THE MONEY ISSUE

OCTOBER 21, 2019

7 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

21 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Amy Davidson Sorkin on Republican loyalty to Trump;
rescuing a President’s résumé; Ralph Fiennes, undercover;
gingers resist extinction; musicals made while you watch.
ANNALS OF SHOPPING
Susan Orlean 28 After a Fashion
TheRealReal gives luxury goods a second life.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Ian Frazier 33 Once and Future Prince
PERSONAL HISTORY
Colton Wooten 34 The Florida Shuffle
How the recovery industry profits off relapse.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Charles Duhigg 42 The Unstoppable Machine
Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s relentless growth.
PORTFOLIO
Hashem Shakeri 60 Ghost Towers
with Robin Wright Iran’s failed plan for a housing paradise.
FICTION
David Means 72 “Are You Experienced?”
THE CRITICS
POP MUSIC
Hua Hsu 76 Vagabon’s immersive sound.
BOOKS
James Wood 79 A neglected Danish masterpiece.
83 Briefly Noted
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 84 MOMA reopens.
THE THEATRE
Vinson Cunningham 86 “Heroes of the Fourth Turning.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 88 “Parasite,” “Gemini Man.”
POEMS
Rae Armantrout 36 “Hang On”
Ed Skoog 50 “Pittsburgh”
COVER
Mark Ulriksen “Towering Wealth”

DRAWINGS Robert Leighton, George Booth, Carolita Johnson, Harry Bliss, Edward Koren,
Liana Finck, Roz Chast, Emily Flake, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Seth Fleishman, Charlie Hankin,
Barbara Smaller, Brooke Bourgeois, Kaamran Hafeez and Al Batt SPOTS Rose Wong
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 ADVERTISEMENT
CONTRIBUTORS
Charles Duhigg (“The Unstoppable Ma-
chine,” p. 42) is the author of “The Power
of Habit” and “Smarter Faster Better.”
He was a member of the Times team
that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for
explanatory reporting.
Hashem Shakeri (Portfolio, p. 60) is a
visual artist, a photographer, and a film-
maker based in Tehran. His work was
selected to appear in Foam Magazine’s
annual Talent Issue, which will be pub-
lished in December.

Susan Orlean (“After a Fashion,” p. 28)
is a staff writer and the author of “The
Library Book,” which came out in pa-
perback this month.
David Means (Fiction, p. 72) has writ-
Celebrate the ten several books, including “Hystopia,”
a novel, and the short-story collection
leaders and “Instructions for a Funeral.”
changemakers Tyler Foggatt (The Talk of the Town,
who are p. 22) is an editor of the Talk of the
Town section.
pushing the
world forward. James Wood (Books, p. 79) teaches at
Harvard. In November, he will publish
“Serious Noticing,” a selection of essays.
Colton Wooten (“The Florida Shuffle,”
p. 34) is a writer living in Raleigh. This
is his first piece for the magazine.
Hannah Goldfield (Tables for Two,
p. 19) is the magazine’s food critic.
Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 84)
has been the magazine’s art critic since
1998. In June, he published “Hot, Cold,
Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-
2018.”
Ed Skoog (Poem, p. 50) is the author
of, most recently, “Run the Red Lights.”
He will publish “Travelers Leaving for
the City,” a book of poems, in 2020.

Mark Ulriksen (Cover) is an artist and
illustrator. On October 24th, he will
SUMMIT: speak about his work at the Big Draw
A DAY OF CONVERSATIONS Festival, in San Francisco.
& EXPERIENCES
Robin Wright (Portfolio, p. 60), a dis-
tinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wil-
son International Center for Scholars,
has covered the Middle East since 1973.

November 10
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4 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019

THE MAIL
SACRED COWS
Tad Friend, in his piece on Impossible
Foods, a startup that makes imitation
meat in the hope of solving climate
change, writes, “Every four pounds of
beef you eat contributes to as much global
warming as flying from New York to
London” (“Value Meal,” September 30th).
As a professor who studies the environ-
mental impact of livestock production,
I was surprised that Friend relied on such
a high per-pound emissions rate for beef,
since most estimates are much lower. Ac-
cording to a recent paper in Agricultural
Systems, the carbon footprint of four
pounds of U.S. beef is equivalent to about
eighty-eight pounds of carbon dioxide.
Per passenger, a flight from New York
to London adds roughly 1,980 pounds
of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,
about twenty times more than the pro-
duction of four pounds of beef.
Friend’s data come from Timothy D.
Searchinger, whose research assumes that
beef consumption leads to deforestation.
According to Searchinger’s theory of
marginal-land use, cutting beef consump-
tion in the U.S. will cause American pro-
ducers to export more, thereby reducing
the global demand for pasturelands in
places like the Amazon, where defor-
estation is rampant. Historically, how-
ever, this hasn’t happened. Since the sev-
enties, Americans have reduced their
beef consumption and U.S. exports have
risen, but deforestation abroad has only
increased, as demand in China and other
countries has soared. Solving our climate
crisis is important, but it’s unlikely that
imitation beef is our savior. Arguing oth-
erwise distracts from the damage being
done by major polluters and inhibits
progress toward real solutions.
Frank Mitloehner
University of California, Davis
Davis, Calif.
Friend’s beef-to-aviation numbers are
drawn from a paper that I published in
Nature, in 2018. For a report published
recently by the World Resources Insti-
tute, the World Bank, and the U.N., I led
a team that expanded on that research to
Our members
return each year
explain why moderating beef consump-
as faithfully as
tion is necessary to solve climate change. the tides.
Estimates of the carbon footprint of
American beef production typically focus
on things like cattle burps and manure,
which account for roughly four per cent
of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. But
these estimates ignore the climate costs
of land use. Although some cattle graze
on dry, native grasslands, most beef pro-
duction relies on wetter pastures or crop-
lands that have been converted from for-
ests, wetlands, and other habitats. These
conversions transfer to the air large quan-
tities of carbon that these habitats stored
in plants and soil. Counting this hidden
cost adds about fifteen per cent to the
average American’s greenhouse-gas emis-
sions over thirty years.
Because climate solutions call for sav-
ing and restoring forests even as a grow-
ing global population demands more
food, any plausible path forward requires
two things: farmers must produce more
beef per acre and consumers in wealthy
countries must eat less beef. That’s why
America’s land-efficient beef farming is
valuable and needs to supply more of the
world’s rising demand. But that’s also
why Americans should eat less beef. Since Situated on 2,500 acres of unspoiled
the seventies, the population of the U.S. paradise, Ocean Reef provides a long list
has grown, but its total beef consump- of unsurpassed amenities to its
tion has remained roughly the same. This Members including a 175-slip marina, two
has undoubtedly saved forests here and 18-hole golf courses, tennis facilities,
abroad. Continuing deforestation reflects state-of-the-art medical center,
the growth in global population and grow- K-8 school, private airport and more.
ing food demands. But this hardly proves
that Americans’ reduction in beef-eating There are only two ways to experience
has no effect. Americans still eat vastly Ocean Reef Club’s Unique Way of Life –
more beef than almost everyone else in as a guest of a member or through
the world, yet beef makes up only three the pages of Living magazine.
per cent of our calorie intake. Shifting Visit OceanReefClubMagazine.com
half of that to plant-based meats could or call 305.367.5921 to request your
do a great deal of good. complimentary copy.
Timothy D. Searchinger
Princeton University
Princeton, N.J.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
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 OCTOBER 16 – 22, 2019

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Tina Turner is seventy-nine and happily retired in Switzerland, but her story and her music are still rever-
berating to the rafters in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” which is playing in London, in Hamburg, and
now on Broadway. The show, in previews at the Lunt-Fontanne, traces the singer’s beginnings, in Nutbush,
Tennessee; her Motown rise to fame; and, of course, her turbulent partnership with Ike Turner, whose creative
control and physical abuse she escaped in the mid-seventies. Adrienne Warren (above) plays the title role.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GRANT CORNETT

1
ART
Roy DeCarava
Zwirner
CHELSEA The tremendous shows of DeCarava’s
black-and-white work currently on view at
two locations—“Light Break,” on West Nine-
teenth Street, and “the sound i saw,” on East
Sixty-ninth Street—are the first large-scale
exhibitions of his photographs to be mounted
in New York since a 1996 retrospective at
the Museum of Modern Art, and the timing
couldn’t be more ideal. It’s wonderful, during
this age of agitprop and questions about who
gets to speak for whom, to be reminded of the
delicacy that one can find in art, a fineness
of sensibility that eludes a blatantly political
reading. Not that DeCarava, who died in
2009, will escape those readings entirely; the
majority of his subjects are black, like the
artist, which means that much of the response
to his images will be, de facto, sociological,
addressing the so-called marginalization of
the people depicted. But there is no such
thing as the marginal in DeCarava’s pho-
tographs. Women, musicians, vegetation,
Harlem: all of it is alive with the experience
of being.—Hilton Als (Through Oct. 26.)
Leslie Hewitt
Galerie Perrotin
DOWNTOWN This New York-based photogra-
pher’s long fascination with the centuries-old
painting genre of vanitas isn’t immediately
apparent in her new show. In contrast to
the gloom of those religious still-lifes, with
their skulls and dying flowers, each image
in her new suite of sunlight-suffused pic-
tures is dominated by a central square of
blond plywood, raised from the floor by a
IN THE MUSEUMS
8 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
small stack of books. Their spines are often
turned away, but some visible titles (such
as “Ark of Bones,” by Henry Dumas) sug-
gest that Hewitt’s improvised pedestals rely
on African-American literature. Additional
objects—snapshots, rocks, a conch shell—
contribute to an aloofly allegorical air; on
the floor, bright-white geometric sculptures
of folded sheet metal serve as handsome foils
to the enigmatic photographs. The exhibition
continues in the gallery’s bookstore, where
Hewitt is staging a series of events with writ-
ers, artists, and musicians.—Johanna Fateman
(Through Oct. 26.)
Shona McAndrew
Chart
DOWNTOWN The rituals of contemporary
courtship, with its nude-selfie exchanges,
meet the sexual politics of nineteenth-cen-
tury French painting in the impressive
portraits of this young Philadelphia-based
artist. For the nine sumptuously detailed
canvases (and three small papier-mâché
sculptures) here, McAndrew photographed
herself in poses borrowed from works by
Manet, Ingres, and Delacroix, among others.
Then she e-mailed the images to female
friends, asking them to stage their own ver-
sions and send them to her. Thrice removed
from their art-historical sources and depict-
ing a diverse selection of bodies (many of
them tattooed) in intimate surroundings,
McAndrew’s compositions transform the
female muse from a hidebound cliché into
a vibrant figure of autonomy. In “Chey-
enne,” McAndrew’s gifted fellow-painter
Cheyenne Julien is seen sitting at the edge
of a pink bathtub against a background of
teal tile—it’s a detail lifted and reinter-
preted from a scene by Jean-Léon Gérome,
a graceful riposte to his Orientalist “harem”
tableaux.—J.F. (Through Nov. 2.)
The business of art gets a bad rap,
thanks in part to the mind-numbing
price tags at auction, from which liv-
ing American artists don’t see a dime.
(The laws differ in Europe.) The ex-
hibition “Edith Halpert and the Rise
of American Art,” at the Jewish Mu-
seum (opening on Oct. 18), is a story
of selling gone right. Halpert, who
was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1900,
became the first important female art
dealer in the U.S. when she opened
the Downtown Gallery, in Greenwich
Village, in 1926. For the next forty-two
years, Halpert helped to establish some
of the big shots of modernism, Stu-
art Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia
O’Keeffe, and Ben Shahn among
them. The sculptor William King’s
1959 terra-cotta likeness of Halpert
is pictured.—Andrea K. Scott
Amy Sherald
Hauser & Wirth
CHELSEA The subjects of the eight strong oil
portraits here impress with their looks, in both
senses: striking elegance, riveting gazes. In six of
the pictures, people stand singly against bright
monochrome grounds. (The other two works are
more complicated.) Sherald activates the double
function of portraiture as the recognition of a
worldly identity and, in the best instances, the
surprise of an evident inner life. All of her sub-
jects are African-American. Should this matter?
It does in light of the artist’s stated drive to seek
“versions of myself in art history and the world.”
Race anchors Sherald’s project in history. She
represents it strategically, rendering the skin of
her subjects grisaille, and thereby apostrophiz-
ing America’s original sin and permanent crisis:
the otherizing of the not white, regardless of gra-
dations. Three years ago, Sherald was plucked
from low-profile but substantial status as an
artist when Michelle Obama chose her to paint
her official portrait. On view at the Smithsonian
National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C.,
it is a tour de force. Even so, it didn’t prepare
me for the more intense eloquence of the can-
vases here—I had a dizzy sensation at Sherald’s
show of ground shifting under my feet.—Peter
Schjeldahl (Through Oct. 26.)
Sarah Sze
Bonakdar
CHELSEA Just as a crescent moon can be either
waxing or waning, Sze’s phenomenal installa-
tion “Crescent (Timekeeper)” seems to be both
coming together and falling apart—a remem-
brance and a forgetting. It’s the centerpiece of
the American artist’s new show, a towering yet
delicate metal scaffold of small moving images,
in which real-time observation and prerecorded
documentation blur (thanks in part to an inge-
nious use of water). Larger images float by on
the surrounding walls, reinforcing the fugacious
mood. Sze (who represented the U.S. at the
2013 Venice Biennale) has taken over the entire
gallery, including the building’s exterior. Her
increasingly ambitious approach—a proposition
that drawing, painting, installation, and sculp-
ture are all just as time-based as film—recalls
Robert Rauschenberg’s maxim about art and
life: “I try to act in the gap between the two.”
In several works here, fragmentary pictures of
Sze’s sleeping husband and daughters recur—
dreamers in an unfinished, ungraspable, beau-
tiful world.—Andrea K. Scott (Through Oct. 19.)
Henry Taylor
Blum & Poe
COURTESY GUILD HALL MUSEUM, EAST HAMPTON,
UPTOWN This L.A. artist paints with flat acrylic
color and a speedy but nuanced gestural sim-
plicity that can break effortlessly into passages
NEW YORK, GIFT OF VIRGINIA ZABRISKIE
of surprising detail. A selection of new por-
traits here, from the series “Dakar, Senegal,”
are installed salon-style and initially evoke
family snapshots, though none of them fea-
ture groups and many are cropped as tightly
as passport photos. Taylor has thrown one
wild-card self-portrait into the mix, but his
relationship to his other subjects remains
purposefully unclear. The exhibition’s title,
“Niece Cousin Kin Look How Long It’s Been,”
suggests a diasporic theme, underscored by a
wall-spanning mural of a world map in which
 “First Republic understands our legacy and our bold
aspirations. We define the goal, and they help us get there.”
A M E R I C A N B A L L ET T H E AT R E
Kara Medoff Barnett, Executive Director

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 cross­section of those genres. Highlights in­
AVANT POP clude the ambient­noise meister Not Waving,
who also hosts a fabulous monthly show for
London’s NTS Radio (Good Room, Oct. 18);
Void Vision, who amplifies her snarling synth
pop with a fearsome stage presence (Saint
Vitus, Oct. 19); and the emerging techno
producer Abby Echiverri (Good Room, Oct.
20).—Michaelangelo Matos (Oct. 17-20.)

Universal Jazz Ensemble

Appel Room
Joe Lovano’s prowess as a saxophonist is matched
only by his near­obsessive craving for fresh mu­
sical experiences. The Universal Jazz Ensemble
is yet another newly minted group from the mu­
sician; this one features a fusion of long­estab­
lished improvisers—including the pianist Kenny
Werner, the drummer Andrew Cyrille, and the
vocalist Judi Silvano—with such younger talents
as the drummer Tyshawn Sorey, the bassist John
Patitucci, the guitarist Liberty Ellman, and the
cornettist Graham Haynes. Their collective
avant­leaning slant lends a tantalizing edge to
the proceedings.—S.F. (Oct. 18-19.)
A dilemma facing any pop star is how to make glossy songs with the
potential to become chart-scaling anthems while also remaining unique Kai Alcé
and creatively honest. The singer-songwriter Charli XCX has spent her Public Records
career trying to navigate those murky waters. On the one hand, her knack There’s been some confusion in recent years
for predicting (and steering toward) pop music’s next frontier has made about the meaning of “deep house,” which
her a captivating presence; on the other, being an early adopter has often the post­E.D.M. generation has hijacked as
a synonym for bass­heavy tech­house. But
meant she’d long moved on by the time the rest of the world caught up. the term has long denoted house records with
Her latest album, “Charli,” released in September, nestles into a sweet heavy gospel, jazz, and soul overtones—a more
spot that feels both polished and spontaneous. The production on even apt name might be “grown folks’ house.” The
Detroit­raised, Atlanta­based d.j. and pro­
its most danceable tracks maintains a sharp edge—metallic E.D.M. and ducer Kai Alcé has steadfastly purveyed this
sci-fi sound elements are littered throughout—and provides a quirky sound for more than three decades; agree­
backdrop for some of her finest writing yet. Pop music may have finally able tempos, sweetly aching vocals, snatches
of horns, and casually strutting bass are his
risen to her challenge, casting Charli XCX in an even brighter spotlight, trademarks.—M.M. (Oct. 19.)
but she is already winking out the door.—Briana Younger
Altin Gün
Africa is rendered dark brown and emblazoned and joy, the homegrown and the imported— Elsewhere
with a dollar sign. Migrating birds, transat­ to holiday songs.—Jay Ruttenberg (Oct. 17.) A few years ago, the Dutch bassist Jasper Ver­
lantic trade routes, a headless security guard, hulst was touring Turkey—and, apparently, its
multiracial sunbathers, and found photos record stores—when he became entranced by
complete a vibrant, pointed meditation on George Coleman Quartet the country’s folk music. Upon returning to

1
colonial history, the legacy of slavery, and the
impact of tourism.—J.F. (Through Nov. 2.)
NIGHT LIFE
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in
advance to confirm engagements.
Los Lobos
Smoke
The unexpected death of the accomplished
pianist Harold Mabern, in September, makes
the tenor saxophonist George Coleman—Ma­
bern’s boyhood friend and frequent collabora­
tor—one of the last surviving members of the
celebrated musical contingent that emerged
from Memphis, Tennessee, in the late fifties.
A recently released recording, “The Quar­
tet,” celebrates the spirited cohesion that the
Coleman­Mabern alliance achieved through
the decades. For this engagement, the greatly
mourned pianist will be replaced by Michael
Amsterdam, he recruited the Turkish singers
Erdinç Ecevit and Merve Daşdemir for Altin
Gün, a sextet that recasts Turkish standards
in a juicy psychedelic haze. The musicians’
subsequent pair of albums evoke their hippie
forebears who electrified old folk and blues
songs: a mission of trippy studiousness.—J.R.
(Oct. 19.)
Jim James / Teddy Abrams
Le Poisson Rouge
In a performance at the Louisville Orchestra’s
ILLUSTRATION BY KELSEY WROTEN

St. George Theatre
For nearly half a century, Los Lobos have
performed nimble roots music, shifting the
genre’s center of gravity from Nashville to
East Los Angeles via breezily innocuous
sounds with a subtle political tilt. But can
any American band endure this long without
issuing a Christmas album? Of course not. On
“Llegó Navidad,” Los Lobos apply their trade­
mark mixture—English and Spanish, longing
Weiss.—Steve Futterman (Oct. 17-20.)
Interzone Festival
Various locations
The increasing clubland commingling of
house, techno, and darkwave now has a festi­
val. The inaugural Interzone, a joint effort by
six New York promoters, offers a substantial
Festival of American Music last year, the front
man of My Morning Jacket, Jim James, collab­
orated with his home­town orchestra and its
young music director, Teddy Abrams, on a song
cycle that grapples with man’s place in the nat­
ural world. Perhaps even bolder, James, rarely
starved for ambition, sang a pair of songs associ­
ated with Nina Simone. That concert is now an
album, “The Order of Nature,” whose grandeur
accentuates the singer’s perennial air of wonder.

