THE CULTURE I SSUE

Month 00, 2016

October 30, 2016

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 The Culture Issue / October 30, 2016

The Exile Last Taboo Lost and Found

Four years ago Kesha was a global superstar. Why American pop culture just can’t deal A pilgrimage to the desert shrine of the
Then a contract dispute — and her rape claim with black male sexuality. assemblage artist Noah Purifoy.
against her producer — sent her career into
the wilderness. By Wesley Morris By LaToya Ruby Frazier

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

6 Continued on Page 8
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experience – I forgot this level of service existed
anywhere.”
P A U L TA Y L O R ’ S A M E R I C A N M O D E R N D A N C E
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 The Culture Issue / October 30, 2016

15
First Words
By Jessica Lustig

18
The Ethicist
By Kwame Anthony Appiah

22
On Technology
By Jenna Wortham

28
Letter of Recommendation
By Keith Pandolfi

32
Drink
By Rosie Schaap

34
Eat
By Francis Lam

36
Well
By Gretchen Reynolds

38
Lives
Tigran
As told to Dmitriy Frolovskiy

78
Talk
Interview by Ana Marie Cox

10 Contributors
12 The Thread
18 Judge John Hodgman
26 Poem
30 Tip
74, 76 Puzzles
(Puzzle answers on Page 70)

Behind the Cover

It All Connects
In Adam Curtis’s epic documentaries, the
world as we know it is pulled back to
reveal a complex web of history, technology
and power.
By Jonathan Lethem
Imagine That Jake Silverstein, editor in chief: ‘‘I like how
The radical empathy of the novelist this cover is both assertive and mysterious.
Yoko Tawada. The tall type comes at you hard and loud,
but the image of the pop star Kesha almost
By Rivka Galchen hides behind it, which suits the theme of
the issue.’’ Photograph by Jack Davison for
The New York Times.

8 Copyright © 2016 The New York Times

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Contributors

Taffy Brodesser- ‘‘The Exile’,’ Editor in Chief JAKE SILVERSTEIN

Akner Page 42 Deputy Editors JESSICA LUSTIG,
BILL WASIK

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a contributing writer Managing Editor ERIKA SOMMER

Design Director GAIL BICHLER
for the magazine and for GQ. Her profile of
Director of Photography KATHY RYAN
the actress Gaby Hoffmann for this magazine
Features Editor ILENA SILVERMAN
won a New York Press Club award in 2014, Politics Editor CHARLES HOMANS
and her profile of Damon Lindelof won the same Story Editors NITSUH ABEBE,
award in 2015. For this week’s Culture Issue, MICHAEL BENOIST,
Brodesser-Akner was interested in profiling Kesha SHEILA GLASER,

because of how the pop star’s continuing litigation CLAIRE GUTIERREZ,

with the producer Dr. Luke has stalled her career. LUKE MITCHELL,
DEAN ROBINSON,
‘‘I can’t think of a time this has happened before,’’
WILLY STALEY,
Brodesser-Akner says. ‘‘The story is really live.
SASHA WEISS
It changed a lot as I reported it, but what became Special Projects Editor CAITLIN ROPER
clear to me is that the strangest thing about it Associate Editors JEANNIE CHOI,
is just how banal litigation can be.’’ JAZMINE HUGHES
Photographed by Kathy Ryan at The New York Times on Chief National Correspondent MARK LEIBOVICH
June 24, 2016, at 5:04 p.m. Staff Writers SAM ANDERSON,
EMILY BAZELON,
SUSAN DOMINUS,
LaToya Ruby Frazier ‘‘Lost and Found,’’ LaToya Ruby Frazier is a photographer who
Page 53 creates work about industrialism, Rust
MAUREEN DOWD,
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES,
Belt revitalization and environmental justice.
WESLEY MORRIS,
JENNA WORTHAM
Rivka Galchen ‘‘Imagine That,’’ Rivka Galchen is the author of three books, Writers at Large C. J. CHIVERS,
Page 66 most recently ‘‘Little Labors.’’ She last wrote for JIM RUTENBERG

the magazine about the transformative power David Carr Fellow GREG HOWARD

of lullabies. Art Director MATT WILLEY

Deputy Art Director JASON SFETKO
Designers FRANK AUGUGLIARO,
Jonathan Lethem ‘‘It All Connects,’’ Jonathan Lethem is the author of 10 novels,
BEN GRANDGENETT,
Page 60 including ‘‘A Gambler’s Anatomy.’’ He lives in
CHLOE SCHEFFE
Los Angeles and Maine. Digital Designer LINSEY FIELDS
Associate Photo Editors STACEY BAKER,
Jaime Lowe ‘‘Lost and Found,’’ Jaime Lowe is a freelance writer living in AMY KELLNER,
Page 53 Brooklyn. She last wrote for the magazine CHRISTINE WALSH

about how to cut your own hair. Virtual-Reality Editor JENNA PIROG
Photo Assistant KAREN HANLEY
Copy Chief ROB HOERBURGER
Wesley Morris ‘‘Last Taboo,’’ Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The
Page 48 Copy Editors HARVEY DICKSON,
New York Times and a staff writer for
DANIEL FROMSON,
the magazine. He last wrote about Colin MARGARET PREBULA,
Kaepernick and patriotism. ANDREW WILLETT
Head of Research NANDI RODRIGO
Research Editors DAN KAUFMAN,

Dear Reader: Did You Lie Today? ROBERT LIGUORI,

RENÉE MICHAEL,
LIA MILLER,
Every week the magazine publishes the results
STEVEN STERN,
of a study conducted online in June by The
MARK VAN DE WALLE
New York Times’s research-and-analytics Production Chief ANICK PLEVEN
department, reflecting the opinions of 2,563 Production Editors PATTY RUSH,
subscribers who chose to participate. HILARY SHANAHAN
This week’s question: Have you told a lie today? 7% Yes 93% No Editorial Assistant LIZ GERECITANO BRINN

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The Thread
Readers respond to the 10.16.2016 issue.
RE: HILLARY CLINTON
Mark Leibovich went inside the final weeks of
Hillary Clinton’s cautious — and surprisingly
risky — campaign.
Yes, Hillary Clinton may be all that stands
between us and the apocalypse. And as
she says, ‘‘We face some hard choices.’’
However, her rhetoric comes across
either as the obtuse promises we’ve
heard before or as personal attacks on
Trump that aren’t effective. Too many
politicians have had their heads in the
sand for too long, concerned only about
holding office. Trump, who vows to smash
all before him, seems the only remedy to
a status quo that’s not working.
To prevent the release of the Kraken
known as Trump, I would advise Clinton
that we didn’t get to where we are solely
thanks to Republicans. Democrats share
the blame. Therefore, a little contrition
would be a good way to start her conver-
sation with the electorate. That would add
much to her credibility, the lack of which
is her biggest liability.
Karen Hartman, Douglas, Mich.
Is there any doubt that Hillary Clinton
is the most vilified public figure of this
still-young century? One national net-
work has a mission to destroy her. The
right-wing-conspiracy-driven social-
media ecosystem hates her, as do many
members of Congress and a wide swath
of the population. Is it any wonder
that she is a private person in a public
role? Can anyone really blame her or
hold it against Clinton to shrink in a
defensive crouch when her opponent
asserts she is a devil whom he would
throw in jail?
12 10.30.16
I, for one, conclude that Trump was
spot on about Clinton: She fights hard, she
doesn’t quit and she doesn’t give up. Are
not those the qualities of a leader? For-
get her less-than-sizzling persona. Ignore
the lingering tides of sexism still awash
in the country. Hillary Rodham Clinton
has absolutely been through the gantlet THE STORY,
of public and personal challenges unlike ON TWITTER
any other public figure in my lifetime.
I cannot recommend
I will enthusiastically cast my vote for her @MarkLeibovich’s
next month. latest piece for
Paul Bernish, Cincinnati, Ohio @NYTmag highly
enough. Insightful,
funny, poignant
(per usual).
RE: ADDERALL @TheWilderThings
Casey Schwartz details her use of prescrip-
tion stimulants to get through school and to
start her career — and her struggle to stop.
Casey Schwartz’s very readable article
details her experience with prescription-
drug abuse and addiction and her hard-
won struggle to break free. But her per-
sonal tale of fall and redemption leaves
behind a different Generation Adderall:
the sort of kid she herself used to tutor
in Los Angeles, who may have been pre-
scribed the drug as a last resort in order
to function in society — i.e., in school —
by following rules and lesson plans and
without disrupting those around them.
As Schwartz suggests in her piece,
research on the long-term effects of extend-
ed use of prescription amphetamines is
sadly insufficient and inconclusive. And
that research is imperative for the health
and safety of the children who have taken
the drug for years, every morning accord-
ing to a prescribed dosage, and who may
need to learn to live with Adderall, or its
future equivalents, indefinitely — in order
to continue to hear music of their own.
Elisa Isaacson, Albany, Calif.
‘Is there any
doubt that
Hillary Clinton
is the most
vilified public
figure of this
still-young
century?’
Illustrations by Giacomo Gambineri
Casey Schwartz’s punchy, engrossing
narrative about the experience of try-
ing and becoming addicted to Adderall
illuminates a conclusion that should sur-
prise no one: Diversion of medication to
patients who have not been diagnosed
properly never turns out well. Sadly,
years after her foray into abusing Adder-
all, a psychiatrist ‘‘legitimized’’ Schwartz’s
addiction by doing a hasty job of evaluat-
ing her, apparently offering no counseling
or education about A.D.H.D. Instead, she
was sent on her way to more stimulant
misuse and trouble, apparently with-
out any follow-up appointments being
required by the prescribing physician.
Although she claims that she faked her
inattentive symptoms to secure her script
for Adderall, it could be that Schwartz did
and does in fact have a milder, subclinical
form of A.D.H.D., given what appears to
be a history of repeated problems with
procrastination and inconsistent effort,
particularly during college. If so, medi-
cation judiciously taken and monitored,
and used in concert with other supports
(psychotherapy, executive-function
coaching, proper levels of exercise and
sleep), might have prevented her from
becoming swept up in the ravages of
addiction. Instead, proper diagnosis and
treatment might have allowed her to func-
tion fully and well during her 20-some-
thing years.
Frances C. Sutherland, Ph.D., Bryn Mawr, Pa.
CORRECTION:
Photograph by Benjamin Lowy
The Eat column on Oct. 16, about the writer
and chef Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, mis-
identified the state where Smart-Grosvenor
was born. She was from Fairfax, S.C., not
Fairfax, Va.
Send your thoughts to magazine@nytimes.com.
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First Words

Addressing ‘grievance’ is a founding principle of American democracy. But are all grudges
created equal? By Jessica Lustig

Anger Management
At the climax of the Broadway musical ‘‘Hamilton,’’ Aaron Burr and
Alexander Hamilton exchange a series of increasingly hostile letters
in the song ‘‘Your Obedient Servant.’’ Burr enumerates a litany of
perceived insults: Hamilton has called him ‘‘amoral’’ and ‘‘a dangerous
disgrace’’ and blocked his political aspirations. ‘‘Burr, your grievance
is legitimate,’’ Hamilton replies dismissively. ‘‘I stand by what I said,
every bit of it/You stand only for yourself/It’s what you do/I can’t
apologize because it’s true.’’ An outraged Burr feels he has been
doubly wronged — first he is bad-mouthed and then his complaint
is answered with a shrug. These irreconcilable differences came to a
head on July 11, 1804, in a fatal duel in Weehawken, N.J. ¶ The genius
of ‘‘Hamilton,’’ which opened in February 2015, four months before
Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, was the way
in which it made the stuff of history textbooks feel unexpectedly
vivid, even contemporary. A year and a half later, the prospect of two
political adversaries drawing pistols at dawn over unforgivable insults
is perhaps not nearly so remote as we might wish. Trump is ‘‘unfit,
10.30.16 15
First Words

and he proves it every time he talks,’’

Hillary Clinton said in the third pres-
idential debate on Oct. 19. ‘‘No, you
are the one that’s unfit,’’ Trump fumed.
There was no handshake afterward.
When the ‘‘Hamilton’’ creator Lin-Man-
uel Miranda hosted ‘‘Saturday Night
Live’’ last month, he acknowledged
the convergence in his rapped open-
ing monologue: ‘‘And, yes, I’m right in
my element/Who knew that ‘Hamilton’
would be so topically relevant?/The way
that these grandstanding candidates be
talking/They’re just a tweet away from
facing off in Weehawken!’’
Grievance is the animating theme of
this election and the natural state of at least
one of the candidates; Trump is a public
figure whose ideology, such as it is, essen-
tially amounts to a politics of the personal
grudge. It has drawn to him throngs of
disaffected citizens all too glad to reclaim
the epithet ‘‘deplorable.’’ But beyond these
aggrieved hordes, it can seem at times as if
nearly everyone in the country is nursing
wounds, cringing over slights and embar-
rassments, inveighing against enemies
and wishing for retribution. Everyone has
someone, or something, to resent — and
often rightfully so.

Americans tend to think of rights and

grievances in completely different ways
— one as a near-mystical birthright and
the other as an unjustice that demands a
response — but they are each part of our
political origin story. In 1774, the First
Continental Congress sent a Declaration
of Rights and Grievances to King George
III, protesting that Americans had ‘‘a
right peaceably to assemble, consider of
their grievances, and petition the King;
and that all prosecutions, prohibitory
proclamations, and commitments for
the same, are illegal’’ — a missive that
set the stage for revolt and the Declara-
tion of Independence two years later. A
grievance was understood to be a wrong
so grave, so serious, that it must be in
but struck from the final version; it would
take the 13th Amendment to begin to
right that wrong. And half the popula-
tion didn’t appear in the founding doc-
uments at all. Abigail Adams, the wife of
John Adams and a future first lady, wrote
to her friend Mercy Otis Warren in 1776
that she had sent ‘‘a List of Female Griev-
ances’’ to her husband in Philadelphia,
where he was working with the Conti-
nental Congress to draft the laws of the
new nation. ‘‘I even threatened foment-
ing a Rebellion in case we were not con-
sidered,’’ Adams wrote, ‘‘and assured him
Those founding strategy for addressing the persecution
and second-class citizenship of black
documents Americans. ‘‘Anyone who classifies his
were a blueprint grievances under the label of ‘human
for how rights’ violations, those grievances can
then be brought into the United Nations
a grievance and be discussed by people all over the
could be world,’’ he said. ‘‘For as long as you
transmuted, call it ‘civil rights,’ your only allies can
be the people in the next community,
through many of whom are responsible for your
democratic grievance.’’ It was a kind of vision test:
institutions, Enough people with enough power had
to be able to see the problem clearly in
into a right.
Smoke: Martin Fischer/Dreamstime

violation of its twinned opposite, a right.
It was the other inalienable principle
claimed by the new nation.
Since then our politics, and our evolv-
ing constitutional rights, have been
shaped by the articulation and settling of
grievances writ large. Slavery was listed
as one of the ‘‘grievances’’ in Jefferson’s
draft of the Declaration of Independence,
we would not hold ourselves bound by
any Laws in which we had neither a voice,
nor representation.’’
What had been established in those
founding documents was a blueprint for
how a grievance could be transmuted,
through democratic institutions, into
a right. In a February 1965 speech in
Rochester, Malcolm X reframed the
order to have it corrected.
But as more rights were secured by
some, they were resented by others, who
saw these gains as their own disposses-
sion. Over the next decades, grumblings
arose over government programs, from
welfare to affirmative action, intended
to target the effects of earlier wrongs. In
2003, the former Democratic governor of

16 10.30.16 Illustration by Javier Jaén

Colorado, Richard Lamm, gave a Swiftian
three-minute speech at a dinner given
by the anti-immigration Federation for
American Immigration Reform. ‘‘I would
like to share with you my plan to destroy
America,’’ he said. As the clinking of forks
grew silent, he recited a checklist that ran
from bilingualism to high-school drop-
out rates. ‘‘I would invest in ethnic iden-
tity and victimology. I would get them to
think that their lack of success was only
the fault of the majority. I would start a
grievance industry.’’
Lamm’s speech went viral in the far-
right reaches of the internet, where
it lives on today: a dystopian vision in
which the sort of redress demanded by
Malcolm X is an engine for the destruc-
tion of American society, a redistribution
of privilege and prosperity from whites
to blacks and a rising tide of immigrants
all permanently changing the ‘‘we’’ that
once defined the nation — and those who
got to rule it.

Trump likes to tell his roaring crowds

that ‘‘we won’t have a country anymore’’
if he isn’t elected. The country he warns
against losing is, of course, the very coun-
try that Lamm warned against losing;
Trump’s candidacy takes that complaint
to its logical conclusion. The good old
days. Populism. Nationalism. Nativism.
All of these are more palatable ways of
serving up the same dish: ‘‘The issue of
white grievance,’’ Bill O’Reilly said on
his Fox News show in April, discussing
Trump’s supporters, ‘‘is not going away.’’
This us-against-them movement
found its willing avatar in Trump, a
man whose motivations — even to run
for president — are personal animus,
personal gain, a flouting of the rules
of engagement and civility, equal-op-
portunity insults for all. ‘‘We have a
bunch of babies running our country,
folks,’’ Trump said at a rally in North
Carolina on Oct. 21, referring to Pres-
ident Obama and the first lady. ‘‘We
have a bunch of losers.’’ It’s a grudge
match with no aim higher than his own
standing. ‘‘It’s him or me!’’ Aaron Burr
howls in the song ‘‘The World Was Wide
Enough,’’ near the end of ‘‘Hamilton,’’
in which he narrates the duel and its
aftermath. Grievance begets grievance.
The personal is political. And history
can be hijacked by the consequences.
The Ethicist By Kwame Anthony Appiah
My Ex Is
Advertising
For Sugar
Daddies.
Can I Tell Her
Mother?
I recently broke up with a longtime
girlfriend. We are both in our mid-20s.
She was temporarily without work
for the summer and low on cash. After
our breakup, it came to my attention
that she had made an account on a ‘‘dating’’
website and had been messaging much
older men about, basically, exchanging herself
for money. Establishing ‘‘relationships’’
like these is in vogue among girls in our age
bracket who seek to pay off college loans
or take exotic Instagrammable vacations
on someone else’s dime. Yes, I understand
it’s 2016, and women are empowered to do
what they wish with their bodies, but I fear
that these men are probably unstable (most
likely married, let’s be honest) and
definitely do not have her best interests at
heart. Maybe it’s watching too much cable
news, but I fear for her safety. I considered
bringing it to the attention of her mother,
who I know will not be supportive of this
line of employment, but I’m conflicted.
To submit a query: I know it’s not my place, but if something
Send an email to were to happen to her and I had this
ethicist@nytimes information at my disposal beforehand,
.com; or send mail
to The Ethicist, The wouldn’t I be in the wrong?
New York Times
Magazine, 620 Name Withheld
Eighth Avenue, New
York, N.Y. 10018.
(Include a daytime It’s dispiriting that seeking ‘‘sugar
phone number.) daddies’’ is in vogue. While sex work
18 10.30.16 Illustration by Tomi Um
shouldn’t be illegal, in my view, it doesn’t he is not a danger to himself or others.
follow that there’s never anything ethical-
ly dubious about it. Adultery is, generally
speaking, wrong, and so is abetting it. And
I have not held a conversation with him in
close to 20 years; although I was shocked
when I learned of the crimes of which he was
there’s reason to worry about the attitude
to your sexuality implicit in treating your
body as a commodity. I suspect many
convicted, I have no basis in personal
knowledge either to vouch for his bona fides
now or to reject them. A mutual friend,
‘‘sugar babies’’ in your circle will end up
regretting what they’re doing.
But it’s not a decision for you to make.
who has a very high regard for the parolee’s
capabilities, has approached me to ask
if I might be able to offer consulting work
You don’t have any information that your
ex doesn’t have. And she’s in charge of
her own life. Dragging her mother into
for the parolee.
It seems to me that if we are going
to have a society that attaches finality to
it is just a way of pressuring her to drop
a pursuit she thinks is just fine. It isn’t
your place to do so. Let your ex know
terms of incarceration (is that what we
do, really?), and that offers parole under
some circumstances, we must offer
your concerns about her safety, but
don’t launch a campaign. If something
bad were to happen to her, it wouldn’t
circumstances that permit a reasonable
prospect of successful rehabilitation.
This includes work, certainly, but does not
be your fault; it would be the result of necessarily imply that the former work
a risk she voluntarily accepted. Per- at which the person excelled should be
haps it’s worth mentioning that sugar restored. Do you have thoughts on
daddies, too, can be at risk: The Times how an individual might act ethically in
has reported on a New York octogenar- such circumstances? Would my duties
ian who was robbed and left bound and include informing my clients and acting
helpless in his apartment after such a only with their ‘‘informed consent’’?
date. Exploitation, in these affairs, can
run in both directions. Name Withheld
A person I knew slightly as a student I completely agree with you about treat-
and subsequently at a distance during his ing a sentence served as a punishment
distinguished academic career was recently completed, not an ineradicable condition,
paroled after completing most of a 20-year and about providing prospects of rehabil-
sentence. He was placed in a halfway house; itation. You don’t say what business you’re
if all goes well, he will be eligible to live on in, so I don’t know what sort of consult-
his own. In order to do that, he will need ing this person would be doing for your
a source of income. clients. But unless you think the parolee’s
I assume that the relevant authorities working for you poses a threat to them,
have made a rigorous determination that they have no right to know anything about
Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman
Jeff writes: My wife and I sleep on an old full-size bed and
are in need of a new one. I would like to buy another full
because I am afraid if we start allowing space between us
now, we will begin an exponential pattern of ever-widening
distance. But my wife wants a queen, citing my occasional
sleepwalking/night terrors, which hardly happen anymore.
————
It’s adorable that you want to keep alive the magic of
clutching your beloved at night and screaming. But as your
Illustration by Kyle Hilton
marriage matures, you will learn that, apart from ‘‘special
times,’’ ordinary co-sleeping is less about intimacy than it
is the normalization of close farting. Being unconscious is
a solitary act, and people need their space. All married couples
who can afford it should have two villas, separated by
a reflecting pool. Otherwise: a king-size bed.
 Influenza viruses are cunning. They constantly change
their structure to avoid being recognized and destroyed by the
human immune system. Meaning that in the months it takes
to mass-produce a vaccine against any one version of the flu,
it could become obsolete. But a universal flu vaccine would
target the parts of the influenza virus that do not change
from year to year, the parts that the virus depends upon to
survive. If proven effective, it would not only protect against
all flu viruses, it would be a once in a lifetime experience.
Yes, viruses are cunning. But scientists at Mount Sinai are
working to outsmart them.
1- 8 0 0 -MD-SINA I
mountsinai.org/myhea lt h

ONLY
MOUNT SINAI WOULD THINK

OF A FLU SHOT AS A

ONCE IN A LIFETIME EXPERIENCE.

