on
Cockneys, or fake Cockneys, should
be laid to rest. But Katherine Water-
ston does wonders with a brief role as
Sylvia, a woman who went to high
school with Jimmy and wound up as
a medic. In a few minutes, she gives
you a hint of the startling ways in which
lives can peel apart and come together
again, and she sets Jimmy thinking.
He and Clyde used to fear a Logan
family curse, but their exploits here—
not the plunder alone but the patent
elixir of hope, savvy, and silliness—
break the spell.
f you are feeling especially dumb, or
IPrime.”
hungover, steer clear of “Marjorie
Michael Almereyda’s film is so
subtly smart, and veiled in such layers
of suggestion, that you need to be on
your toes from the beginning.
In a beautiful house by the sea, an
elderly woman, Marjorie (Lois Smith),
talks to a more youthful man, named
Walter ( Jon Hamm). He sits erect on
the couch, unflappable and neatly
groomed, like Don Draper crossed with
a robot; there’s something not quite
right about him, and it’s only at the end
of the scene that the something be-
comes clear. As Marjorie brushes past
him, she walks through his shoes as if
they weren’t there at all. And they’re
not. Walter is a Prime—a computer pro-
gram, providing a 3-D facsimile of a de-
ceased person. In this case, the true Wal-
ter was Marjorie’s late husband, and she
has chosen to have him return as an
earlier self, thus setting an immediate
moral test: if you could summon up
those you have loved and lost, at what
stage would you capture them? In their
heyday? Or as they were in yours?
Almereyda’s movie, adapted from a
stage play by Jordan Harrison, is tech-
nically science fiction, picking through
the thorny issues of identity that grew
in “Blade Runner,” yet it looks only
lightly futuristic. We never find out
how you order a Prime, or whether it’s
just the well-to-do who can afford one;
will the poor continue to mourn as be-
fore? At one point, we gather that Mar-
jorie herself must have passed away, be-
cause it’s a reboot of her—not younger,
but more kempt—who chats with her
daughter, the sorrowful Tess (Geena
Davis), politely asking for details of the
departed Marjorie, so as to become a
more accurate copy. (“I’m vain?” “A lit-
tle.” “That’s helpful.”) Then we have
Tess’s husband, Jon (Tim Robbins),
fond of his Scotch; we wonder whether
he, in turn, will bring forth a substitute
Tess, once she is no more, and whether,
like all the humans in the movie, he
will be tempted to arrange for an im-
proved or happier model. “Marjorie
Prime” could use a trim, as some of the
exchanges linger too long, but Mica
Levi, who worked on “Under the Skin”
(2013) and “Jackie” (2016), contributes
another searching score, and the film,
with its coastal haze and its fickle gusts
of rain, is likely to lodge in your mem-
ory. Or, as it will soon be called, your
hard drive. 
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 28, 2017 87

 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Benjamin Schwartz,
must be received by Sunday, August 27th. The finalists in the August 7th & 14th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the September 11th issue. Anyone age thirteen or
older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”
..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“This all started with the Fancy Feast.”

Rob Gregory, Chicago, Ill.

“Maybe it’s time we had a kid.” “Should we try that new place in the corner?”
John Lammers, Baldwinsville, N.Y. Gary Borislow, Johns Creek, Ga.

“His videos bought this house. He deserves a little respect.”

Tom Trottier, Ottawa, Ont.