10 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019

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James reunites with Abrams and members of his a folksy intimacy to his songs that keeps them “Desire”
orchestra for this intimate show.—J.R. (Oct. 20.) grounded, the lyrics plunging straight into the
heart. Broken troubadours ripping open their Miller Theatre
chests may be a tale as old as time, but Kennedy Nearly a decade ago, the then fast-rising com-

Lee Konitz Nonet
Jazz Gallery
With his cool tone and exacting phrasing,
Lee Konitz, a brilliant alto saxophonist who
diverged from Charlie Parker in the late for-
ties, still sounds like no one else on the horn.
The ninety-two-year-old icon has found an
invaluable collaborator in the saxophonist and
arranger Ohad Talmor; Talmor’s charts, which
will be re-created at this performance, anchor
Konitz’s weaving improvisations on the recent
album “Old Songs New.”—S.F. (Oct. 20.)
Dermot Kennedy
Kings Theatre
The singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy, who
began his career busking on street corners in
his native Ireland, has a voice made of soul
and husk, perfectly suited for guy-plus-guitar
musings. Even when his production expands
to include splashier electronic and pop in-
fluences—as it often does on his recently re-
leased début album, “Without Fear”—there is
AT THE OPERA
1
is a compelling case for making room for one
more.—Briana Younger (Oct. 22.)
CLASSICAL MUSIC
“El Barbero de Sevilla”
Teatro LATEA
Seville had a certain exotic appeal for eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century composers
and their audiences, with such operas as “Don
Giovanni,” “Le Nozze di Figaro,” and “Car-
men” set in the Andalusian city. In 1901, the
Spanish composers Gerónimo Giménez and
Manuel Nieto flipped the script, adapting
Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” into a zar-
zuela with a new libretto and copious musical
references to the original bel-canto comedy.
New Camerata Opera stages “El Barbero de
Sevilla” in a bilingual production featuring
English dialogue; Rod Gomez directs, and
Pablo Zinger conducts.—Oussama Zahr (Oct.
16 and Oct. 18-19 at 7:30 and Oct. 20 at 3.)
poser Hannah Lash created a penetrating
chamber opera, “Blood Rose,” featuring the
alto Kirsten Sollek and the JACK Quartet (in
its original configuration). On a commission
from Columbia University’s Miller Theatre,
the now well-established and celebrated Lash
enlists Sollek and the present JACK lineup
for her newest venture: “Desire,” a chamber
opera in which a secret garden and a mysteri-
ous stranger figure into an interior journey of
discovery, doubt, and self-empowerment. The
countertenor Daniel Moody and the baritone
Christopher Dylan Herbert complete the cast;
Rachel Dickstein directs, and Daniela Candil-
lari conducts.—Steve Smith (Oct. 16-17 at 8.)
“Concrète Jungle”
Invisible Dog Art Center
Dan Siegler—a composer whose early expo-
sure to avant-garde jazz, Public Enemy, and
No Wave would inform his subsequent ven-
tures in theatre, television, and dance—took
his cues from vintage musique-concrète tape
assemblage when constructing his newest piece.
“Concrète Jungle,” which Siegler began work-
ing on as his father was slipping into dementia,
employs urban sounds, sampled and reorga-
nized, to evoke a bygone New York City. Live
contributors include the choreographer and
dancer Pam Tanowitz, the vocalist Christina
Campanella, the violinist Tomoko Omura, and
the bassist Greg Chudzik.—S.S. (Oct. 17-18
at 7:30.)

George Lewis
N.Y.U. Skirball
Any new piece by the composer George Lewis
is cause to celebrate, both for the fecundity of
his imagination and for the way his ingenious
conceptions bring out the best in his collabo-
rators. Here, the International Contemporary
Ensemble—which has proved an ideal vehicle
for Lewis’s creations, both onstage and on rec-
ord—gives the first local performances of two
recent works driven by big ideas: “Soundlines:
A Dreaming Track,” based on a travel journal
kept by Steven Schick (who narrates) during
a seven-hundred-mile walk, and “P. Multitu-
dinis,” whose organizational properties are
derived from the political philosophy of Spi-
noza.—S.S. (Oct. 18-19 at 7:30.)

With “Manon,” Jules Massenet gave the story of a pleasure-seeking young New York Philharmonic
woman the scope of a Greek tragedy, charting her rise and fall among the David Geffen Hall
Parisian demimonde in five precisely written acts. The Cuban-American Just over a year ago, the New York Philharmonic
soprano Lisette Oropesa, who takes on the role in the Met’s current revival named the South Korean composer Unsuk
Chin the latest recipient of its Marie-Josée
ILLUSTRATION BY AMANDA BERGLUND

(Oct. 19 and Oct. 22), ties together the narrative’s disparate threads—
Kravis Prize for New Music, a prestigious
Manon’s covetousness, young heartbreak, glamorous reign atop high society, award that includes a commission for a future
spiral into greed, and ultimate redemption in death—with a voice that’s as season. With that unknown work looming,
light as gossamer and as sure as steel. The director and costume designer the orchestra sets the stage with another Chin
piece. “Šu” showcases Wu Wei on the sheng,
Laurent Pelly dresses up the production, which also stars the inconsistent a traditional Chinese mouth organ. Susanna
tenor Michael Fabiano and the elegant baritone Artur Ruciński, in Belle Mälkki, a vital and exacting conductor, also
Époque finery, but he finds moments to critique the way men of means leads Haydn’s Symphony No. 22 in E-Flat
Major (“The Philosopher”) and Strauss’s “Also
acquire and discard women. The conductor Maurizio Benini draws out Sprach Zarathustra.”—S.S. (Oct. 18-19 at 8 and
the score’s opulence, and the chorus sounds dynamite.—Oussama Zahr Oct. 22 at 7:30.)

12 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019

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 variety of styles rather than blockbusters like
CONTEMPORARY DANCE “Swan Lake” or “Giselle.” There are more
new ballets this season than usual, too, in-
cluding a Twyla Tharp opus, her seventeenth
for the company. Entitled “A Gathering of
Ghosts,” it is, in large part, a tribute to the
principal dancer Herman Cornejo, who is
marking his twentieth season with the com-
pany. On Oct. 26, in a program organized in
his honor, Cornejo will also dance George
Balanchine’s 1928 piece “Apollo” for the first
time in New York. Both James Whiteside, a
principal dancer in the company, and Gemma
Bond, recently retired, have produced new
works: “New American Romance,” by White-
side, and “A Time There Was,” by Bond.
And, from Jessica Lang, there is a jazzy,
full-throttle duet to “Fly Me to the Moon,”
made for the rapidly up-and-coming danc-
ers Catherine Hurlin and Aran Bell. Alexei
Ratmansky’s “The Seasons,” a cornucopia
of dances set to richly textured music by
Alexander Glazunov, returns, as does the
thrillingly formal “Theme and Variations,”
by Balanchine.—Marina Harss (Oct. 16-20
and Oct. 22. Through Oct. 27.)
In the nearly two decades since the Twin Towers collapsed, many dances
have tried to evoke the enormous loss associated with September 11th. Koosil-ja
“The Day,” making its New York début at the Joyce Theatre (Oct. 22-27), Roulette
is as much a musical response as a physical one. The idea comes from A few years ago, in “I Am Capitalism,” the
Maya Beiser, a cellist who combines contemporary-music credibility choreographer Koosil-ja took on the subject
with pop-star and opera-diva glamour. She plays two pieces composed of capitalism and its influence on the way
we move, interact, and make art. Now the
for her by David Lang: one created in response to 9/11, the other with choreographer, who uses everyday technol-
text about memory, crowdsourced from the Internet. Onstage with her is ogy and text in addition to movement in
no less than Wendy Whelan, the not-quite-retired New York City Ballet her work, is going beyond capitalism to the
data that underpin it. In “Open Data Story
luminary, executing geometric, affecting choreography by no less than of Profit and Death,” she explores the infor-
the august postmodernist Lucinda Childs. It’s an exceedingly handsome mation that has come to define us, constantly
production, with stage design like a memorial and video haunted by ghosts. harvested, commodifying our every move.
The piece uses cell phones, projections, and
If it ultimately falls short of its subject, focussing too much on its stars, the the Internet to take a satirical look at the
stars do shine.—Brian Seibert relationship between people and technolo-
gy.—M.H. (Oct. 15-17.)

Iestyn Davies Mivos Quartet do the honors, on a program

Carnegie Hall
The five-person viol consort Fretwork, which
replicates the configuration of early-music
string bands, joins the expressive counter-
tenor Iestyn Davies for a concert in Car-
negie’s Weill Recital Hall. The program is
a thorough exercise in the commingling of
instrumental and vocal timbres in Renais-
sance and Baroque music, with madrigals
by Gesualdo, consort songs by Byrd, pieces
by Johann Christoph Bach and Purcell, and
new orchestrations of arias by Handel. Re-
imagined versions of Vaughn Williams’s “The
Sky Above the Roof” and “Silent Noon” add
a dash of twentieth-century lyrical directness
to the evening.—O.Z. (Oct. 19 at 7:30.)
that also features Rihm’s Schumann-inspired
“Fremde Szene II” and his settings of poems
by Mörike and Rückert.—S.S. (Oct. 19 at 7:30.)
Latonia Moore / Ryan Green
Morgan Library & Museum
Latonia Moore and Ryan Speedo Green,
fresh off memorable performances in the
Met’s fall run of “Porgy and Bess,” open the
George London Foundation’s recital season.
The soprano and the bass-baritone present a
heavy-hitting program of opera excerpts (in-
cluding the explosive “L’altra notte,” from Boi-
to’s “Mefistofele”) and major songs (Duparc’s
sublime “L’Invitation au Voyage” and Wolf’s
A.I.M
Joyce Theatre
Kyle Abraham may have changed the name
of his company, formerly Abraham.In.Mo-
tion, to an acronym, but he’s still its guiding
force and greatest dancer, a real shape-shifter.
When he débuts a solo, as he’s doing this
season, it’s something to see. This time, it
will also be something to hear, since he’s
accompanied by a live gospel choir. Abra-
ham’s dancers, though, aren’t far behind him.
Whether it’s the entire company responding
to one another’s commands in Trisha Brown’s
tricky “Solo Olos” (1976), or Tamisha Guy
and Marcella Lewis alternating in Abraham’s
“Show Pony,” this is a troupe of extraordinary

1
gnarled “Michelangelo Lieder”); Ken Noda movers. On opening night, they’re joined by
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRIET LEE-MERRION

accompanies them.—O.Z. (Oct. 20 at 4.) one more: Misty Copeland, performing a

“Strange Scenes”
DiMenna Center
The eminent German composer Wolfgang
Rihm wrote “Et Lux” in 2009, setting frag-
ments of the Latin Requiem Mass to music
that shifts restlessly between modes of succor
and discord. A decade later, the U.S. première
of the hour-long work, with its baked-in con-
tradictions, might feel even more of the mo-
ment; the vocal ensemble Ekmeles and the
slippery, sensual solo that Abraham created
for her for the Fall for Dance Festival.—Brian
Seibert (Oct. 15-20.)
DANCE
“Swan Lake / Loch na hEala”
American Ballet Theatre
BAM Harvey Theatre
David H. Koch The Irish theatre director and choreographer
During the fall season, A.B.T. dancers get Michael Keegan-Dolan’s work is steeped in the
to play a little, dancing shorter works in a atmosphere and the traumas of his native land,

14 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019

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rooted in both its mythical past and the pres­
ent day. His retelling of “Swan Lake,” made
for Teac Damsa, the company he founded on
the Dingle Peninsula, has little to do with the
familiar ballet and much to do with the gritty
urban realities of the Irish Midlands. Jimmy,
the protagonist, is a depressed, unemployed
young man, tormented by his mother and con­
templating suicide. There are magical swans
here, too, but their predicament is linked to
a local legend (“Children of Lir”), and also to
the trauma visited upon children by abusive
priests. Plastic sheeting, chairs, and concrete
blocks create a grim everyday setting, while
a musical ensemble animates the scene with
its keening Irish­Nordic folk music.—M.H.
(Oct. 15-20.)
Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana
Le Poisson Rouge
One of the best ways to experience flamenco
is in the intimacy of a café cantante or a tablao,
close to the sparks but cooled by a beverage.
Flamenco Vivo replicates that experience at
Le Poisson Rouge, with wine and cocktails
for purchase and musicians and dancers from
Spain, including Lucía Alvarez, Isaac Tovar,
Fanny Ara, and Emilio Ochando.—B.S. (Oct.
16-18.)
Yanira Castro
New York Live Arts
Since Castro founded her company, a canary
torsi, ten years ago, she has been playing with
the interaction between performers and audi­
ence, going beyond participation and into col­
laboration, with viewers contributing material
and affecting decisions in the creative process.
She now extends that project in “Last Audi­
ence,” a work that draws on Greek tragedy and
requiems. Each performance is unique, and all
are free with a reservation and preceded by a
communal meal.—B.S. (Oct. 16-20.)
Kayla Farrish
Danspace Project
In the past few years, Kayla Farrish has distin­
guished herself as a supple, powerful dancer
while performing with Kyle Abraham, among
others. But her artistic pursuits and talents
also include choreography, photography, and
film. All those interests feed into “The New
Frontier (My Dear America) Pt. 1,” which
dances along the line between trauma and
tenderness in black experience, looking at
America’s history and its future, sometimes
with a satirical lens.—B.S. (Oct. 17-19.)
Ben Munisteri
92nd Street Y
The veteran downtown choreographer pre­
sents “Elemental Complexity,” a program of
new and recent works that reflect his primary
interest in shapes, patterns, and spatial ar­
chitecture. “Petrichor” (2015), for example,
lays out, weaves together, and layers a small
number of movement phrases in continually
pleasing ways, all to a cool electronic sound
score by Pogo. A new work, “Permafrost,” is
set to Satie piano pieces.—M.H. (Oct. 18-20.)
16 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
1
THE THEATRE
All My Fathers
La MaMa
In the hilarious first half of Paul David Young’s
new play, David (Richard Gallagher), a version
of the playwright, pays a reluctant visit to his
childhood home, in Kentucky. His monster
of a mother, Regina (a spectacular Deborah
Hedwall), announces, through the fog of
her dementia, that David’s true biological
father was his (now dead) pediatrician, Dr.
Woodman (a perfectly doctorly Brian Has­
tert), and not her long­suffering husband, Bill
(touchingly performed by Jonathan Hogan).
In the rambling second half, Regina and Dr.
Woodman revolt against the way that David
has told the story, with Woodman pointing
out that the script borrows countless snippets
of dialogue from famous family dramas to tell
this purportedly autobiographical tale. The
play is about the anxiety of influence, both
genetic and literary—but, as directed by Evan
Yionoulis, David gets a bit buried under all
those words.—Rollo Romig (Through Oct. 20.)
Freestyle Love Supreme
Booth
In this new improvised rap show on Broadway,
directed by Thomas Kail and created by Kail,
Anthony Veneziale, and Lin­Manuel Miranda,
there is no playwright, only rappers (Veneziale,
Utkarsh Ambudkar, and Aneesa Folds), a pair
of beatboxers (Chris Sullivan and Kaila Mul­
lady), and two keyboardists (Arthur Lewis and
Ian Weinberger). Veneziale, who is the show’s
m.c. in addition to participating in the free­
styles, moves crisply from one set piece to the
next; Ambudkar most ably turns his barrage of
words into workable narrative and clearly felt
emotion. In one segment, they riff on audience
members’ deep irritations—daylight­saving
time, mayonnaise, and boys, one night. In
another, an audience member tells a story of
regret, which the ensemble acts (and raps) out
straightforwardly and then reinvents coun­
terfactually to “correct” it. At a recent show,
Lin­Manuel Miranda was a “special guest”
(there will be several throughout the run). He
was rapping as he entered, but you couldn’t
make out the words over the applause—it didn’t
matter what he was saying, only that he was
there.—Vinson Cunningham (Reviewed in our
issue of 10/14/19.) (Through Jan. 5.)
Georgia Mertching Is Dead
Ensemble Studio Theatre
The three women of this new comedy—the hi­
lariously foulmouthed, very pregnant Gretchen
(Diana Oh), the quirky, juvenile Whitney
(Layla Khoshnoudi), and the self­destructive,
self­hating Emma (Claire Siebers)—could have
their own sitcom. Catya McMullen’s script,
about a road trip that the three friends (all with
various vices) undertake to North Carolina, for
a friend’s funeral, is funny, engaging, and occa­
sionally vicious, especially when it dives into
its characters’ ugly, vulnerable moments. The
acting, under Giovanna Sardelli’s direction, is
adept until it becomes self­consciously stagy.
Beneath the charming, if familiar, premise of
the production—presented by Ensemble Stu­
dio Theatre, Youngblood, and Radio Drama
Network—is a sombre core, about loneliness,
brokenness, and addiction, but the play doesn’t
take the time to mine that fascinating ground,
instead opting for a quick, calculable resolu­
tion.—Maya Phillips (Through Oct. 27.)
The Glass Menagerie
Wild Project
In anticipation, perhaps, of Halloween, this
revival of Tennessee Williams’s great mem­
ory play, from 1944, is advertised as being
“spooky.” But Austin Pendleton and Peter
Bloch, the co­directors of the show, which
runs two hours without an intermission, do
not add any spine­tingling ambience to “The
Glass Menagerie,” unless dim lighting and
a tinkly underscore qualify (they do not).
At times, the oversensitive Laura Wingfield
(Alexandra Rose) stands behind a scrim like a
forlorn ghost, staring into space as her mother,
Amanda (Ginger Grace), and brother, Tom
(Matt de Rogatis), argue about her future
and the family’s dire situation. The show is
respectful and hits its marks, in a journeyman
way, but it never triggers the deeper, almost
primal emotional response that more accom­
plished productions of Williams’s story can
unlock.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (Through Oct. 20.)
Katsura Sunshine’s Rakugo
New World Stages
There are more than eight hundred Japanese
masters of the thousand­year­old comic­sto­
rytelling tradition called rakugo, but only one
living foreigner: a big, burly, blond Canadian
with a bellowing, rapid­fire style, whose own
master gave him the name Katsura Sunshine.
Kneeling onstage with only fans and hand tow­
els as props, rakugo performers tell a variety of
tales, some original, some traditional: here,
one (written by Sunshine’s master) is about a
reincarnation gone wrong; another (traditional)
is about a grouchy friend tricked into eating
rotten tofu. (Sunshine will tell ghost stories
next month, family stories in December, and
bawdy stories in January.) Funnier than the
tales themselves, though, is Sunshine’s expla­
nation of rakugo—an explanation that is, he
notes, a traditional part of rakugo—which he
has fashioned into an entertaining essay about
the foibles of translation, easing qualms about
cultural appropriation with a heavy dose of
self­deprecation.—R.R. (Through Jan. 4.)
Linda Vista
Hayes
In this new play by Tracy Letts, directed by
Dexter Bullard, a particularly vicious mid­
life crisis leaves all kinds of mess in its wake.
Wheeler (a funny Ian Barford) is a loudmouth
wriggling his way toward divorce; he doesn’t
spend enough time with his kid, but he does
find opportunities to land himself in a series
of sexual scrapes. Letts is a proven purveyor
of jokes, and the script of “Linda Vista” is
dense with laughs, maybe more than the richly
flawed Wheeler deserves. His friends Paul (Jim
True­Frost) and Margaret (Sally Murphy) set
him up with a pretty life coach, Jules (Cora
Vander Broek), but, despite the aptness of the
 match, Wheeler finds a way to screw things
up. At about two and a half hours, the play
feels too long, and, by the end, the audience
has had lots of laughs but hasn’t learned much
it didn’t know by minute three about poor
Wheeler.—V.C. (Through Nov. 10.)
Slave Play
Golden
ing through rapids on a slippery raft. Still, a
story pushes through. Duran (Joshua Henry)
and Mariana (Ciara Renée), two sweethearts al-
most crushed by life on the peripheries of Reno,
Nevada, have blessedly found one another, but
Mariana’s ex-husband (Ryan Vasquez), a car-
toonish criminal with a murderous streak, won’t
let go easily. The songs are well-wrought pop
sweets—each harmony exact, each structure
shapely. Henry sings especially well. But the
Schultz (James Remar) and falls for Schultz’s
mistress, Vera Cicero (Diane Lane). Another
mobster, Owney Madden (Bob Hoskins), who
owns the Cotton Club, in Harlem, comes to
his aid—and launches him as a movie actor.
Meanwhile, the tap dancer Sandman Wil-
liams (Gregory Hines) faces racist abuse at
clubs where he’s performing; his romance with
Lila Rose Oliver (Lonette McKee), a light-
skinned singer, is thwarted by her efforts to