The Ethicist
him, except that you vouch for the work
you’ve asked him to do.
My concern is with the well-being of my
elderly, visually impaired aunt who still lives
alone at 89. She has lived in the same
one-bedroom condo her entire life, Since she
rarely goes out, she has limited ability
to walk but is still able to get around her
condo. For many years, she has been able
to secure the help she needs with driving,
cleaning and personal affairs by asking
acquaintances if they know someone who
will help her for $10 an hour. Amazingly,
this has worked out pretty well for her. One
woman, with a very kind and generous
heart, went over and above in her assistance.
This lady has now quit, because my aunt
can be strong-willed and verbally abusive.
Additionally, my half sister and others
cite her personality as the reason they have
not spoken to her for about a decade, even
though they live blocks away. I live thousands
of miles away; it is a three-hour flight.
Years ago, my aunt drafted a will in which
I am named as beneficiary; I am affluent
20
and do not need her estate, but I should
mention that it contains more than enough
to pay for her care. All I want to do is keep
her safe and content during the last years
of her life. For the last few years, I have been
speaking to her frequently about lining up
consistent and reputable help, for which she
would have to pay more than $10 an hour;
she seems afraid to spend her money. Also,
I would like to help her get her documents
in order and put together a plan ‘‘in case
of emergency.’’ After each conversation
she says, ‘‘I’ll have to think about it.’’ If
I press her, she gets very angry and starts
shouting. When I tell her about dangers
and unpleasant consequences that she could
endure, she accuses me of trying to scare
her. I’m the only one she has, and yet she
acts with suspicion toward me.
At this time she has no help, except
for a food service that brings her meals
throughout the week. I am becoming
increasingly uncomfortable with continuing
to just speak to her and reason with her.
Is it even morally correct for me to continue
to do so, knowing that we are not getting
If something anywhere? If I were to take action and find
legal ways to insist that a plan be put in
bad were to place for her care, in her home for as long
happen to her, as possible, the scene could be alarmingly
it wouldn’t unpleasant for all involved. Even my mother,
who is her sister-in-law and one of the
be your fault; few people who gets along with her, is not
it would be in agreement with my taking action.
the result of
Name Withheld
a risk she
voluntarily Your mother has a point. You report that
accepted. your aunt is cantankerous and mistrustful,
but you don’t say that she’s lost the capaci-
ty for rational thought. So she continues to
have the right to manage her own life. That
means the only thing you have the right
to do is to reason with her. You don’t have
the right to take over her affairs.
That’s a little cut and dried, though,
isn’t it? We know that age-related demen-
tia is a gradual process; you’re on this side
of the divide, and then you’re on that side
of the divide, but in the usual course of
things, there isn’t a particular day when
you moved from one to the other. So
perhaps there are ways to help your aunt
make plans for her care.
The next time you see her in person, you
might want to bring standard forms for
recording her medical choices, and take
her through the options. These are things
it’s hard to discuss on the phone; she may
also be daunted by (and defensive about)
the prospect of organizing the paperwork.
You can help get the papers drawn up
and executed. If she’s worried about the
expense, as older people sometimes are,
you could offer to cover this yourself.
Then there’s the matter of getting, and
paying for, proper help. A big issue here is
how well she’s able to manage what geria-
tricians call the ‘‘activities of daily living’’
(bathing, eating, dressing, etc.) Help her
to see that to accept help isn’t to give
up independence; indeed, it’s what will
enable her to maintain an independent
existence as long as possible.
After six years at a job (and almost
as many bosses), I got the boss from hell
(think ‘‘The Devil Wears Prada’’). This
company was extremely mismanaged,
there was a lot of turnover and H.R. saw
what they wanted to see. I knew my
new boss was building a case against me,
in order to bring in her cronies from her
previous company. I was already looking
for a new position, with a different
company — I had interviewed three times
with them and was scheduled for my
fourth — when I finally got fired. Was
I obligated to tell them in my next interview
that I had been fired? I didn’t want to
lie, or lie by omission, but I was in dire
financial straits and really needed this
job. My recommendations were from old
bosses — one who heard through the
grapevine what happened and one who
didn’t. I assume the one who knew
based her recommendation on the time
period I worked for her. Did I have
an obligation to tell the other one? Did
I have an obligation to tell the
company I was interviewing with
and that did in fact hire me?
Name Withheld
The only You don’t have an obligation to pass on
information that’s not asked for and that’s
thing you have not germane to your ability to do the job.
the right There can be an exception when there are
to do is reason clear expectations to the contrary, but this
is unlikely in most contexts. Still, the fact
with her. You that you’re not obliged to say you’ve been
don’t have the fired doesn’t mean keeping silent was nec-
right to take essarily the best thing to do. Relations
with employers are best when they’re
over her affairs. open and straightforward. And had they
found out that you’d been fired during the
interview process, they might have wor-
ried about your candor. But you interacted
with them. I didn’t. And there were obvi-
ous pitfalls here: Your bad-mouthing the
old boss could have made them wonder
what you’d have to say about them one
day. If you thought they were capable of
grasping the whole picture, though, I’d
have urged you to tell them once you knew
you had lost your job.
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy
at N.Y.U. He is the author of ‘‘Cosmopolitanism’’ and
‘‘The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.’’
21
On Technology By Jenna Wortham

Barack Obama, the nation’s This October, the White House opened
its doors to a few thousand people for
South by South Lawn, a daylong event

first truly digital president, described as a ‘‘festival of ideas, art and

action.’’ Both the event and its name were
a nod to South by Southwest, the annual
brought Silicon Valley ideas — technology-and-music festival held in
Austin, Tex., where Barack and Michelle

and influence — to Washington. Obama showed up as surprise keynote

speakers earlier this year. The story
goes that they were so impressed by
Is that a good thing? their experiences, they decided to host
their own microrendition before leav-
ing office. Attendees at the White House
version — the types of people who describe
themselves in Twitter bios as ‘‘creator’’ or
‘‘innovator’’ — were told to dress casually,
in clothes suitable for a picnic. The D.J.
Beverly Bond, of Black Girls Rock, blasted
Public Enemy’s anthem ‘‘Fight the Power’’
and Parliament’s ‘‘Flash Light’’ across
the lawn, which was studded with coffee
carts, Lego sculptures and virtual-reality
stations. Enormous stages erected for the
occasion housed a rotating cast of musical
guests and speakers throughout the after-
noon. As the sun began to set, volunteers
handed out plaid blankets so people could
stretch out on the ground.
The event felt like the swan song of
the first president who seemed to get it
— ‘‘it’’ being the value of start-up culture.
A friend in attendance that day told me
that she thought Obama wanted us to
feel ‘‘some ownership, that tech doesn’t
have to be far away or out of our lives.’’
He wants to leave behind a ‘‘nation of
makers,’’ she said. Megan Rose Dickey,
who covered the event for TechCrunch,
wrote that it left her ‘‘optimistic that
maybe our country can change and learn
to do the right thing.’’
In many ways, Obama is America’s
first truly digital president. His 2008
campaign relied heavily on social media
to lift him out of obscurity. Those efforts
Source photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

were in part led by a founder of Facebook,

Chris Hughes, who believed in the Illinois
senator’s campaign so much that he left
the start-up to join Obama’s strategy team.
After he was elected, he created a trifecta
of executive positions in his administra-
tion modeled on corporate best practices:
chief technology officer, chief data scien-
tist, chief performance officer. He sat for
question-and-answer sessions on Reddit,
released playlists of his favorite songs on
Spotify and used Twitter frequently, even
once making dad jokes with Bill Clinton.

22 10.30.16 Illustration by Adam Ferriss Next Week: On Money, by John Lanchester

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On Technology
He stoked deep and meaningful connec-
tions with scores of entrepreneurs in
Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates,
Mark Zuckerberg.
Obama routinely pushed policy that
pleased the tech-savvy, including his
successful effort to keep broadband sup-
pliers from giving preferential treatment
to bigger web companies over individu-
als. Even his tech-specific fumbles seem
unlikely to mar his permanent record: The
rocky debut of HealthCare.gov, the online
insurance marketplace that cost more than
$600 million to build and crashed almost
immediately after it went live, was later
brushed off as a technical difficulty. And his
administration’s pressure on Silicon Valley
companies to aid its cybersecurity efforts
hasn’t seemed to dampen their enthusiasm
for him. Obama used his ties to the tech
sector to foster diplomacy: Last year, he
24 10.30.16
took Brian Chesky, the chief executive of
Airbnb, with him to Cuba as an economic
endorsement of the revolutionary powers
of start-ups to change the world.
South by South Lawn presented an
image of America as a start-up and tech-
nology as a small-batch industry, full of
dreamers and inventors. I was invited to
moderate a panel, ‘‘How Do We Fix Real
Problems With Technology?’’ As much
as I enjoyed our conversation, the prem-
ise felt flawed. ‘‘Fixing’’ problems with
technology often just creates more prob-
lems, largely because technology is never
developed in a neutral way: It embodies
the values and biases of the people who
create it. Crime-predicting software, cel-
ebrated when it was introduced in police
departments around the country, turned
out to reinforce discriminatory polic-
ing. Facebook was recently accused of
Illustration by Adam Ferriss
Obama has suppressing conservative news from its
routinely pushed
trending topics. (The company denied a
policy that pleases
the tech-savvy. bias, but announced plans to train employ-
ees to neutralize political, racial, gender
and age biases that could influence what
it shows its user base.) Several studies have
found that Airbnb has worsened the hous-
ing crises in some cities where it operates.
In January, a report from the World Bank
declared that tech companies were wid-
ening income inequality and wealth dis-
parities, not improving them.
For better or for worse, the last eight
years have been defined less by the rise of
small tech companies than by the expan-
sion of Big Tech. We’ve seen the second
Silicon Valley boom, with companies val-
ued in the billions, including Facebook,
Uber, Snapchat, Palantir and Dropbox.
Jenna Wortham
is a staff writer Established technology companies like
for the magazine. Amazon, Apple and Google have expanded
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On Technology

their reach and influence throughout the Obama was the I left the event as the gorgeous after- become ‘‘discouraged and say, ‘I’m just
world. And while many countries have noon unfurled into a balmy evening, not going to deal with government.’ ’’
pushed back against that spread, our gov-
first American still unsure what to make of it. But a few Obama was the first American president
ernment has essentially left them alone. president to see days later, during a speech at Carnegie to see technology as an engine to improve
(In August, for instance, WhatsApp technology as Mellon, Obama seemed to reckon with lives and accelerate society more quickly
announced that it would begin sharing his feelings about the potential — and than any government body could. That
user data with Facebook, its parent com-
an engine to limits — of the tech world. The White lesson was apparent on the lawn. While
pany, and its suite of products — news improve lives House can’t be as freewheeling as a I still don’t believe that technology is a
that gave some Americans pause but and accelerate start-up, he said, because ‘‘by definition, panacea for society’s problems, I will
caused German regulators to intervene democracy is messy. And part of gov- always appreciate the first president who
on behalf on their citizens.) society more ernment’s job is dealing with problems tried to bring what's best about Silicon
As Obama's presidency winds down, quickly than that nobody else wants to deal with.’’ But Valley to Washington, even if some of the
Silicon Valley and Washington seem to be any government he added that he didn’t want people to bad came with it.
getting closer. Just a few days after South
by South Lawn, The Washington Post body could.
reported that Facebook was quietly talking
to White House officials about rolling out Poem Selected by Matthew Zapruder
a controversial app called Free Basics. On
the surface, Free Basics sounds fantastic: C. K. Williams (1936-2015) wrote the poems in ‘‘Falling Ill’’ after a terminal diagnosis of
It promises free mobile internet for those multiple myeloma. This poem, which appears toward the end of the book, is a glimpse into
who can’t afford expensive data plans. But the mysterious insights of a person on the threshold of death.
only Facebook and Facebook-approved
services would be available through the
app, and the app can collect data on those
who sign up, both to increase the compa-
ny’s user numbers and maintain the growth
needed to impress shareholders. The same
service sparked outrage when Facebook
tried to introduce it in India last year; offi-
cials believed it would create an unfair mar- Life
ketplace and the potential for discriminato-
By C. K. Williams
ry practices. Fusion recently reported that
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram gave a
company called Geofeedia access to infor-
Always now the word the idea the very notion
mation that helped law-enforcement agen- resides lavishly in the past where it once
cies monitor and target minority activists. meant dread fear all the dire forebodings
The close ties between our government
and tech companies have led to changes of those fearful vacuums that carried with them
that Farhad Manjoo, the New York Times intimations of destruction finalities ending
technology columnist, told me ‘‘will have while now life can indicate things salvaged
big effects for a long time, and we’ll say they
started under Obama.’’ as though the most fleeting of feelings
None of this was mentioned at South by could be held could be contained could
South Lawn. Instead, speakers heralded be experienced at will or again or just once
the power of the tech community. John
Lewis, the congressman and civil rights as though one might close one’s eyes and
leader, gave a rousing talk that implored chant life or as though one might gaze up out
listeners to ‘‘get in trouble. Good trou- of the world and hold it in memory like a poem
ble. Get in the way and make some noise.’’
Clay Dumas, chief of staff for the Office here I am the poem would begin take me keep me
of Digital Strategy at the White House,
but how do we keep you when we need you
told me in an email that the event could
only when by definition you’ll be gone
be considered part of a legacy to inspire
social change and activism through tech-
nology. ‘‘In his final months in office,’’
he wrote, ‘‘President Obama wants to
empower the generation of people that
Matthew Zapruder is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, ‘‘Sun Bear.’’ He teaches
helped launch his candidacy and whose poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California and is editor at large at Wave Books. C. K. Williams was the
efforts carried him into office.’’ author of 22 books of poems. ‘‘Falling Ill’’ will be published posthumously next year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

26 10.30.16 Illustration by R. O. Blechman

Letter of Recommendation
Buicks
By Keith Pandolfi
The moment my father pulled into the
driveway with his new Buick LeSabre Lim-
ited was one of his proudest. He parked the
car in the center of our circular driveway,
right by the front door, and beckoned my
mother and me to come have a look. The
LeSabre was a beautiful car, the color of
Champagne. It had a tufted velour interior,
soft vinyl doors and a faux-walnut dash-
board that lit up warm as a hearth.
This was 1984, and I was 14 — too
young to take the car out for a drive
myself, though that was all I wanted to
28 10.30.16
do. When my father went inside to help
Mom with dinner, he let me stay in the
driver’s seat with the keys in the igni-
tion so I could listen to the Delco stereo.
After a while, he came back out with a
yellow cassette tape, the words ‘‘Johann
Strauss’’ embossed on its plastic casing.
He shoved it into the player and lit a cig-
arette. As the sun set on our Cincinnati
subdivision, Dad and I fell deep into the
Vienna woods. It’s one of those moments
I still go back to, a reminder of the fleet-
ing security of being a kid.
Photograph by Jason Nocito
A 1985 LeSabre Security, both personal and financial,
coupe.
is how General Motors long marketed
Buicks. By the time my father bought
one, Buick had already carved out its
insecure spot in the pantheon of Ameri-
can sedans: a step up from the Chevy and
a corner office shy of the Cadillac. But
as the years have passed, the qualities
that made Buicks attractive to accom-
plished parents and grandparents — their
sofa-on-wheels comfort, their ocean-liner
smoothness — have become more of a
joke than a selling point. That’s especially
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Letter of Recommendation
true among those under 65, long the aver-
age age of a Buick owner, though I recent-
ly read it’s skewing more toward 59.
My father died in 1990, and Mom
married another Buick man named Ted,
who had a penchant for Park Avenues.
Visiting the two of them in Florida in
my 20s and 30s, I would leave my rigid
Volkswagen Jetta in their driveway and
drive Ted’s Buick as much as he would
allow. A sense of ease washed over me
as I settled into its plush leather driver’s
seat — first-class accommodations com-
pared with the Jetta’s economy.
As a borderline claustrophobic, I
found that the Buick’s spaciousness let
me breathe a little. As a Luddite, I found
solace in the archaic dashboard controls.
I would take the Park Avenue out on warm
Florida nights, opening the windows and
sailing it through the smooth back roads
of New Smyrna Beach, its loose steering
always reminding me more of a cabin
cruiser than a car. Whenever I came to a
straightaway, I would hit the gas pedal as
hard as I could. It was a fast and powerful
car, and though I drove it recklessly more
times than I should have, I rarely worried.
There was a confidence that car inspired,
a feeling of control.
One thing I never felt was cool. That’s
because Buicks aren’t cool. They’re not
even cool anymore to the demographic
that once loved them most. When I told
my father-in-law recently that I loved
Buicks, he shivered and said, ‘‘Those
are old-man cars, buddy.’’ My father-in-
law is 72. I suppose his attitude reflects
our times, when the pressure to be cool
stretches far beyond our teens, into our
30s and well past our 40s.
I’m hardly immune to this impulse.
Standing in line at a Manhattan lunch
spot a few months ago, I eyed the foot-
wear of the nearby 20- and 30-somethings
to ensure the next pair of Nikes I bought
would be stylish enough. I’m 46. But the
truth is that I’m sick of trying. Now more
than ever, I find myself drawn to the tra-
ditional signposts of American adulthood
— the blue blazer from Brooks Brothers,
the four-bedroom colonial-style home,
the roomy sedan. Maybe it’s because I’ve
always found adult life too overwhelming
to navigate. Maybe it’s easier to use my
parents’ wants as a compass instead of
my own.
30 10.30.16
The Buick As my father guided the LeSabre
LeSabre’s Ups
through the twists and turns of our subur-
and Downs
ban streets all those years ago, he looked
1959:
4,347 pounds,
like a ship captain and a sad-eyed savior.
12 miles per gallon. Though I admire him, I didn’t follow my
1965:
father’s career path. I became a reporter
3,947 pounds, instead of a businessman. I moved to New
12.1 miles per gallon. Orleans and then New York. Adjusted for
1986: inflation, my salary has never exceeded
3,587 pounds, his. I didn’t marry until I was 41, and had
21 miles per gallon.
my first child last year at 45. In terms of
1992: how I imagined my life would turn out,
3,417 pounds,
21 miles per gallon.
I’m a little behind. I wish I had the money
for a good wristwatch, a down payment
2005:
3,567 pounds,
on a house, a Buick of my own.
23 miles per gallon. Driving through Pennsylvania last
winter, I hit a deer and totaled the
(1959 and 1965 Honda my wife’s father handed down
m.p.g. estimates
by automobile-
catalog.com.)
Tip By Jaime Lowe
How to Ride a
Unicycle
‘‘You’re going to fall a lot,’’ says Scott
Wilton, vice president of the Interna-
tional Unicycling Federation. ‘‘It takes a
long time to learn, and it takes the will-
ingness to fall down and get back up.’’
Make sure the unicycle is the right size
for you. Next, get on: ‘‘Stand behind the
unicycle, not to the side of it like you
would a bicycle,’’ Wilton says. Put the
saddle between your legs and, with the
pedal for your dominant foot at the 9
o’clock position, step up onto the unicy-
cle as if you were climbing stairs; as the
unicycle moves underneath you, put the
other foot on its pedal. Hold onto a wall
or a fence for support. (Dismounting is
Illustration by Radio
to her just before we met. Shopping for
a replacement, I urged her to come with
me to a Buick dealership, thinking we
might be able to afford a used Regal or
LaCrosse. She agreed they were nice,
but she wouldn’t have it. Buicks were for
old people, she said. And more import-
ant, we weren’t quite ‘‘there’’ yet.
I look forward to the day when we get
there. As for now, whenever I see the red
taillights of a Buick glowing before me
on a highway, I’ll imagine there’s a fami-
ly inside; that the mother and the father
are accomplished, well heeled. There’s a
kid in the back seat, nodding off to the
sounds of a Strauss waltz on the radio.
When he falls asleep, he’ll dream that
he can drive.
easy, Wilton says: ‘‘Step off backward —
do the exact same thing you did to get
on the unicycle, but in reverse.’’)
When both feet are on the pedals, try
to get a feel for the unicycle by rocking
back and forth; stand up and sit down.
‘‘It’s gonna feel weird at first, but the lon-
ger you spend on it, the easier it will be,’’
Wilton says. ‘‘Once you get on, you have
to go for it. Lean forward and start ped-
aling. Some people get freaked out, and
their brain shuts down, and they stop
pedaling.’’ Don’t do that. To make turns,
take your cross-body arm and point it in
the direction you want to go. ‘‘Once you
know how to turn, you won’t need to use
your arms anymore.’’ Going backward
is tricky. Build up to it: When moving
forward, slow down and pedal one revo-
lution in reverse, then go forward again.
‘‘Just keep going back and forth,’’ Wilton
says. ‘‘It’s a really good thing to learn
with the help of a hand from a friend just
to get the feel.”
When Wilton, who is 23, got a uni-
cycle from his mother 12 years ago, he
didn’t have any instructional resources
beyond the advice of a friend’s uncle.
‘‘On average, it takes about 20 hours to
get a sense of it,’’ Wilton says, ‘‘but it’s
really hard to do it for more than an hour
at first.’’ After mastering basic skills, a
rider can move into more difficult ter-
rain. Any mountain-bike trail will do,
for example. ‘‘Start on the green trails,’’
Wilton says, ‘‘and just ride.’’
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Drink By Rosie Schaap
Good Blood
A cocktail can tap into more indecorous
desires, in a playful way.
A couple of Halloweens ago, I decided to
switch out my lazy, customary Frida Kahlo
costume (thrown together in five minutes
with an embroidered Mexican dress, a few
dollar-store roses and an eyebrow pencil)
32 10.30.16
and instead become Frida of the Damned,
so I added stage blood and fangs to my
usual get-up. I really tried to be scary.
I also happened to be tending bar that
night. But as soon as I asked a customer,
Photograph by Gentl and Hyers
through my plastic fangs, what he wanted
Blood and Sand
to drink, I got laughter in response.
1 oz. Scotch whisky
Stung by my failure to frighten, I con- (choose a blend with
soled myself after my shift with what a distinctly
seemed like an appropriate choice for smoky character)
the occasion: a bloody mary. But despite
its viscous ruddiness, it just didn’t feel
¾ oz. sweet vermouth
like the right drink. I wanted something ¾ oz. cherry liqueur
just as bloody-minded, stronger in
impact but lighter on the palate, some- 1 oz. fresh orange
juice (preferably from
thing more unapologetically a cocktail, a blood orange)
less a meal in a glass.
The bloody mary and its many vari- Orange peel (a twist or
ants aren’t the only drinks with blood in a swath) for garnish
their names — or that somehow suggest
Shake liquid ingredients
it. (The first and most obvious choice
with ice, and strain into
would be red wine.) I might have turned a chilled cocktail glass
to a Captain’s Blood cocktail: a rum- or coupe. Garnish with
based drink similar to a daiquiri, except orange peel.
that it’s made with dark rum instead of
white and a small but essential measure Captain’s Blood
of falernum (a syrup flavored with spic-
es, often nuts, sometimes lime, some- 1 ½ oz. Jamaican
dark rum
times alcoholic and sometimes not,
and popular in Caribbean rum drinks). ¼ oz. falernum
I prefer it on the tart side: just adjust the 1 oz. fresh lime juice
amount of sugar to make it as sweet or
2 dashes
as sharp as you like.
Angostura bitters
But in retrospect, I think a Blood
and Sand would have satisfied me most ½ teaspoon
superfine sugar (or
that Halloween night. It’s a gorgeous
more to taste)
Prohibition-era cocktail named for a 1922
Rudolph Valentino hit melodrama, and Lime wheel or
wedge for garnish
it is said to have made its first appear-
ance in print in Harry Craddocks’s 1930 Shake liquid ingredients
‘‘Savoy Cocktail Book.’’ Craddock’s recipe and sugar with ice,
calls for equal parts Scotch whisky, cher- and strain into a chilled
cocktail glass or coupe.
ry brandy, Italian vermouth and orange Garnish with lime wheel
juice. I prefer different proportions that or wedge.
allow the whisky and juice (all the better
if it’s from blood oranges, both for flavor
and for color) to predominate, but you can
play with these to your taste. The Blood
and Sand is also a corrective for anyone
who thinks Scotch whisky doesn’t play
well in a mixed drink: Without that deep,
Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Amy Wilson.
vital smokiness, it would be a much less
exciting proposition.
These are two very different drinks,
but both the Captain’s Blood and the
Blood and Sand are perfectly sanguine.
They remind us that cocktails give us a
place on which to project some of our
more indecorous desires and, by liquid
proxy, playfully indulge in taboos. There’s
nothing sinister in allowing yourself a bit
of fantasy, some room to surrender to
some more subterranean inclinations —
no plastic fangs necessary.
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Eat By Francis Lam

A Shorter Road to Singapore

A grandmother’s braised duck, and the tastes of an island nation.

34 10.30.16 Photograph by Davide Luciano Food stylist: Michelle Gatton. Prop stylist: Alex Brannian.
‘We’re as likely ‘‘I can already hear my mother scolding
me: ‘You should find something more
to cook pasta as special to cook!’ ’’ Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
hot pot.’ confessed. ‘‘But, you know, Asian parents
— you’ll find a thousand ways to disap-
point them before breakfast.’’ Or dinner,
depending on the time of day. Just off
a publicity tour for her novel, ‘‘Sarong
Party Girls,’’ set in Singapore, Tan and I
were talking about making the sweet soy-
sauce-braised duck she grew up eating
there. Special or not, it was a dish I was
excited to make with her, because Singa-
porean food isn’t easy to find in New York,
or in the United States, for that matter.
There are just about 36,000 Singaporean
immigrants in America, and only about
1,000 have arrived in New York City in the
past five years, according to the United
States Census Bureau. Few restaurants
serve Singaporean food, and the ones that
do usually offer a greatest-hits collection
of dishes, 40 or 60 or 100 on one menu. It’s
an awkward way to serve the cuisine of
a country whose most important natural
resource are perhaps the street-food cooks
who spend their entire lives mastering just
one dish. These are cooks who know, say,
exactly how many shakes they will give
their fried prawn noodles before they are
seared just-so in their woks, or who know
that their herbal pork-rib soups are at
their best three hours and seven minutes
after their stands open. Cooks who have
to make dozens of different dishes a night
can’t have the same touch.
The scarcity of Singaporean food here
is distressing for a people who not only
pride themselves on their cuisine but
whose national identity can be said to be
wrapped up in it. Singapore is a polyglot
society of Chinese and Indians from dif-
ferent regions and native Malays, with
Eurasians and foreigners in the mix. Most
families are in various stages of creoliza-
tion, from the old Peranakans (Chinese
who intermarried with Malays hundreds
of years ago) to people like the grand-
mother of the chef Nicholas Tang. She
arrived in Singapore as a girl in the 1920s
from Fujian, China, and was adopted by a
Peranakan family, who taught her to make
a chicken curry, aromatic with Indian
spices and a Malay paste of coconut, lem-
ongrass, ginger and onion. Tang serves
that curry now as a special at DBGB, the
French bistro in Manhattan where he is
the chef, as a homage to his heritage, but
with French technical flourishes.
Comment: nytimes.com/magazine
‘‘My generation tends to cook widely,’’
Tan said. ‘‘We’re as likely to cook pasta as
hot pot. We pride ourselves on having a
diverse society, and when we talk about
our ethnic differences, it’s often about our
food, acknowledging that you make this
thing differently than me. Everyone cele-
brates everyone else’s festivals — my family
is Chinese, but I grew up celebrating Hari
Raya and Diwali as much as Christmas —
because we all get to eat each other’s food.’’
And so, when we talked about other
dishes that may be more ‘‘special,’’ Tan also
suggested otak otak, a Peranakan macker-
el pâté, minced with fatty nuts, wrapped
in banana leaves and grilled until set and
smoky. Or a Boxing Day curry, made from
bits of roast beef or ham or goose left over
from your proper English Christmas din-
ner. But we settled on her braised duck,
because Tan remembers it on her grand-
mother’s stove every time she visited, and
she most wanted to share what she called
‘‘our daily food, the things you wouldn’t
think to share with other people because
they’re not special enough.’’
It was a simple process — she caramel-
ized some sugar, ‘‘fried’’ some aromatics in
it, poured in sweet soy sauce and settled
the duck into the pan to gently simmer for
an hour or so, before dropping in some
fried tofu and boiled eggs to absorb that
darkly rich sauce. As the duck cooked, she
noted that she uses star anise in the braise,
which isn’t traditional. But it adds an extra
layer of memory: Its cinnamon-fennel
scent is a feature of braised pork dishes
she grew up with, and having it in her New
York home now is a way of shortening the
distance to Singapore. She pulled the duck
out before it was fully cooked, a touch of
pink signifying a Western preference.
‘‘Every time I cook my grandmother’s
food, I feel like I’m desecrating her mem-
ory,’’ Tan said, laughing a little nervously.
But as we ate, the duck’s rich, round fat
wound together the flavors of star anise
and ginger, and the bites of tofu released
waves of savory, syrupy sauce, and I told
her I was sure that her grandmother
would be just fine with this.
Singaporean Braised Duck
1 hour 15 minutes, plus marinating time
1 5-pound duck, whole
2 tablespoons kosher salt,
plus more to taste
2 tablespoons Chinese five-spice powder
8 teaspoons sugar
4 pods star anise
15 cloves garlic, lightly smashed
4 inches galangal or ginger, peeled
and sliced into ¼-inch coins
1 cup kecap manis (see note)
14 ounces packaged fried tofu,
cut into 2-inch pieces
6 hard-boiled eggs
Steamed rice, for serving
Auntie Khar Imm’s Chile Sauce
(recipe online)
Note: Kecap manis is a thick, sweetened
Indonesian soy sauce commonly found in
Asian markets.
1. Trim the duck of any visible excess fat,
especially from the tail area. Mix together
the salt and five-spice powder, and
season the duck all over, including inside
the cavity, and marinate, refrigerated,
for 2 hours or overnight. Rinse the duck
with fresh water inside and out.
2. Place a large wok or Dutch oven over
medium heat, and add the sugar. After it
liquefies, watch it carefully as it caramelizes
to a medium brown, swirling the pot
occasionally to help it color evenly. Add the
star anise, garlic and ginger, and stir to
coat in the caramel, and to keep the caramel
cooking until it’s a dark brown, but not
burned. Stir in 1 cup of water to dissolve the
caramel, then add the kecap manis.
3. Add duck, breast side up, then add water
to come up halfway, submerging the legs.
Raise the heat to bring the liquid to a boil, then
turn the heat down to a very gentle simmer,
just barely bubbling.
4. Cook for 15 minutes, then carefully flip the
duck so the breast side is down. Cook 15
minutes, then flip again. Taste the liquid, and
add salt or more kecap manis to taste. Cook
15 minutes, then flip so the breast side is down
again. Cook another 5 to 15 minutes, until
the breast is cooked to your liking. Traditionally
it should be cooked through, but Tan’s spin
is to remove the duck when the breast meat
is 135 to 140 degrees, or medium. To use a
traditional test, poke a chopstick in the thickest
parts of the duck thigh and breast; if it goes
through without too much resistance, it’s done.
5. Remove the duck to a platter or cutting
board, and tent with foil. Let it rest for 10
minutes. Add the tofu and eggs to the sauce,
and simmer them gently for 10 minutes,
until stained and hot. Skim the sauce of any
floating fat if necessary, and serve it all
with rice and chile sauce.
Serves 6.
Adapted from Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan.
35
Well By Gretchen Reynolds

Give Yourself a Break

What researchers found when looking for a way to
make marathoning less stressful on the heart.

Completing a marathon can be trium-

phant — but also heart-rending, in a sur-
prisingly literal sense. Immediately after a
race, many recreational marathoners have
been found to have high levels of enzymes
in their blood that indicate cardiac dam-
age. These runners have ‘‘stunned’’ their
hearts, as some exercise cardiologists
put it. Enzyme levels generally return to
normal within a week or so, suggesting
that hearts recover quickly, but some
experts have still wondered if there are
less-stressful ways to get through a mar-
athon. For example, should nonelite run-
ners deliberately walk part of the way?
Exercise scientists in Germany took
up this question for a study published
earlier this year in the Journal of Science
and Medicine in Sport. They recruited
42 recreational runners training for
their first marathon and then, just before
the race, randomly split them into two
groups. Half the runners were told to
walk for a minute after roughly every
mile and a half, the others to run the
entire race. Everyone set their own run-
ning and walking paces.
Both groups felt some trepidation
about their assignments, according to
Kuno Hottenrott, a professor of sports
science at Martin Luther University in
Germany, who led the study. The non-
stop runners ‘‘were worried that they
would not be able to finish the entire race returned to normal — the stunned heart Marathon fatigue, they told the researchers. Two of
without having to walk for a bit,’’ he says, does not seem to be permanently affect- them were unable to finish.
while the walkers fretted that their times ed — but the results demonstrate that participants Fast, fit and experienced marathoners
would suffer. In fact, almost all of them intervals of walking during a marathon who walked will probably not find much benefit in a
finished in a little more than four hours, will not eliminate the stress endured by part of their run-walk program, Hottenrott says; their
a relatively respectable time for nonelite a participant’s heart. bodies should already be inured to the
runners. The walkers tended to speed up What the walkers did show, though, course were physical demands of running 26 miles.
when they resumed running, producing was much less strain on the rest of the fresher and had But he recommends the approach for
faster average miles than those in the body. Despite running faster or harder faster average beginners and runners whose goal is a
other group. than the other subjects when running, finishing time of four hours or more. And
Everyone also showed elevated levels this group reported less fatigue and little miles than those Hottenrott points out that almost all of
of the enzymes in their blood that signal muscle soreness at the end of the race. who ran the study participants who were in the
damage to the heart, however. Hotten- None of the walkers dropped out. Most all the way. walk-run group said that they planned
rott says that by the time of follow-up of the nonstop runners, on the other to run another marathon while using the
tests four days later, those enzymes had hand, had very sore legs and felt intense strategy again.

36 10.30.16 Illustration by Renaud Vigourt

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Lives
Last March, I had to move out of the apart-
Rent Control ment on Oktyabrskaya Street in Moscow
where I lived for 10 years. In a big city with
lots of available places, I did not expect it to
In Moscow, housing discrimination be hard to find a new room, and I made my
first pick shortly after going online. There
has become a fact of life. was one thing that I more or less ignored:
Like many of the listings, the description of
As told to Dmitriy Frolovskiy
the rental contained the phrase ‘‘Slavs only.’’
In Moscow, many believe that migrant
laborers from the Caucasus region and
Central Asia rent accommodations in
order to convert them into so-called rubber
apartments, cramming 10 or more people
into them. Foreign workers, or gastarbeiters,
who come here ready to work all sorts of
jobs, are usually identifiable by thick south-
ern accents. But that was not me.
As an Armenian raised and educated in
Moscow, I have always considered myself
a Muscovite, part of Russian society.
Although I am not Slavic, I think and speak
in Russian, and my Armenian is limited. I
don’t condone the racial stereotyping, but
the ‘‘Slavs only’’ notices in the real estate
listings did not make me raise an eyebrow.
When I dialed the number for the place
I liked, the agent was very polite. He liked
that I was local and worked for a good
firm near the Belorusskaya metro station
downtown. We were preparing to set up a
meeting, but then he asked for my name.
‘‘My name is Tigran,’’ I replied.
He paused and then mumbled, ‘‘Why
are you speaking without an accent?’’
Befuddled, I started explaining my back-
ground, but I had barely managed a sen-
tence when he cut off the call.
Before trying again, I told my aunt
about the incident. It did not surprise
her, and she mentioned a friend who is a
real estate agent. He was probably famil-
iar with the problem, and perhaps he had
access to other listings or knew owners
who did not screen out non-Slavs. I didn’t
call him then. I decided to make it Plan B.
I spent several hours online, comparing
apartments and rates and trying to avoid
‘‘Slavs only’’ listings. The next apartment I
picked — a place I would share with anoth-
er tenant — was near the Mayakovskaya
metro station, in a grand old building
within walking distance of the Kremlin.
Based on the photos, the rooms were nice-
Name: Tigran Tigran, who asked Russian to Dmitriy ly furnished and had parquet floors. The
Age: 27
that his last name Frolovskiy, a writer description didn’t mention anything about
be withheld for safety based in Moscow.
not wanting non-Slavs.
Location: Moscow reasons, works as
a business consultant. I thought about telling the agent my
He told his story in name was Sergey — common in Russia
38 10.30.16 Illustration by Melinda Josie
— but when he answered, he introduced
himself as Sergey, and I was caught off
guard. Somehow I got through the whole
conversation without giving my name. We
agreed to meet later that day.
As we shook hands, I announced my
Armenian name. Sergey did not seem to
be bothered by it — that was a relief — and
we proceeded to the apartment.
He rang the bell, but the door was open,
so we stepped into the corridor. ‘‘I’m com-
ing, coming, please start without me,’’ the
female voice yelled from the kitchen.
Every room had different warm-
colored wallpaper that added harmony
to the general perception of the place.
The apartment had high ceilings, com-
mon for buildings of Stalin’s era. Pan-
oramic windows overlooked Tverskaya
— one of Moscow’s main streets. Soon
the woman, my potential apartment
mate, appeared. She was in her 40s and
wore a Russian dressing gown featuring
a floral pattern.
‘‘Hi, my name is Tigran,’’ I said, smiling.
She did not reply but stared at Sergey.
There was an awkward feeling, an ele-
phant in the room.
‘‘Please, meet Irina,’’ Sergey said, break-
ing the silence. Then without waiting for
her to say anything, he started describing
the apartment. Irina did not seem to be
listening, and at one point she approached
me. ‘‘I don’t think that this place suits you,’’
she whispered in my ear.
While I stumbled to come up with a
reply, Irina switched to Sergey and said
aloud, ‘‘Sergey, isn’t there a ‘Slavic people
only’ requirement?’’
I could not remain quiet. ‘‘Do you care
about decent people living here, or only
those who are Slavic?’’ I asked.
‘‘I don’t know you, but I’m very familiar
with your people!’’ she yelled.
‘‘I don’t know you, either,’’ I shot back.
‘‘What if you are an alcoholic?’’
Irina did not respond. I stared at
Sergey, but he was silent.
‘‘Now I am confident that this place
doesn’t suit me,’’ I said, starting to walk out.
As I went out to my car, I was full of
emotions. It was almost funny that some-
thing like this could occur today in a major
multinational city. But it was also very dis-
appointing to realize that it does, to find
out in such a personal way. In the end, even
the agent my aunt told me about couldn’t
help. I managed to find an apartment only
with the help of my friends.
 The other guy.

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The second half of the year is usually a time for
blockbusters. Massive, world-destroying sum-
mer movies give way, after a month’s lull, to a
splashy new slate of high-stakes fall television
shows; the names of renowned authors dot the
front pages of publishers’ fall catalogs; soon
enough the machine of culture is once again
ramping its way up into a new set of massive,
world-destroying holiday-season movies. Even
if you’re not consuming the same well-marketed
hits as everyone else, there’s a good chance that
it still feels as though you are: Once a piece of
art takes hold, in whatever corner of Ameri-
can culture you frequent, it can feel as if it’s
all anyone has to talk about anymore, whether
it’s the pop song people keep quoting or the
new prestige-TV fascination everyone around
you spends Monday mornings gasping over. We
all get our own inescapable blockbusters — the
creations that offer us a common experience,
The Culture Issue
then dominate our collective imaginations for
as long as they can manage.
So for this fall’s Culture Issue, we’ve tried to
do something different. We’ve tried to turn an
eye toward the things we don’t often see or hear
about — not just the culture being made in hidden
corners but the silences and absences of the hits
themselves. What follows is a look at some of
what lingers just outside the usual frame, some-
times by omission and sometimes by design.
41
Four years ago Kesha was a
global superstar. Then a contract
dispute — and her rape claim
against her producer — sent her
career into the wilderness.

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Photograph by Jack Davison
43
 esha was tired; Kesha was in
her Saturn return. A Saturn
return, she explained to me,
happens to people between
the ages of 27 and 31. ‘‘It’s
when [expletive] gets really
real and really hard, and you
have to face life as an adult,’’
she said. Her hair was wet,
and she wore eyelash exten-
sions and no makeup. Her
face, close up, is covered in
freckles the color of very light
coffee that make her look
younger than 29. ‘‘It’s just a
period in your life where you
just kind of go from being
more of a kid to a real adult.’’
She had been practicing
this September day onstage at the Brooklyn club
Warsaw, singing high and singing low, readying
for her show that night, for which there had to be
glam, a word that fits no intuitive part of speech
and means that her hair and makeup were get-
ting done. She used to cover those freckles, but
she doesn’t anymore. She dressed in one of her
two Nudie suits, the white one, the Western wear
customized for her with an embroidered eye that
matched the tattoo of an eye on the palm of her
hand; a heart with a dagger in it; a few flowers; a
couple of crosses. The Nudie suit was the same
one she wore to the Billboard Music Awards in
May. This is what she has taken to performing
in since all this went down — fewer leotards, no
more general pantslessness.
In 2014, Kesha (née Kesha Rose Sebert) sued
Dr. Luke (né Lukasz Gottwald), one of the music
industry’s most successful and powerful pop
music producers, and his various entities, saying
he had drugged and raped her and emotion-
ally abused her, and asked to be released from
her contract. He countersued her for breach of
contract and defamation hours later. A million
briefs and filings and countercomplaints later,
in February, a judge in New York denied her
request for an injunction on her recording con-
tract (a recording contract can hold you hostage
for life, or at least for a majority of your career).
That day, her fans, known as her Animals,
threw glitter across the steps of the courthouse,
a reminder for her that whatever happened, she
was still their queen. They chanted, ‘‘Free Kesha
now!’’ It was to no avail: Kesha, in a white suit
of far less merriment than the Nudie suit, sat in
the gallery, her head on her mother’s shoulder,
weeping. That day, #FreeKesha stormed social
media, and within weeks, Adele spoke out from
the stage in support of her. Taylor Swift, with
whom she was only casually acquainted, donated
$250,000 to help cover her crippling legal fees.
Kelly Clarkson went on the record to say that Dr.
Luke was a liar, that he was ‘‘kind of demeaning,’’
that she had been blackmailed into working with
44 10.30.16
him. In April, the same judge said Kesha’s claims
weren’t detailed enough to consider and that the
statute of limitations had long since passed on
her allegations of rape.
Kesha is no longer the artist we met in the late
aughts: blazing dollar sign in her name in place of
the S, gold Trans Am that she said she wanted to
have continuous sex in, 24-7 party girl, dredged
in oil and breaded like a schnitzel in glitter. Now
she is someone in suspended animation, unable
to release new music pending contract litigation,
touring small clubs to make some money to help
fund her lawsuit and to make sure her fans don’t
forget her; now she is someone who wants to
work and make music, just without the man she
says raped her; now Kesha is a cause.
Outside Warsaw, her fans also had (or did?
or committed? It’s still unclear) glam. A myopic
young man who held a vial of maroon glitter
told me that he lost his mother two months ago
and that he came in from out of state for this
show. ‘‘If Kesha can get through this year,’’ he
said, ‘‘so can I.’’ A young woman in ripped panty-
hose and shorts used a blue glitter stick to apply
tiger stripes to a friend’s face. ‘‘Kesha is such an
inspiration to me,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m a survivor, too.’’
Before I could ask if she was talking about general
lifelong survival or if she was a victim of sexual
assault, her friend screamed, ‘‘She’s here!’’ and a
mass of people in their early 20s rushed around
the corner to find Kesha, who had emerged from
the club beaming. One of them yelled: ‘‘Mom!
She’s my mom! I have to go make sure she knows
she’s my mom!’’ As her Animals approached,
Kesha opened her arms to one of them.
‘‘Hi! Hi! You were in court!’’ Kesha said. ‘‘You
were there!’’
‘‘Yes, yes, I was there,’’ the Animal said. ‘‘I’m
so happy you’re free now!’’
Here Kesha got serious. She looked the Animal
in the face and said very carefully: ‘‘No, no. I’m not
free. Don’t think that, because there’s still a lawsuit.
I have new music. I — ’’ She stopped herself, then
hugged the Animal and a few more, took a picture
with all of them and left.
Later, she told me that people didn’t really
understand the predicament she was in. They
think it’s simple, that she’s free or not free,
that she must have won her court case because
‘They were like, ‘‘Oh, my gosh,
you’re free,’’ and I was like,
‘‘No, sweetheart, I love you, but no,
I am not, and I don’t know
where you got that information.’’ ’
she’s performing. ‘‘They were like, ‘Oh, my gosh,
you’re free,’ and I was like, ‘No, sweetheart, I
love you, but no, I am not, and I don’t know
where you got that information.’ ’’ Her Ani-
mals, the world at large, they didn’t really get
that she had written new songs — 22 of them
— and recorded them at her own expense and
that they were sitting somewhere waiting to be
completed and polished and released. She told
me that she wanted to get her story out so peo-
ple really understood what was going on — that
right now, she is the opposite of free.
At Warsaw, she threw Christmas lights across
the stage and performed in front of a sign lit up
in jaunty cowboy letters that said ‘‘[Expletive] the
World,’’ because that was how she was feeling.
She prowled back and forth in her Nudie suit,
which she eventually took off to reveal a fringed
black hot-pants onesie that read ‘‘FTW’’ on its
rear. There was no more hitting her cue, no more
hyperchoreographed pop-star dances, except
one done maybe as a joke, in dinosaur masks. At
one point she played a guitar with her teeth after
pretending to eat her boyfriend’s face. This was
just a very strange, very Kesha club show.
She sang some of her biggest hits, often modi-
fied with a country lilt. She sang a cover of the
song she helped write for Britney Spears, ‘‘Till
the World Ends,’’ like a haunted dirge. ‘‘I can’t
take it, take it, take no more,’’ she sang, her voice
deep and wounded. At one point, she shouted:
‘‘Anything outside of these four walls doesn’t
matter tonight. I’m talking about rent. I’m
talking about homework. I’m talking about your
[expletive] ex-boyfriend. I’m talking about my
lawsuit.’’ The crowd went berserk. ‘‘[Expletive]
that!’’ she screamed as the Animals cheered and
threw glitter.
On the rooftop of her hotel in Brooklyn the day
after the show, Kesha was talking about the par-
ticular and peculiar predicament she finds her-
self in — a pop star suspended in a Jell-O mold
of paralysis, unable to put out new music until all
of this is resolved — when a bee began to circle
her with intense interest and finally landed on
the knee of her black jeans, within one of their
artfully torn holes. ‘‘If I don’t freak out, I’ll be
fine,’’ she said, her eyes watching the insect.
It was an intimate discussion, just Kesha and
me, a bee and four members of her team, includ-
ing her lawyer, all leaning in and listening and
ready to yank a hood over my head and remove
me in the event that our talk broached anything
that might seem antagonistic to her continuing
litigation. The night before, at her concert, her
lawyer stuck by my side as if we were on a date.
How disconcerting all this was: Kesha is
someone whose image was built on a decidedly
unchaperoned ferality, a spontaneity and a streak
of rebellion and a lack of self-consciousness.
Once she sang that she brushed her teeth with
a bottle of Jack Daniels. She sang about suitors