Jeremy O. Harris’s tonally uneven yet intellec-
tually ruthless play, directed by Robert O’Hara,
has transferred to Broadway after premièring,
last winter, at New York Theatre Workshop. In
the first, tense act, the mirrored set reflecting
both a vista of a Southern plantation and the
audience, three couples in antebellum cos-
tumes enact sexual battles of sorts: Kaneisha
(Joaquina Kalukango) is a black slave who
wants the white “Massa” Jim (Paul Alexander
Nolan) to call her “Negress” while he orders
her to clean the floor; Phillip (the hilarious Sul-
livan Jones) is a light-skinned black slave sum-
moned by his unhinged white mistress, Alana
(Annie McNamara), for violin playing and
much more; and Gary (Ato Blankson-Wood)
is a black slave commanding the white inden-
tured servant Dustin (a genially showboating
James Cusati-Moyer) to do his kinky bidding.
When the couples are revealed to be part of
an academic therapy study—led by Téa (the
pitch-perfect Chalia La Tour) and Patricia
(Irene Sofia Lucio)—Harris’s trenchant, raw
exploration of the long, inescapable shadow
that America’s past casts on even the most
intimate relationships unfolds in devastating
increments.—Shauna Lyon (Through Jan. 19.)
1
characters, unlike their notes, never make it off
the page.—V.C. (Through Nov. 17.)
MOVIES
The Cotton Club Encore
Francis Ford Coppola’s newly reëdited ver-
sion of his musical gangster film, from 1984,
adds ten minutes of footage that boosts its
potent ideas but can’t help its often cartoonish
tone. It’s based on real-life tales of Prohibi-
tion-era bloodshed and New York night life.
The musician Dixie Dwyer (Richard Gere)
is forcibly befriended by the gangster Dutch
OFF BROADWAY
pass for white. Coppola can’t avoid a dash of
mythology when filming brutal killings, but
he also looks grimly at the Mob’s role in pop-
ular artistry—and in enforcing racial barriers.
Laurence Fishburne, as a Harlem mobster,
steals the show in one scene; Larry Marshall
thrillingly impersonates Cab Calloway; and
Stephen Goldblatt’s phantasmagorical cin-
ematography often outpaces the schematic
action.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)
The King
The monarch of the title is King Henry V, though
it’s quite a while before he ascends to the En-
glish throne. In the earlier passages of the story,
he is Prince Hal (Timothée Chalamet), a noted

Victor
Axis Theatre
“Those were happy days,” Edgar Oliver intones
in his unplaceable lilt, somehow both animated
and deadpan, as his hand drifts downward
like a falling leaf. “Why do we survive them?”
Like a dying breed of downtown New Yorker
crossed with an extraterrestrial ghost, Oliver
has rematerialized to deliver his latest fond,
funny, strange, elegiac memoir-monologue
about “the sorrows of men who live alone in
rooming houses,” this time about his beloved
friend and neighbor Victor Greco, who died
in February and who was homeless for the last
ten years of his life. Sensitively directed by
Randy Sharp, with a suitably sepulchral set
(by Chad Yarborough) and lighting (by David
Zeffren) and live music by a guitar-cello-piano
trio led by Paul Carbonara, the show gives the
impression that the shy loner onstage has had The playwright and director Richard Nelson creates dramatic worlds not
a far richer social life than most of us will ever so much play by play as house by house. His “Apple Family Plays,” which
have.—R.R. (Through Oct. 26.) appeared between 2010 and 2013, chronicled four evenings in the life of a
fictional family in Rhinebeck, New York, where Nelson lives; each was set on
The Wrong Man a historic date, such as the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
Robert W. Wilson MCC His next project, “The Gabriels,” followed another Rhinebeck family through
Theatre Space the 2016 campaign season as it unfolded in real life; the last installment,
ILLUSTRATION BY IRINA PERJU

This musical, with lyrics, book, and music by
the hitmaker Ross Golan (he’s written for Ari-
ana Grande and Justin Bieber), might be better
classified as an opera-in-power-ballads, or even
just an album—a “live album experience”—of
uncommon thematic and narrative coherence.
Nobody stops for even a word of spoken dia-
logue; the audience rides from chord to chord,
one melisma to the next, like passengers crash-
“Women of a Certain Age,” premièred on (gulp) Election Night. But Nelson’s
plays don’t bellow about the march of history; they are understated ensemble
pieces, in which history echoes faintly in the background. He continues his
“Rhinebeck Panorama” with “The Michaels” (starting previews on Oct. 19,
at the Public), set in 2019, in the kitchen of a third family, headed up by
Rose (Brenda Wehle), a renowned choreographer. The cast includes the
Nelson regulars Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders.—Michael Schulman
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 17
reprobate and a disappointment to his reigning
father (Ben Mendelsohn). David Michôd’s film
borrows boldly from Shakespeare, stripping
away the verse and reordering the sequence
of events; Falstaff (Joel Edgerton), for exam-
ple, not only carouses with Hal but survives
to fight alongside him, after his coronation, at
the Battle of Agincourt. The scenes of combat
are, in fact, the best thing about the movie,
displaying a precision and an intensity that are
wanting elsewhere. Chalamet, so finely vulner-
able in “Call Me by Your Name” (2017), is not
the most plausible of rakes; a more enjoyable
turn comes from Robert Pattinson, who seems
at once menacing and foppish as the Dauphin
of France.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue
of 10/14/19.) (In limited release.)
Judy
Renée Zellweger’s passionate and vulnerable
incarnation of Judy Garland energizes this em-
pathetic, nuanced, yet patchy drama centered
on the singer’s London concert series in 1968,
the year before her death. Struggling with her
AT THE MOVIES
career because of a prescription-drug addic-
tion dating back to her childhood stardom,
Garland desperately seeks custody of her chil-
dren, Lorna and Joey Luft, but is penniless and
homeless. She only accepts the London gig to
earn enough money to support them. Although
she flings herself devotedly into the concerts,
her initial triumphs crumble in the face of fresh
troubles, including an unhappy new marriage
and failed business plans. Flashbacks to her
teen-age years at M-G-M reveal the abusive
studio regime that brought her worldwide fame
at the expense of her private life. Tom Edge’s
script, based on a play by Peter Quilter, lapses
into clichés, but the dialogue is often sharp,
and Zellweger offers it up with flair and fury.
She also sings, and, though her voice hardly
resembles Garland’s, she commands the stage
majestically. Directed by Rupert Goold.—R.B.
(In wide release.)
Pain and Glory
The latest film from Pedro Almodóvar stars
Antonio Banderas as Salvador Mallo, a movie
director in late middle age. (Many of the
details are autobiographical.) He lives alone
in Madrid, attended by aches and pains of
every description; it is only in meeting figures
from his past—an actor with whom he once
worked; a former lover—that he rediscov-
ers his creative strength. Now and then we
are spirited back into that past, and to the
happiness that enveloped Salvador, as a boy
(played by Asier Flores), in the company
of his mother, Jacinta (Penélope Cruz). No
one is more dexterous than Almodóvar at
slipping to and fro across time, and never be-
fore has he, or the rueful Banderas, conjured
so convincing an air of autumnal regret. A
lovely performance from Julieta Serrano, as
the elderly Jacinta, is wholly in keeping with
the mood. In Spanish.—A.L. (10/14/19) (In
limited release.)
Wild Rovers
The director Blake Edwards, best known for
his comedies, made this rowdy yet haunted
Western, from 1971, about two gunslinging
cowboys, the grizzled Ross Bodine (William
Holden) and the dandyish Frank Post (Ryan
O’Neal), who are sent on a grim mission: to
transport the body of a fellow ranch hand
who was kicked in the head by a balky horse.
Their hyperbolically antic dialogue en route,
about life and death, fate and hopelessness,
evokes Vladimir and Estragon on the prai-
rie—until, frustrated by their ill-paying labor,
they turn to crime. The cowboys’ comedic
bravado masks the absurdity in their bursts
of violence. Edwards’s West is grossly phys-
ical: gunshots shatter bodies, punches leave
bruises, drinks go down hard, and drunken-
ness is an ugly mess. Bodine and Post exult in
the transcendent wonder of the vast landscape
and revel in the illusory joys of their outlaw
freedom; their solitude and boredom on long
rides through uninhabited country drive them
to delusion and destruction.—R.B. (Metro-
graph, Oct. 19, and streaming.)

Will
This drama, by the director Jessie Maple,
from 1981—one of the first features directed
by a black American female filmmaker—is
a blunt cinematic instrument of immense
power. It’s set in Harlem and centered on
Will Jennings (Obaka Adedunyo), a young,
unemployed former college-basketball star
The Cameroonian-born, Belgium-based director Rosine Mbakam’s two who is a heroin addict attempting to kick
documentary features, “The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman” (2016) and the habit cold turkey. He lives with his wife,
“Chez Jolie Coiffure” (2018), both opening at Anthology Film Archives Jean (Loretta Devine), who keeps the family
on stable financial footing and is increasingly
on Oct. 16, form an extraordinary diptych of the migrant experience. The exasperated with him. Will’s friends, also ad-
earlier film is boldly and intricately personal. Mbakam, accompanied by dicts, are trying to get a twelve-year-old boy
her white European husband and their toddler son, returns to her native called Little Brother (Robert Dean) hooked,
too; Will draws him away, brings him home,
city, Yaoundé, to visit her mother, whose recollections delve deep into and cares for him. Yet Will faces formidable
the intimate nexus of politics and tradition—including her marriage to obstacles, both institutional and personal,
a polygamous man and the principles of female independence that she in his struggles with drugs and in his search
for work and, above all, a sense of purpose,
imparted to Mbakam. A crucial institution there is the tontine, a financial which Maple presents plainly, frankly, and
self-help group for women, which also comes to the fore in “Chez Jolie confrontationally. Will’s crisis has a spiritual
dimension, and Maple evokes it, dramati-
COURTESY ICARUS FILMS

Coiffure,” filmed in a Brussels hair salon that is managed by a Cameroonian

cally and symbolically, in a wide-ranging and

1
woman named Sabine and serves as a meeting place for African residents. documentary-based view of Harlem.—R.B.
Sabine speaks to Mbakam about her arduous clandestine journey to (Metrograph, Oct. 20.)
Europe and her experience of racism in Belgium. Mbakam’s camerawork
makes brilliant use of mirrors and windows—and, in the process, catches For more reviews, visit
a terrifying police raid against undocumented migrants.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