Kesha on her way to a performance
with her band, the Creepies.
visiting her metaphoric gold Trans Am. A friend Kesha’s lawyer at the time, whom she has since
of mine interviewed her a few years ago and told replaced, argued that Kesha was less valuable to
me they’d had a hilarious time, sitting outside a Sony than Luke. ‘‘Their business interest is in pro-
loud bar, laughing and drinking. He called her moting Dr. Luke, because he’s their hit maker, not
‘‘giddy’’ and ‘‘ready to rumble.’’ He showed me a Kesha. Kesha’s been on ice for two years.’’
piece of paper upon which she had scribbled a Luke’s lawyer, Christine Lepera, said in an
sketch of a penis and testicles and signed it ‘‘K$.’’ email that the allegations of rape and emotional
Her restlessness is still there, but now it bubbles abuse are ‘‘horrific’’ and ‘‘simply not true,’’ that
like lava beneath her dormant-volcano facade. Kesha never intended to actually prove her claims
She has so much she wants to say, but while she in court, just to use them to get out of her con-
spoke, she paused to figure out how best to word tractual obligations. As part of Dr. Luke’s defama-
a sentence, or how it would look in print once she tion case, his team cited a deposition from 2011,
said it. The restraint was unnatural; it wore on her. when Kesha was being sued by her former man-
In February, 16 months after she filed her ager for breach of contract. In it she was asked
first suit and 38 months after her last album if Luke had ever given her drugs or if they had
was released, Kesha asked to have her con- ever had sex, insinuating that he had a Svengali
tract, under which she still owed three albums, hold on her. Kesha said she didn’t remember, she
absorbed by RCA, the label that is the exclusive didn’t know, finally she said they had never had
distribution arm for Dr. Luke’s label, Kemosabe/ sex. Luke’s team uses this to say that after the
Kasz Money, Inc. (KMI). But Sony, which owns time she says she was raped, in 2005, she swore
RCA, said that it had not been party to the origi- under oath that they had never had sex and that
nal contract between Kesha and KMI; only Luke, she either was lying then or is now.
who discovered her and made her famous, had But Kesha’s supporters would tell you that to
the power to release her. take anything in that deposition at its face value is
In April, after the judge dismissed most of to pretend we know nothing about the pathology
Kesha’s civil complaints (which included a of victims of sexual assault, about power dynamics
request for monetary damages), Kesha’s lawyers and about human fear, something much discussed
filed appeals, which remain in their early stages. in a post-Bill Cosby, post-Roger Ailes, one-more-
The same judge had said that she assumed Sony week-of-Donald Trump world. But also consider
would provide Kesha with a new producer, just that Dr. Luke presumably wouldn’t rush to work
as it said it would. ‘‘Why would they take an art- with someone who has accused him publicly of
ist who is popular, who is making them money, rape, no matter what the truth of is.
and not promote her work when they’ve already Consider that until she can release music,
invested millions?’’ she had asked, according to Kesha has very limited means of income, with
a court transcript. It was a reasonable question. litigation that has gone on since 2014 and that
Photograph by Angie Smith for The New York Times. Opening photo and cover photo: Styling by Shelby Scudder. Hair and makeup by Vittorio Masecchia. Manicure by Miho Okawara.
costs at least $100,000 per month, the most con-
servative estimate I could calculate. Consider
that Kesha has no ability to earn money, outside
of touring for audiences of a few hundred, pay-
ing expenses from her own pocket, and that,
as Kesha’s side has suggested, not allowing her
to release music is a good way to prevent her
from being able to afford continued litigation.
But the least rewarding thing you can do is try
to guess at any of this. You can read every one
of the thousands of pages of filings and come no
closer to the truth. Trust me, I tried. ‘‘Reading
court filings doesn’t get you to the truth,’’ Dan
Stone, an entertainment litigator at Greenberg
Glusker Fields Claman & Machtinger, told me.
‘‘Even if this case goes to trial, it’s possible that
no one will ever know what did or did not happen
when the parties were alone in a room.’’
On the Brooklyn rooftop, Kesha said that she
submitted 22 songs to Sony in early summer.
According to her representatives, Sony didn’t
provide any meaningful feedback until after a
judge intervened in late August. Her represen-
tatives told me that recording and releasing
‘‘Warrior,’’ her second album, took only eight
months from start to finish. I knew that they
were agreeing to let her talk about the case for
the first time in part because of what Kesha said:
that she wanted people to know what she was
going through. I believe they also knew that
public understanding of this case had worked
for her so far, and that further understanding of
the music-making predicament might only help.
She wanted to play her new music for me. The
bee was now circling her face. ‘‘Please go,’’ she
whispered to it, but it lingered.
Kesha was supposed to be fun. That’s what she
says she was told when she began preparing
songs for ‘‘Animal,’’ her debut album. ‘‘Something
that was always told to me is: ‘You’re fun. We’re
going to capitalize on that.’ ’’ We were at her house
in Los Angeles a few days after the concert. Her
team and I had waited downstairs amid the fan
art and the psychedelic Moroccan-mod décor
— patterned couches and rugs, two full-size vel-
vet sheep with silver heads, dinosaur figurines,
wax skulls, crystal stones and various sketches of
penises and testicles. Someone on her team men-
tioned displeasure with The Times’s review of the
Warsaw show. I had read it, too, and I said that
it seemed that the critic was a Kesha fan — he’d
written in praise of her several times — and that
if he didn’t like the show, perhaps they should
think about how Kesha fans will react to her new
genre transitions and experimentation.
She came downstairs in pink leopard leggings
and a T-shirt that had a picture of Iggy Pop on
all fours and read ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Dog,’’ and
she started to tell her story. ‘‘I was like, ‘I am fun,
but I’m a lot of other things.’ But Luke’s like: ‘No,
you’re fun. That’s all you are for your first record.’ ’’
Kesha moved from Los Angeles to Nashville
45
when she was 4 with her mother, a songwriter
who most notably helped write ‘‘Old Flames Can’t
Hold a Candle to You,’’ which has been covered
by Dolly Parton. Dr. Luke told Billboard maga-
zine in 2010 that he was particularly impressed
with an improvised rap Kesha did on her demo,
that he liked her ‘‘bravado’’ and ‘‘chutzpah.’’ But
after she arrived in Los Angeles and signed with
Kemosabe, Luke was busy with other artists.
Kesha spent her time writing songs, and even-
tually wrote for or with artists including Miley
Cyrus and Alice Cooper. (According to an inter-
view her mother gave Billboard magazine, the
purported rape happened somewhere during all
this, in 2005, after a party at Paris Hilton’s house.)
Then, in 2009, she was the featured vocalist on
‘‘Right Round,’’ by Flo Rida, produced by Dr. Luke.
Things changed quickly after that.
‘‘Animal’’ was released the first week of 2010,
going platinum in the United States and multi-
platinum in other countries. She was something
completely new in a female pop star, something
grittier and less polished than we were used to.
She sang about getting drunk and partying. She
sang openly about sex, without the romance
we’d been accustomed to, all in a voice that was No more general pantslessness:
half-teasing, half-moaning. The album contains Kesha at Warsaw, a Brooklyn club, in September.
‘‘Party at a Rich Dude’s House,’’ and of course,
‘‘TiK ToK,’’ the album’s first single, which went
multiplatinum, setting a new record for digital playing field. I’m a superfeminist. I am an ultra- put out an EP called ‘‘Cannibal’’ in late 2010, then
downloads in a single week by a female artist. till-the-day-I-die feminist, and I am allowed to ‘‘Warrior’’ in 2012, which had an even edgier sound
‘‘TiK ToK,’’ she told me, was written to be more do, and say, and participate in all the activities than ‘‘Animal.’’ It was still dancey and poppy, but it
nuanced and more definitively ironic at first. But that men can do, and they get celebrated for it. had a hard 1970s-inspired rock roughness. There’s
her producers and co-writers on the song, Dr. And women get chastised for it.’’ It soon became a punk-influenced song called ‘‘Dirty Love,’’ which
Luke and Benny Blanco, had to keep her image clear that people thought she was something she recorded with Iggy Pop.
in mind. She says of Dr. Luke: ‘‘I remember spe- she truly wasn’t. They didn’t get that the dollar She began to rebel against the lyrics that she
cifically him saying: ‘Make it more dumb. Make sign in her name was ironic — that it was not says were finding their way into her songs. ‘‘Lyr-
it more stupid. Make it more simple, just dumb.’ ’’ an image, but a kind of comment on image. ics that would say: ‘Get that heifer out my face.
She tried, joking around with some lyrics she They didn’t get that her talk-singing wasn’t an I’m going to pull your ponytail back because you
found silly. ‘‘I was like, O.K., ‘Boys try to touch attempt at rap; it was its own thing, just a way don’t know me, bitch, you phony trick,’ ’’ she says.
my junk. Going to get crunk. Everybody getting she made music. ‘‘I was like, O.K., not going to sing that. I will
drunk,’ or whatever, and he was like, ‘Perfect.’ ’’ She toured with the album, and she watched not sing those words. Like, no. And then there
The problem was, she said, there was no bal- as her army of fans solidified and organized and was this argument about it.’’ (In statements made
ance. Every song was a song about partying, and named themselves. Her weirdness and her talk through his representatives, Luke denied that he
yes, that was who she was, Kesha says that was of inclusivity and her ways of distorting her looks had created an image for Kesha outside the one
definitely who she was, but she’s a real person with glitter made her the flagpole around which she originally crafted for herself; that he had pres-
having a complete human experience, and she the freaks and rejects began to gather. There sured her to put only party songs on ‘‘Animal’’;
wanted her album to reflect that. ‘‘To this day, was something about her freedom, about how that he had dictated lyrics to her; or that he had
I’ve never released a single that’s a true ballad, it appeared that she would never brook any dis- emotionally abused her in any way.)
and I feel like those are the songs that balance crimination, that called them to her. ‘‘I looked In 2013, Kesha went on tour to promote ‘‘War-
out the perception of you, because you can be a at people in the face, and they said: ‘You helped rior.’’ At the end of the year, she found herself
fun girl. You can go and have a crazy night out, me.’ ‘You helped me come out to my parents.’ exhausted and depressed. It had been eight
but you also, as a human being, have vulnerable ‘You helped save my life.’ And all of a sudden, I, long years since she’d signed her contract. Her
emotions. You have love.’’ unbeknown to me, am changing the world in a self-consciousness about her body dovetailed
When the album was released, Kesha says, positive way, and now that I’ve gained the knowl- with her general sense of helplessness. The only
she was surprised that people criticized her for edge that this is possible through music, that’s thing she could control was what went in and
singing about the same things that her heroes, the most important part of it.’’ out of her body. In January 2014, Kesha checked
Bob Dylan and the Beastie Boys and Iggy Pop In her legal filings, she says that during this time, herself into a treatment center that specializes
and Fugazi and Johnny Cash, had always been Luke became verbally abusive to her, that he called in eating disorders.
celebrated for. She thinks of the Beastie Boys’ her a ‘‘fat [expletive] refrigerator’’ and criticized her At this point in the story, at home in her chair,
‘‘(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)’’ as weight in front of people. ‘‘I was under immense she stopped for a minute, then leaned toward me
the soul sister of ‘‘TiK ToK.’’ ‘‘You know, when I pressure to starve myself,’’ she told me. ‘‘And I tried and touched my knee. ‘‘As you grow up and you
first came out, I was saying I want to even the to and almost killed myself in the process.’’ She grow awareness, some say ignorance is bliss, and

46 10.30.16 Photographs by Angie Smith for The New York Times


Kesha with fans — they call themselves her Animals —
before her Brooklyn club show.
in some ways, it is, but once you realize and you
gain knowledge, it’s there, and you can’t deny
it,’’ she said. ‘‘And now I’m very much aware of
things that I wasn’t before, and it keeps me more
accountable for my actions.’’
While she was at the clinic, she became des-
perate to write music. Her boyfriend found a
toy keyboard for her, and after some negotia-
tion, the staff let her keep it. She wrote songs
and she did therapy and she received letters
from fans. She did therapeutic coloring, and
one day she began writing letters back to those
fans on coloring-book pages, writing around
pictures of dinosaurs and kittens playing with
yarn, ‘‘Someone I work with has literally driven
me into this disease, tortured me and [expletive]
with me and my family,’’ she wrote in a letter
that was posted to social media. ‘‘So I’m here
taking time and getting my MAGIC BACK DAMMIT.’’
This was the first time the public had heard
these claims.
She left treatment in March after two months.
The first thing she did was remove the dollar
sign from her name. ‘‘I’m just fun,’’ she repeat-
ed, this time in a sour voice. ‘‘That’s all I am.
That’s it. ‘That’s all you are. That’s all you are.’ ’’
She leaned toward me. ‘‘I was taking back my
strength, and I was taking back my voice, and
taking back my power, taking back my body. I’m
just taking back my [expletive] life.’’
The second thing she did was file her lawsuit.
In 2009, Kesha was introduced to Ben Folds,
the singer-songwriter, musician and producer.
It was right around when she was breaking out,
and she found herself wounded by the things
people say on the internet, including, as Folds
recalled, ‘‘Eat [expletive] and die, you [exple-
tive] slut.’’ Folds reassured her. It seemed clear
to him that she was strong enough to survive
it. Later, he did a string arrangement for her
on ‘‘Past Lives,’’ the last song on the deluxe
edition of ‘‘Warrior.’’ The thing he loves about
her, something both he and another producer
told me, is that she is unselfconscious about
being wild and imperfect. She understands the
value in her voice sounding off for a minute. She
understands why a note should sound crazy.
While she was in rehab, Kesha wrote a song
called ‘‘Rainbow’’ on her tiny toy keyboard. Her
mother had always told her that you could tell
that a song was great if it could be sung against
just one note and still sound good. As she sat
singing it against one note, on the floor of the
‘She’s the only performer
I can think of that has gone from
being packaged to real.’
rehab facility, she knew she had something.
She imagined ‘‘Rainbow’’ like a great orches-
tral production, something that Brian Wilson
would have done on ‘‘Pet Sounds.’’ She wanted
this song to be produced by Ben Folds, who just
happened to have friends who could play cellos
and violas and kettle drums and the oboe and
the flute and the French horn. He called in all
his favors, and they rented out the big room at
Capitol Records and tried to do the song fast and
cheap. He wanted her to stand where Nat King
Cole and Frank Sinatra had stood, to understand
her importance in the line of musicians that peo-
ple remember.
He had her play with the bridge a little,
sending ideas into his voice mail over a cou-
ple of days until they got it exactly right for
recording. The process was revelatory for her.
‘‘He just really helped pull out of me exactly
what I wanted to be, but I’ve always kind of
been scared to try,’’ she recalls. ‘‘And he’s like:
‘Try to sing that high C. Try to go higher. Try to
do this weird thing with your voice.’ Instead of
getting shamed, it was like I was being encour-
aged and validated, and it was so magical and
so beautiful.’’ Folds produced the final version
using just two takes.
Kesha was invited to sing at the Billboard
Music Awards on May 22. On May 17, the show’s
producers issued a statement saying that KMI
had rescinded its approval of her performance.
KMI suspected she would use the platform to
make her case against Dr. Luke. Ultimately, it
relented and allowed her to sing a cover, after
she signed a statement saying she would not
talk about Luke or give interviews at the awards.
Folds asked her if she thought she could do a
stripped-down version of Bob Dylan’s ‘‘It Ain’t
Me, Babe,’’ and she said she thought she could. So
he called his friend the violin player, and Kesha
put on her white Nudie suit and got up there
with just a piano playing a sparse two-note line
and some spare violin, and with tears in her eyes
she sang a version of the song that was more
poignant and beautiful and stirring than any of
her pointed and literal covers at her club shows.
Her pauses were extraordinary; her voice, which
was her new voice, was revelatory — had we ever
heard that voice before?
‘‘That’s what kills me, is the almost parable
of her being held down for a little while,’’ Folds
says. ‘‘She’s the only performer I can think of
that has gone from being packaged to real.
Most of the time people start off, and it’s like
their rawness is what breaks through, and then
they have to continue to build that into a more
polished commercial thing. What she’s actually
doing is the opposite, where she’s now show-
ing that actually, there is something really huge
beneath the whole thing.’’
Kesha was tired; Kesha was right in the mid-
dle of her Saturn return. A (Continued on Page 73)
The New York Times Magazine 47
These are banner times for penises onscreen.
In the last 18 months or so, I’ve seen casually
naked men on ‘‘The Affair’’ and on ‘‘Girls,’’ plus
casually naked robots on ‘‘Westworld.’’ Penises
have appeared on ‘‘Game of Thrones’’ (where
one was once violently disappeared) and been
simulated by a killer drill on ‘‘American Horror
Story: Hotel.’’ They were in movies like ‘‘Get
Hard’’ and ‘‘Unfinished Business’’; one was
there-ish on John Cena in ‘‘Trainwreck’’; they
showed up in stunt form on a meek Adam Scott
in ‘‘The Overnight’’ and through the boxer
briefs of a smugly sunny Chris Hemsworth
48
in ‘‘Vacation.’’ Ralph Fiennes spent some of
this spring’s ‘‘A Bigger Splash’’ having a glo-
rious time wearing nothing. And then there
was ‘‘Weiner,’’ a hit documentary about the
scandal started by the disseminated bulge in
a politician’s underwear. Once upon a time,
just seeing a man’s rear on television might
cause a scandal; now you don’t have to go too
far out of your way to encounter his front. Our
cultural standards have relaxed just enough to
show a man in full.
And why not? Women have long been
asked to take off their clothes, out of both
artistic necessity and rank gratuitousness. Isn’t
it men’s turn? Even when the nudity veers into
homophobia (and boy, can it), there is an ‘‘at
last’’ quality to all of this bareness: It’s so matter-
of-fact, so casual. (We’re not, to be clear, talking
about erections; there’s still a line between a
flaccid, out-of-focus penis attached to what’s
probably a stunt double on ‘‘The Affair’’ and,
say, a European troublemaker like Gaspar Noé
filming aroused, ejaculating ones.) We’ve got-
ten more gender-neutral, more feminist, more
comfortable with our various bodies, more used
to seeing dudes in gym locker rooms, better
 Why American pop culture
just can’t deal with black
male sexuality.

By Wesley Morris

at Instagram and Snapchat and Tumblr — and

so, too, have we gotten more O.K. with penises.
Some penises, anyway.
A vast majority of these penises are funny,
casual, unserious. Their unceremonious appear-
ance — as naturalism, comedy, symbolism, prov-
ocation — is new, and maybe progressive. But
that progress is exclusive, because these penises
almost always belong to white men. As common-
place as it has recently become to see black men
on television and at the heart of films, and as
normal as it’s becoming to see male nudity in
general, it has been a lot more difficult to see
those two changes expressed in the same body. woman from a half-black, half-white lieutenant for American popular and political culture — a
A black penis, even the idea of one, is still too governor’s attempt to force her into marriage. fantasia of white supremacy, black inhuman-
disturbingly bound up in how America sees — That’s just the plot; Griffith’s genius was at its ity and the tremendous racial anger that’s still
or refuses to see — itself. I enjoyed HBO’s sum- most flagrant in the feverish surrounding details. with us today.
mer crime thriller, ‘‘The Night Of,’’ but it offered The country isn’t even done being rebuilt in ‘‘The Look at Gov. Paul LePage of Maine, who,
some odd food for thought: The most lovingly Birth of a Nation,’’ and here comes the K.K.K., speaking at a town-hall meeting in January,
photographed black penis I’ve ever seen on already determined to make America great again. blamed invading dealers for the state’s drug
TV belonged to a corpse in the show’s morgue. The movie crackles with sensationalist moral problem — men with such cartoonishly ‘‘black’’
Meanwhile, the series’s most sexual black char- profanity. Many of the black characters, for start- street names as ‘‘D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty.’’
acter was a rapist inmate. ers, are played by white actors, all having a grand They come north for business, he said, and ‘‘half
The black penis is imagined more than it’s time making randy savages out of their roles. the time, they impregnate a young, white girl.’’
seen, which isn’t surprising. This newly relaxed
standard for showing penises feels like a triumph
of juvenile phallocentrism — it’s dudes peeking
over a urinal divider and, as often as not, gig-
gling at what they see. Not all of that peeking is
harmless; some of those dudes are scared of what
they’ve seen. And knowing that — knowing even
a whiff of the American history of white men’s
perception of the black penis — leaves you vul-
nerable to attack, even when all you think you’re
doing is going to see, I don’t know, ‘‘Ted 2.’’
Officially, there are no penises in ‘‘Ted 2,’’ the
comedy written by, directed by and starring
Seth MacFarlane that was a hit last summer.
And yet they’re everywhere — scary black ones.
Mark Wahlberg plays a New England knuckle-
head named John, who swears that you can’t
use the internet without running into one.
When a mishap at a fertility clinic leaves him
covered in semen, a staff member tells him
not to worry; it’s just the sperm of men with
sickle-cell anemia, a disease that, in the United
States, overwhelmingly afflicts African-Ameri-
cans. John’s best friend, Ted — a nasty animated
teddy bear — gets a huge kick out of this: ‘‘You
hear that? You’re covered in rejected black-guy
sperm,’’ it says. ‘‘You look like a Kardashian!’’
The sperm bank is the pair’s Plan B. Plan A
entails Wahlberg and the bear breaking into Tom
Brady’s house and stealing some of his spunk as
he sleeps. When they lift the sheets, staring at
his crotch, they’re bathed in the golden light of
video-game treasure. In another movie, this might
be a clever conceit. Here it feels like paranoid pro-
paganda, a deluxe version of what entertainment
and politics have been doing for more than 200
years: inventing new ways to assert black infe-
riority. Now a teddy bear has a greater claim to
humanity than the black people it mocks.
This is what’s been playing out in our culture
all along: a curiosity about black sexuality, tem-
pered by both guilt over its demonization and a
conscious wish to see it degraded. It’s as old as
America, and as old as our movies. This was American cinema’s first fea- LePage might have been channeling Griffith —
ture-length masterpiece. A full century later, or cockamamie pseudoscience like ‘‘The Negro
The national terror of black sexuality is a cen- it has lost none of its hypnotic toxicity. Even as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization,’’ a 1903
Credit by Name Surname

tral pillar of the American blockbuster. In 1915,
D. W. Griffith’s ‘‘The Birth of a Nation’’ envisioned
a post-Civil War country run by feckless white
abolitionists, nearly ruined by haughty blacks and
then saved by the Ku Klux Klan — a mob whose
energies are largely focused on rescuing a white
now, to see this movie is to consider cheering
for the Klan, to surmise that every black man
is a lusty darkie unworthy of elected office, his
libido, his life. Its biases are explicit and elec-
tric. Griffith established a permanent template
with this movie, not just for filmed action but
article in which the Baltimore doctor William Lee
Howard argued that integration was impossible,
not simply because black people were savages
but because they were savages who hungered to
rape white women. ‘‘When education will reduce
the large size of the Negro’s penis,’’ he surmised,