18 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019


1
TABLES FOR TWO
Miss Ada / Golda
184 DeKalb Ave., Brooklyn;
504 Franklin Ave., Brooklyn
The tantalizing combination of brown
butter and fried sage may have its origin
in Italy, but it turns out to work just as
well with pita as it does with pasta. At
Miss Ada, a restaurant in Fort Greene,
it gets spooned, nutty and fragrant, over
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARY KANG FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
a sweet but earthy carrot hummus, and
again over a bowl of fluffy whipped ri-
cotta. The pita—warm, puffy, chewy—
goes perfectly, too, with a rich, stretchy
stracciatella cheese, its milky surface
marbled with little golden ponds of olive
oil and topped with, depending on the
season, heirloom tomatoes, basil, cucum-
bers, and red onion, or snap peas, blood
orange, ground-cherries, and kumquat.
“Mediterranean with a twist” is how
the restaurant describes its food. The
chef and owner, Tomer Blechman (late
of Bar Bolonat, Gramercy Tavern, and
Maialino), is originally from Israel, and
the menu is rooted in the traditions and
flavor profiles of the Middle East. Some-
times the twist is Italian, sometimes it’s
Mexican—the sauce beneath the short-
rib skewer is described as “Israeli mole”
(made with Middle Eastern spices, choc-
olate, and harissa), and the Dead Sea
#2 cocktail (guava, mezcal, mint, lime)
is basically an Israeli margarita—and
sometimes the za’atar-crusted salmon
is accompanied by Japanese eggplant.
Across the board, what comes out of
the kitchen tends to be lovely. At other
restaurants, skewers can feel like ripoffs;
here they are reasonably substantial and
easy to share. The short ribs are fork-
tender and, strewn with sliced pickles,
reminiscent of pastrami; a complexly
seasoned ground-lamb kofta kebab is
impaled, cleverly, on a long, tapered cin-
namon stick. There’s a satisfying snap to
the salmon’s za’atar crust as it gives way to
silky pink flakes. The fillet sits on a smear
of labneh, an ingredient that it would
seem the kitchen were overusing if each
dish it popped up in were not so inargu-
ably suited to it. My favorite is the labneh
mousse, as airy as Italian meringue and
crisscrossed with seasonal-fruit granita.
To say that Miss Ada has been
overlooked wouldn’t be quite accu-
rate. It’s difficult to get a prime-time
dinner reservation there. But the rea-
son I first tried it only recently, more
than two years after it opened, is that
its success has been relatively quiet. I
went not because of the usual P.R. blitz
or the big-name-chef-driven buzz but
because I kept hearing about it through
trusted word of mouth. After a couple
of meals, I felt ready to join the whisper
network. At a time when young chefs
are getting attention for putting modern
and inventive spins on Middle Eastern
cooking—particularly in Los Angeles,
home to lauded restaurants like Kismet
and Mh Zh—Miss Ada deserves to be
part of the conversation.
And it’s not alone in Brooklyn. If
Miss Ada, with its house-made blueberry
kombucha, is speaking in the vernacular
of the moment, then Golda, a Middle
Eastern-ish all-day café in Bed-Stuy, is
texting in it. Opened in 2017 by the late
restaurateur Danny Nusbaum, whose
family started Pick A Bagel, it offers a
number of almost parodically millennial
touchstones, including açai yogurt and
chia-seed oatmeal with date-oat milk.
But, surprise, the matcha spritzer,
made with fresh-squeezed orange juice
and seltzer, accomplishes the seemingly
impossible task of making matcha taste
good. And just because the cauliflower
looks fantastic on Instagram—its cru-
ciferous treetop fried until it appears to
have been spray-painted gold, placed
upon a pool of tahini dyed electric fuch-
sia with beet juice, and finished with
forest-green chermoula and jewels of
dried apricot—doesn’t mean it’s not
absolutely delicious.
Golda began serving dinner recently,
and the menu is a bit disappointing, per-
haps because Nusbaum isn’t there to
oversee it. Still, the all-day offerings,
including a fried-chicken sandwich
pulsing with the heavenly perfume of
Aleppo pepper, are enough to recom-
mend it. And there’s always Miss Ada
at night. (Miss Ada, dishes $8-$28. Golda,
dishes $5-$21.)
—Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 19
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
PARTY ON THE LINE
resident Trump has an idiosyncratic
P view of what he calls “rights,” which
he seems to conflate with any power,
mechanism, or maneuver that will allow
him to avoid legal jeopardy. In a letter
sent last Tuesday to Nancy Pelosi, the
Speaker of the House, and to several
committee chairs, Pat Cipollone, the
White House counsel, said that Trump
would not comply with requests from
the House’s impeachment inquiry, owing
to his duty to “preserve the rights” of fu-
ture Presidents. The inquiry itself is un-
constitutional, the letter charged—al-
though the Constitution expressly gives
the House the right to conduct it. On
Wednesday, Trump said that he would
consider coöperating only “if they give
us our rights,” echoing a tweet from the
previous day, in which he said that he
couldn’t let a key witness, Gordon Sond-
land, the U.S. Ambassador to the Eu-
ropean Union, be deposed by congres-
sional investigators because he “would
be testifying before a totally compro-
mised kangaroo court, where Republi-
can’s rights have been taken away.”
By “Republican’s rights,” the Presi-
dent may just be referring to himself
and to his grand delusion that he has
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
unmatched prerogatives. If he thinks
that his party can simply halt all inves-
tigations into his behavior, that’s wrong,
too—wrong even if the Republicans
had a majority in the House, and even
though they do have a majority in the
Senate. Republicans in both chambers
are entitled to shape the process. They
can, of course, defend Trump, but they
can also question and confront him. One
of the crucial issues in the impeachment
drama is whether they will do so.
They might start by objecting to a
President’s asking a foreign leader to
investigate the family of one of his op-
ponents.Trump has more or less bragged
about doing that in a phone call with
President Volodymyr Zelensky, of
Ukraine, regarding Joe Biden and the
business dealings of his son Hunter. In-
stead, congressional Republicans have
either remained silent or tried to show
that it’s the Democrats who are at fault.
Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority
Leader, said on “Fox and Friends” that
“more people in America want to in-
vestigate what Biden has done with his
son than want to impeach this Presi-
dent.” Actually, a Fox News survey last
week showed that fifty-one per cent of
voters think that Trump should be “im-
peached and removed” from office.
(Trump tweeted, in response, “Who-
ever their Pollster is, they suck.”)
If articles of impeachment are passed,
which seems increasingly likely, it will
take sixty-seven votes in the Senate to
convict Trump, which means that at
least twenty of the fifty-three Repub-
licans will have to walk away from him.
That number still seems distant. The
Washington Post keeps a tally: as of last
week, no Republican senators publicly
supported impeachment, thirty-nine
were unequivocally behind Trump (for
example, calling the investigation a
“witch hunt”), and only fourteen ex-
pressed some concern about the alle-
gations. Mitt Romney, of Utah, has been
the most critical; Ben Sasse, of Ne-
braska, who has broken with the Pres-
ident before, said that some aspects of
Trump’s call with Zelensky are “terri-
ble,” but also that the House investiga-
tion is a “partisan clown show.”
Yet, in the same week, Republicans
were as openly angry with Trump as
they have ever been when he announced,
after a phone call with the Turkish Pres-
ident, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that the
United States would step aside as Tur-
key launched a military offensive in
northern Syria. The move was seen by
many in both parties as a betrayal of
Kurdish militias that have been a valu-
able partner in the fight against ISIS,
but have long been targeted by Turkey.
Air strikes began within days of the an-
nouncement. Senator Lindsey Graham,
of South Carolina, ping-ponged be-
tween saying that the Administration
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 21
had “shamelessly abandoned” the Kurds
and pledging to hold a hearing to allow
Rudy Giuliani, the President’s volatile
lawyer, to lay out his conspiracy theo-
ries related to Ukraine. Two days later,
two of Giuliani’s associates were ar-
rested on criminal charges alleging that
they had tried to funnel foreign money
into American election campaigns.
It’s as though any dissent on mat-
ters of policy requires a greater show of
loyalty on impeachment. In this, the
Republicans’ intended audience is not
only Trump but his electoral base. Sen-
ator Mitch McConnell, who is up for
reëlection next year, sharply criticized
Trump’s decision on Syria, but also ran
an online campaign ad in which he
claimed that impeachment is proceed-
ing because “a left-wing mob” has Pe-
losi in its clutches. “The way that im-
peachment stops” is with “a Senate
majority, with me as majority leader,”
McConnell said. “But I need your help:
YOU’RE FIRED!
TRUMP, UNEMPLOYED
onald Trump, in a recent phone call
D with House Republicans, expressed
the concern that impeachment is a “bad
thing to have on your résumé.” Truth is,
we’ve all been there. But, whether it’s a
piddling score on the SAT, a history of
drinking on the job, or a “constitution-
ally illegitimate” congressional inquiry,
there’s always a way to put a positive spin
on it when searching for the next gig.
“The joke is that nobody reads the
résumé,” Nick Corcodilos, a professional
recruiter based in New Jersey, said. “It’s
scanned by a machine.” Corcodilos runs
a Web site called Ask the Headhunter
and is known for what he describes as
his “iconoclastic techniques.” He can help
you get a job, but he’s more interested in
dismantling our broken hiring system.
He charges two hundred and eighty-five
dollars for an hour-long phone call.
“I do workshops for executive-M.B.A.
programs at Harvard, Cornell, Whar-
ton. These are sophisticated people who
ask me, ‘How do I get in the door? Should
22 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
please contribute before the deadline!”
Trump relies on the appearance of a
united party to validate his ever more
corrosive policies—and his tirades—
with voters. If that unity falters, things
could move quickly. Yet what’s remark-
able is that more Republican senators
who are not facing reëlection, or are se-
cure in their seats, have not spoken out
as a matter of principle. Some may be
boxed in by positions they staked out
earlier in Trump’s Presidency. In the
course of the Mueller investigation,
many congressional Republicans de-
manded that the Justice Department
aggressively investigate the investiga-
tion’s origins, which, they suggested,
would show that Trump had been
wronged. Did they know that this pur-
suit might take the form of Trump’s
asking Zelensky for “a favor” regarding
a phantom Democratic Party server, or
Attorney General William Barr’s play-
ing detective in Rome and London?
I use a résumé?’” Corcodilos said. One
tip: copy the job description and paste it
at the end of your résumé. If the com-
pany does a keyword search, it’ll match
every word they’re looking for. “Now,
that’s sneaky,” he said. “But it’s a game.”
He continued, “So, what should Don-
ald Trump do? I don’t know what he’s
talking about. He’s never applied for a
job. I don’t think the guy’s ever had a ré-
sumé in his life.”
Corcodilos had a point. A correspon-
dent went on Fiverr, a Web site for free-
lance workers, in search of résumé writ-
ers for hire. One user, Brooke_resumes,
offered services for just five dollars. The
correspondent explained that the résumé
would be for Trump.
“I’ll do it for $150,” Brooke_resumes
responded. Another vender, Stivstiv, was
hired instead, for fifty bucks. Stivstiv’s
real name is Steve. In 2005, Steve received
an M.B.A. from Arizona State University.
The résumé, delivered the next day,
was in a modern two-column format—
the kind that would make a Wharton
career counsellor’s face go purple. Its
color palette—blue, gray, and white—
had a calming effect, while simultane-
ously arousing suspicions that the
template was from Microsoft Word.
“Donald John Trump” was in big letter-
ing at the top, followed by a summary
Probably not, but, with Trump, they had
good reason to fear something extreme.
That experience should be a warn-
ing to Republicans defending Trump
at a time when the full extent of his
recklessness is only just being revealed.
His refusal to participate won’t put an
end to the impeachment inquiry; it will
only initiate more fights about subpoe-
nas and witnesses, defiance of court or-
ders, and obstruction of justice. This
will all go to the heart of Congress’s
right to conduct oversight, and may pro-
vide separate grounds for impeachment.
(One of the draft articles of impeach-
ment in Watergate concerned Richard
Nixon’s failure to honor subpoenas.)
Trump has already referred to the im-
peachment inquiry as a coup. This is
not a moment for Republican legisla-
tors to stand by and watch as a consti-
tutional crisis unfolds. That is some-
thing they have no right to do.
—Amy Davidson Sorkin
of qualifications: “Political Leader with
decades of experience developing sophis-
ticated policies and advocating for United
states citizenry.” A projects section fea-
tured Trump University and the Don-
ald J. Trump Foundation—the fact that
both are defunct was omitted—and a list
of accomplishments included “Star on
the Hollywood Walk of Fame” and “Have
never filed for personal bankruptcy.” In-
stead of an e-mail address, Trump’s Twit-
ter handle was listed.
But the résumé—designed as though
Trump had been booted from office
early—screamed “impeached,” just as
Trump had feared. The POTUS section
(“Signed the biggest tax cut in history,”
“Made treaties with foreign nations”)
was dated “January 2017–December
2019”—a black mark in soft gray italics.
Nancy Brout, the author of “Losing
Your Job and Finding Yourself: Mem-
oir, Myths, and Methods for Inventive
Career Transitions,” had a fix. “I always
recommend just using years without
months on your résumé,” she said. “And,
if there are time gaps between positions,
take anything you did on the side—con-
sulting or volunteer work—and fill them
in.” (Trump could mention his real-estate
business.) Brout added that, if you weren’t
in a job for very long, you might leave it
off your résumé altogether. “It’s not lying,”
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she said. “It’s just not part of your story.”
Should Trump, then, omit the Presi-
dency from his résumé? Damian Birkel,
the founder of a support group called
Professionals in Transition, said that
Trump should include it because he’s had
the job for more than a year: “He couldn’t
get away with not listing it, because of
all the things that have occurred under
his stewardship of the United States.”
Birkel, who has lost his job five times,
suggested that Trump prepare a “bridge
story,”a short, unemotional statement ex-
plaining why a person was let go: “Some-
thing like ‘As a highly successful and very
rich and shrewd businessman, I can tell
you that, when it comes to closing a deal,
there are terms that don’t involve money.
As I was negotiating with Volodymyr
Zelensky, I reinforced our relationship
and asked him to do me a favor. This is
something I’ve done throughout my ca-
reer, and, if you go back and read up on
it, it’s a proven fact that I did no wrong.
And, if I had an opportunity to do it
again, I wouldn’t change a thing.’”
The correspondent submitted Trump’s
résumé, along with the bridge story, to
Laura Medeiros, the director of faculty
appointments at Harvard’s Kennedy
School. At press time, Medeiros had not
1
yet extended an offer.
—Tyler Foggatt
CURTAIN CALL DEPT.
A SURMISE
ven before being cast as Gareth Mal-
E lory, otherwise known as M, the head
of M.I.6, in the James Bond franchise,
Ralph Fiennes, the English actor, was
intrigued by the motivations of spies.
“Agents have to create intimacies, rela-
tionships, trusts with other people—that
they then have to go and exploit,” Fiennes
said the other day, talking in the garden
of a restaurant near his home in Shoreditch,
London. How does a spy justify, or even
tolerate, such a betrayal, Fiennes won-
dered—ideology? Sociopathy? “As an
actor, you ask, ‘What is going on inside?’ ”
The occasion for Fiennes’s reflections
on spycraft was the release of “Coup 53,”
a documentary directed by the Iranian-
24 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
Ralph Fiennes
born filmmaker Taghi Amirani. The film
concerns the little-known role played by
the British secret service in orchestrating
the overthrow, in 1953, of Iran’s left-wing
Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossa-
degh. In particular, it reveals the critical
part played by a British agent, Norman
Darbyshire, who was in charge of hand-
ing out the money that precipitated the
violent ouster of the country’s democrat-
ically elected leader in favor of the more
tractable Shah. “Coup 53” pieces together
this murky episode from multiple sources,
including footage long buried in the ar-
chives of the British Film Institute: a se-
ries of interviews with former spies, con-
ducted thirty-five years ago for a TV
documentary. Mysteriously, an incendi-
ary interview with Darbyshire, in which
he acknowledges Britain’s role in the
coup, didn’t appear in the final cut of the
program, nor was it to be found in the
bowels of the B.F.I.
Left with only a transcript of the in-
terview, Amirani pulled off a bit of a
coup of his own: landing Fiennes to read
Darbyshire’s recollections aloud. This
was achieved thanks to the intercession
of the film’s editor, Walter Murch, who
was the sound designer on “Apocalypse
Now,” among other storied movies. “I
knew Walter from ‘The English Patient,’”
Fiennes said. “They sent me the tran-
scripts and showed me what they were
doing, and I was hooked.” At the time of
filming, Fiennes was playing the lead in
“Antony and Cleopatra” at the National
Theatre. “I said, ‘I can’t change my beard,’
but they didn’t want that,” he explained.
Fiennes didn’t have time to learn lines,
but that wasn’t called for, either. Instead,
he showed up for a few hours of film-
ing in the Savoy Hotel, where he sat in
an armchair to which a piece of chintz
had been stapled, to replicate the one
used by the original crew for its inter-
views, which were conducted in the same
location. Fiennes, who, in the film, wears
jeans and an ancient-Roman beard, did
not pretend to be Darbyshire. He sim-
ply read from the transcript, which the
film crew had placed out of frame. The
result is an energizing conceit: Dar-
byshire, who acknowledges responsibil-
ity for running the coup—and who
calmly admits to having had Mossa-
degh’s chief of police killed—is animated
by Fiennes’s flinty glamour and peerless
dramatic chops. “I was not trying to be
him,” Fiennes said. “I read the lines, but
I try to give them some kind of life. It’s
a weird sketch-in of an idea of who some-
one might be. It’s a surmise.”
Typically, Fiennes delves deep into
research for a character—he’s been bi-
cycling around Suffolk and chatting with
villagers in pubs, preparing to play Basil
Brown, the archeologist who, in 1939, ex-
cavated the site of a seventh-century
Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo.
But, in the case of “Coup 53,” no such
preparation was possible. “We don’t know
who Norman Darbyshire was,” Fiennes
said. Fiennes draws upon type, deliver-
ing Darbyshire’s revelations with the ar-
rogance and patrician manner of the mid-
century British establishment: “Timing
is always of the essence, and secrecy.” A
pause, the slightest of shrugs. “Persians
aren’t very good at either.”
Why the recording of Darbyshire’s
interview went missing, and where it
now is, are questions Amirani was un-
able to resolve. The mystery also remains
as to why Darbyshire chose to speak so
freely to a TV crew after a lifetime of si-
lence. In the film, Lord David Owen,
who was the British Foreign Secretary
in the late nineteen-seventies, during the
period of the Iranian Revolution, spec-
ulates that Darbyshire didn’t like the fact
that the U.S. had acknowledged its own
involvement in the coup. “We all like
recognition for what we’ve done,” Owen
said. “He was fed up with being told that
this was the Americans. He wanted a
good old British view—he wanted them
to get some credit for it.” Fiennes spec-
ulated that it may have been the actor
in Darbyshire who sought out the lime-
light. “If I play Antony, I am creating
that mask for those three hours. But, if
you are a spy, you are creating a whole
persona that you have to be, for days on
end,” he said. “It is like the supreme act-
ing challenge. And you get no curtain
call.” He went on, “Norman Darbyshire
nect the dots of her freckles with perma-
nent marker; and a Conor McGregor
look-alike named Jason Eveleth, whom
Crary offered as an alternative to the so-
called Ed Effect. This was more quack-
ery, attributing a recent uptick in the
self-reported sex lives of male redheads
to the celebrity of Ed Sheeran. Crary
noted that, whereas female redheads have
the novels on which the series was based
and a “distinguished whitehead”—a spir-
itual cousin. On the count of three, echo-
ing a line from the show, the crowd
shouted, “Gingers are kissed by fire!”
As a troupe of fire dancers prepared
to perform, Crary received word that
there was a “random red” on the prem-
ises—a potential member who had ar-