50 10.30.16 Photo illustration by Delcan & Company. Photographs by Jens Mortensen for The New York Times.
 ‘‘as well as bring about the sensitiveness of the
terminal fibers which exist in the Caucasian,
then will it also be able to prevent the African’s
birthright to sexual madness and excess.’’
Finding the source of this fear isn’t difficult.
You can read the history of the black penis in
this country as a matter of eminent domain: If
a slave master owned you, he also owned your
body. Slaves were livestock, and their duties
included propagating the labor pool. Sex wasn’t
pleasure; it was work. Pleasure remained the
prerogative of white owners and overseers,
who put their penises where they pleased
among the bodies they owned. Sex, for them,
Credit by Name Surname
was power expressed through rape. And one
side effect of that power was paranoia: Wouldn’t
black revenge include rape? Won’t they want to
do this to our women?
So from the time of slavery to the civil rights
era, with intermarriage illegal, black men faced
every possible violence, including castration and
far worse, as both punishment and prevention
against even presumed sexual insult. An exchange
as common as eye contact, as simple as salutation,
could be construed as an assault. Black men were
bludgeoned and lynched for so little as speaking
to white women. In 1955, while visiting Missis-
sippi from Chicago, Emmett Till was kidnapped,
tortured and shot for supposedly whistling at a
white woman. As a boy, I was told that story the
way you warn a child about traffic lights, seatbelts
and talking to strangers. Till’s age ensured that
you never missed the point: He was 14.
Claude Neal was 23 — a farmhand in Jackson
County, Fla., who in 1934 was accused of raping
and killing his white boss’s 20-year-old daughter,
Lola Cannady. He was moved from jail to jail
so white lynch mobs wouldn’t find him before
the trial. But eventually they tracked him down
in Alabama, holding the jailer at gunpoint and
absconding with Neal. The news of his capture
attracted a bloodthirsty crowd of as many as 3,000.
Lest a riot ensue and someone get hurt — someone
besides Neal — he was lynched by a group of six,
who then dragged him behind a car to the Can-
nadys’ farm, where Lola’s family members took
turns slashing and shooting his corpse. Onlookers
stabbed at it, spit on it, ran their cars over it. His
body was then driven back to town and strung up
in an oak so that the full mob could have its way.
People skinned him. His fingers were cut off and,
eventually, jarred. He was set on fire.
In 2011, Ben Montgomery re-reported Neal’s
murder for The Tampa Bay Times. His article con-
tains a passage in which one of those first six
assailants recalls what happened that day: ‘‘Well,
I guess we was pretty liquored up, and I ain’t like
that no more, but we cut off his balls and made
him eat them and say they was good. Then we
cut off his pecker and made him eat it and say it
was good.’’ The nadir might have been castration,
but the bottom was reached well before Claude
Neal was turned into a string of just-married cans,
before his humanness was mistaken for a knife
block, a sheet of shooting-range paper, kindling.
Maybe he did take that poor girl’s life, but we’ll
never know: He never went near a courtroom.
There’s no unremembering that his own life
ended as a chew toy for hellhounds.
The warning in these stories is obvious: Be
careful near white people. The warning between
the lines isn’t hard to spot, either: Be careful
because your sexuality, to them, is hazardous.
It’s funny how often we’re forced to remember
that. This year, the second season of Lifetime’s
‘‘UnREAL,’’ a juicy scripted drama set behind
the scenes of a ‘‘Bachelor’’-like reality show,
introduced a black bachelor in order to toy with
America’s dubious assumptions about the sexual
prowess of black men. (The real show turned out
to be as self-incriminating as the fictional one.)
In September, Lena Dunham made an irritating
paradox of those assumptions when she took
public umbrage after the football player Odell
Beckham Jr. paid her insufficient attention at this
year’s Met Gala, a perceived slight that seemingly
devalued her worth as a white woman. It was a
21st-century offense that seems as if it could have
been taken in the 19th.
The nation’s subconscious was forged in a vio-
lent mess of fear, fantasy and the forbidden that
still affects the most trivial things. A century after
Griffith, you’re free to go to a theater and watch
Chris Hemsworth throw his legs open and parade
his fictional endowment, while sparing a thought
for what it would mean if a black star who goes by
the Rock were to do the same. By the end of the
1960s, some black people were wondering that
about Sidney Poitier: How much longer would a
40-year-old man have to stay a movie virgin? How
many more times could he be made a mannequin
of palatable innocuousness? In 1967, after black
neighborhoods across the country burned in race
The New York Times Magazine 51
riots, Poitier slapped the face of a haughty racist at
the emotional apex of ‘‘In the Heat of the Night,’’
when he was just about the biggest star in Hol-
lywood and at the peak of his talent. By the end
of the year, though, in ‘‘Guess Who’s Coming to
Dinner,’’ he was back to his serene, tolerable self,
playing the only kind of Negro a liberal white fam-
ily could imagine as worthy of its young daughter:
Johns Hopkins- and Yale-educated, excruciatingly
well-mannered, neutered.
In his cultural history of the penis, ‘‘A Mind of
Its Own,’’ David M. Friedman includes part of a
letter that a Pennsylvania lieutenant named Wil-
liam Feltman wrote in 1781 after a dinner on a Vir-
ginia plantation, during which he was served by
teenage boys whose penises were visible beneath
their clothes. The plantation’s owners seemed
to assume the casualness now reserved for all
those white movie and TV penises, but Feltman
was agog: ‘‘I am surprized this does not hurt the
feelings of the fair Sex to see those young boys of
Fourteen and Fifteen years old to Attend them,
[their] whole nakedness Expos’d, and I can Assure
you It would Surprize a person to see those damn
black boys how well they are hung.’’ Abolitionists
and others loosely sympathetic to black people
were equally enthralled, writing stories that
made heroes of slaves with names like Selico,
Itanoko and Zami — men who were excellent
lovers and, also, immodestly well-hung.
Reading about yourself in this way — reduced
— is disorienting. I don’t feel that way, like a sav-
age, a Selico, a walking schlong. I know the fantasy
exists. It renders black men desired on one hand
and feared on the other. But that’s a script for
somebody else’s movie, one that Blaxploitation
films began to flip not long after Poitier showed
up for dinner and, arguably, because he did.
The ingenuity of the Blaxploitation era, with
all its flamboyant, do-it-yourself carnality, was its
belief in black women and men and its conflation
of danger and desire. The movies — self-conscious-
ly, hyperkinetically black — were at full strength
from the very end of the 1960s through the first
half of the 1970s, and more or less kicked off with
a literal bang: Melvin Van Peebles directing himself
doing the nasty in ‘‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss
Song.’’ If the movies are ridiculous, they’re ridic-
ulous in the way bell-bottoms, platforms and hair
the circumference of a disco ball can now seem
like camp. But back then, that was simply the way
things were: baad. You went to ‘‘Slaves,’’ ‘‘Super Fly,’’
‘‘Dolemite’’ and ‘‘Blacula’’ because you wanted to
see yourself, but also because these movies were
the political repossession of toxic myths. ‘‘Shaft’’
named a detective while winking at his anatomy.
Black men were swinging their dicks for black
audiences. The films wanted not just to master the
myth but also to throw it headfirst out the window.
But the myth has wings, and they’ve since
attached themselves to white writers and direc-
tors — one or two of whom even know how to
52 10.30.16
I know the fantasy exists.
It renders black men
desired on one hand and
feared on the other.
fly with them. For every couple of Seth Mac-
Farlanes, there’s a Quentin Tarantino: someone
who would consider himself an Enlightenment
figure, an abolitionist, woke.
‘‘The Hateful Eight,’’ Tarantino’s Reconstruc-
tion western from last winter, is another of his
Blaxploitation remixes. This one gathers a group
of barely acquainted people — all positioned on
negligibly opposite sides of morality, history and
the law — and traps them, Agatha Christie-style,
in a shack during a blizzard. A lot them of get
to spinning yarns, but only one of those stories
earns a flashback: the one told by Maj. Mar-
quis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a cavalryman
turned bounty hunter. At just about the movie’s
halfway point, he tells a grizzled Confederate
general named Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern) a
tale about the general’s dead son. Warren says he
happened upon the younger Smithers and, rec-
ognizing him, staged an act of racial retribution,
which the flashback shows us. The son crawls
naked through snow toward Warren’s midsection
and puts his head in front of the major’s genitals.
Then the score goes horror-film crazy and cuts
back to Jackson, who gives the narration all the
Zeusian jive that you pay Jackson to summon.
With the old Confederate officer shuddering in
disbelief, Warren boasts that this shivering white
boy sucked his ‘‘warm. Black. Dingus!’’
In the world of this film, Tarantino is playing
with the truth. He’s playing with math (I at least
found more than eight hateful people). But most
important, he’s playing with fire. His movie runs
along the third rail of race in America: that black
dingus. Who knows if Warren made this story up.
Courtesy of Tarantino, he knows that nothing turns
a white man red faster than a black penis. The sto-
ry’s probable falseness only makes it more devas-
tating, because falseness is what the story messes
with: the fear of black male sexuality; how it’s chas-
ing your white wives, mothers and daughters; that
the black penis can be a vengeful weapon. Opening
up the threat to sons laughs at the ludicrousness of
it all. That dingus is coming for everybody.
This flamboyance is partly how Tarantino’s
films have come to understand black people —
as mighty movie types rather than as human
beings. ‘‘The Hateful Eight’’ made its defiant
appearance during the centennial of ‘‘The Birth
of a Nation,’’ and the movies share the same
post-Civil War era. Watching Jackson stand over
that bobbing white head, you feel the inversion
of Griffith’s template. Tarantino orchestrated
lurid, white-on-black sexual violations for ‘‘Pulp
Fiction’’ and ‘‘Django Unchained,’’ so you notice
the inversion of his own template, too. This time
it’s black power dominating white that’s pre-
sented both as a kind of rape and a mode of
justice. Tarantino revises the social parameters
of the Hollywood western so that racism and
misogyny are its villains. Most of that revision,
though, still hangs from a black penis.
Even if you’re Tarantino and learned from
Blaxploitation, why propagate these myths —
what the Depression-era journalist W. J. Cash,
late explicator of the Confederate psyche, once
called the ‘‘Southern rape complex’’? Why contin-
ue to frame black power as a genital threat? For
white artists concerned with black life, the myth
matters, and it should: It’s a white invention. But
attempts to dispel that myth tend to reinforce it,
sometimes because the myth-busters’ love for
black men seems indistinguishable from what’s
supposedly despicable about them. Hence those
cartoon hero-slaves, Selico, Itanoko and Zami. It
can be a peculiar thing being black in this coun-
try. Even the people who claim to love you are
capable of these little accidents of hate — the
social equivalent of finding hair in your food.
This is it, isn’t it? Here’s our original sin metas-
tasized into a perverted sticking point: The white
dick means nothing, while, whether out of revul-
sion or lust, the black dick means too much.
One night, when I was 24 and living in San
Francisco, I met a handsome white guy visit-
ing from Germany. We stood near a window
in a crowded bar and talked about an art show
he’d just seen. Eventually I brought him to
my apartment, where, after removing some
of his clothes, he eagerly started to undo my
pants. But then he stood there for a moment
and gave my crotch a long, perplexed look,
like Geraldo Rivera did when, after months of
buildup, he opened what turned out to be Al
Capone’s empty vault. He replaced his clothes
and, before exiting, explained himself: ‘‘That’s
not what I expected.’’
I knew what he meant. He was expecting a
‘‘Guinness Book of World Records’’ penis. He
wasn’t the only one — just the last to do it with
such efficiently rendered disappointment. That
hurt, but I remember being amused that, for him,
all our attraction came down to was what someone
had told him my dick should look like. I remember
standing there, half-dressed in my living room, and
actually saying out loud, ‘‘Why does he know that?’’
But everybody knows. Anytime a pair of pants
is prematurely rezipped or the line goes dead in
a sex app’s chat window, I always know: He was
expecting a banana, a cucumber, an eggplant,
something that belongs (Continued on Page 71)
A pilgrimage to the desert shrine of
the assemblage artist Noah Purifoy.

By LaToya Ruby Frazier

As told to Jaime Lowe
A few years ago, I saw something by the assem-
blage artist Noah Purifoy that startled me.
One of the ‘‘Watts Uprising’’ pieces at P.S. 1 in
Queens, made of debris found after the Watts
riots, was so similar to the way my friend, the
installation artist Abigail DeVille, works. She
and Purifoy both collect discarded materials.
In Abigail’s case, it’s to show how people are
positioned in society; for Purifoy it was social
commentary. They both have this sense of
responsibility and duty embedded in their work.
Objects that had no meaning, this junk, all of
a sudden said something about the American
experience. Abigail’s installation ‘‘Dark Day,’’
at the New Museum, was made out of furniture
collected from Dumpsters outside her grand-
mother’s projects in the Bronx: The furniture
was suspended upside down from the ceiling.
When I saw Purifoy, I immediately saw Abigail.
Purifoy was born in 1917 in Alabama. He
fought in World War II, came back and soon fled
to Los Angeles. It struck me deeply, his sense of
displacement. After the Watts riots of the mid-
1960s, he collected burned materials that ended
up in his art. Purifoy had a creative solution to
dealing with injustice. Instead of evaporating
or being silent, he took these things — pieces
of wreckage — and turned them into works of
art, a meditation on one’s life, one’s work, one’s
history. This is the most powerful act.
Abigail and I wanted to make a pilgrimage
and pay homage to someone who is clearly an
ancestor and a predecessor for each of us. We
wanted to witness our history in Purifoy’s work
in the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum. I couldn’t
believe how incredibly hot it was in the Mojave
— I was hoping I wouldn’t faint. It felt as if I
were going through this spiritual cleansing and
detox. This has been a rough few years in think-
ing about racial equality.
Even though he died in 2004, Purifoy is still
teaching us in these 10 acres of a hundred or
so sculptures in Joshua Tree. He moved there
when he was priced out of Los Angeles, in a
way that is so similar to gentrification today.
The art world didn’t really allow him to exist,
though he was offered a space in the Mojave
to live and to create. It really hit me when I
saw ‘‘Aurora Borealis,’’ a large-scale sculpture
of wood, chairs and other found objects. I could
understand Purifoy as a person and how he
moved through life. I remember quietly look- Pat Brunty, caretaker of the
ing at Abigail look at that piece, and she saw Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum,
a part of her reflecting back. It was a moment which maintains the Noah
that almost brought me to tears, to realize we Purifoy Foundation, behind one
did have an ally and a predecessor. of Purifoy’s artworks.

54 10.30.16 Photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times
The New York Times Magazine 55
56 10.30.16 Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times
The New York Times Magazine 57
 Right: Abigail DeVille wearing a poncho
and a diamond-shaped sculpture
she made from cardboard and mirrors.
‘‘It looks like some kind of action like
an offering might occur here. Tires are
symbolic of the rising and setting of the sun
and continual progression of change.’’
—
Preceding pages, from left:
‘‘When I look at that wood and the boots
and that gesture, I think about work,
labor and being a caretaker.’’

DeVille, photographed through a

motel window, with reflections of the
photographer and the landscape
behind her. ‘‘I’m on the outside, Abigail’s on
the inside, we’re facing each other.
I was thinking about Alfred Stieglitz
and Georgia O’Keeffe.’’

58 10.30.16 Photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times
The New York Times Magazine 59
In Adam Curtis’s epic documentaries, the world
as we know it is pulled back to reveal a complex
web of history, technology and power.

By Jonathan Lethem
If the first paragraph of this article were the start
of an Adam Curtis film, it would begin with a flat,
declarative statement. Something like: ‘‘This is a
film about a curious afternoon in the summer of
2016, when an American novelist pretending to be
a journalist went to meet a British journalist who
wanted nothing to do with being called an artist.’’
The British journalist’s name is Adam Cur-
tis. Now 61, Curtis has written or directed more
than a dozen hypnotically watchable, hilarious
and ominous films, all of which explore nothing
less than the cultural and political subconscious
of the last half of the 20th-century and the first
decades of the 21st. I’d been obsessed with Cur-
tis’s work for years; to meet him felt like a priv-
ilege. I was in a mighty fine mood too, having
finished both a novel and a semester of teaching
just days before. I was informed, by the friends
who offered me a room in their Camden Town
flat, that the London weather was good. Not
good, great. Never mind that the world was in
tatters and Donald Trump was smirking unstop-
pably toward Republican coronation. When
Curtis suggested I meet him in the famous lobby
of the BBC, I borrowed my host’s London map
and tackled the crazy-quilt streets. My two-mile
walk was exultant. A person who for years had
been only an odd, welcome intruder in my brain
was about to take me to lunch.
Outwardly, Curtis’s films are journalistic
exposés in a documentary mode. They often
extend to three or four or even five one-hour epi-
sodes; more recently they’ve consisted of single
continuous presentations lasting more than two
hours. Curtis is not an underground presence,
not in England. He is a longtime employee of the
BBC, a.k.a. (sentimentally) ‘‘the Beeb,’’ a pillar of
20th- and 21st-century British self-understanding.
The films take familiar subjects — the Cold War,
the growth of public relations or financial or mil-
itary-industrial bureaucracies, the premises of
the ecology or anti-psychiatry movements, the
enmeshment of Western democracies in quasi-
colonial military adventures in the Middle East —
and render them strange. Stories that might seem
like ‘‘social studies’’ fodder become, in Curtis’s
hands, compulsive, like a giddy horror film you
can’t quit watching.
His method is one of serenely bizarre juxta-
position. He pursues the art of the wild leap, at
the level of both ‘‘form’’ (the editing in his films,
which consists of abrupt jumps between dispa-
rate sequences and images) and ‘‘content’’ (his
factual assertions, the lines he traces among
seemingly unrelated events and historical actors;
the music, which veers between trance-inducing
techno-beats or ambient indie pop of the Brian
61
Eno persuasion and satirically iconic standards or
show tunes; and his own narration, which drones
on authoritatively except when suddenly giving
way to aphoristic headlines that flash on-screen
in the manner of a Barbara Kruger-style gallery
installation, or vanishes in favor of undigested
imagery and song). It is as if your history teacher
had decided to show you the brainwashing films
that Malcolm McDowell was forced to watch in
‘‘A Clockwork Orange.’’ Like McDowell’s charac-
ter, you at once resist and are seduced, and by the
end your brain is both exhausted and enlarged,
full of new things that don’t all seem to fit togeth-
er. Unlike McDowell’s character, if you are me,
you want more, and are willing to prop your own
eyelids open to get it. Long before preparing to
meet him, I’d been prone to spending too-long
nights on Curtis binges on my laptop, resulting
in Curtis hangovers the following day.
Now, I won’t offer too much more of this rote,
no-longer-very-New Journalism stuff — I swear
never to mention anything either Curtis or I ate
or drank — but it’s crucial that I offer a behind-the-
curtain glimpse here, because it exemplifies a dif-
ficulty native to Curtis’s films. This difficulty could
be called: Where Is This Voice Coming From? One
of Curtis’s central subjects, running through all
his work, is the possibility that we’re listening to
the wrong voices in public life, and in our own
heads; that the ideas we find authoritative and
persuasive about our politics and culture are in
fact a tenuous construction, one at the mercy of
bias, invisible ideological sway and unprocessed,
untethered emotions (principally, fear).
What this brings up, reasonably enough, is the
problem of Adam Curtis’s authority: Who is he
to be telling me this? Probably this was already
in the back of my head during my happy walk
through Regent’s Park. Had Curtis asked to meet
in the lobby, rather than some modest cafe near-
by, in order to underscore his platform at the
BBC? Or to play against it? Or was there perhaps
no modest cafe nearby?
And, despite the humble cards I’ve played
(weather, map, hangovers), let’s not ignore my
present platform. ‘‘This is a film about a curi-
ous afternoon in the summer of 2016, when The
New York Times came to make a polite visit to
the BBC, in order to enclose one of England’s
most unusual journalists within its own sphere of
influence.’’ For some readers, these major-brand
affiliations may be ennobling, and inspire con-
fidence. For those more suspicious, the names
of the mighty news organizations will be proof
that deeper truth has, like Elvis, left the building.
Curtis prefers you to be suspicious, alert to
bullying ideologies that whisper in the guise of
neutral authority (like ‘‘The Paper of Record’’).
And yet he wants you to believe him. Why
shouldn’t he? And so a Curtis account of our
meeting would reveal, through his dry, airy, insin-
uating narration, what you’re really seeing: not
simply a jaunty middle-aged American stepping
62 10.30.16
into a famous lobby to greet a boyish, alert, mid-
dle-aged Brit, but two media conglomerates in
communion as well. The voice is essential. For,
as Curtis would be the first to tell you, systems
of power, influence and control are extremely
difficult to depict on camera.
I arrived, in fact, as Curtis was laboring at edits
on his new film, ‘‘HyperNormalisation,’’ a nearly
three-hour epic pegged to several present crises:
Brexit, European immigration, suicide bombing,
the war in Syria. The sequence under Curtis’s
editorial hand today involved the financial firm
BlackRock, which operates a powerful comput-
erized risk-management network called Aladdin
on the outskirts of an innocuous town in Wash-
ington State. Curtis’s belief is that Aladdin, in
guiding the investment of now more than $14
trillion of assets around the world, has become
an enormous unacknowledged force for stasis in
an innately dynamic world.
But how to show it? All he had to work with
were a few archival talking-head clips, an Alad-
din advertising reel, some footage he shot of
the sheds housing Aladdin’s server farms and
his own narration. Curtis was frustrated. ‘‘How
do you illustrate something invisible?’’ he asked,
as if he’d never solved this problem before, or at
least not to his satisfaction. ‘‘It’s not even people
doing keystrokes on computers. It’s just things
roaring away. I’ll show you this 37-second shot,
my driving past those sheds.’’
As we watched, Curtis told me about his
admiration for the recent movie ‘‘The Big Short,’’
which tried to portray, for a popular audience,
another facet of those invisible forces at work.
‘‘This is the whole thing about ‘good and evil’ —
it’s a naïve view of the world. The problem is big-
ger, it’s a system.’’ Curtis and I briefly discussed
a word coined by the critic Timothy Morton to
describe a problem so vast in space and time
that you are unable to apprehend it: a ‘‘hyper-
object.’’ Global warming is a classic example of
a hyperobject: it’s everywhere and nowhere, too
encompassing to think about. Global markets,
too. But naming a hyperobject alone is of limited
use; human cognition knows all too well how to
file such imminent imponderables away, on a
‘‘to-do’’ list that’s never consulted again.
‘‘I thought it was a brave stab at it,’’ Curtis said,
continuing his analysis of ‘‘The Big Short.’’ ‘‘But
my argument would be that even the financial
system they’re pointing to is only a component of
something even bigger, that we haven’t really put
together. That bigger thing: It’s my hyperobject.’’
‘‘I want to be Adam Curtis when I grow up.’’
These words were tweeted last year by the gadfly
American documentarian Errol Morris, director
of ‘‘The Thin Blue Line’’ and ‘‘The Fog of War.’’
Morris’s tweet greeted the release of Curtis’s film
‘‘Bitter Lake,’’ a two-and-a-quarter-hour histori-
cal fugue on the American, Russian and British
interventions in Afghanistan. ‘‘I’m embarrassed,
because the amount of stuff I’ve learned from
Adam Curtis is almost unending,’’ Morris told
me. ‘‘There’s really no one like him here. I think of
Seymour Hersh, who’s a different kind of animal
altogether. There’s this raw intelligence — let’s
call Curtis sui generis. Had I ever heard of Qutb
before I watched ‘The Power of Nightmares’?
Maybe you had — I hadn’t.’’
Morris was talking about Sayyid Qutb,
the Egyptian author, Muslim theologian and
anti-Western propagandist, who is one of the
twin poles — the other being the Chicago-based
conservative academic Leo Strauss — around
which Curtis wove his three-part 2004 series,
‘‘The Power of Nightmares.’’ Qutb, who was partly
educated in the United States, became a leader of
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and was executed
in 1966 for plotting to overthrow the government
of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. His intellectual
lineage runs directly through Ayman al-Zawahri
to Osama bin Laden. And no, I hadn’t heard of
him before Curtis’s film either.
‘‘The Power of Nightmares,’’ a study of the par-
allel growths of radical Islamist violence and the
neoconservative movement that defined the U.S.
response to 9/11, was the first Curtis film that
Morris, or I, had seen. The film’s thesis: that the
present disaster was in some sense called forth
by two oddly compatible apocalyptic responses
to the anxieties raised by the fulfillments and
disappointments of Western-style liberalism.
Uncomfortable in 2004, the film’s assertions
still attract dispute even as the central thesis
has trickled into the popular imagination such
that many who have never seen Curtis’s film now
accept it as a given.
If Americans like Morris and myself have
tended to learn of Curtis’s work beginning with
‘‘The Power of Nightmares,’’ his British viewers
usually started earlier, with his landmark treatis-
es on the biases of technological utopian social
thinking (‘‘Pandora’s Box,’’ 1992); on propagan-
da, historical amnesia, brainwashing and nos-
talgia (‘‘The Living Dead,’’ 1995); on the growth
of popular psychiatry and public relations, and
the merging of the cult of personal fulfillment
with consumerist imperatives (‘‘The Century
of the Self,’’ 2002). ‘‘The Century of the Self,’’ in
particular, is seen by many in Britain as Curtis’s
signature accomplishment. These early works
construct a kind of ‘‘bible’’ of Curtis’s thinking,
upon which his later arguments build.
The British director Stephen Frears began
with ‘‘The Mayfair Set’’ (1999), which depicts a
group of entrepreneurs who, starting in the ’60s,
dismantled the power of the British state and
helped usher the free market back into politics,
Credit by Name Surname
with disastrous results. ‘‘It’s absolutely brilliant,’’
Frears says. ‘‘I was just watching television, and
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was
such a dazzling analysis. He’s a cult figure in
England, but he has access. The BBC is the great-
est broadcasting organization in the world. In
 ‘Bitter Lake,’ he had all the material. He’s stand-
ing in the right place, inside that archive.’’ Even
among those skeptical of Curtis’s narratives, his
masterly use of the BBC archive — his uncanny
capacity to excavate sequences from the dark
side of journalism’s moon and the expressive
power he finds in their juxtaposition — produces
awe. Curtis possesses a ‘‘dazzlingly acute eye,’’
wrote Andrew Anthony in The Observer, even
as he accused him of ‘‘superimposing his own
creative theory as journalistic fact.’’
Curtis is justly proud of his adeptness in the
archives: ‘‘It’s all stored in a giant warehouse
on the outskirts of West London, deliberately
kept anonymous. It’s the biggest film archive
in the world. The cataloging is good, although
it’s been done at different stages. But, because
the BBC is an organization that has a vast global
news output, I discovered that, throughout the
1980s, there were these giant two-inch video-
tapes, called COMP tapes, onto which satellites
would just dump stuff overnight. And they’re
not well cataloged. You can go to a news item
and see; if there was a COMP tape for that day,
you can order it up. Those two-inch tapes start
to degrade, but they’ve been transferred, and
they’re amazing.’’
Pause.
‘‘Or no. Sometimes they’re very boring.
Sometimes they’re like an hour of a chair waiting
for someone to come to it. I don’t do that Andy
Warhol stuff of a chair for an hour. But then,
someone will come to the chair and prepare,
and you’ve got that moment. When one of those
COMP tapes turns up for me because of some-
thing I’ve ordered, I just press fast forward and
go through it all. Until something catches my
eye, and then I will then digitize it. And I’ve got
a very good memory. I have a pattern memory,
an associative way of thinking.’’
Pause.
‘‘If you really want to know, it’s like a comput-
er game, the archive. There are different levels.
Most people can only get to Level 1. I can get to
Level 6.’’
Readers may recall a sequence from Michael
Moore’s ‘‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’’ in which Deputy Sec-
retary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was inadver-
tently caught licking his comb as he readied to go
on camera. The moment was imperishable, and Further thinking will always be required: the director
cruel. As it happens, Curtis has made it a recur- Adam Curtis at his home in London.
ring emblem of his work to show familiar figures
of power — Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan, Thatcher, Moore did with Wolfowitz, to expose his poli- ‘‘HyperNormalisation,’’ it is Col. Muammar
Putin, many others — in interstitial moments of ticians as pathetic. The tiny portraits he carves el-Qaddafi who steals the show, thanks to a stream
a similar kind, often precisely when they have from the archives are, instead, strangely tender. of uncanny archival appearances of this kind,
taken a chair in preparation for the red light to The human souls in question often appear intro- including one in which he pours himself a healthy
go on, and are either unaware they are already spective, as if measuring their self-possession, glass of milk from a pitcher. Curtis, by testimony
Credit by Name Surname

being recorded or too bored to care.
Curtis’s brief against world leaders — or at
least the policies they’re chosen to embody,
at the cost of great misery — is pretty savage.
Neoliberals fare as poorly as neocons. He’s got
no love for tyrants either. But he doesn’t opt, as
or discreetly consulting some inner oracle. Bill
Clinton coughs. Hillary Clinton nods to herself,
hesitates, smiles. Putin shrugs. Hafez al-Assad
merely waits, thinking.
Curtis’s films often have surprise bonus pro-
tagonists — guest stars, in television terms. In
of his narration, regards the sinister, flamboyant
Qaddafi as the West’s polymorphous dupe, less
a monster than a man monstrously acted upon
— a fictional character in a story the West told
itself to skirt harder truths. ‘‘Violence born out of
political struggles for power,’’ Curtis said, ‘‘became

Photograph by Immo Klink for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 63
replaced by a much simpler image, of the head of
a rogue state, who became more like an archcrimi-
nal who wanted to terrorize the world.’’
With each new bit of footage, a glance, a shy
smile, Qaddafi’s human presence seeps unex-
pectedly into the viewer’s sympathies. Reagan’s
does as well. Curtis’s politicians, ultimately,
contend with their own bafflement in the face
of the unseen forces shaping their world. They’re
traveling with us, stuck inside the hyperobject.
Curtis grew up in Platt, North Kent, just outside
Greater London. His father was a cinematogra-
pher who worked with the British documentar-
ian Humphrey Jennings, with the ‘‘Death Wish’’
director Michael Winner and on ‘‘The Bucca-
neers,’’ a pirate-themed television program star-
ring Robert Shaw. Curtis’s family was left-wing.
‘‘According to family talk,’’ he said, his great-uncle
was a committed Trotskyite. His socialist grand-
father, meanwhile, ‘‘would stand as a member of
Parliament for seats he would never, ever win —
and he did it every election.’’
Curtis earned a degree in the human sciences
at Oxford, then briefly taught there. Unsatisfied
with academia, he took a job at the BBC, even-
tually going to work in the early ’80s as a seg-
ment producer on ‘‘That’s Life!’’ a kind of cross
between ‘‘60 Minutes’’ and ‘‘Candid Camera.’’
There, Curtis learned his craft. ‘‘One week I was
sent up to Edinburgh to film a singing dog,’’ he
said. ‘‘His owner said that when he played the
bagpipes, the dog would sing Scottish songs.
We set the camera up. The owner dressed up in
a kilt and started to play the bagpipes. The dog
refused to sing. It just sat there looking at me
just saying nothing. It just sat there, with a really
smug look on its face. This went on for about
two hours.’’ Curtis phoned his producer. ‘‘She
said: ‘Darling, that is wonderful. Don’t you see
that the dog refusing to sing for a man dressed
up in a kilt is actually very funny? Go back and
keep filming. Film the dog doing nothing. But
film the man as well.’ ’’
‘‘So I did. We ran a long close-up shot of the
dog’s face with the sound of out-of-tune bagpipes.
It was quite avant-garde, but the audience loved
it, especially when you cut it against the face of
the man puffing at the bagpipes who genuinely
believed that the dog was about to sing.
‘‘That time with a dog taught me the funda-
mental basics of journalism. That what really
happens is the key thing; you mustn’t try and
force the reality in front of you into a predictable
story. What you should do is notice what is hap-
pening in front of your eyes, and what instinc-
tively your reaction is. And my reaction was that
I hated the dog as it looked at me silently. So I
made a short film about that.’’
Despite his Oxford education, a hint of a
provincial resentment defines Curtis’s attitudes
toward London’s cultural intelligentsia. Amer-
icans might model this as the ‘‘John Lennon
64 10.30.16
‘If you’re an artist, you
have that rather smug sense of,
I’m doing this great work.
I don’t have that at all. I go out
and find stories.’
syndrome’’ (as opposed to the sense of ease and
entitlement exhibited by, say, Mick Jagger). ‘‘The
snooty people disagree with me,’’ he said. ‘‘The
posh literary lot. They don’t like me because they
think I’m not elegant and literary and I don’t
make enough references. And what I do is I
play fast and loose — not with the facts, they’re
not interested in that — but with my aesthetic
responses. I put pop music, David Bowie, in the
middle of an Afghan film. It’s all a bit vulgar.’’
Curtis foregrounds such tonal collisions, and
he still delights in the comedy of dogs refusing
to sing on cue, especially when the dogs in ques-
tion are influential scientists, famous politicians
or pontificating news presenters. He underlines
the pratfalls and discontinuities of our neoliberal
consensus not only with pop songs but also with
an occasional boing! sound straight out of a car-
toon soundtrack. Curtis isn’t frightened, and he
doesn’t want to frighten you either. ‘‘I try to do
the very opposite,’’ he said. He prefers using ‘‘all
sorts of devices and jokes and parodies of fear
to undercut the fear, to try and pull the poison.
Because people are overwhelmed.’’
‘‘Movies are an authoritarian medium,’’ wrote
David Foster Wallace in 1996. ‘‘They vulnerabi-
lize you and then dominate you.’’ Wallace’s cau-
tionary tone typifies humanistic reservations
about the power of the moving image, in the
hands of a spellbinder like Curtis (or, in Wal-
lace’s essay, David Lynch). ‘‘Film’s overwhelm-
ing power isn’t news,’’ Wallace continued. ‘‘But
different kinds of movies use this power in dif-
ferent ways. Art film is essentially teleological:
it tries in various ways to ‘wake the audience up’
or render us more ‘conscious.’ ’’
Curtis alludes to such aims only in the plainest
terms. ‘‘I use music and all the cultural references
that I would talk to my friends about, so it feels
like a program made by someone you know,’’ he
said. ‘‘Also, what I do deliberately, is I show the
joins. There’s no reason you can’t join any two
pieces of film up. So I will often in the editing
deliberately make a discordant edit. It just makes
you aware of what it is you are watching.’’
Curtis has as at least as much in common with
installation artists like Kruger or Christian Mar-
clay as he does with shoe-leather reporters like
Hersh — indeed, his most anomalous project,
‘‘Everything Is Going According to Plan’’ (2013),
consisted of a site-specific film-concert hybrid
at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, in
collaboration with the band Massive Attack. But
Curtis defiantly resists being called an ‘‘artist.’’
‘‘If you’re an artist, you tend to have that rath-
er smug sense of, I’m doing this great work,’’
he said. ‘‘I don’t have that at all. I go out and I
find stories, and I find ways of doing them in
an imaginative way. I’m a journalist, and I’m
responding to my time. That’s it.’’ Forget Curtis’s
collaborations with rock musicians; never mind
the cover ‘‘it’s art’’ might offer him from critics
complaining that he lacks footnotes and dabbles
too much in allusion and mood; and never mind
how every plumber is supposed to want to be a
poet. Curtis wants no part of it.
His grudge against contemporary art can seem
either a provocation or an eccentricity, until he
places it in relation to a few of his key terms,
like ‘‘consumer capitalism’’ and ‘‘the self.’’ ‘‘The
problem is that the central ideology of our age
is the idea of self-expression,’’ he said. ‘‘That the
self, being expressive, is the good thing. It’s what
I trace in ‘The Century of the Self.’ Expressing
yourself through consumerism is central. So, the
dilemma for artists is that however radical in con-
tent their paintings, their performance art, their
video works, the mode in which they’re doing
it — self-expression — feeds the strength of the
very thing they’re trying to overthrow, which is
modern consumer capitalism.’’
Curtis prefers Balzac, the novelist of intricate
social tapestries, to the modernist tradition of inte-
riority defined by Woolf and Proust. But the nov-
elist he claims as inspiration is Dos Passos, whose
‘‘U.S.A.’’ trilogy he read when he was a boy, and
whose centrifugal blend of pastiche and documen-
tation may be the key to Curtis’s style. At the other
end, Curtis’s artistic nemesis is Andy Warhol. ‘‘I’ve
got this idea. I call it the I.A.R., the Inappropriate
Aesthetic Response. I date it back to Warhol. It’s
this idea you can take horrific images like the elec-
tric chair and aestheticize them. The beheading
videos, the orange jumpsuits against the desert
background; ISIS uses that knowingly. I have a
ruthless theory, that the radical-art movement,
which grew out of the failure of revolutionary
politics, becomes the outriders for the property
developers. You need the aesthetic of decline in
order to make those buildings desirable.’’
‘‘HyperNormalisation’’ is a summation of one
of Curtis’s major themes: that liberalism — since
the collapse of certainty about how its values
would transform politics, finance and journal-
ism — has in fact become genuinely conservative.
Credit by Name Surname
In a world of unpredictability, it has retreated
from genuine frontiers, instead opting for hold-
ing actions that can make it feel stable and safe.
So we live, thanks to our advanced systems
of monitoring, compensation and control, in
a bubble of our own devising. And in Curtis’s
 critique, contemporary artists and hipsters do as
much to create this bubble as the internet itself.
‘‘On a social-media network, it’s very much like
being in a heroin bubble. As a radical artist in the
1970s, you used to go and take heroin and wander
through the chaos and the collapsing Lower East
Side, and you felt safe. That’s very like now. You
know you aren’t safe, but you feel safe because
everyone is like you. But you don’t have to take
heroin, so it’s brilliant. You don’t get addicted, or
maybe you do. Mostly you do.’’
Under Curtis’s riffing spell, gripes so familiar
as to be almost embarrassing — artists paving
the way to gentrification, sure; the internet seals
us up in self-flattering silos, right — appear as
thunderbolts lighting up a shadowy landscape.
For an instant, Patti Smith and Richard Hell are
as culpable in the Catastrophe of the Now as Alan
Greenspan and Wernher von Braun. Jane Fonda,
too. ‘‘Fonda is fascinating because she’s ‘radical,’
and then she does the next shift, which is to say,
‘If you can’t change the world, you change your-
self, your body.’ And she kick-starts the VHS rev-
olution with her exercise tapes. Then marries Ted
Turner, who doesn’t want to analyze the news;
he just wants to watch the news.’’
Curtis paused for breath. ‘‘That’s the founda-
tion for this modern conservatism: ‘Oh, my God.
It’s so terrifying. Whatever we do leads to disas-
ter. So what we have to do is shift around and plan
for danger, in order to keep stable’ — you have to
have the right body mass index — and instead of
analyzing the world in order to change it, you just
monitor it for risk.’’
Curtis’s critiques of the internet sometimes
echo those of skeptics like Jaron Lanier, who sees
it as a dead end for art, and Evgeny Morozov, who
questions its ability to effect social change. ‘‘The
internet was invented by engineers,’’ Curtis tells
me. ‘‘When engineers build a bridge, they don’t
want it to develop, they want it to stay stable. And
the same is true of the fundamental engineering
system of the internet. It’s based on feedback.
And feedback is about stability. So, what hap-
pened with Occupy, and with Tahrir Square, is
that it was a great system to get everyone togeth-
er into a group, but then it had absolutely no
content. It’s a really terrible mistake they made
— they mistook an engineering system for a rev-
olutionary set of ideas.’’
Elsewhere, Curtis sounds like a science-fiction
writer — one from the 1950s, when S.F. writers
began accurately satirizing the world we find
ourselves in today. ‘‘The utopia they hold out is a
world where machines make everything for you
and you have endless leisure time, you become
Credit by Name Surname
creative and everyone’s happy. And the only thing
is, actually, everyone’s incredibly unhappy because
they haven’t got anything to do. What we call our
jobs today are actually fake jobs. We sit in our
offices in front of our screens in order to get the
money to go out and buy stuff. Our job is really
Film stills from Adam Curtis
Distilling the undistillable:
Images (above and
opening pages) from Adam
Curtis’s latest film,
‘‘HyperNormalisation.’’
to go shopping. And the rest of the time, we sit in
our offices doing complicated managerial things,
and when we’re not, we’re actually watching the
internet. The internet is there to keep you happy
during your fake job.’’ Curtis’s antic side, however,
can’t turn away from the bloody wreckage. ‘‘I see
people in shops now, going through Instagram,
and then looking at things like ‘Is this right?’ It’s
almost like they’re reading the Bible. It’s absolutely
fascinating. Instagram is the aestheticization of
everything. What began with Modernism, which
is to actually worry about how things are done
rather than about what they’re saying, has now
ended with Instagram. I love it.
‘‘What will happen to the internet in the
future?’’ He’s riffing again. ‘‘Will it become a
bit like a John Carpenter movie? You go there,
amidst the ruins, and it’s weird, and you can be
nasty — just have fun and be bad, like a child.
From about ’96 to about 2005 people built these
lovely websites, they put up masses and masses
of fantastic information. They’ve left them sitting
there, but it’s like a city that everyone’s gone
from. And what’s come in instead is a weird
world where you don’t know what’s real — just
people shouting at each other. It’s good fun, but
it’s not real.’’
Though Curtis regards the internet with
ambivalence — and who among us doesn’t? —
his current method of disseminating his films,
and his ideas, wouldn’t be possible without it,
particularly in America. This contradiction he
embraces. Speaking of ‘‘The Power of Night-
mares,’’ he told me, ‘‘A lot of people said, ‘Oh,
the television networks in America would never
show it.’ What I’d noticed is that the moment I
put it out, it went up on the internet. I under-
stood at that point that it would have more
political power and be seen by many more
people if I let it be a thing that people want
to find illegally.’’ (Virtually all of Curtis’s films
are available to the intrepid Googler for free
viewing, but if I told you where to find them,
they might vanish.)
Curtis seems to cherish his place in America
as a voice seeping from under the floorboards.
In a way, the ruined apocalyptic John Carpenter
city appears to be where he wants to live. Even
in Britain, Curtis made ‘‘Bitter Lake’’ not for
television broadcast but as an experiment in
releasing his work to the BBC iPlayer website
instead. ‘‘HyperNormalisation’’ had an exclusive
iPlayer release as well, on Oct. 16. It has freed
him, in ‘‘Bitter Lake,’’ to play with moody, word-
less sequences sustained longer than anything
in his earlier pieces, and to include violence
too disturbing for television broadcast. ‘‘It’s
a good place to experiment. The woman who
runs iPlayer — I was the first person to do an
original thing for her — is giving me a great
deal of freedom. It won’t last. They will bring
the palace guards into the internet quite soon,
and we’ll have to follow (Continued on Page 75)
The New York Times Magazine 65
The radical empathy of Yoko Tawada.

By Rivka Galchen
Photograph by JH Engström
67
 t was a gray and drizzly afternoon
when Yoko Tawada and I crossed
under a green-and-gold paifang to
meet with mammals much larger than
ourselves. Tawada had brought me to
the Berlin Zoo because she had visited
its famous polar bear, Knut, regular-
ly while working on her 2014 novel,
‘‘Memoirs of a Polar Bear,’’ which will
be published in English in November.
The tale of the real-life Knut is at once
moving and outlandish: His mother,
Tosca, a retired performer from the
German Democratic Republic circus,
rejected Knut at birth, so he was raised
instead by a male zookeeper ‘‘mother.’’
When an animal rights activist com-
mented in a German newspaper that
the zoo’s ethical responsibility was to
let Knut die, children protested and the world fell
in love with the poor animal. He became a celeb-
rity, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for a cover
of Vanity Fair, and lines to visit Knut formed daily
for his scheduled appearances. ‘‘But by the time
I knew him,’’ Tawada said, ‘‘it was later in his life,
when people complained that he was less cute.’’
‘‘Memoirs’’ is actually three memoirs: the
first narrated by Knut’s circus-performing Rus-
sian grandmother, the second by Knut’s mother
and the final by Knut. Tawada wrote ‘‘Memoirs’’
in Japanese, then translated it into German on
her own. The novel’s matriarch polar bear also
begins her book in a language other then Ger-
man. When the bear tells her publisher that she
wants to begin writing in German herself, rath-
er than having it translated from Russian, she is
told that part of the appeal of her work is that
it’s written in ‘‘her mother tongue.’’ She doesn’t
like that. ‘‘I’ve never spoken with my mother,’’ she
protests. Her publisher counters that a mother is a
mother, even if you never speak with her. ‘‘I don’t
think my mother spoke Russian,’’ the polar bear
says. The publisher is unpersuaded; she is discour-
aged. When, in another scene, a stranger presses
the polar bear similarly about her language and
origins, the stranger finally concludes: ‘‘Oh, I see,
you’re a member of an ethnic minority, is that it?
. . . Minorities are fabulous!’’
There were no polar bears out when we arrived
at their enclosure. Instead there was just a sign
noting that one of them didn’t like noise. ‘‘They
used to say it was unfair that Knut had to live with
three old ladies,’’ Tawada said. ‘‘They said the ladies
bullied him.’’ The last time Tawada saw Knut was
two days before he died unexpectedly, of an undi-
agnosed encephalitis. ‘‘One thing that interested
me was that Knut’s mother had been a performer,
but Knut didn’t have to perform — and yet he still
performed. He really played to the crowds.’’
I asked her if maybe that was the origin of her
idea to write something from Knut’s perspective.
She said: ‘‘I had memories of myself as a child, of
how much I loved to use words to make not only
68 10.30.16
my parents but also other adults smile. I don’t
think of that as performing though. But it’s also the
case that I wondered, as a child, and still: Was it
also different for the animals, under communism
and under capitalism?’’ She laughed. ‘‘I really did!’’
As we walked the grounds, Tawada said, ‘‘You
see most of these animals were born here in the
zoo, even though their labels still describe other
countries.’’ We came upon a large dark bird with
a yellow face labeled ‘‘Schmutzgeier,’’ or ‘‘Dirty Vul-
ture.’’ ‘‘Poor guy!’’ Tawada said with a giggle. ‘‘They
didn’t give him a very nice name.’’ We wandered
past a sun bear, who in the book teases Knut for
referring to himself in the third person, although
this day the sun bear was sleeping. Farther along,
we passed Rüppell’s glossy starlings and Luzon
bleeding-hearts. In the hazy light, the birds
seemed touchingly overdressed. Nearby was the
enclosure of the magnificent polar wolves, two
dead birds visible within. In ‘‘Memoirs,’’ one of
the wolves harasses Knut for not having a proper
family. ‘‘I do not like these wolves,’’ Tawada said. ‘‘I
do not like them at all.’’ Somehow these relatively
mild words sounded like swearing.
‘‘How can you not like wolves?’’ I asked.
‘‘They’re beautiful, I know. But they’re fascists.
Only the best woman is allowed to make children
— no one else.’’
Tawada and I looked together at the informa-
tional sign, which described the loyalty and fam-
ily values of the wolves. In the novel, Knut notes:
‘‘The wolf was proud of the fact that the members
of his family looked as alike as photocopies. But
I revere Matthias [his human mother] for having
suckled and cared for a creature like me who was
not at all similar to him.’’
It struck me that you can be offended by an
animal only if you take it seriously, as you would
a human. Tawada has written most often about
foreigners and outsiders, but also about people
who metamorphose into animals (‘‘The Bath’’) or
have intimate relations with people suspected to
be animals (‘‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog’’). An
elementary-school teacher who tells her students
to wipe with used Kleenex feels, in Tawada’s por-
trayal of her, as familiar and alien as a household
pet. In ‘‘Memoirs,’’ when a polar bear walks into
a bookstore or a grocery store, there are no trou-
bles stemming from a lack of opposable thumbs.
As with Kafka’s animal characters, we are freed
to dislike them in the special way we usually
reserve only for ourselves.
‘‘All immigrants are artists,’’ Edwidge Danticat
has said. Under pressure to make themselves legi-
ble, immigrants have no choice but to invent new
ways of speaking. And in their reading of the world
around them, immigrants uncover the alien that
always abides in what seems, for the natives, most
familiar. But some people are foreign regardless
of geography; they are naturally nonnative, immi-
grant or not. Tawada is one of these. ‘‘Sometimes I
think maybe I’m a little bit Jewish,’’ she joked, after
telling me that the writers that mean the most to
her are Walter Benjamin for his essays, Kafka for his
fiction and Paul Celan for his poetry. This kindred
feeling makes sense. Benjamin, Kafka and Celan all
worked, like Tawada, in a German language that
was in some ways hostile to them — and this hos-
tility is an essential aspect of their thought.
The varied characters in Tawada’s work —
from different countries, of different sexes and
species — are united by the quality that Benja-
min describes as ‘‘crepuscular’’: ‘‘None has a firm
place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines.
There is not one that is not either rising or fall-
ing, none that is not trading its qualities with its
enemy or neighbor; none that has not completed
its period of time and yet is unripe.’’
One of Tawada’s earliest pieces, ‘‘The Talis-
man,’’ published in the early 1990s, begins:
In this city there are a great many women
who wear bits of metal on their ears. They
have holes put in their earlobes especially
for this purpose. Almost as soon as I got
here, I wanted to ask what these bits of
metal on people’s ears meant. But I didn’t
know if I could speak of this openly. My
guidebook, for instance, says that in Europe
you should never ask people you don’t yet
know very well anything related to their
bodies or religion.
Another of her short pieces, ‘‘Canned Foreign,’’
also among her earliest stories, opens with: ‘‘In
any city one finds a surprisingly large number
of people who cannot read. Some of them are
still too young, others simply refuse to learn the
letters of the alphabet.’’
Each opening is an accurate description that
is nevertheless unsettling. In ‘‘Memoirs,’’ Tawada
plays with this same effect through the simple
drama of having her polar-bear narrator attend-
ing a conference — ‘‘how uninteresting the con-
ference had been yet again’’ — and finding herself
tripped into thoughts of her childhood by the
topic of the day’s discussion: The Significance
of Bicycles in the National Economy. (Tawada is
very often very funny.) Here as elsewhere, Tawa-
da is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the
natural situation for a ghost story was a minor
government employee saving up to buy a fancy
coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its
owner as an overbearing nobleman.
Tawada’s biography most likely amplifies her
estrangements. Born in Tokyo in 1960, she moved
to Hamburg in 1982 and has lived in Germany ever
since. Her father worked as a translator of non-
fiction books and eventually opened a bookstore
specializing in academic books from abroad. Even
today, she writes drafts sometimes in German,
sometimes in Japanese and sometimes in alter-
nating languages within the same novel. She reads
in at least five languages. She has a different rela-
tionship than most of the rest of us do to words, to
nations and even to taxonomy. One of her trans-
lators, Susan Bernofsky, remembers that Tawada
asked her American press, New Directions, to
work from the German version of ‘‘Memoirs,’’ not
the Japanese one, ‘‘because she said she’d already
translated it into a Western sensibility.’’
Tawada has been awarded the most prestigious
literary prizes in Germany and Japan, including
the Goethe Medal and the Kleist and Akutagawa
Prizes. In those countries, she’s heralded. In the
United States, she has been a visiting writer at pres-
tigious universities, as well as the subject of several
dissertations, but she is notably less well known,
even though New Directions has been steadily
publishing her fiction since 2007. ‘‘Memoirs’’ is in
certain ways distinct from Tawada’s work to date
in English: It is longer, and much more eventful.
Circus managers are vetted by the secret police;
Soviet polar bears go on strike over working con-
ditions in a circus; a mother polar bear gives up
her child to be raised by another animal; the Berlin
Wall falls. But as in all of Tawada’s work, language
is itself a character. When the matriarch polar bear
finds herself aboard a train to leave East Germany,
she thinks: ‘‘A fly bumped against my forehead, or
wait, not a fly, a sentence: ‘I am going into exile.’ ’’
So even as ‘‘Memoirs’’ reads like a goofy comedy, Yoko Tawada during a reading in front of the
it also reads as a profound meditation on alterity, sculpture of Knut at Berlin’s natural-history museum.
labor conditions, language and love. Which is to
say: It reads like classic Tawada. Bobby. Bobby was also famous in his day; he the work of Dostoyevsky, of Bulgakov, also of
You could argue that it’s always a historical died in the Berlin Zoo of appendicitis in 1935. Bruno Schulz, and so I wanted to go and study in
moment of hating (and not seeing) the ‘‘other,’’ but Bobby and Knut, side by side, seemed like a stage the Soviet Union, or maybe Poland. But it was 1982
the sentiment seems now at a particularly precari- duo playing for contrast. ‘‘Somehow it’s easier to and not an easy time to go there.’’ With her father’s
ous crescendo. ‘‘Memoirs’’ offers its own version of imagine what Knut is thinking than to imagine help, she found an internship in Hamburg with a
‘‘seeing the other.’’ It does this not so much by com- what Bobby is thinking,’’ Tawada said. ‘‘Bobby business that was an intermediary between pub-
pelling us to see the humanity in polar bears; polar looks too much like us.’’ lishers and booksellers. Tawada already had some
bears are easy to love. But Knut’s mother, Tosca, ‘‘I didn’t know Knut would look so skinny.’’ familiarity with German because she had studied
devotes most of her memoir to imagining the inner ‘‘He was just an adolescent,’’ Tawada said. ‘‘I it, along with English, in school. ‘‘Because of the
life of her animal trainer, Barbara. The empathic know, it’s very sad to see him. But it’s just a sculp- 1968 student movement, there had been pressure
ask there is to look with love and understanding at ture of his body, modeled by hand, and then with on schools to offer more than just English,’’ she
humans — even as they are implicated in the struc- his real fur on it. It was important to people that said. ‘‘The idea was, for example, if you wanted to
tures of brutality and dominance, moved most by Knut not be taxidermied. It’s a modern version learn about nuclear power and you were only read-
their own small-minded fears and dreams and, of a stuffed animal.’’ ing in English, you were going to learn something
of course, are hastening the melting of the poles. The first time I met Tawada was at a very very different than if you were reading in German.’’
Even we deserve understanding and love. crowded reading she gave at the Deutsches Haus In Hamburg at the time, it was common for
of New York University. She read from fragments students to attend classes at the university with-
Tawada and I walked to Berlin’s Museum für of prose-poetry written on a white glove she wore out officially enrolling. ‘‘Living in Germany in the
Naturkunde, a predecessor of the American Muse- on her hand; she then took off the glove, turned it ’80s and ’90s was so, so cheap,’’ she said. ‘‘Some
um of Natural History in New York City. After the inside out and read what was written on the other of us studied 10 or 20 years! Just working part-
unexpected death of Knut in 2011, a sculpture of side of the fingers. Barbara Epler, the publisher time jobs as typists or assistants.’’ She enrolled
him was made, and it is now housed at the Berlin of New Directions, told me a story about seeing officially in the mid-1980s and met her German
museum. When ‘‘Memoirs’’ came out in Germa- Tawada perform at the Goethe-Institut in New publisher, Konkursbuch, a small, brainy press
ny, Tawada gave a reading in front of the glass- York with the avant-garde jazz pianist Aki Takase; that is otherwise known for publishing thrill-
cased Knut. (‘‘It was a little spooky,’’ she told Tawada’s role involved grating stale bread and ers and high-end lesbian erotica. Konkursbuch
me.) We were the only adults unaccompanied throwing Ping-Pong balls onto the piano strings. published her first work, in a bilingual edition,
by children. We made our way past dinosaur But the Tawada I spent the day with in Berlin was in 1987, and she has stayed with that press ever
bones, past gemstones. We stopped at an over- quite shy, and too gently considerate to be at all since. Her first publication in Japan wasn’t until
size Araneus diadematus specimen from 1951. strange. Her performance self seems constructed four years later.
Nearby, a catalog was open to the section for to prevent her from having to pretend to be at Finally moving past the sad sculpture of Knut,
ordering glass mammal eyes. ‘‘I love these,’’ she ease — a way of exaggerating the unnaturalness of a Tawada and I made it over to a hippopotamus
said, calling my attention to the pages. performance, so as to avoid the lie of ‘‘naturalness.’’ whose mouth was wide open; at the hippo’s side
Then, abruptly, there was the famous Knut. He Tawada never particularly intended to move to was a much smaller hippopotamus. Tawada said
stood in the glass case next to a gorilla named Germany. ‘‘I was in university,’’ she said. ‘‘I loved there was a famous German hippo, but she couldn’t