1
wanted a curtain call.” historically been hypersexualized (think rived unwittingly. “We get one every
—Rebecca Mead Jessica Rabbit), their male counterparts year,” he said. This one, named Cath-
have been stereotyped as dweebs (think erine Keighery, was from Ireland, and
MINORITY REPORT Alfred E. Neuman). “Ed Sheeran is not was visiting friends in Albany. She’d
NIGHT OF THE WALKING RED a real macho guy,” Crary said. Eveleth, gone hiking that morning in Vermont,
on the other hand, has a mobster’s nose and then stopped off in Troy for din-
and twenty-inch biceps. He objected to ner, on impulse. “Some ginger guy with
Crary calling him a bodybuilder, on a beard and a dog stopped me and said,
grounds of political correctness. “I’m a ‘Are you going to the Redhead Night?’”
professional fitness athlete,” he said. she explained.
The red tide soon numbered two hun- Keighery’s bangs shone like copper
very so often, word circulates on the dred and spilled onto the back deck. Crary wire. “In Ireland, once a year, we have a
E Internet, and in the peripheries of
the mainstream media, that people with
climbed a fire escape and called the meet-
ing to order. “There are two items on
Kiss a Ginger day,” she said. “And the
wise guys, they kick—‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’
red hair, like polar bears and coral reefs, our agenda,” he said. “And the first one they say. ‘I misheard.’ Because we are a
are not long for this world. The argu- is ‘us.’” He singled out a local real-estate marginalized group, as I’m sure you
ments tend to involve pseudoscience— agent who brandished a fresh tattoo of know.” She gestured at Anasha Cum-
speculation about the effects of increased the club’s logo—a Rubik’s-like quadrant mings, a hirsute Troy councilman who
sunlight over the British Isles in a warm- of red, orange, umber, and white—on his was elected after distributing his cam-
ing climate, misunderstanding of the forearm. The second item was “them.” paign platform printed on the backs of
nature of recessive genes—and can often Crary mentioned “Game of Thrones,” wearable red-beard cutouts. “Were you
be traced, like much quackery, to profit and said, “Red-headed characters did bullied as a child?” she asked.
motive. An interest in selling ancestry pretty well, didn’t they?” to whoops of “I was homeschooled,” he said.
tests, say, or hair dye. Duncan Crary, a applause. He proposed a “special toast Crary presented Keighery with a
red-bearded redhead in Troy, New York, for George R. R. Martin,” the author of League membership card. “There’s no
gets particularly energized when dis-
cussing an extinction-forecasting study
produced more than a decade ago by the
Oxford Hair Foundation—a group
funded by Procter & Gamble. “It’s a P.R.
scam!” he says. Crary likes to refer to his
fellow-gingers, who represent between
one and two per cent of the global pop-
ulation, as a “permanent minority.”
Shortly before 6 P.M. the other day,
Crary surveyed the crowd at a riverside
bar in Troy, exposed the whites of his
green eyes with mischievous delight, and
muttered, “The red tide is coming.” It
was the seventh annual meeting of his
club, the League of Extraordinary Red
Heads, which convenes in October be-
cause of pumpkins and rusty foliage.
Among the attendees were an eight-year-
old boy sporting a T-shirt that read
“MC1R,” a reference to the gene respon-
sible for his Day-Glo follicles; a mother
of three blue-eyed gingers—“the rarest
combination,” she said—who recalled the “Just once, I’d like a raise that didn’t feel insignificant
efforts of a childhood nemesis to con- in the grand scheme of things.”
dues to pay, because you already paid
them growing up,” he said.
“So true!” Keighery said. “You know,
the gingers are a dying breed. We’re get-
ting bred out. It’s a fact.”
Crary snorted.“That’s been debunked!”
he said. “We are not going extinct, girl.
I think we predate humans. Neanderthals
may have been redheads.”
“So we don’t all have to go ridin’ a
redhead?” Keighery asked, sounding
disappointed.
Nearby, a dark-haired man bummed
a light from a bald man, who nodded in
approval. “Another leper,” he said, refer-
ring not to the shared absence of ginger
1
but to the cigarette habit.
—Ben McGrath
MAKING IT UP DEPT.
COMEDY CORTEX
hen Anthony Veneziale was a
W sophomore at Wesleyan, he got
cut from the soccer team and decided to
audition for an improv group called Gag
Reflex instead. He got in. One of his fa-
vorite exercises was the Song Game, in
which the performers would pause a
scene, ask the audience to shout out a
musical genre, and then make up an aria
or a country ballad on the spot. “And this
was the late nineties, so rap was ubiqui-
tous,” Veneziale said recently. That’s how
he got into freestyle improv comedy.
Veneziale, who is now forty-three,
was in his dressing room at the Booth
Theatre, where his group, Freestyle Love
Supreme, was about to perform its first
preview on Broadway. In the show, Vene-
ziale (his rap name is Two Touch) and
his castmates ask for words and anec-
dotes from the audience and then spin
them into hip-hop sketches. Back at
Wesleyan, Veneziale went on, he was a
teaching assistant for a film class, and
one of the students was Lin-Manuel Mi-
randa. “I had heard that he was a really
good freestyler,” he recalled. After grad-
uation, Veneziale and his classmate
Thomas Kail formed a production com-
pany in New York, and their first proj-
ect was an early version of Miranda’s mu-
sical “In the Heights.” “Any time he had
26 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
a break, I would go in and be, like, ‘Let’s
freestyle,’” Veneziale said. “I finally wore
him down and was, like, ‘Hey, I think we
should do this in front of people.’”
The group that became Freestyle
Love Supreme was set to perform its
first show at the Peoples Improv The-
atre, in August, 2003. The day before, a
blackout hit the Northeast. Veneziale’s
friend Abe was supposed to come in
from Queens and d.j., but the trains were
down, so Miranda’s roommate Bill Sher-
man stepped in to play keys and saxo-
phone. Twenty people showed up; the
group bought them all beer and per-
formed in the basement of the Drama
Book Shop, which had regained power.
They got a regular Friday-night gig at
the P.I.T. and gained a following. Mean-
while, careers started exploding: Sher-
man became the musical director of
“Sesame Street”; Miranda applied his
freestyling skills to the Founding Fa-
thers. Both appear as part of Freestyle
Love Supreme’s rotating Broadway cast,
along with the “Hamilton” alumni Chris-
topher Jackson and Daveed Diggs.
Improv is hard enough; making it
rhyme requires special prowess. Accord-
ing to Veneziale, it all has to do with
loosening up the mind. “I’m fascinated
with brains,” he said, after putting on his
costume (blue fedora, pink tropical shirt).
For the past two and a half years, he has
been working with an otolaryngologist
at the University of California, San Fran-
cisco, to study which parts of the brain
are activated and deactivated by freestyl-
Anthony Veneziale
and Lin-Manuel Miranda
ing. Subjects, which have included sev-
eral members of Freestyle Love Supreme,
lie in fMRI machines and play associa-
tive word games. Activity tends to cool
in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,
which, Veneziale explained, acts as your
“monitoring-critic voice,” while the me-
dial prefrontal cortex—“your creative
flow”—heats up. In 2013, Veneziale
co-founded a company called Speech-
less, which runs improv workshops at
such companies as Google, ESPN, and
Walmart; it has taught more than sixty
thousand people, on every continent ex-
cept Antarctica. (A workshop is planned
for the McMurdo Station, an Antarctic
research base.) “I do believe it’s a beau-
tiful adaptogenic skill,” Veneziale said.
It was forty-five minutes until show-
time. Veneziale went downstairs, where
that evening’s cast was waiting in a psy-
chedelic lounge. Before every perfor-
mance, they do a warmup designed to
stimulate the proper parts of the cortex.
They gathered around a coffee table and
began with a “sound bomb.”“Be informed
by each other and by the mo-mo,” Vene-
ziale instructed. They closed their eyes
and communicated with pfffffffts and
pows and za-za-zas, sounding like a hip-
hop Rube Goldberg machine. Next, they
passed around a bucket filled with left-
over word suggestions from that day’s
dress rehearsal. Each performer fed words
to the next person, who would then con-
jure up a verse. “Here we go: ‘Star Wars,’”
Veneziale said to a beatboxer named
Kaila Mullady, who freestyled, “Yeah,
they call me Princess Leia. / Like Darth
Vader, ’cause you know that I’m a slayah!”
Veneziale drew the word “plantain.” “In-
sane!” Mullady rapped. “It looks like a
banana / but it does not taste the same.”
After the exercises, the performers
took their places. Had their cortexes been
scanned right then, Veneziale conjec-
tured, “we’d see deoxygenated hemoglo-
bin leaving parts of their brains.” An-
drew Bancroft (stage name: Jelly Donut),
who wore a black hoodie, said, “I love
the science of it. But I like to dumb it
down a little and say, ‘Oh, that little voice
that says “you can’t do this” or “that per-
son’s better than you”—he might still be
there, but he’s grumpy in the corner, be-
cause he doesn’t really have any volume
right now.’ The volume, for me, is: What’s
going to happen? What’s next?”
—Michael Schulman
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ANNALS OF SHOPPING
AFTER A FASHION
TheRealReal brings high-end goods into the “circular economy.”
BY SUSAN ORLEAN
our Birkin bag, your Chanel flats,
Y your Alaïa bandage dress, your Rick
Owens leather leggings—all your ex-
pensive so-called investment clothing
was, in the olden days, an investment
in name only. If you went up a size or
down a size or just experienced a fash-
ion rethink, there was no recourse; your
wardrobe was largely illiquid. Other
terrible things could happen. You might
be an influencer and your followers could
get tired of seeing you drag around the
same Gucci clutch, but it cost so damn
much that you had to wring all the value
out of it. Or you might realize that you
weren’t giving every Cathy Waterman
stud in your collection sufficient ear
The company’s “luxury managers” help clients decide what to sell.
28 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
time and yet were hankering for an
Anita Ko climber.
One recent Wednesday morning, a
young woman named Chasity Saun-
ders was addressing a situation like
this. She had a pair of bedazzled mul-
ticolored Christian Louboutin booties
that she loved but no longer love-loved,
and she had mixed feelings about a
pair of Fendi pumps and a Tom Ford
foldover tote, and was concerned that
a gold ring from an ex-boyfriend might
be blocking her energy in such a way
as to inhibit her from starting a new
relationship. She was meeting with
Sarah Ro, who works for the luxury
consignment site TheRealReal, to con-
sider her options. Saunders, who lives
in a cheery apartment in the San Fer-
nando Valley, had laid out the shoes
and bags in question on her sofa and
was perched beside them. She and Ro
chatted about how they’d first met (at
the jewelry counter at TheRealReal’s
brick-and-mortar store in West Hol-
lywood) and about how Saunders’s
work as a model and actress was going
(she’d just shot an ad campaign for the
beauty retailer Ulta).
Saunders had previously consigned
jeans and sweaters at a local used-cloth-
ing store, but this was her first time
with TheRealReal. Ro explained how
the consignment process worked: She
would take Saunders’s items and send
them to the main warehouse, in the
San Francisco Bay Area, where they
would be evaluated, priced, photo-
graphed, and posted on the site. When
they sold, Saunders would receive a
check for fifty-five per cent of the price.
(The rate can vary between forty and
eighty-five per cent.) “I’m not trying
to get rid of anything for the money,”
Saunders said to Ro. “For me—well, I
just love to shop. And right now I have
my eye on a Y.S.L. bag that I saw on
TheRealReal.” She chuckled and held
up one of the Louboutin booties. It
was eye-popping, with a long shiv of
a heel and a bulging toe.
“Look at that!” Ro exclaimed.
“I know! I mean, if I’m going to
spend two thousand dollars on a shoe,
I want to step out as a star,” Saunders
said. The bootie glimmered in her hand.
“I love them, but I’m not for sure for
sure about them anymore. I feel some-
one else will love them.”
Ro nodded encouragingly and said,
“I’m here when you’re ready.”
Saunders paused for a moment, and
then said, with a sigh, “O.K., I think
I’m ready.” She opened a Louboutin
shoebox, pulled out a satin bag, placed
the booties inside, shut the box, and
handed it to Ro. “Bye-bye, I loved you!”
she said to the shoes. The two women
were quiet for a moment. Then, sud-
denly, Saunders reached for the box.
Ro looked stricken. “Can I have them
back for a minute?” Saunders said. “I
just want to do an Instagram story
with them.” Ro relaxed and handed
the box to her. Saunders positioned a
shoe against her white sofa for a beauty
ILLUSTRATION BY LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
shot, and zoomed in on it with her
phone. “I’m consigning today with The-
RealReal,” she narrated, “and these are
a pair of my favorite shoes. So watch
for them!”
n 2011, Julie Wainwright, an e-com-
I merce entrepreneur, founded The-
RealReal, a platform for selling previ-
ously owned luxury goods. Selling used
clothing wasn’t a new idea; vintage and
used-clothing stores have been around
forever, and some have even gotten big.
Buffalo Exchange, which is based in
Tucson, began selling used jeans and
flannel shirts in 1974, and now has fifty
locations across the country; Cross-
roads Trading, which opened in 1991,
has thirty-seven. A few renowned shops,
such as Decades, in Los Angeles, have
specialized in very expensive used de-
signer goods in an atmosphere in which
much is made of a gown’s provenance,
especially if, as is often the case, the
previous owner was a celebrity. But,
generally speaking, resale businesses
were little local shops that catered to
aficionados, hipsters, and people on a
budget. Wainwright decided to go
global and high-end.
“My parents loved beauty, and they
hated things going to waste,” she told
me recently. Her father owned an art-
and-design business in Indiana. In his
spare time, he liked digging through
the town dump to see what he could
salvage and refashion into, for instance,
a chandelier. “Both of my parents loved
reusing things,” Wainwright said. She
studied management at Purdue; her
first job out of college was a position at
Clorox. After a few years there, she took
a chance on joining a tech startup in
San Francisco. She ended up running
Pets.com, a site for pet supplies. It folded
in 2000, during the first e-commerce
collapse, but by 2010 the economy had
steadied and Wainwright felt that it
was time to get back into business. She
decided to pivot from pets to luxury
goods, a category that she thought was
not well represented online.
On a shopping trip with a friend,
she noticed a rack of used fancy clothes
at the back of a boutique. After doing
some homework, which included sell-
ing some of her jewelry at pawnshops,
to see what the experience was like, she
hired a few people and began hunting
for inventory. “I called all my friends
and said, ‘I need you to send me any-
thing you’re not using.’ I met stylists
and asked them to send us their cli-
ents.” She collected for two months
before opening the business. The re-
sponse was so enthusiastic that Wain-
wright was worried she would run out
of things to sell. Unexpectedly, she got
a call from a stylist saying that one of
her clients, who had so many clothes
that she stored them in a warehouse,
had decided to get rid of some of them.
Wainwright got a U-Haul truck and
picked up nine hundred articles of
clothing and shoes. “This woman was
very tiny, so we got a lot of size-2 dresses,”
she said. “But she wore a very standard
size-7 shoe.”
hopping for used clothing had al-
S ways been a hit-or-miss affair, since
the supply relied on getting consign-
ments from whoever lived near the
shop. Putting used clothing online,
though, meant that the Louboutin
booties consigned by Chasity Saun-
ders in the San Fernando Valley could
be seen and bought by anyone in the
world. Using the Internet to sell sec-
ondhand clothes really began in 1995,
with the launch of eBay, but you had
to search through millions of listings
to find what you wanted. TheRealReal
offered only luxury clothing and jew-
elry, and, unlike eBay, it took posses-
sion of consigned items and guaran-
teed that they would be examined by
authenticators, to rate their condition
and to eliminate counterfeits, by check-
ing brand markings and serial num-
bers. Clothes were photographed in a
studio on headless mannequins against
a white background, so that the site
looked clean and consistent, as op-
posed to the D.I.Y. pictures that ap-
pear on eBay—a genre that can in-
clude items spread out on a bed and
half obscured by a cat that wandered
into the frame. In its first year, The-
RealReal sold ten million dollars’ worth
of clothing and jewelry. It has since
sold more than eight million items,
and when it went public last June—
the first clothing reseller to do so—it
had a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Fashion has had its struggles in the
past few years, ranging from Forever
21’s recent bankruptcy filing to the
downturn at Prada to the thundering
drumbeat of bad news from malls and
department stores. But news about
the clothing-resale business is posi-
tively merry. According to a report by
the consignment company ThredUp,
which used research from GlobalData,
a retail-analytics firm, resale was a
twenty-four-billion-dollar market in
2018, and will grow to sixty-four bil-
lion dollars by 2028, making it one and
a half times the size of the behemoth
fast-fashion business—the Zaras and
H&Ms and Forever 21s of the world.
Luxury companies make no money
from the resale of their items. So far,
they have ignored resellers like The-
RealReal, or grudgingly appreciated
that people who get in the habit of
buying Louis Vuitton secondhand
might eventually graduate to buying
retail. In a few instances, though, the
relationship has been prickly: Chanel
is currently suing TheRealReal, claim-
ing that the site has no authority to
verify the authenticity of Chanel prod-
ucts, and therefore doesn’t have the
right to claim that the Chanel items
it offers are real. The site said, in a
statement, that it “stands behind its
authenticity guarantee.” The suit is cur-
rently in federal court.
Some people might think buying
used clothing is icky, but nine million
more people bought secondhand
clothes in 2017 than in 2016, and, ac-
cording to “Rise of the Fashion Resale
Marketplace,” a report released earlier
this year by the investment bank Ray-
mond James, sixty-two per cent of
women say that they have bought or
are willing to buy secondhand. The-
RealReal is just one of many thriving
clothing resellers (although, like many
new Internet-based businesses, it has
yet to turn a profit). Poshmark, which
was also founded in 2011, has sold a
billion dollars’ worth of merchandise
so far; Vestiaire Collective, based in
France, focusses on the international
market; Rebag offers only handbags;
StockX is the leading sneaker reseller;
ThredUp, which sells used casual cloth-
ing, adds fifteen thousand items to
its site every day. The London-based
Depop describes itself as “a global con-
duit” where “creative influencers” can
buy and sell items and also “like” list-
ings, just to show their enthusiasm and
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 29
to feel part of the Depop community.
Unlike TheRealReal consigners, Depop
sellers write their own listings. “Super
cute 100% linen Peter Pan collar crop­
ped jacket in grey blue, perfect for frol­
icking in a field,” one recent listing
began, followed by a sterner request:
“ONLY ‘LIKE’ IF YOU’RE INTERESTED
IN PURCHASING I NEED TO MAKE
RENT THIS MONTH.”
In the Raymond James report, shop­
pers said that they bought secondhand
because it cost less than re­
tail, they could find things
that were unique, they could
buy brands they normally
couldn’t afford, and it turned
shopping into something
of a treasure hunt. Thirty
per cent said that buying
resale is an environmentally
responsible choice. Fashion
is one of the world’s most
polluting industries. Ac­
cording to the Ellen MacArthur Foun­
dation, an organization promoting reuse
and recycling, the equivalent of one
garbage truck full of textiles is incin­
erated or added to a landfill every sec­
ond. Fast fashion—clothes that are
made cheaply and tend to go out of
style after a season of wear—is a big
culprit. Extending the life of an article
of clothing or a pair of shoes, making
it part of the “circular economy,” keeps
it out of the trash.
TheRealReal now has the tagline “A
Sustainable Luxury Company,” and last
year it developed what it calls a “sus­
tainability calculator,” which for each
item of women’s apparel notes how
much is saved in water (used in man­
ufacturing) and in driving miles (the
carbon offset, as estimated by the En­
vironmental Protection Agency) by buy­
ing the item used rather than new. For
instance, according to the calculator, a
Monse wool­blend plaid skirt given a
second life saves 50.81 litres of water
and 15.18 driving miles, versus produc­
ing a new one. This doesn’t take into
account the possibility that you could
skip the Monse wool­blend plaid skirt
altogether and save even more water
and driving miles, but not shopping at
all is a different calculation entirely.
When I asked Erin Santy, the head
of communications for TheRealReal,
what the company’s biggest challenge
30 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
was, she thought for a moment and
then said, “Passivity! That’s what Julie
always says. Having things in your closet
just sitting there, rather than clearing
them out and consigning!” When she
said that, it occurred to me that resale
sites are in the interesting position of
not making anything or owning any­
thing: they are just the pass­through
point for products, a sort of transpor­
tation hub for luxury goods. Conse­
quently, the company needs to cultivate
people willing to consign
their belongings just as ac­
tively as it needs to culti­
vate customers; there’s a bit
of selling on both ends of
the process.
Wainwright believed
that TheRealReal would
succeed only if she could
convince people that con­
signing was easy. Instead
of having to schlep your
bag of unwanted clothes to the local
vintage shop, you could mail them in,
or, even better, a “luxury manager” from
the site, like Sarah Ro, would pick
them up from your home. (Most other
resale sites, including Poshmark, are
“peer­to­peer”—that is, the company
doesn’t take possession of your belong­
ings, and you are responsible for sending
them to buyers.) There are a hundred
and eighty luxury managers working
for TheRealReal, based in cities across
the country. Many previously worked
in fashion or in actual stores; they were
in the business of persuading people
to buy. Now they are in the business
of persuading people to sell. A num­
ber of them have regular clients whom
they collect from as often as once a
month, and they become de­facto
fashion consultants, helping clients
decide what should stay and what
should go.
ne recent morning, I joined Santy
O as she drove from Los Angeles
to Palm Desert with Karin Dillie, who
is the head of TheRealReal’s trusts­
and­estates department. Dillie was
visiting a home in Palm Desert that
had belonged to a woman named Jean
Blake, who had recently died. Blake
left no will, and one of her nieces was
trying to make arrangements for her
belongings. Santy, who is lanky and
ebullient, was wearing a summery Ra­
chel Comey dress that she had bought
on TheRealReal. Dillie has long blond
hair and a sunny air. She was wearing
a floral Ganni shift, Givenchy sun­
glasses, Chanel flats, and a Gucci watch,
all of which she had bought on The­
RealReal. The two women swore that
they had not planned their outfits; they
both just happen to buy most of their
clothes on the site. “It’s very danger­
ous to work here,” Santy said. “We
don’t get an employee discount.”
Dillie has an M.B.A. from Yale and
had worked at Sotheby’s before The­
RealReal asked her to launch the de­
partment. The company had been ex­
panding, first adding menswear, then
children’s clothing, then home décor
and art. Because more people were ask­
ing it to help sell the contents of en­
tire households, a trusts­and­estates
department was the natural next step.
Dillie now travels at least two weeks
a month for the job. She has cleared
out an estate in California that con­
tained dozens of Hermès Birkin bags,
a house in Michigan with hundreds of
pairs of collectible sneakers, and a Ten­
nessee mansion packed with Chanel.
“I did an estate in Connecticut a while
ago whose owner must have been very
polite to his personal shopper and never
sent anything back,” Dillie said. “The
closets were just filled with suits with
the tags still on.”
Dillie knew that Blake had been
an enthusiastic shopper who loved Ju­
dith Leiber handbags, but otherwise
she wasn’t sure what to expect. A dream
scenario would be if, among Blake’s
possessions, there was a Gucci Dio­
nysus suède mini bag (an envelope
clutch that is one of the most sought­
after handbags on TheRealReal and
can sell for more than fifteen hundred
dollars), or an Hermès Avalon blan­
ket (twelve hundred dollars or more,
and one of the most desired home
items), or a Goyard dog collar (an­
other favorite, and usually priced at
more than five hundred dollars). Bucket
hats have been enjoying a big increase
in searches on the site this year (up
three hundred and sixty­five per cent),
but Dillie knew it was unlikely that a
woman in her eighties had had any
Kangols in her closet.
Blake’s house was a low rectangle
of sugary-pink stucco in a tidy gated
community called Marrakesh Coun-
try Club, which doesn’t allow garage
sales, so emptying an estate there
presents challenges. Liquidators had
offered a few thousand dollars to take
the contents of the house, but Cindy
Ellsworth, Blake’s niece and executor,
thought that it had to be worth more.
“She had beautiful things,” Ellsworth
said, meeting us at the door and lead-
ing us into the living room. The place
was quiet and dim, with a static, un-
inhabited air. The living room was well
appointed and old-fashioned, chock-
ablock with paintings and sculptures
and lamps and tables and books and
mirrors and bowls and baskets. Ells-
worth, who lives in Germany, recounted
the experience of meeting with the liq-
uidators. As she was telling the story,
her face crumpled and she choked up.
“You know, my aunt was a nurse. She
worked her whole life for these things.
To have someone tell you they’re not
worth anything . . . ”
Dillie said, “That’s not the case. It
is absolutely worth something. Where
do we want to start?” Ellsworth ges-
tured toward several Lalique and Bac-
carat crystal figurines on an end table.
Dillie murmured approvingly, took snap-
shots for the receipt, and slipped the
figurines into padded bags. Then they
headed into the master bedroom. The
bed was strewn with handbags.
“It seems like Judith Leiber is sell-
ing,” Ellsworth said. “Isn’t it?”
“It’s a little more of a narrow de-
mographic,” Dillie said, “but yes.” She
photographed all the Leibers, as well
as a Prada and a Louis Vuitton, and
put them in a large collection bag. She
then picked up a red Hermès purse
and examined the lining. “This one
I’m not sure about,” she said, showing
Ellsworth some cracks in the leather.
“You wouldn’t expect to see this in a
real Hermès.”
They peered inside the bag and fin-
gered the cracks.
“If you’re sure,” Ellsworth said.
“I’m pretty definitely sure,” Dillie
said. “Believe me, we play the real-or-
faux game at work all the time.” She
mentioned that people often send in
rings from ex-husbands only to dis-
cover that the diamonds are fake. Ells-
worth laughed, walked over to the closet,
and pulled out an orange Chanel blazer.
“Orange was her color,” she said.
“Wow, she lived the California life,”
Dillie said, photographing the blazer.
“The California colors, California style,
the whole thing.”
After a few minutes, they sat down
with Blake’s jewelry box. Dillie passed
on the pearls and jade pieces (“Sorry,
but the market for them is really soft,”
she said. “Maybe one of the nieces would
want them?”). Ellsworth showed Santy
a gold brooch that featured a pair of
poodles, then handed it to Dillie.
“She had two poodles,” Ellsworth
said. “I’m sure she loved this pin.”
Dillie admired it for a minute and
turned it over. “Ooh, it says ‘Tiffany,’”
she said, brightly. “Nice surprise! I love
surprises!” She packed up the poodles.
The women had been working for
about two hours, and Dillie had col-
lected about fifty items. It was a good
haul, but relatively modest; her record
is three thousand. She told Ellsworth
that they could look at some of the
TURN YOUR
paintings and sculptures, too, but Ells-
worth wanted to take a break, and said
she would call when she was ready to
CONCERN
keep going. “There’s just so much,” she
said, with a sigh. “I can’t pack it up and
INTO IMPACT.
take it to Germany with me!”
here are currently about six hun-
T dred and twenty thousand items
by fifty-five hundred different design- We can help
ers on TheRealReal’s Web site, rang-
ing from a four-hundred-and-eighty- maximize your
eight-thousand-dollar loose ruby to
a fifty-dollar Marc Jacobs headband. charitable giving.
Every listing is unique and requires its
own sku—stock-keeping unit, which
is how all stores keep track of inven-
tory—so inventory control is some-
thing of a technological feat. The com-
Contact Jane at
pany also has three stores (two in New (212) 686-0010 x363
York City, as well as the one in West or giving@nyct-cfi.org
Hollywood), which add the complica- for a consultation.
tion of a store shopper approaching
the cash register with something that
an online shopper in Australia just
bought. There is now a system for
“freezing” an item online while some-
one in a store is trying it on.TheRealReal
plans to open one or two new stores a
year. This might seem to contradict the
Internet-based nature of the business,
but it gives consigners somewhere to www.giveto.nyc
drop things off in person, and serves
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 31
as a street-level advertisement for the
company. Also, the stores sell a lot of
clothes. In fact, everything in the stores
is for sale, including the lights and the
staff ’s desks and chairs; if a shopper
buys one of the store fixtures, a replace-
ment is often found on the Web site,
in an actual demonstration of the cir-
cular economy.
The day after the trip to Palm Des-
ert, I stopped by the West Hollywood
store, where a young man named Aidis
Malinauskas, a business-analytics con-
sultant, was meeting with Lauren Hunt,
a jewelry and watches valuation man-
ager, to consign a few things. “I’m a
watch fan,” Malinauskas said. “You
could call it a hobby, or a passion—or
maybe a bit of craziness.” He took two
boxes out of a tote and handed them
to Hunt. “I see this as an opportunity
to evolve my collection. My budget is
not infinite.” He added, “I have some
exciting pieces here. ” He opened one
of the boxes. Hunt’s eyes widened.
“A Rolex GMT-Master II, released
in 2013,” Malinauskas said, with a
flourish.
“The Batman!” Hunt exclaimed.
“Yes, the Batman,” Malinauskas said.
“Very hard to get one. I’m consigning
it because, honestly, it doesn’t get as
much wrist time as others in my col-
lection. Also, I have my eye on some-
thing new.” He explained that his
grandfather had given him a watch
when he was in first grade, which started
him down the path of watch collect-
ing. In the meantime, Hunt was tap-
ping away on her laptop, looking up
prices and discussing the watch on Slack
with the rest of her department. Ma-
linauskas opened the second box, which
contained a Bell & Ross Regulateur
with a big, moony face and a stainless-
steel bezel.
While Hunt was looking up the
Bell & Ross, I asked Malinauskas about
the watch he was wearing. “It’s a Ze-
nith with four complications,” he said,
pointing to four small dials on the watch
face. I’m not sure if he came in that
morning planning to sell the Zenith,
but after talking about it for a few min-
utes he slipped it off and handed it to
Hunt. She glanced at it, then sat up
straight and began talking pricing.
TheRealReal sells clothing and jew-
elry strictly on consignment, but takes
32 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
watches either on consignment or as
an outright sale. Malinauskas opted to
sell. “For the Rolex, we can give you
$15,995,” Hunt said. Malinauskas smiled.
She added, “The Zenith El Primero,
we can offer you $7,595, and the Bell &
Ross, $2,795.”
“Excellent,” Malinauskas said, “be-
cause I have my eye on a Rolex Day-
tona stainless steel.”
efore I left the store, I consigned
B a few things of my own (a pair of
sandals and some trousers) and then
joined Sarah Ro, the luxury manager,
and we headed down to Manhattan
Beach to visit another consigner. Ro
has a degree in interior design and used
to own a home-goods store in New
York City. She began her relationship
with TheRealReal as a consigner. One
day, in the middle of handing off some
of her unwanted clothes to her luxury
manager, she realized that she wanted
to be on the other side of the transac-
tion. She loves the part of her job that
involves finding new business. The
consigner we were going to see, Tanya
Monaghan, was the mother of one of
her children’s school friends. “I let the
idea of consigning just develop organ-
ically, when Tanya was ready,” Ro said.
“I didn’t push.”
Sometimes, though, Ro does go with
a little push. She has been known to
walk up to a well-dressed person at, say,
the Century City mall and announce,
“I love what you’re wearing, and we
would take everything!” This approach
has often worked. If she goes to an ap-
pointment in a nice apartment build-
ing, Ro finds the manager on her way
out, and asks to do a pop-up consign-
ment event or to have the manager call
her if someone is moving out and might
want to off-load some goods. She has
a salubrious and encouraging effect on
her clients. “At one appointment, this
woman was literally throwing shoe-
boxes at me, she was in such a hurry,”
Ro said. “I’ve had people get so excited
that they’ve decided in the moment to
consign thirty-thousand-dollar watches.
I’m especially good at helping them
go through their jewelry boxes. We
want to be able to provide a full closet
clean-out.”
That day, Ro was wearing a long
taupe dress she had got in Korea and
carried an Yves Saint Laurent bag from
TheRealReal. She told me that her first
client was a single woman living in a
modest apartment, who surprised her
by having a load of designer accesso-
ries. (“She was consigning so she could
save up and buy a Rolex—and I was
so proud of her, because she got it!”)
Now her regular clients include Insta-
gram influencers. “I haven’t met a lot
of the influencers. I just deal with their
teams,” she said. We moved through
sludgy traffic and then pulled off the
freeway into the residential section of
Manhattan Beach. Monaghan’s house
was breezy and beachy, decorated in
many shades of white. Monaghan, who
is a stylist and a fashion editor for a
regional magazine, was dressed in a
sleek black turtleneck and jeans, with
no shoes. She greeted Ro, and after
they talked for a few minutes about
their children she led us upstairs. All
three of us plus a chair fit inside her
bedroom closet. The clothes were or-
ganized by color, each item hanging
the same precise distance from the next.
“Gorgeous closet!” Ro said. “Look
at this!”
“That’s the danger of being a styl-
ist,” Monaghan said, laughing. She
mentioned that she had been consign-
ing since she was in college. “I would
consign my jeans and tops, because I’d
get bored with stuff,” she said. She
started handing clothes to Ro.
“Nice,” Ro said, looking at a velvet
jacket. “Ulla Johnson?”
Monaghan nodded. She pulled out
a few more hangers, handing Ro a Ra-
quel Allegra lace top, a Tibi dress, and
a half-dozen other pieces. “I think that’s
about it,” she said. We were heading
out of the closet when she stopped and
said, “Oh, wait!,” and gathered up sev-
eral evening bags. “These can go,” she
said. She then went back to the hang-
ing clothes and ran her hand over them,
touching each one lightly, like some-
one looking through a produce bin for
the ripest avocado. She extracted an
Isabel Marant dress. Tilting her head,
she studied it and then passed it to Ro,
who held it up and said she thought it
was beautiful.
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” Monaghan said.
“But I’m sick of it. And I’m trying to
limit my closet.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Ro said. 
 2077 . Citing “impossible” weather,
SHOUTS & MURMURS aliens leave, causing loss of confidence
in global markets, financial panic. Re-
lease of Prince’s updated greatest-hits
album postponed.
2083. Mass extinctions, desertification
of Europe, nuclear war. Critical opin-
ion of Prince’s newest, “Little Red Sus-
tainable Electric-Powered Self-Driving
Corvette,” questions album’s faithful-
ness to his original vision.
2085-86. Warmest nuclear winter ever
recorded in Northern Hemisphere.
Prince’s special “Dark ’N’ Ashy” Christ-
mas album falls flat.
2097 . Human race facing extinction.
Carbon-dioxide-breathing bots discover
Prince, start their own Prince fan site.
0. Carbon-dioxide-breathing bots
discard old calendar, establish binary cal-

ONCE AND FUTURE PRINCE

BY IAN FRAZIER
The seven-time Grammy Award winner re- 2065 . Carbon-capture technology
portedly left behind a vault containing so much purchased by ExxonMobil, mothballed.
music his estate could put out an album a year Heirs resolve dispute. “U R Prince”
for the next century.
—ABC News. gets respectable numbers on Arctic-
Antarctic Spotify.
2025 . Wildfires again sweep the West 2069 . Aliens land super-air-condi-
Coast. Windstorms bearing sand and tioned spaceship on last remaining part
ash cause mass evacuations in South- of New Mexico desert still above water.
ern California. Title track from Prince’s X6y2 Craniums, alien High Commander,
latest album, “Rain of Colors Other reveals that Prince’s newest, “AstroMusi-
Than Purple,” reaches No. 17 on Bill- Kology,” is a personal favorite.
board’s Top Forty. 2071 . Final melting of tundra leads to
2043. Last remaining Antarctic ice flooding of Central Asia and displace-
shelf slides into the ocean, leading to ment of millions. Discovery of previously
an additional two metres in sea-level unknown Prince symbol in a secret
rise and total inundation of lower Man- drawer requires redesign of “Raspberry
hattan. “Prince 2 Infinity,” released in Hazmat Beret” CD cover.
time to qualify for the 2043 awards sea- 2072 . Aliens announce that they be-
son, wins Best New Secret-Vault Album lieve strongly in Earth’s future, plan to
of the Year. stay and open Prince-themed water park
2052 . Canada, accepting the inevita- and cyclotron.
ble, cedes the lower half of its territory 2073 . Last tuna-salad sandwich on
to migrant caravans from the United planet is eaten by coal-industry lobby-
States. Prince’s single “Love EvN Sex- ist in Winnipeg, new U.S. capital. Re-
ier” becomes migrants’ unofficial anthem. alistic hologram of Prince accepts Post-
2055 . Nunavut, the Native nation Lifetime Achievement Award at Rock
above the Arctic Circle, begins construc- and Roll Climate-Controlled Deep-
tion of forty-foot-high steel wall. Pub- Underground Survival Bunker of Fame.
licity for the double-album set “Piece 2076 . Typhoons bury Japan in plas-
O’ Prince” generates international buzz. tic from the Greater Pacific Gyre (for-
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
endar beginning at zero. Bot-produced
album of outtakes, “Prince +-==-+,”
results in five hundred million bot
downloads.
1 . Flush with cash, bot-owned record
company builds huge monuments to
Prince in non-spatial dimensions.
10 . Anti-bots from black-hole galaxy
invade planet formerly known as Earth,
make peace with resident bots through
mutual love of Prince.
100. Fungus brought by anti-bots be-
gins to wipe out Earth bots. Fungus
found in ordinary bathroom grouting
ravages anti-bots. Surviving bots and
anti-bots unite to wire entire planet into
single intercontinental cold-fusion-
powered sound system to play Prince.
110 . Last remaining human Prince
fan is honored by bots and then ritu-
ally dematerialized. Global sound sys-
tem plays A.I.-generated Prince mix-
tapes around the clock, commercial-free.
111 . Bot archeologists discover hid-
den trove of unreleased Billy Ray Cyrus
music. Bot mass suicides depopulate
planet.
11011 . “=+==#=+=#Prince Farewell
Album+-=-=+” becomes a megahit on
several planets of Alpha Centauri. New
visitations of aliens land in former Min-
neapolis, initiate dune-buggy-and-
bathysphere tours of important sites in
career of Prince.
11111 . Unblinking eye of God appears

2064 . Carbon-capture technology
finally begins to make dent in atmo-
spheric carbon dioxide. No Prince album
released because of dispute among heirs.
mer Pacific Ocean). Hundreds of Prince
impersonators perform his “Hot E-Nuff
4 U??” at Super Bowl CIX, in Gander,
Newfoundland, U.S.A.
in heavens; the other eye and facial fea-
tures resemble Prince’s.
INFINITY SIGN . Alpha and Omega, the
End of Time. Prince goes on forever. 
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 33