Photograph from Yoko Tawada The New York Times Magazine 69

Answers to puzzles of 10.23.16 remember if it was one of these: ‘‘The children took in Switzerland passing through the village
OVER/UNDER know her from a book. She was saved from the of a famous children’s-book author. ‘‘When I was
zoo during the war.’’ Only 91 of at least 3,700 Berlin young, I wrote to a writer I loved, a children’s writ-
A D O P T A R A B S A B A S E D
C A P E R A B A L O N E O C A N A D A Zoo animals were rescued. ‘‘It’s very upsetting for er, K. M. Peyton,’’ Tawada told me. ‘‘I remember
A D E L E N O S P R I N G C H I C K E N children to learn that the wild animals, freed from this well, because this was the first letter I ever
B R O K E N U P V O W T O H I L L
A L A S G U N G E E K Y O H O
the zoo, were shot,’’ she said. ‘‘We have a book in wrote in a foreign language, in English.’’
F A C I N G A D E A D L I N E O R A N G Japan about the Tokyo Zoo during the war. Maybe ‘‘Did she write you back?’’ I asked.
O S O O Y L Y T D S G T R I O in a story about humans, it will always seem like ‘‘She said she was very happy to get a letter
U T A H N R E S I N I T A L I A N O
L E T M E S E E B E Y O N D B E L I E F the humans are at least somewhat guilty. But for from the end of the world! I thought Japan was
D S M U N D A Y T O P F A L L S the animals, the children can feel pure sadness.’’ the center of the world.’’
F R E R E P L I E D
T A B L E A O L T S A R S H M S
For her essays, she wrote about Curious
O N T H E D O W N L O W C A T B O A T S Like all animals, we eventually grew hungry. George, who sees the city from up above rath-
S U S T A I N S C L O S E A G L O W Tawada suggested that we eat at the cafe associ- er than from down below, and she wrote about
S T E D D E I F S S O B E R A
A S A H I I N S E V E N T H H E A V E N ated with the LiteraturHaus, in Wintergarten. As the Russian fable ‘‘The Snow Daughter,’’ in which
E P I I N N E R H A H M O O N we headed there, we passed statues of two white the main character disappears by jumping over
W I R E S E P I A C A P I T A L W
A T T H E L A S T M I N U T E E L E N A
bears. Then a blue bear. Then a multicolored bear. a fire. She wrote about ‘‘The Hundred Dresses,’’
S T E E P E R S E D A R I S M I N E R ‘‘They are the symbol of the city,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s which describes a Polish girl in Connecticut being
P O S E A S L O B E S P E T R I funny, because they became popular again as a picked on for always wearing the same dress, and
symbol at a time when there were no more bears about ‘‘Bedtime for Frances,’’ a sweet story about
KENKEN in Germany. Just like the teddy bears became pop- a badger who doesn’t want to go to sleep. And
ular as real bear populations were falling,’’ she said, she also wrote about ‘‘Oley the Sea Monster,’’ an
her voice trailing off. ‘‘But some wild animals have almost unbearably sad tale about a harbor seal
come back to Germany! After the Berlin Wall fell, taken from his mother and mistaken for a monster
some wolves started coming in from the formerly before a benevolent aquarium keeper disobeys
communist states. As if they understood what a orders to kill Oley and instead returns him to
border was. Though they didn’t need visas.’’ the harbor. Each of the children’s books was, in
Is it possible for a great work of literature to a sense, a story of alternative perspective, and of
be strongly reminiscent of Don Freeman’s ‘‘Cor- vulnerability. The happy endings felt heavy with
duroy,’’ that old children’s story of the bear in a sadness, the sad seemed to promise light.
DIAGRAMLESS
department store, searching for a button? Cordu- I wanted to say something to Tawada about how
H S T roy sees the escalator as a mountain, the furniture this reminded me of her work, but I felt as though
A P E
V E T
floor as a palace. ‘‘Memoirs’’ makes as much use English had turned into a language that was not my
J A Y S E E L B A R Q of the naïveté of its bears as of their insight. When native one. Instead I asked Tawada if she had gone
N A S A L A C E I C E U P the matriarch bear arrives in the West — in our to the circus as a child. ‘‘I remember going once,’’
J A C K M U R P H Y S T A D I U M
U N O S G A L E T T E O C T A
world — she describes the opaque (to her) phe- she said. Her parents took her to see a traveling
M O B P A S E O K O S nomenon of window shopping: ‘‘The boredom of Soviet circus when it visited Tokyo. ‘‘I remember
P S S T B I N A M C Z A P S the passers-by was apparently considerable, since there was a bear who rode a tricycle,’’ she said.
R E L A C E D A R T I S T E
O C A P T A I N M Y C A P T A I N
they scrutinized every product in the shop win- ‘‘And that amazed me. And I knew even then
P O D A U T O B A H N S W O E dows.’’ When shopping for smoked salmon in the that what was exciting was just that he was doing
E N D S S Y N A P S E P I N T supermarket, she makes the beautiful and precise something normal, something even I could do.’’
D E E P H E N S
R A I S I N G A S T I N K
observation that it is found ‘‘where the coldest A few of the children’s books Tawada had men-
L A N T E R N F I S H goods were displayed in the brightest light.’’ And tioned I didn’t know. When I got home, I ordered
F O O T R A C E S in another scene, in a department store selling the ones I could find in English. ‘‘Jeanne-Marie
records, she observes: ‘‘A gramophone stood on Counts Her Sheep,’’ by Françoise Seignobosc, was
FREEWHEELING TIGHT-FIT SUDOKU a pedestal, and right beside it, a life-size, black- a numbers book about a little girl dreaming of how
spotted white dog made of plastic. You could see many lambs her sheep, Patapon, will have, and
1 7
A P 2 6 9 345 8 his image on each of the phonograph records, what Jeanne-Marie will be able to buy with the
L S A which I found pathologically excessive.’’ money she makes from the lambs’ wool. Jeanne-
A S R
3 69 85 12 4 7
Many books written for children are of no par- Marie imagines many lambs and many purchases.
C D C A 7 38 1 6 5 24 9 ticular interest once you’re an adult, but the great But it turns out there is just one lamb. Jeanne-
E E O G 4 29 5 1 378 6 works for children have the density of poetry Marie (who in the illustrations is now an old,
D R U
5 3 1 and the depth of parable; very little in ‘‘adult’’ hunched woman) is able to knit only one pair of
E A S 9 7 4 2 6 8
S E 6 4 5 literature rivals it. The greatest animal characters socks. ‘‘But Jeanne-Marie tried to look very happy,
8 1 2 9 3 7
come from kids’ books, and Kafka. Together they anyway, for she did not want Patapon to feel sad.
seem to suggest an alternative citizenship, that Patapon was so pleased with her one little Lamb!’’
Answers to puzzle on Page 74
of the majorly minor, the brutally gentle. In that Was it a sad ending? Or a happy one?
SPELLING BEE sense, Tawada’s work does seem to me to be fit- I wrote to Tawada to ask what about the book
Bailiwick (3 points). Also: Abaci, aback, acacia, alack, tingly that of and by and for a ‘‘child.’’ had held her attention across so many years. She
alibi, alkali, babka, bacilli, balalaika, biblical, black, So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised wrote that she loved its use of repetition, because
blackball, cabal, cabala (or cabbala/kabala/kabbala), when Tawada told me that she was in the mid- ‘‘as a small child, the world won its shape repeating
calla, callback, cilia, clack, iliac, kickback, kickball,
labia, labial, lilac, wicca. If you found other legitimate
dle of writing essays on 10 children’s books. A the same words and similar sentences.’’ But she also
dictionary words in the beehive, feel free to include publisher in Japan invited her to write them after liked the ending. ‘‘The sheep is happy with only
them in your score. reading a piece Tawada wrote about a hike she one child, that is not capital for her, but love.’’

70 10.30.16
Taboo
(Continued from Page 52)
to either a farm animal or NASA.
He was expecting the mythical Big
Black Dick (which, online, people
just call ‘‘B.B.D.’’). That presumption
is something you tend to prepare for
with interracial sex — that your dick
could either render the rest of you
disposable or put your humanity on
a pedestal, out of reach. That it could
make you a Mapplethorpe.
Last year marked the 30th anni-
versary of Robert Mapplethorpe’s
‘‘Black Book’’: 97 black-and-white
photographs taken between 1977
and 1986, before and during the
AIDS crisis. In the photos, black
men sit and stand and contort
themselves for portraits, from
entirely nude to fully clothed.
There are looks of defiance, hap-
piness and rapture; in a few, there’s
no ‘‘look’’ at all, just a man in pro-
file, say, his eyes closed, his skin
emitting something lunar. There
are photos of backs. There’s one
of two feet, where the light makes
the striations in the toes seem
like a glacial landmass. There’s a
bare rear that looks like ripe fruit,
another that evokes a Rorschach
blot and one more, taking up the
entire lower half of the frame, that
looks like a hippopotamus.
Some of the photos are meant to
be erotic, and all are meant to seem
worthy of being looked at. They’re
born of the same curiosity and fas-
cination as the black characters in
Tarantino’s movies. Sometimes
what’s in the frame can seem hard
to work out, almost intentionally
miscomposed; in some early pic-
tures I’m not sure Mapplethorpe
always knew the difference. In many,
though, he obviously did. With ‘‘Man
in Polyester Suit,’’ he nailed it. Taken
in 1980, the photo is still the star of
the ‘‘Black Book’’ group. A gentleman
stands in a matching blazer, vest
and trousers, filling the frame from
midchest to just above the knee. The
image has the basic cheesiness of a
department-store catalog photo — a
headless person, not quite facing the
camera, arms at his side, his brown
hands open. His zipper is open,
too, and out of it hangs his penis.
It’s veiny, uncut, positioned almost
equidistant between the hands and
bigger than both. Its droop brings
it close to Dalí’s melting clocks. My
favorite detail is the bit of white shirt
coming through the zipper. It makes
the penis look as if it were getting
out of bed. An everyday object — the
male power suit — gets a scandalous
comic assist.
‘‘Man in Polyester Suit’’ is one of
the great jokes on American racism,
one misconstrued as pornography
and therefore as exploitation. Is
that America’s problem or Map-
plethorpe’s? (Or, for that matter,
Tarantino’s?) Are these guys doing
social politics or fetishization? The
difference between fetishization
and romance is that only romance
really cares what its object wants.
Mapplethorpe and Tarantino both
have complicated relationships
with that difference.
To spend time with Mapple-
thorpe’s work now is to find in it a
kind of distorted love — what that
German guy came all the way to
America to discover. Mapplethorpe
found most bodies beautiful and
otherworldly, but especially black
ones. He lit dark skin so it looked
like wet paint and arranged sub-
jects until they became furniture or
evoked slave auctions. That naïve,
dehumanizing wonder complicates
what, at the time, was the radical,
defiant feat of inscribing black men
— black gay men — into portraiture.
It strikes a peculiarly foundational
American note: This was another
white man looking at black men,
with effrontery but also with want.
You can locate a sense of owner-
ship, of possession, in many of the
images. Two of Mapplethorpe’s last
relationships were with black men.
Any eroticism in the photos might
have come from the possibility that,
sexually, he himself was possessed.
These pictures made Mapple-
thorpe, who died in 1989, one of
the country’s most notorious men.
Among his most hostile adversaries
was the race-baiting Senator Jesse
Helms of North Carolina, who called
Mapplethorpe’s work ‘‘sickening
obscenity.’’ Whatever we mean
when we talk about the culture wars
of the 1980s and 1990s culminates
with this — Mapplethorpe’s pictures
of black men, S.&M. scenarios and
fisting, and the 1990 retrospective
at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts
Center that led to an obscenity trial.
In its defiance and its awkward
ideology, that fellatio shot in ‘‘The
Hateful Eight’’ is the opposite of a
Mapplethorpe: Tarantino luxuriates
in its anti-eroticism.
The artist Glenn Ligon waged
his own museum-ready critique in
‘‘Notes on the Margin of the Black
Book’’ (1991-93), in which he dis-
mantled Mapplethorpe’s collec-
tion and captioned each image with
quotes from scholars, from Mapple-
thorpe’s subjects, from people he
interviewed in bars. You could find
James Baldwin, but you also had
some lady named Rita Burke, who
worried that these pictures would
give you AIDS. Ligon, whose own
sly, emotional work investigates
the psychological contours of
black ontology, doesn’t condemn
his source material; he opens it out,
argues with it. In the end, what he
asserts is that a black penis is mys-
terious only to those who don’t have
one. He’s right: Black male sexuality
is of interest in American popular
culture only when the people expe-
riencing it are white.
There is no paradigmatic white
penis. To each man his own. But
there is a paradigmatic black one,
and how do you stunt-cast for that?
When people are turning down
sex with a perfectly good black
penis to look for a perfectly better
one, how do you determine what
an authentic-seeming black penis
even is? What does the Kevin Hart
of black dicks look like? What about
the Denzel? And how would a white
casting director know?
There’s a more pernicious prob-
lem at work here, too. The under-
representation of the black penis
bespeaks a larger discomfort with
depicting black male sexuality with
the same range of seriousness,
cheek and romance that’s afford-
ed white sexuality. The history of
American popular culture is an
immersion in, if not loving white
people, then knowing that white
people can love. There’s been no
comparably robust black equiva-
lent. But there is a recent history of
black people daring to create one.
So much is going on in the video
for Cameo’s 1986 hit ‘‘Candy’’ that
it makes you dizzy. The song is
the happiest sort of funk number
— hard-edged and insinuating yet
bright. (They sing ‘‘candy’’ so that it
The New York Times Magazine
rhymes with ‘‘today.’’) In the video,
which Zbigniew Rybczynski direct-
ed, the surfaces of a cityscape are
composited and layered so that fig-
ures — musicians, models — keep
leaping in and out of them. At some
point the women are made to seem
as if they’re floating upward, like fizz
in a Champagne flute. The clothes
are by Jean Paul Gaultier, who really
has a gift for boldly dressing black
people. But the most dizzying thing
of all is the red codpiece Cameo’s
frontman, Larry Blackmon, wears
over his black tights. It looks like a
piece of hard candy.
The same codpiece appears in
the video for Cameo’s biggest hit,
‘‘Word Up,’’ and in ‘‘You Make Me
Work.’’ Blackmon’s boiled-egg
eyes and caterpillar mustache give
him an out-of-left-field look, even
for an R.&B. artist near the start
of the video era, and in Gaulti-
er’s comically erotic costumes
— form-fitting everything, breast-
plates, cutout chain mail tops, big
polka-dotted hats — he looks like a
trainer at a cartoon sex gym. In the
opening shot for ‘‘Back and Forth,’’
the codpiece zooms toward the
screen, then acts as a pendulum
that, in swinging, wipes one scene
into the next. The band was con-
temporaneous with Mapplethorpe,
but it controls its own organ. And
it’s not as though Blackmon had to
do a lot gesticulating or gyrating.
The piece spoke for itself. It never
said anything all that dirty, but it let
Blackmon mess with presumptions
and curiosities about his penis.
(And about his orientation — that
sex gym seemed pretty gay.)
You didn’t have to see an actu-
al penis to know when one was
71
speaking to you. Around the time
that Cameo was hitting its peak,
so was Bo Jackson. He declared
himself bi-athletic, playing football
for the Raiders and baseball for the
Royals. Nike made him the star of
a classic campaign — ‘‘Bo Knows’’
— whose crowning image was a
black-and-white Richard Noble
photograph of Jackson holding
a bat behind his head, wearing
white baseball pants and football
pads over his bare chest. Your eye
almost doesn’t know where to
look. His arms? His stomach? His
perfectly symmetrical face?
There’s no real threat in that
picture. His hands don’t hold the
bat; his shoulders do. The pads
cover his chest in a way that, as a
teenager, I found modest. But in
the original photo you can see the
tops of his thighs — twin sequoi-
as — and the substantial bulge
between them. With Larry Black-
mon, I figured I was supposed to
look at his crotch and probably
laugh. Jackson’s was paralyzing —
in a way that would have further
appalled Lieutenant Feltman at
that plantation dinner. But I was
amazed. Jackson’s cockiness was
comprehensive. He wasn’t coming
after anybody. We were supposed
to come to him. The slight lean of
the legs alone had a gravitational
pull. I mean, what else was that ad
selling? There weren’t even any
sneakers in it! Just that man, his
black body, its power, his crotch.
Just sex. It wasn’t an accidental pic-
ture, either. Bo knew. Apparently
so did Nike, because many repro-
ductions of that image covered up
his crotch with ad copy or started
at his midsection.
The late 1980s and early 1990s
might have been the nuttiest time
for black male sexuality. It was a
height of the culture wars and of
identity politics, which pitted cre-
ative people against moralists and
artists against one another. Black
men were often the crux. On one
hand, they were the antagonists of
news reports and America’s night-
mares: rapists, muggers, criminals,
gangstas, kids liable to ‘‘wild out,’’
sometimes guilty, a lot of times
not. On the other hand, hip-hop,
African-American comedy and
sports were moving them to the
center of the culture, making stars
72 10.30.16
of rappers, stand-up comedians
and athletes, men like L.L. Cool
J, Eddie Murphy and Michael Jor-
dan. Prince was the 1980s’ greatest
erotic adventurer. Madonna made a
coffee-table scrapbook called ‘‘Sex’’
that featured the priapic rapper Big
Daddy Kane in a three-way with her
and Naomi Campbell. It was the
Kim Kardashian’s ‘‘Selfish’’ of its
day, except much further out there.
America loved famous black
men and feared the rest of them.
Then someone murdered Nicole
Brown Simpson and Ron Gold-
man, and the prime suspect was
her black ex-husband, O. J. After
that, the pride certain white people
took in letting someone like O. J.
be one of them must have seemed
like a cruel, postlapsarian joke.
Two recent major projects about
Simpson, a drama and a documen-
tary, made the whole tragedy seem
inevitable, essential to our natures
and the races’ relationship to each
other, all bound up in the original
sin of slavery and the racism it
manufactured. No one can ever
quite agree on who’s the sinner
and who has been sinned against,
whether it’s 1994 or right now.
But at least now it’s easier to find
more of the kind of sexual black
imagery that was so freighted a few
decades ago. The internet contains
bottomless warrens of black men
starring in their own pornos. There
are pictorials of old celebrities and
viral images of current celebrities’
wardrobe mishaps. The pride in
some of these websites counter-
acts the fetishizing that sends some
people hunting for ‘‘B.B.D.’’ and the
self-reducing that leads other people
to offer it up. Mainstream American
culture is still ambivalent about what
to do with black men’s sexuality, but
you can find unequivocal comfort on
shows like ‘‘House of Cards,’’ ‘‘Broad
City’’ and ‘‘Jessica Jones,’’ in which
white women are convincingly, inof-
fensively attracted to black men who
aren’t the shows’ stars but are per-
mitted to be sexual.
But needing to be permitted is
part of the problem.
We have a strong, ever-prolifer-
ating sense of how white people
see the sexuality of black men, but
we are estranged from how black
men see themselves. Post-Blax-
ploitation, that connection was
primarily confined to the art world.
The queer film essays of Marlon
Riggs and Isaac Julien, from the
late 1980s and early 1990s, remain
different but intellectually con-
joined odysseys of the male gaze,
aimed at himself — two black mir-
rors. Otherwise, there was virtual-
ly no television and very few mov-
ies that were seriously interested
in normal black desire, straight
or otherwise. That’s changing.
The Starz crime drama ‘‘Power’’
is about an unfaithful black crime
boss (Omari Hardwick), and a few
months ago, it made room for a
casual cameo by the rapper 50
Cent’s penis. And that bartender
who slept with Jessica Jones hap-
pens to be Luke Cage (Mike Col-
ter), who now has his own show,
a so-so Blaxploitation-minded
superhero drama that presents
Colter as the sexiest man on tele-
vision (or any streaming service).
The record-industry soap opera
‘‘Empire’’ doesn’t even seem to
know there ever was a white gaze;
it’s the least self-consciously black
show I’ve ever seen. The only peo-
ple the power family at the show’s
core won’t sleep with are one
another, but we’re only two and a
half seasons in. Give them time.
There is still something missing
from our picture of black male sex-
uality, though, regardless of who’s
looking: romance. We know black
men can grind, but rarely do we see
them love — as though we’d have
to upend too many stereotypes,
shed too much pathology, making
it impossible to get there.
There’s a magnificent new movie
called ‘‘Moonlight’’ that knows
how hard that is. It’s the story of a
young Miami man named Chiron
(it’s pronounced ‘‘Shy-RONE’’),
who is portrayed, over about 20
years, by three different actors.
His mother’s a junkie. A drug deal-
er becomes a father figure. Chiron
flees bullies who suspect — as he
does himself — that he might be
gay. (‘‘What’s a faggot?’’ he has to
ask, at one point.) Barry Jenkins
wrote and directed the movie and
fights it past the clichés in Chiron’s
biography, which are clichés only in
the movies. For one thing, ‘‘Moon-
light’’ is surpassingly gorgeous.
The depth-of-field camera work
and luscious soundtrack give the
movie atmosphere. You can feel
the humidity. You can also feel the
hormones roiling this kid, who is
desperate to connect them to some-
one, then desperate to bury them.
But he can’t. And that’s because —
and this is important to say because
it’s so rare — Jenkins knows Chiron
is a human being. Not because he’s
a sex machine.
It’s as if Jenkins has seen the
punks and thugs and clowns who’ve
popped up in so many movies, as
if he knows about the fetishes and
the gazing, about imperfect allies
like Mapplethorpe and Tarantino,
about all the gawking that’s done at
black men and their penises with-
out ever truly seeing. It’s as if he
knows all of this and is determined
to strip it all away. There’s noth-
ing inherently wrong with black
men’s sexuality — only the ways it
has been distorted, demonized and
denied. Blackmon had his codpiece
for protection. Jenkins is certain
that Chiron needs something even
stronger: affection.
When I was 9 or 10, I spent the sum-
mer at a camp at my school. One
day, after swimming, I was show-
ering, zoned out but dialed in. I
snapped out of it when I heard two
older boys talking. ‘‘Yo, he’s look-
ing at your dick!’’ ‘‘What going on,
man? What are you doing?’’ They
were talking to me. One of them
was lean, very fit, a shade darker
than I am and, incredibly enough,
named David. His eyes were small
but bright. And I had been looking
at his penis.
I didn’t know what to say, so I
told the truth. ‘‘Yours is so much
handsomer than mine!’’ They
almost fell over laughing. The won-
der with which I said it probably
was funny. ‘‘You a faggot!’’ David
said. I stayed a ‘‘faggot’’ for the rest
of my school life.
The only penises I’d ever seen at
that point were as black as David’s.
But I noticed his. He was 12 or 13
and more developed. Admiring it
got me cast out of our little Eden
— but only because that’s how boys
are. We didn’t know about sexual
myths or racial threats, about the
taboos that we would discover are
our particular birthright. I didn’t
anyway. Not yet. I just saw a penis.
And it was beautiful.
Kesha
(Continued from Page 47)
recording contract acts as embalm-
ing fluid to the person you were
when you first signed it. Kesha can
create a new sound. She can use her
new voice. She can sing her pop
hits as country songs. But there’s
no guarantee anyone will release
those new songs: There’s a clause
in her original contract that insists
she remain ‘‘reasonably consistent
in concept and style to the artistic
concept and style’’ of the original
recordings; there’s a clause that says
she’s not even allowed to change
her name without approval.
The rape claim bubbles beneath
every proceeding and every filing
and every motion in this case. It
shades every word of every page
of every version of these suits. Our
legal system isn’t set up to deal
with a case like Lukasz Gottwald
p/k/a Dr. Luke, Kasz Money, Inc.
and Prescriptions Songs, L.L.C. v.
Kesha Rose Sebert p/k/a Kesha:
a rape claim that’s past its sell-
by date, which has turned into a
banal contract dispute. Kesha will
not relent on her accusations, and
Dr. Luke won’t relent on his defa-
mation suit. How could they settle?
Settling will only make either of
them look as if they lied. The story
of Luke v. Kesha is a story of repu-
tational murder-suicide; it’s a gre-
nade whose pin has been pulled;
it’s a story of scorched earth.
Over the last two months, I was
given information that you are
given when you work at a major
magazine whose story stands to
influence the situation. Kesha was
provided with outside produc-
ers, Sony told me just days before
this went to press, and Kesha and
Kemosabe had agreed to work with
about a dozen of them. Sony said
it ‘‘has made it possible for Kesha
to record without any connection,
involvement or interaction with
Luke whatsoever.’’ But a day later,
representatives for Kesha told me
that wasn’t the case, saying, ‘‘Dr.
Luke has insisted Sony’s partici-
pation is just an ‘accommodation’
and has not denied that all deci-
sions regarding the album are still
being made by Dr. Luke.’’ Luke’s
lawyer told me that Luke is looking
forward to seeing his name cleared
in court. His lawyer says that
Kesha has always been welcome to
record and can be in a recording
studio as early as this week. But if
you were to create a spectrum of
emotional experience, you’d find
that Luke v. Kesha sits on the oppo-
site end of where we sit when we
want to listen to a pop song. Their
old music already sounds distorted
and spoiled to me. The only thing
we know for sure is that this case
will forever define both of them,
and that while it’s going on, the
world doesn’t get to see this new
side of Kesha. The only thing we
know for sure is that even if it is
ever resolved, this story is forever.
At last, I was able to hear four
of Kesha’s new songs. I went to an
office in Manhattan and sat in a
room and listened while two of her
representatives looked on. Kesha
told me that when the inspiration
hits her with a song — a lyric, a
hook, a melody, anything — she is
struck dumb with it until she puts
it down on paper, that the inspi-
ration itself feels like a divine act.
I heard ‘‘Hunt You Down,’’ which
was a real country song with banjo
and some real country sentiments:
‘‘If you [expletive] around, I’ll hunt
you down.’’ I heard ‘‘Learn to Let
It Go,’’ which sounded like some-
thing you’d hear in heavy rotation
on radio with Kesha’s beautiful,
low voice singing that a happy end-
ing is up to you. I heard ‘‘Rosé,’’ a
toast to an old boyfriend who has
married. ‘‘The good things never
last,’’ she sings.
But the song I want to tell you
about most is ‘‘Rainbow.’’ If it ever
emerges from private listenings, it
will be your favorite Kesha song.
It’s big and sweeping, and you can
hear every instrument that Ben
Folds and his associates played — it
does recall a Beach Boys vibe, just
as she wanted it to. And as Folds
said, the way she sings the song is
so rich and so real that it jerks you
out of your expectation of a pop
song. ‘‘I found a rainbow, rainbow,
baby,’’ she sings. ‘‘Trust me, I know
life is scary, but just put those col-
ors on, girl, and come and paint
the world with me tonight.’’ In the
final section, her voice becomes
stronger and more strained, and
the effect is devastating. I asked to
hear it three more times.
Puzzles