P E R S O N A L H I S TO RY
THE FLORIDA SHUFFLE
Cycling through relapse and recovery under a blazing sun.
BY COLTON WOOTEN
n February, 2017, I stepped off a plane
I in Tampa, drunk and dope-sick. I was
twenty-four, and for the past eight years
I had been shooting up heroin, cocaine,
and all manner of pills: Dilaudid, Opana,
OxyContin, Desoxyn, Ritalin. Now I was
on my way to River Oaks, an addiction-
treatment center, where I would spend
the next forty-five days. River Oaks was
on a gated campus, surrounded by a small
forest with trails running through it. I
was withdrawing from heroin and ben-
zodiazepines at the time, and mornings
were the worst: I woke in the dark at
6 a.m., the pain of withdrawal not yet
mediated by the day’s first dose of Sub-
oxone or Librium. I promised anyone
For treatment centers, addiction can be turned into a constant flow of revenue.
34 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
who met me that I would die, simply
die, of withdrawal; when, on day twenty-
three, I had a seizure, I thought, Yes, I
am really dying, but then I lived.
We had access to dietitians and per-
sonal trainers, yoga sessions and intra-
venous vitamin therapy; pharmacogenetic
testing determined which medications
worked best with our DNA. When it
was time to leave, I had become so com-
fortable that I walked the grounds bare-
foot, making laps around the Serenity
Trail, feeding apples to the horses by the
stables where we met for equine ther-
apy, on Wednesdays.
I made a few friends there, but we
soon dispersed, some to Baltimore, oth-
ers to New Jersey, one to wake up in the
morning to find that his girlfriend had
died beside him in the night, high on
heroin, having aspirated her vomit. The
rest of us—those without jobs, school,
or families calling us home—moved
into sober homes in South Florida.
South Florida—the densely populated
area comprising Palm Beach, Broward,
and Miami-Dade counties—has four
hundred and seventy-eight licensed fa-
cilities for drug treatment. There are
more treatment centers than public el-
ementary schools. It’s difficult to live
here for long without hearing some-
one’s sad story: the Lyft driver who loved
cocaine and still does, but from a distance
now; the anesthesiologist who studied
at Johns Hopkins and shot up fentanyl
before it was popular.
For the next few months, I moved
between recovery and relapse, cycling
through the Twelve Steps, then going
off in search of drugs. I would walk out
of group therapy in a huff and then, days
later, check into another detox for what-
ever length of time insurance would
cover. After inpatient rehab, I’d move to
sober housing and enroll in an outpa-
tient program at a nearby clinic. As long
as I was insured, I didn’t have to touch
money. There’s a name for this peripa-
tetic life style: clinicians, clients, and local
officials call it the Florida Shuffle.
I spent the month of May in Delray
Beach, in an antebellum-style mansion
with Spanish moss hanging from the
trees in the front yard, spiral staircases
indoors, and large white vitrified tiles in
the dining room. This was a partial-hos-
pitalization program, where people are
sent after they detox from a relapse. We
recited the Serenity Prayer before we
ate, pleased by the way we felt ourselves
rising to the occasion. Many of us were
not yet twenty-five, but we had lived in
a disorderly way, and because of that we
felt ancient, as if we had survived some-
thing, which we had. It was only hon-
orable that we should try to live well.
In June, I found myself living, for the
second time, in an old residential motel
in Boca Raton, which had been con-
verted into apartments for drug addicts
and alcoholics passing between rehab
and polite society. The apartments were
on a street called West Camino Real;
nearby, houses sell for about a million
dollars and even the grocery store offers
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER
valet parking. My building was tiny,
spare, and utilitarian. Each day, we were
required to attend four hours of group
therapy; each week, we had our urine
tested for drugs. Both of these services
were billable to insurance.
In our spare time, in the desolating
heat, we would sit at a picnic table in the
parking lot to chain-smoke and drink
Red Bull and play spades or poker. I
smoked forty cigarettes a day—Marlboro
Red 100s, the long ones. Struggling to
bury how lonely we were, and how afraid,
we traded war stories, recalling the drugs
we had done and loved, and the times
they took us down—each of us striving
to top his neighbors’ wretchedness, to
prove himself exceptional in his ability
to ruin himself totally. It was easy to get
lost, to lose track, to lose time between
the weeks and days and palm-tree after-
noons. News of relapses, of overdoses and
deaths, was always breaking, and so the
emergencies that one day held us rapt
were soon supplanted by new ones.
We spoke about emotions, trauma,
illness, about whether we had succumbed
to influences, experiments, pressures—
or whether we had been born this way.
Perhaps the source of our addiction lay
deep in our genes, beyond poppies or
cartels or Big Pharma. Or perhaps we
had simply made bad choices.
One day, I get a phone call from Mi-
chelle, whom I know from River Oaks.
(Some names have been changed.) She
moved to South Florida the week after
I did, at the age of nineteen, after twelve
trips to detox in the previous five months.
Now she says that she left her sober
housing the night before, with her boy-
friend, Dylan, and that since then they
have been shooting heroin in his car,
where, she supposes, they live now. But
the dope was so good, she says, that she
had to use only a quarter of her usual
dose to wreck herself.
It isn’t as if Michelle is pressuring
me to get high with her, but she reminds
me of drugs, of their purchase on total
escape. She reminds me that I wish I
were on drugs right now.
“And you’re getting more?” I ask.
or many years, South Florida’s
F addiction-treatment landscape was
celebrated as a haven for Twelve Step
programs. In 2007, the Times described
the constellation of sober homes in Del-
ray Beach, a city of sixty-eight thousand,
as “a funky outpost of sobriety,” and “the
epicenter of the country’s largest and
most vibrant recovery community.”
This community began to take shape
in the late sixties, when a doctor, a phar-
macist, and a police officer—Frank
Kucera, Bill Plum, and Bill Cochran—
assembled the Drug Abuse Founda-
tion, a small group of volunteers con-
cerned with drug-use-prevention efforts.
In the following years, the main sub-
stances abused were alcohol, cocaine,
barbiturates, and amphetamines—
Quaaludes, Miltown, Dexamyl, Dexe-
drine. Responding to a mounting pub-
lic need, Palm Beach County started
the Comprehensive Alcohol and Re-
habilitation Programs, in 1967. Several
new halfway houses opened, funded by
the county, but many of their rehabili-
tation methods were experimental, such
as forcing residents to wear a sign around
their neck if they broke a house rule.
Still, South Florida appealed to pri-
vate residential-rehab facilities, which
developed outpatient treatment plans
of their own. Soon, people came from
across the United States to Delray Beach
to open what would be called “recov-
ery residences.” John Lehman, a con-
sultant for the Recovery Outcomes In-
stitute, a research agency and mentorship
program, told me, “What emerged in
Delray Beach was a very robust Twelve
Step community, a lot of A.A. and N.A.
meetings. Those meeting rooms were
filled with individuals who were com-
ing from all over the world to live in
recovery residences, and it flourished—
it just grew—and people were doing
really well.”
This method, which came to be
called the Florida Model, offered a
cheaper alternative to residential rehab
programs—such as Silver Hill Hospi-
tal, in Connecticut, or Betty Ford Cen-
ter Drug Rehab, in California—where
patients lived on large campuses. In the
Florida Model, after detox and inpa-
tient rehab, clients would move into re-
covery residences, or sober homes, and
attend outpatient therapy.
Sober living presented an appealing
option for young people in recovery,
who might have criminal records or bad
credit and could not afford, or manage,
to live alone. These were people for
whom structure and a community of
peers meant the possibility of a home.
Though each house had its own rules
and standards, the Twelve Steps of
Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics
Anonymous were universal.
And so it went, for some thirty years,
that parents would send their prodigal
sons or daughters—whenever their lives
had become untethered in New Jersey
or Philadelphia or Ohio—to Florida,
first to dry out in treatment, and then
to live in a sober home. They would
make new friends; find low-stress re-
covery jobs, waiting tables in diners,
folding jeans at the mall, or answering
phones at a call center; and subscribe
to the Twelve Steps. Eventually, hav-
ing survived their addictions into adult-
hood, many of them would return home.
Others would remain in Florida and
open sober homes of their own.
came to Florida after a long stretch
I of lunacy in Brooklyn, where I was
living in a building beside the J train,
its tracks parallel to my window. I would
sit on my air mattress with my heart
gone arrhythmic and look at the trains
going by. The mattress, my only furni-
ture, was held together with electrical
tape, which covered the perforations
made by syringes and corkscrews and
smoldering cigarettes that often fell into
bed with me.
Every day, I injected at least a bun-
dle of heroin—ten bags, each weighing
around a tenth of a gram. If the dope
was cut with fentanyl, I might overdose
after two bags. I couldn’t always under-
stand my dealer when he spoke, because
he sometimes removed his teeth to
smoke crack, but he had a valiant heart
and once called an ambulance for me
when I overdosed on his corner. I woke
up in the hospital, pulled the I.V. out
of my arm, and took the subway home.
I started smoking crack cocaine to
save money, although it never quite
worked out that way, and soon I was
dissolving it in vinegar and injecting it
as well. There was something sacra-
mental about preparing a shot and hit-
ting a vein, then pulling the plunger
back to catch a plume of blood bloom-
ing into clouds of crimson. Cocaine
psychosis led me to Bellevue, then to a
homeless shelter, then to begging on
the street in Greenwich Village.
When I called my mother, finally, to
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 35
ask for help, I had been shooting her-
oin all night in a stranger’s apartment.
It was on that stranger’s mattress, with
only one dose remaining, that it struck
me: This is how people die. They over-
dose in unknown company, and their
bodies are shoved into coat closets in
dilapidated buildings and aren’t discov-
ered for months. I felt wretched for im-
plicating my mother in my situation.
What had she done to deserve this? I
would always be the boy in the princi-
pal’s office, calling for a ride, or in jail,
needing to make bail. My life, looking
back, seemed to consist of scenes spliced
together from emergency rooms, psy-
chiatric wards, doctors’ offices, pharmacy
queues, holding cells, therapists’ couches,
street corners, pawnshops. My life scared
me; it scared me to death.
Later, at River Oaks, during an ex-
ercise in which we were asked to re-
count what rock bottom looked like for
us, and how it felt, I’d share my mem-
ory of those days, the last before rehab,
of my becoming a vagrant, the plot of
which seemed to align with the redemp-
tion narrative that our therapist was
steering us toward. But, even then, I
knew that it is useless to talk about rock
bottom so early in recovery: no matter
how bad things get, they might well get
worse. And then they get better, and
then worse again, and I seemed to have
a high tolerance for suffering. There was
the week I spent on dialysis, the eight
times I went to rehab, the spring I got
some reading done in solitary confine-
ment, and all the times I almost died
on the street.
s the biracial child of a single
A mother, I was an anomaly in the
suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina. We
were, for a long time, one of the only
families of color in the area that we
knew of. My mother conceived me when
she was thirty-eight, using sperm from
an anonymous donor. My mother, who
is black, chose a donor who was white—
Italian and Irish, according to docu-
ments—and so my childhood seemed
to evolve from an odd genetic question.
I was often lonely and alone and
filled with hate. Nothing gratified me.
There was always this matter of time
happening, this question of how
to spend it. On weekends, when my
mother was not at work, she lay in bed
36 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
HANG ON
Domestic as
an empty shopping cart
parked on a ledge
above a freeway.
*
Artifactual as
an acorn barnacle.
“What is the purpose of barnacles?”
people ask the Internet.
Barnacles are filter feeders.
They’re fish-tank décor.
A plaque of barnacles
on top of a toilet—
this cluster
of brittle puckers,
clinging
to its old idea,
these craters striped
pale lavender
for some
unlikely eye.
—Rae Armantrout
in the dark, exhausted, in her fifties, see now—but I did not see them then.
raising a teen-age boy. In another room, My mother lamented my not hav-
I, too, lay in the dark. That was my im-
pression of family life and of adult-
ing a male influence, and so forced me
to play soccer and baseball and basket-
hood; I supposed that, in the future, ball. I sang soprano in the Raleigh Boy-
instead of going to school, I would have choir, until my voice changed. I had
some sort of job, and on the weekend friends, even best friends, at times. But
I would sleep. the feeling with which I returned home,
My outlook was myopic, given the always, was of being alone. I took what
example my mother had set. When she felt like every medication for A.D.H.D.
was in graduate school, in the early over the years—Ritalin and Adderall
eighties, a teacher told her, with racial and Dexedrine and Desoxyn—and
condescension, that she might find doc- Prozac for depression, which in time I’d
toral work too rigorous. She was the come to recognize as intractable.
only black student in her classes, and In high school, I was not a nerd and
she ultimately earned a Ph.D. in edu- I was not a jock, and although I was a
cation. She had lived fully, embracing junkie, I was not quite a burnout—I did
a life of work in public education, and not smoke pot or even cigarettes. I played
of great love. She had dimensions, I the clarinet in the school band, but I
was too lazy to march at football games. gle mothers. We were both alone in the plications. It’s possible to regard the Flor-
I was openly gay, often pugnaciously so, world, it sometimes seemed, but we were ida Shuffle as a by-product of drug-
and my failure to make an earnest bid doing it together, whatever it was. addiction treatment.
for acceptance only alienated me from The Affordable Care Act, which be-
my peers. I would listen to “Lonely Planet or the first eight months that I lived came law in 2010, has changed the land-
Boy,” by the New York Dolls, jump into
the tightest jeans by Cheap Monday,
F in Florida, as I hopped from one
detox clinic or sober home to another, I
scape of addiction treatment, requiring
that insurance companies cover services
and get into cars with strange men twice had no notion of the industry in which for substance-use disorders. (It also al-
my age, who found me exotic because I I was enmeshed. In 1986, there were ap- lows children to remain on their par-
was tall and bronze and underage, black proximately seven thousand treatment ents’ policies until the age of twenty-six.)
and white and very thin, a predator’s wet facilities for substance abuse in the U.S.; Building on the Mental Health Parity
dream, with sad eyes and father issues. today, there are at least fifteen thousand, and Addiction Equity Act, of 2008, the
The first time I did heroin I was six- a figure that doesn’t include most sober A.C.A. prohibits insurers from enforc-
teen. My friend Rebecca, a senior at a homes. In the same period, the addic- ing stricter benefit limitations than those
nearby high school, came over to my tion-treatment industry’s revenue rose applied to manifestly physical ailments,
house. After getting into college, Re- from nine billion dollars to more than such as a knee replacement or cataract
becca had started using heroin every fifty billion dollars. In Palm Beach surgery. It also prohibits limiting treat-
day. I was a sophomore and already tak- County, addiction treatment is a bil- ment on the basis of a preëxisting con-
ing amphetamines and cocaine; wiry lion-dollar industry, and the profusion dition. Roughly sixty-two million peo-
and enervated, I was ready to come down. of sober homes, treatment centers, and ple received new access to mental-health
One Friday afternoon in the spring, she detox facilities overlaps with South Flor- and behavioral care. Today, addiction it-
brought over some dope. ida’s most lucrative industries—tour- self doesn’t count as a preëxisting con-
I snorted the powder off the jacket ism, real estate, construction. Iatrogen- dition, but a relapse can make it one.
of a book about raising boys, one of my esis, which derives from the Greek for Relapses are common among ad-
mother’s child-psychology volumes. Re- “brought forth by the healer,” refers to dicts, even when things seem to be going
becca shot up. Taking a syringe from a a medical phenomenon in which efforts well, and treatment is expensive. A
bundle of about thirty held together to treat an illness only cause further com- month of inpatient rehab can cost tens
with rubber bands, she gripped the rig
between her teeth and untied a blue rib-
bon from her hair. After wrapping the
ribbon around her bicep, she pulled it
taut, and, holding the syringe like a pen-
cil, she lowered it into a vein in the crook
of her elbow. I was squatting on the
floor, staring up at her; as the sun came
through the bay window behind her, il-
luminating dust, she looked beautiful.
During my senior year, I worked at
a bar downtown, to afford the heroin
that I used every day. I made about two
hundred dollars a night and spent it all
on dope. By the time I got to college,
in New York, my drug use had escaped
control. In the morning before classes,
I’d shoot cocaine strong enough to get
me off the floor, where I’d passed out
hours before, after banging too much
heroin. With everything silenced except
for a clear note in my head, I’d sham-
ble to the bathroom and vomit blood
that looked like coffee grounds, the re- Rembrandt van Rijn, The Rat Catcher, etching and drypoint, 1632. Estimate $12,000 to $18,000.

sult of organ damage. Old Master Through Modern Prints Oct 29

On that stranger’s mattress in Brook-
lyn, I was desperate and alone and knew
to call my mother. Only by dint of her
emphatic competence was I able to ac-
cess the kind of help I needed. We had
our differences, my mother and I. We
were both only children, raised by sin-
Featuring Rembrandt Etchings from the John Villarino Collection
Old Master Drawings Nov 5
Featuring 19th-Century French Drawings from The Eric Carlson Irrevocable Trust
Todd Weyman • tweyman@swanngalleries.com
104 East 25th St, New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 37