SPELLING BEE WINDING DOWN TIGHT-FIT SUDOKU

By Frank Longo By Patrick Berry By Wei-Hwa Huang

How many common words of 5 or more letters can Answers to Path A clues wind down the grid along the Enter digits from 1 to 9 in the grid so that no number
you spell using the letters in the hive? Every answer unshaded path, one after another, starting in the upper is repeated in any row, column or 3x2-outlined
must use the center letter at least once. Letters may left. Answers to Path B clues wind down the opposite region. Some squares are split by a slash and need
be reused in a word. At least one word will use all way, starting in the shaded space at the upper right. 2 digits entered in them. The smaller number
7 letters. Proper names and hyphenated words are not When the grid is filled, the letters in the shaded squares always goes above the slash.
allowed. Score 1 point for each answer, and 3 points will spell a word that can precede “down.”
for a word that uses all 7 letters. Ex.
Path A
3 5
Rating: 8 = good; 15 = excellent; 22 = genius Environmental cautionary tale from Dr. Seuss (2 wds.) 1 1 6 2 4
2
• Custom-tailored (3 wds.) • School attended by the 4 6 4 13
Clintons • Dull and lifeless, as the eyes
5
1
4 > 3 1
5
6 5 2 4

Path B 2 5
4 2 1 356
B Conditional prison release • Imitated an owl • Sell-to-
your-friends company • Right, as wrongs • Writer of
rags-to-riches tales

W C A B
9
3
4
A 1 5
2
3
L I 7 4
5
K 6 3
7
6 8
7 1
Our list of words, worth 28 points, appears with last week’s answers. A B 8

ACROSTIC
1 O 2 K 3 B 4 J 5 N 6 E 7 M 8 S 9 C 10 I 11 A 12 P 13 Q 14 U 15 L 16 K 17 F 18 B 19 D 20 T 21 M 22 H 23 E 24 N

25 C 26 A 27 S 28 Q 29 J 30 I 31 R 32 O 33 K 34 G 35 B 36 D 37 C 38 A 39 T 40 M 41 N 42 U 43 S 44 H 45 E 46 F 47 K

By Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon 48 P 49 J 50 D 51 B 52 Q 53 O 54 L 55 A 56 N 57 G 58 M 59 P 60 I 61 F 62 D 63 B 64 U 65 S 66 H 67 Q 68 O 69 N 70 J

Guess the words defined below and 71 C 72 F 73 K 74 I 75 R 76 M 77 T 78 A 79 B 80 D 81 O 82 L 83 U 84 P 85 N 86 I 87 E 88 G 89 R 90 C 91 K 92 J

write them over their numbered
dashes. Then transfer each letter to 93 O 94 F 95 H 96 M 97 T 98 B 99 S 100 G 101 Q 102 E 103 P 104 R 105 K 106 D 107 N 108 L 109 A 110 C 111 T 112 I 113 J
the correspondingly numbered square
in the pattern. Black squares indicate 114 B 115 H 116 M 117 K 118 F 119 S 120 A 121 Q 122 R 123 P 124 J 125 E 126 T 127 I 128 G 129 C 130 D 131 B 132 H 133 Q 134 N 135 S 136 P

where words end. The filled pattern will

137 E 138 R 139 F 140 L 141 G 142 T 143 U 144 C 145 K 146 A 147 E 148 I 149 J 150 O 151 H 152 P 153 D 154 F 155 M 156 L 157 C 158 Q
contain a quotation reading from left
to right. The first letters of the guessed
159 A 160 I 161 K 162 E 163 U 164 P 165 S 166 B 167 G 168 M 169 L 170 T 171 O 172 H 173 J 174 I
words will form an acrostic giving the
author’s name and the title of the work.

A. Sign of nervousness (2 wds.) F. Source of the line “An honest answer K. Athlete with the memoir “Days of P. Skits with pie fights or lewd jokes
is like a kiss on the lips” Grace” (2 wds.) (2 wds.)
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
120 11 159 78 26 109 146 55 38 ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
118 61 72 46 94 139 17 154 33 117 161 2 91 73 47 105 145 16 59 103 164 123 84 48 12 152 136
B. Diet of those who would be queens
(2 wds.) G. Slightest idea L. Connecticut city called “The Rose of Q. Deferential to a slavish degree
New England” ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 67 158 52 28 13 101 121 133
51 131 114 35 18 63 3 98 166 79 141 88 57 167 128 34 100 ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
140 108 15 169 156 82 54 R. Hole in one or triple play, e.g.
C. What a scepter symbolizes H. Enigma that’s hard to crack (2 wds.)
M. Concubine in a sultan’s seraglio ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 75 138 104 122 31 89
157 110 129 71 90 25 9 144 37 66 115 172 95 44 151 132 22 ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ S. Saint who founded the Jesuits
168 21 96 155 40 58 7 116 76
D. Positive but qualified assertion I. Name associated with a ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
(3 wds.) “burping seal” N. Call home (2 wds.) 99 43 135 165 27 119 8 65

____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ T. Make light of, de-emphasize
153 80 130 50 36 62 106 19 10 60 86 174 160 30 127 112 148 74 107 134 24 41 69 56 5 85
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
E. Site of a onetime boom and bust J. Classic Rube Goldberg-like board O. Unopposed chance to score a point 126 20 39 142 111 97 77 170
(2 wds.) game first published by Ideal (2 wds.) (2 wds.) U. Feeling too hot and too cold by turns
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
147 23 87 6 102 45 162 137 125 4 149 173 70 29 113 92 124 49 68 81 150 93 53 32 171 1 14 143 64 42 163 83

74
Curtis Trump,’’ he told me. ‘‘It’s the end of something I did in film. Which they called sampling. Basically
(Continued from Page 65) — that’s what I would think — and if it’s the end just going and replaying stuff and remaking it into
of something, then it’s about time we started new things, which is really good fun. But funda-
more rules, but for the moment it’s a very good inventing something new.’’ mentally, it’s doing what I’m accusing BlackRock’s
place to be.’’ In his pauses I felt Curtis’s thinking as a tan- computer of doing: constantly monitoring the
gible presence in the room. He wasn’t so much past, reworking it into other patterns, as a hedge
Because Adam Curtis is a journalist, and because measuring his willingness to provoke or offend as against the future. Am I giving you any vision of
Donald Trump is the black hole toward which all negotiating with his own frightened-bunny view the future?’’ The question felt earnest, but if I’d
journalistic light presently bends, a portion of Cur- of the question. ‘‘I mean, I think he’s dangerous,’’ said yes he’d have laughed at me.
tis’s new film concerns the Republican nominee. he concluded, ‘‘but I think there are lots of other ‘‘In fact, actually the great thing about human
‘‘HyperNormalisation’’ will be essential viewing dangerous things around in the world.’’ beings is that they’re protean,’’ Curtis told me,
for American audiences if for nothing more than a near the end, before I let him get back to his
sublime six-minute film-within-a-film that depicts If the end of this article were the end of an Adam editing. ‘‘They can be anything you want them
Trump in his role as a casino proprietor. Curtis tells Curtis film, it wouldn’t find its way to any very defi- to be. They’re amazing. But we’re stuck with
the story of Trump’s entanglement with a probabil- nite conclusion. Instead, the pileup of astounding the idea that there is a fixed self. We’re stuck
ities analyst named Jess Marcum and a Japanese facts and images and insinuations would leave you with the idea that there is a body mass index
gambler named Akio Kashiwagi, who some believe wanting both less and more, but with a very cer- that you must have. We’re stuck that this is the
may have been murdered by the Yakuza. tain sense of having been taken out of yourself for food you must have. We’re stuck with the sys-
Was it Kashiwagi’s mysterious death, which a while — of having tested the edge of the bubble, tem of finance. It’s just stuck. And maybe, I’m
voided a several-millions debt to Trump, that if not actually escaped it. This is what I like best part of the stuckness.’’ Several times, Curtis and
spurred Trump out of the risk-laden world of about his films and what I liked best about pick- I circled back to the notion of the ‘‘hyperob-
actual construction, investment and management ing Curtis’s brain up close for three days: Further ject’’ — that which is too big in time and space
and into the realm of speculative virtuality — the thinking will always be required. to comprehend. Perhaps this is merely short-
practice, that is, of selling his name for others to He seems to feel the same way. ‘‘Maybe I’m hand for the sensation of apprehending that we
slap onto buildings, even as he became a television part of the conservatism that I’m being incredibly are creatures born into a world that seems to
and tabloid personality to make that name more rude about,’’ he said. Uncovering this reservation demand our understanding, but will never grant
valuable? In Curtis’s portrait, anyway, Trump is seemed almost to delight him. ‘‘I should have the it. ‘‘You have to recognize that you’re part of the
an avant-garde figure. From the film’s narration: humility to recognize that the sort of films I make thing,’’ he said. ‘‘But the point about journalism
‘‘Trump had realized that the version of reality that are locked in the past. If I was going to really attack is to try to portray the thing you are part of. I
politics presented was no longer believable. … And myself — a lot of people also did in the 1990s what think that’s the best you can do.’’
in the face of that, you could play with reality.’’
In the wake of Brexit, though, what did Cur-
tis think of the rise of Trump? ‘‘For a lot of the
people who support Trump — and the new right
in Europe — it’s not really nationalism,’’ he sug-
gested. ‘‘It’s a class thing.’’ He thought again for
a moment; that wasn’t quite it. ‘‘You know when
you’re told to adopt the brace position in an air-
craft because you’ve got some turbulence? It’s as
if everyone’s in the brace position at the moment,
and they don’t dare look out of the window and
see the world for what it is. All the people terrified
of Trump are in the brace position — you know,
as you gulp another whiskey, ‘Oh, my God — are
we going to drop down 20,000 feet?’ If you’re in
that position and someone starts walking around
the aisle, you want them to stop. You’re in the
brace position. They’re teasing you. They know
you’re frightened. They decided to get up and
walk around the plane, and you don’t like it.’’
But Trump’s supporters are, of course, also
deeply enbubbled. Trump, according to Curtis,
may himself be only another form of feedback
system, similar to a chat-bot who replies to you
by restating your questions in a flattering style.
‘‘He’s a hate-bot. You go, ‘I’m angry,’ and he goes,
‘I’m angry, too!’ And nothing changes. But the
system likes it: Angry people click more.’’
I asked whether the prospect of Trump’s actu-
ally winning concerned him. At the time of my
visit with Curtis, many national polls showed the
candidates tied. ‘‘I’m trying to abstract myself
from the frightened-bunny view of Donald

The New York Times Magazine 75

Puzzles Edited by Will Shortz

UPDATES 1

19
2 3 4 5

20
6 7 8 9

21
10 11 12 13

22
14 15 16 17 18

By Caleb Madison
23 24 25 26

ACROSS 44 Prefix with -pathy 86 Band with the

27 28 29
1 One talking on the 45 School in Berkshire 1991 No. 1 hit
phone, nowadays? 47 Shelf supports “Unbelievable” 30 31 32 33
5 Numerical prefix 48 Set (against) 88 Like non-
9 Glitz 49 Result of Québec’s prescription meds 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42
13 Coronas, e.g. vote to leave 89 Colt 45 brewer
19 What sweet Canada 90 Home to 43 44 45 46 47

gestures may mean 50 Event code- Hernando

48 49 50 51
20 Whitman sampler? named Operation 91 American ____
21 Like sardines Neptune 93 Start of many 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59
22 The princess in 51 Endure, in an congregation
“The Princess expression names 60 61 62 63 64
Diaries” 52 B flat equivalent 94 Suit
23 “Fine, see if I 56 Lie on the beach 95 Woodrow Wilson 65 66 67 68 69 70

care!” 58 *Enzo Ferrari was the only U.S.

71 72 73 74
25 Banned pollutants called it “the most prez to have one
26 With reason beautiful car ever 96 *Something 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82
27 Reading comics, made” spotted on a
doing crosswords, 60 Make sense of runway? 83 84 85 86 87 88
etc. 62 Lush 99 Margarine
28 *2000s group with 64 Acronym for an 101 Axis foe 89 90 91 92 93

three eponymous outdoor fantasy 102 When sung five

game 94 95 96 97 98
Disney Channel times, a 1974
films, with “the” 65 Things found at Rolling Stones hit
99 100 101 102
30 U.S.C.G. rank the starts of the 103 *1968 Peter
31 Woman of whom answers to the six O’Toole drama, 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111
it’s begged, “Please starred clues with “The”
don’t take my 71 Get bored (of) 107 1998 Faith Hill 112 113 114
man,” in a 1973 hit 72 Prefix with -stat hit that describes
33 Place 73 Not go home by “perpetual bliss” 115 116 117 118

10/30/16
34 *Athletic footwear curfew 112 Cold-weather
119 120 121 122
once promoted by 75 *Showy orange conveyance
Pelé bloom 113 Part of P.S.U.:
38 Bled 80 Artist Magritte Abbr.
39 Bo’sun for Captain 82 Chest bones 114 Annual California 121 Comes together 6 Intimidates 41 Composer Satie 81 Best Supporting
Hook 83 Some acids music festival 122 Football gear 7 Faction in 42 Dirección Actress nominee
43 Soon enough 84 Fantasy creatures 115 Symbol of wisdom “Twilight” fandom geográfica for “Birdman”
116 Small change DOWN 8 Funny Schumer 46 ____ Boston (luxury 85 Make a “T”
117 “I’ll take care of 1 Kemo ____ 9 Minnesota athlete hotel) gesture in
Puzzles Online: Today’s puzzle and more 47 Eagerly seized basketball
than 9,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/crosswords
that” 2 Corsica et d’autres 10 Able to practice,
118 Employments 3 Recruiting org. say 50 One side of the 87 Pro
($39.95 a year). For the daily puzzle commentary:
119 Threw out 4 Odysseus, by birth 11 Pulitzer-winning climate change 90 Eats
nytimes.com/wordplay.
Edward debate 91 Setting for a sunset
Mobile crosswords: nytimes.com/mxword 120 In view 5 Possible paths
12 Best-selling PC 51 Pops on the Seine
game before The 53 J.F.K. tower grp. 92 Rehab attendees
Sims 54 Plant malady

KENKEN
Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each
13 Convert chips to
money
14 X-ray, e.g.
caused by
overwatering
55 Teacher’s head
93 Split
95 The fingers of a
hand, e.g.
97 One plus one?
heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication 15 Tech help station count
57 Familiar folks 98 Fancy-schmancy
or division, as indicated in the box. A 5x5 grid will use the digits 1–5. A 7x7 grid will use 1–7. 16 ’Stro, e.g.
59 Target audience of 100 Actress Balaban
17 Streamlet
Out magazine 101 Hit musical with
18 “Goes”
61 Actress Polo the song “N.Y.C.”
24 Tinder and others
63 “Don’t quit ____ 103 Exam with logic
28 Miss ____ (late TV
now!” games, briefly
psychic)
66 Browser button 104 Digging
29 Astronaut Shepard
67 Flipped 105 Sounds after a
32 U.S. base site in
the Pacific 68 Assess magic trick
34 Half of a 1960s pop 69 Angel who visited 106 Some contraceptive
group Joseph Smith devices
35 Popular sleep aid 70 Lie on the beach 108 Loudly acclaim
36 Godzilla foe 74 Implied 109 “____, She Wolf of
37 Ages and ages 75 Tailor’s need the SS” (1975 cult
38 Prince and others 76 Kind of theater film)
40 Who said 77 Barb 110 Cold-weather
“Revolutions are 78 Settles snugly conveyance
the locomotives of 79 1000, 1500 and 111 Lip
history” 2000: Abbr. 114 Part of a wheel
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. © 2016 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

76
 Great chefs use
great knives.
Hear their stories at wusthof.com

Chef Clayton Chapman

Chef Ann Kim
Chef Sam Gorenstein
Talk

Omarosa fact that I had been a Democrat my entire

life. As an African-American, that’s what
we tend to do. African-Americans are loyal
to the Democratic Party, but unfortunately,
Manigault the Democratic Party is not loyal to them.
When did you change your mind? My big
split really started during the election that
Changed Parties involved Barack Obama and Hillary Clin-
ton. Some of the attack tactics that were
used, particularly from the Clinton camp
For Trump — at first, I was very much supportive of
Hillary, until I saw how she was treating
this African-American man. I went on to
Interview by Ana Marie Cox
support Barack Obama and work on his
campaign in Ohio, but it was then that I
saw the fractures in the Democratic Party,
and particularly how they treated Presi-
dent Obama. I was really turned off.
I understand that disillusionment with
the Democratic Party, but was the choice
to, specifically, become a Republican
You’re a prominent member of Donald made because of Donald Trump? When
Trump’s presidential campaign,, as the Donald announced, my decision was to
director of African-American outreach,
utreach, support my friend in his desire to become
after competing on ‘‘The Appentice’’ tice’’ in the president of the United States. We jok-
2004. Statistically speaking, he does ingly called ourselves Trumplicans at the
not seem to be having very much ch suc- beginning. For independent-minded voters
cess with either women or minorities. orities. who want to see a change — I mean, even
Oh, my God, I disagree. When n I took his children were not registered Republi-
the position, we were polling at zero. can. In the last few months, I feel like my
Nationally, we’re at an average off 8 per- eyes have been opened to the need for a
cent. Romney and McCain got around greater presence of African-Americans in
6 to 7 percent of the African-American
merican the Republican Party. Or in any party.
vote. Our goal is to get 15 to 20 percent Do you have any policy reasons as to
of the African-American vote, and d we still why you changed parties? Well, the most
think that number is possible. obvious is that I believe the Republican
I’m seeing you guys polling at 2 percent. Party lines up much more with my Chris-
I’ll send you the numbers that I have. tian beliefs. Many African-Americans will
Do you think the improvement ment is share in that same platform.
because of his oft-repeated line, ‘‘What Recently, Donald Trump tweeted that
do you have to lose?’’ You called it exactly he is glad about the unendorsements
what it is: a line. That is not the totality
tality of and the lack of support from the G.O.P.,
our engagement. He’s actually employed
mployed because it unshackles him. What do you
an entire program in order to reach ach out think that he might say or do not that he
to the African-American community. nity. wasn’t able to do before? I certainly don’t
He spends a lot of time talking about out how want to purport to speak for him. I think
terrible things are for black people ple — he both candidates should be focusing on
has said that if he’s elected, black k people how they’re going to improve the lives
will ‘‘be able to walk down the streetet with- of the American people. His focus should
Interview has been condensed and edited.

out getting shot.’’ I assume you, wherever

herever certainly be on what he is going to do to
you live, are able to walk down thee street help make America great again.
without being shot. Not necessarily. ily Do you think he wasn’t doing that
Age: 42 Manigault is a Her Top 5
A lot of people don’t remember that you television personality Bible Verses: before? I just can’t speculate as to what
Occupation:
were a political appointee in the Clinton and the director 1. Jeremiah 29:11 he purports by that. Because, with Mr.
Trump campaign
administration. I was in Al Gore’s office of African-American 2. I Corinthians 14:4-8 Trump, you know. . . . You never know.
official
outreach for Donald 3. Proverbs 3:5-6
for a little under a year, and then I moved Hometown: Trump’s presidential 4. John 3:30
Are you disturbed by what Trump said
to the personnel office. Youngstown, Ohio campaign. 5. Matthew 11:28 in those tapes? He apologized. He apol-
I assume you were a Democrat then. Oh, ogized to his family; they accepted his
absolutely. I’ve been very vocal about the apology, and so do I.

78 10.30.16 Photograph by Andrew T. Warman

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Shown: Loom & Leaf Ultra-Premium Memory Foam Mattress

No phony sales, no nonsense — this is The Saatva Company Our 3 mattress styles — classic innerspring, ultra-premium
philosophy. In 2010, we recognized that customers deserved memory foam, and 100% natural latex — are eco-responsibly
better than the expensive and confusing buying experience made in America with best-in-class materials. And, unlike the

our expertly engineered ultra-luxury mattresses at a great
price with a pressure-free online buying process. 5 years and
luxury mattress source with tens of thousands of positive
reviews across the web.
mattress setup in your home with 24/7 concierge customer
service. This signature blend of modern e-commerce technology
and old-fashioned customer service is the reason we have
been the web’s best-reviewed mattress company for the past
5 years.

ULTRA-PREMIUM MEMORY FOAM CLASSIC LUXURY INNERSPRING 100% PURE, NATURAL LATEX

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