“The frame is too Louie-Schmooie.”
• •
of thousands of dollars; in the past, this
kind of treatment was mostly limited
to the wealthy. The A.C.A. made it eas-
ier for the owners of treatment centers
to bill insurers, and rehab, suddenly dem-
ocratic, fell within reach of the well-
insured middle class and its children.
Because there is no federal licensing
framework for addiction-treatment cen-
ters, insurance companies trust the fa-
cilities to abide by state regulations. But
little in medicine is as ill defined or as
anecdotal as addiction treatment. Most
rehab centers are not hospitals.The coun-
sellors are often not psychologists. The
medical directors can submit instruc-
tions from a distance.
few years ago, as the opioid crisis
A became the heroin crisis—now we
keep it simple by calling it the overdose
crisis—a variety of fentanyl analogues,
with names like carfentanil and acetylfen-
tanyl, began augmenting heroin to poi-
sonous degrees. The elevated potency of
street drugs meant that relapses were
frequently deadly. In 1999, seventeen
thousand Americans died from drug
overdoses. In 2017, more than seventy
thousand did—a death count exceeding
38 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
that of the height of the AIDS crisis. That
year, as the National Civic League gave
Delray Beach the All-America City
Award, the Times, NBC, and the Palm
Beach Post described the city as the cen-
ter of an opioid-overdose epidemic. An
analysis by Peter Haden, of WLRN,
Miami’s public-radio station, found that
the money that the Delray Beach Fire
Department spent on naloxone, which
is used to treat opioid overdoses, rose
thirteen hundred per cent between 2013
and 2016. People who had come to South
Florida for recovery were suddenly dying
en masse. One month in 2016, there were
“ninety-eight overdoses reported and
eighteen deaths believed to be over-
dose-related in Delray Beach,” Marc
Woods, a city official, recalled.
Like any industry in a period of ex-
plosive growth, addiction treatment at-
tracted wrongdoers. Insurance fraud be-
came rampant. The most profitable kind
involves inflated charges for urinalysis
reports—a practice that has come to be
called the “liquid gold rush.” Urine tests
provide evidence to rehab centers that
clients are drug-free, but there aren’t any
regulations that define standard practice.
Traditionally, urinalysis has been per-
formed using test strips; a typical dip-
stick test, which changes color to reflect
a positive or negative reading, costs some
five dollars and can be done anywhere.
Sending urine to a laboratory, which uses
gas or liquid chromatography to render
results more accurately, can cost thou-
sands of dollars.
In 2011, Frank Cid, an owner of high-
end treatment programs in South Flor-
ida, opened his own lab. He recruited
detox centers to send him urine—they
would be reimbursed by insurance com-
panies for collecting it, and he would
bill the companies for testing it. Ac-
cording to court documents, in 2014, an
affiliate of Goldman Sachs that wanted
to buy Cid’s business valued it at more
than thirty-two million dollars. (The
deal ultimately fell through.)
Soon, many of the facilities that had
been sending urine to Cid began to open
labs of their own. Sober-home owners
quickly followed suit. It was an extraor-
dinarily lucrative business. A patient tested
three times a week could generate twenty
thousand dollars a month. Between April
and July, 2017, Addiction Labs of Amer-
ica, Lab Geeks, and Physicians Group of
Boca Raton billed my insurers more than
seventy-five thousand dollars.
Between 2011 and 2015, prosecutors
allege, staff at Good Decisions Sober
Living, a sober home in Palm Beach
County, filed a hundred and six million
dollars in claims for urine drug screens
with eighty insurance companies, and
insurers paid out $31.1 million. Accord-
ing to an indictment, Kenneth Bailyn-
son, the owner of Good Decisions, had
opened his own lab and taken over the
sprawling Green Terrace Condomini-
ums, where he housed dozens of recov-
ering addicts; he used the clubhouse by
the pool as a collection site for urine.
The Palm Beach Post reported that
Bailynson turned Green Terrace into
“an armed camp, where guards with
guns made sure addicts did not leave.”
At his detention hearing, Jim Hayes,
the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the
Southern District of Florida, described
Good Decisions as a “piss farm,” in busi-
ness “only to harvest residents’ urine.”
(Bailynson has pleaded not guilty. His
lawyer declined to comment.)
As the urinalysis business grew, own-
ers of sober-living facilities started com-
peting with one another for patients.
They began to lure addicts with incen-
tives: an iPhone, perhaps, or a gift card
for groceries every week, or reduced or
free rent. Brochures touted properties
on the Intracoastal Waterway.
The kids who arrived for treatment
soon saw that their insurance policies
could be used as expense accounts for
detox or sober living. John Lehman, of
the Recovery Outcomes Institute, told
me, “They also learned that these pred-
ators didn’t care if they stayed sober.” It
was possible to leave a sober home in
Delray Beach, get high by the ocean in
Miami, and, whenever things grew dicey,
book a room at a detox facility in West
Palm Beach, whose staff would send a
car to pick up patients. South Florida
had become, as Lehman put it, “the re-
lapse, rather than the recovery, capital
of the world.”
“So long as you got into the van to
go pee in cups,” Lehman said, “and as
long as insurance was still reimbursing
for those drug tests,” it became possible
to live on the dole of one’s health plan.
He has seen facilities where a person
could “smoke crack in the bathroom,
shoot dope on the porch, and drink Jack
Daniel’s on the living-room couch.” Dave
Aronberg, the state’s attorney for Palm
Beach County, described relapse as “more
profitable than sobriety.”
The competition for well-insured pa-
tients can veer into what’s known as pa-
tient-brokering. The Florida Patient
Brokering Act prohibits people and
health-care facilities from offering any
kind of “commission, bonus, rebate, kick-
back, or bribe, directly or indirectly, in
cash or in kind,” in exchange for patient
referrals. Depending on the number of
paid referrals, patient-brokering can be
a first-degree felony in Florida, result-
ing in a sentence of up to thirty years in
prison. But the practice remains com-
mon. Many patient-brokers pick up
young drug users from the street. The
castaways of treatment centers are easy
to spot as they walk around, their bed-
rolls wrapped in black garbage bags, wild
and disconsolate from loitering all day
in the heat.
ast August, Haley went missing. I
L had met her in 2017, during Hur-
ricane Irma. The owner of our sober
home had moved us to an empty house,
on a golf course in Coral Springs, which
was supposed to be weatherproof. As
the palm fronds lashed in the wind, we
became friends. Haley was tall and
blond, and had voted for Donald Trump
in 2016, but the #MeToo movement
caused her to consider feminism.
When she disappeared, she had been
dating a patient-broker named Greg.
She lived with him in a sober home in
West Palm Beach. In practice, it was a
flophouse, with seven rooms housing
twenty people. The landlord worked at
a treatment center nearby, where he sent
tenants who relapsed—this happened
all the time, because he funded much
of their drug use. Haley would tag along
with Greg until 7 A.M., chasing bodies
to deposit at the detox facilities.
Haley described how Greg and other
patient-brokers would entice addicts.
“They’d be, like, ‘Why don’t you do this
and I’ll pay you,’ just to get somebody
to go in, or ‘We’ll get you high and then
we’ll take you in,’” she said. The land-
lord “would cut them a check for a cou-
ple grand. So he knew what they were
doing, but he turned his head to act
like he didn’t.”
Haley told me later that, at the
house, “the only rule was don’t get high,
but then, when you broke that rule, it
was, like, they would work with you
for a while.” Haley said she returned
to detox five times between August
and September.
Greg disappeared with Haley’s car,
and she traded her phone for drugs. She
trundled through strange
neighborhoods, smoking
crack and seeing stars amid
the slums of Boynton Beach,
and we all wondered where
she was. She couldn’t have
told us.
lorida’s Department of
F Children and Families
licenses treatment facilities,
but it has no authority over
sober homes. The Americans with Dis-
abilities Act treats those enrolled in re-
covery programs as a protected class,
and the Fair Housing Act mandates
that neighborhoods make accommoda-
tions for people in recovery who want
to live together. This makes it difficult
to regulate sober homes. The Florida
Association of Recovery Residences, a
nonprofit, is the only organization that
is designated by the D.C.F. to assess
and certify sober homes, which hap-
pens on a voluntary basis. Yet FARR has
only four field assessors.
In 2016, to address the crisis of pa-
tient-brokering, Aronberg, the state’s
attorney for Palm Beach County, es-
tablished the Sober Homes Task
Force, a joint effort between prosecu-
tors and local law enforcement. “We
kept hearing about people with sub-
stance-use disorder being exploited
by bad actors who take advantage of
well-intended federal laws, like the
Americans with Disabilities Act and
the Affordable Care Act, and that
they keep them in an endless pattern
of relapse to siphon off their insur-
ance benefits,” Aronberg told me. “The
rogue sober homes don’t have to reg-
ister; they don’t have any mandatory
certifications or inspections.”
Lehman spent three years trying to
get local and state law-enforcement
agencies to investigate the bad actors in
the recovery industry, and finally suc-
ceeded in meeting with the state’s lead-
ing insurance-fraud investigator, who
contacted the F.B.I. Lehman told me,
“I just dumped all this frustration, all
these different cases that were in vari-
ous different states of data collection on
our end, and they asked me to provide
them with a list of the top ten offenders.”
He said that six of the ten names that
he gave were among those indicted by
the Department of Justice last year, in
part of the largest crack-
down on health-care fraud
in American history. Fed-
eral authorities charged a
hundred and twenty-four
people in South Florida
alone, and dozens of sober
homes were shut down. (No
facilities certified by FARR
were implicated in the crack-
down.) “The sober houses
had all the protections of
the Americans with Disabilities Act,
and were warehousing kids for their in-
surance cards,” Marc Woods, the Del-
ray Beach official, said.
In 2017, Kenny Chatman, who ran
several treatment centers and sober
homes, went on trial for money laun-
dering, sex trafficking, and insurance
fraud. He pleaded guilty, after evidence
surfaced that he had held female clients
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 39
hostage for sex work. One victim testified
that she had been bound in shackles in
the basement of one of Chatman’s houses
while men paid to rape her. “I recall
close to 150 in total different faces of
rapists abusing me daily over a period
of 3-4 weeks,” she wrote. “I was unre-
strained for brief periods, only to be
cleaned up of bodily fluids. I thought I
was going to die there.”
Chatman, who was sentenced to
twenty-seven years in prison, owes mil-
lions of dollars in damages to thirty-
two insurance companies, including
eight million dollars to Blue Cross
Blue Shield.
There are signs that the local and
federal crackdowns have had some
effect. Between 2017 and 2018, opioid
deaths in Palm Beach County fell by
forty per cent, and the number of re-
ported overdoses in Delray Beach have
fallen to an average of seventeen a
month. According to Woods, about
half the sober homes in Delray Beach
have closed. In April, the managers of
the facilities where I stayed in Delray
Beach and Boca Raton were arrested
on charges of patient-brokering, and
both residences have since closed. But,
as the treatment industry has retreated
in Florida, it has expanded in other
states. California, home to the so-called
“Son, why don’t you switch to my shampoo and conditioner?”
Rehab Riviera, around Los Angeles, is
estimated to have at least two thou-
sand sober homes.
he Florida Shuffle is not just about
T moving from one bad place to an-
other; it is about doing so without aim
or sense of place. It is about people
who, at the end of a twenty-eight-day
course of rehab, or a stint at detox, find
that they have nowhere to go. It is about
never growing up. To spend one’s twen-
ties moving between clinical settings
and halfway houses is fundamentally
arresting. Sometimes people return
home after years of “working on them-
selves” to find that they do not quite
fit in anywhere. The Florida Shuffle
becomes a way of moving through life,
and the only lens through which one
understands it.
Last winter, I was living in a sober
home on the border of Pompano Beach
and Deerfield Beach—a few streets
down from the motorcycle dealership
where the rapper XXXTentacion was
shot to death, the previous June. When
I moved in, the oldest tenant in the
house had lived there for six years, the
house manager for two, another tenant
for ten months. This stability is rare.
But then, between August and March,
twenty-one people passed through the
house, settling in for a few days or weeks
before they relapsed, or moved else-
where, or died.
My friend Brandon, who had moved
into the house in August, left one night
in February without telling anyone.
He visited my room to ask for a ciga-
rette before leaving, and I wonder now
what was crossing his mind as he stood
there, leaning against the doorframe.
Later that night, I walked down the
street to 7-Eleven to look for him. Peo-
ple often wound up there, by the dump-
sters—always the dumpsters, an un-
official annex of the departed. None
of my housemates would come with
me; they sat looking at their phones,
and then at the TV, sighing, having
washed their hands of Brandon. The
stragglers by the dumpsters, the pawn-
shop, and the laundromat all said that
I’d just missed Brandon; he’d breezed
by about seven minutes earlier.
Brandon was diabetic, and had never
been able to manage his disease—that
is, even when he could afford insulin,
along with the ancillary drugs that he
required for neuropathy. Around 1 A.M.,
he called me. He was drinking stolen
red wine behind a Target, where he
was planning to sleep before going to
work at Panera Bread, in the morning.
There was a spigot in the alley where
the freight trucks dock, a benefit of
choosing Target over Walmart.
A few days later, Eddie, a housemate
who had been clean since July, over-
dosed and died in a motel room in
Deerfield Beach. He had left in frustra-
tion on a Saturday and was dead by
Wednesday. I can still see him bound-
ing around corners—his forehead framed
in grease and dirt and sweat from the
garage where he worked, his tattoos be-
ginning in a sleeve around his neck and
ending at his ankles. They had set him
back something like twenty thousand
dollars through the years, he said. We
liked the same music, and on the speak-
ers in the back yard we would play
Townes Van Zandt and Bruce Spring-
steen, John Prine and Warren Zevon:
“Carmelita, hold me tighter/I think I’m
sinking down / And I’m all strung out
on heroin, on the outskirts of town.”
It robs you of something, after a while,
to see this sort of thing happen, over
and over. When Eddie died, not know-
ing how to express our emotions, or how
to apprehend them properly, we said to
one another, “That’s crazy about Eddie.”
Most young addicts I knew didn’t
get funerals with a viewing; they were
burned to bits in furnaces and, as ashes,
thrown into the ocean or tossed to the
wind from a mountaintop. I wonder, if
I had the opportunity to look on my
dead friends one last time—if I could
see them as they were in the end, as pale
bodies—whether that might startle me
into something like closure.
Instead, I see them on Facebook,
the dead I have known and still know.
I have become obsessed with death; I
see it everywhere.
A couple of weeks after Eddie’s death,
I ran into Brandon walking down a side-
walk in Pompano. He was wearing a
waiter’s uniform, from the restaurant
where he worked at night, and carrying
an old patent-leather satchel that I had
given him. He was heading to a liquor
store that sold cheap margaritas on Fri-
days. He said he was going to San Diego
soon, to live in a motel where the rooms
cost twenty-seven dollars a night. The
sky was orange and roseate as we parted.
We said, “I love you, man,” and prom-
ised to keep in touch, but we never did. • •
fter Michelle calls me in June, I
A walk from West Camino Real to
Palmetto Park Road, where Michelle,
from 7-Eleven. He declines, saying that
he is coming up on a sobriety anniver-
tanyl—and it isn’t lovely and it isn’t ter-
rible, either, but it is not the same as it
who is driving Dylan’s car, is stalled in sary, of six months or whatever, and, used to be. End-stage addiction fore-
traffic. She doesn’t have a license, and after all, he is driving. I am aghast. “Why closes novelty.
she doesn’t know how to drive a stick are you here with us, then?” I ask. “Be- We go everywhere that day with
shift. I can’t drive stick either, and I cause Michelle said you guys needed our dirty blood and hot bodies and Mi-
haven’t driven at all since I was nine- my help,” he says. Jacob drives us to the chelle’s pretty dark hair falling down
teen, when a judge revoked my license pawnshop, where we pawn Dylan’s Xbox her back in greasy skeins, and I hate
after I was arrested a couple of times for sixty dollars, and to the dealer, to who we are. Somehow, we are on the
for driving drunk. But I take the wheel, buy heroin. Jacob doesn’t use with us, beach, and I wish we were young and
and we manage to move the car to a nor does he regard us with disdain. fun, svelte and bronze, and maybe I even
parking spot in front of Boca Raton’s Soon we are shooting up in the car, say this aloud. I wish I liked the beach.
City Hall. taking turns with the syringe. The tip If we minded how we lived, the con-
In order to afford drugs, we must is frayed and curling backward, so that sideration was mild. If we worried that
drive to the pawnshop to trade in Dylan’s it snags against the flesh; removing the our sober home might evict us for using
Xbox, so Michelle calls Jacob, who lives needle reminds me of excising an in- drugs, we also understood that we could
in the apartment below mine, and whom grown hair. In my eight years of intra- fall back into detox, where we could
we know from our recovery groups; in- venous drug use, it is the first time I watch Netflix over Gatorade and Va-
viting anybody to join our hateful dis- have shared a syringe. Never again, I lium, and then have chicken cordon bleu
solution seems unwise, but she tells me tell myself, but, a few months later, I do. in bed. Then we could transfer to yet
that it’s fine. Here I am again, still hung up on this another treatment center or sober home.
“We should go to 7-Eleven while adolescent outlaw kick of mine, slouched Beyond one place, another like it stood,
we wait for him,” I say. “And get for- by the window in the back seat of Dylan’s and whether or not we said goodbye
ties.” Somehow, I never can get past car, crowded with tools and clothes— seemed not to matter—we trusted that
age seventeen. everything he owns, I suppose, as he no we would meet again. So long as we
When Jacob arrives, I offer him some longer lives anywhere—my head now were not dead, we were fine, there was
of the Four Loko that I have stolen dropping low. The heroin is likely fen- hope—we would make it, after all. 
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 41

THE UNSTOPPABLE MACHINE
Politicians want to rein in Amazon. But Jeff Bezos is ready to use his power to fight back.
n 2017, a few months after Forbes
I named Jeff Bezos, the founder of
Amazon, the world’s richest man, a
rumor spread among the company’s ex-
ecutives: Bill Gates, the former wealth-
iest person on earth, had called Bezos’s
assistant to schedule a lunch, asking if
Tuesday or Wednesday was available.
The assistant informed Bezos of the
invitation, and told him that both days
were open. Bezos, who had built an
empire exhorting employees to be “vo-
cally self-critical,” and to never “believe
their or their team’s body odor smells
of perfume,” issued a command: Make
it Thursday.
Bezos’s power play was so mild that
it likely wasn’t noticed by Gates, but
within Amazon the story sparked a
small panic (and, later, an official de-
nial). Such a willful act of vanity felt
like a bad omen. At Amazon’s head-
quarters, in Seattle, the company’s four-
teen Leadership Principles—painted
on walls, posted in bathrooms, printed
on laminated cards in executives’ wal-
lets—urge employees to “never say
‘that’s not my job,’ ” to “examine their
strongest convictions with humility,”
to “not compromise for the sake of
social cohesion,” and to commit to
excellence even if “people may think
these standards are unreasonably high.”
(When I recently asked various em-
ployees to recite the precepts, they did
so with alarming gusto: “ ‘Frugality
breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency,
and invention!’ ”) A former executive
said, “That’s how we earn our suc-
cess—we’re willing to be frugal and
egoless, and obsessed with delighting
our customers.”
Amazon is now America’s sec-
ond-largest private employer. (Walmart
is the largest.) It traffics more than a
third of all retail products bought or
sold online in the U.S.; it owns Whole
Foods and helps arrange the shipment
of items purchased across the Web, in-
42 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
A R E P O R T E R AT L A R G E
BY CHARLES DUHIGG
cluding on eBay and Etsy. Amazon’s
Web-services division powers vast por-
tions of the Internet, from Netflix to
the C.I.A. You probably contribute to
Amazon’s profits whether you intend to
or not. Critics say that Amazon, much
like Google and Facebook, has grown
too large and powerful to be trusted.
Everyone from Senator Elizabeth War-
ren to President Donald Trump has
depicted Amazon as dangerously un-
constrained. This past summer, at a de-
bate among the Democratic Presiden-
tial candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders
said, “Five hundred thousand Amer-
icans are sleeping out on the street,
and yet companies like Amazon, that
made billions in profits, did not pay one
nickel in federal income tax.” And Ste-
ven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary,
declared that Amazon has “destroyed
the retail industry across the United
States.” The Federal Trade Commis-
sion and the European Union, mean-
while, are independently pursuing in-
vestigations of Amazon for potential
antitrust violations. In recent months,
inquiries by news organizations have
documented Amazon’s sale of illegal
or deadly products, and have exposed
how the company’s fast-delivery pol-
icies have resulted in drivers speed-
ing down streets and through intersec-
tions, killing people. Company insiders
were accustomed to complaints from
rivals at book publishers or executives
at big-box stores. Those attacks rarely
felt personal. Now, a recently retired
Amazon executive told me, “people
are worried—we’re suddenly on the
firing line.”
Amazon executives were also con-
cerned about dramatic changes within
the company. In 2015, Amazon had
roughly two hundred thousand em-
ployees. Since then, its workforce had
nearly tripled. Bezos, now fifty-five,
had transformed as well, from a pudgy
bookseller with an elephant-seal laugh
to a sleek, muscled mogul whose em-
pire included a television-and-movie
studio. (Bezos declined to be inter-
viewed for this article.) Amazon exec-
utives comforted themselves with the
thought that, even if the story about
the Bill Gates lunch was true, at least
their boss wasn’t reckless, like, say, Elon
Musk or Travis Kalanick or Adam Neu-
mann. Many admired Bezos’s dedica-
tion to his wife and children, and saw
it as an embodiment of the company’s
integrity. Still, they whispered, what if
his flywheel has gone off track?
The notion of the flywheel—the
heavy disk within a machine that, once
spinning, pushes gears and production
relentlessly forward—is venerated with-
in Amazon, as Ian Freed learned on
his first day of work, in 2004. Freed had
initially glimpsed the power of the In-
ternet as a Harvard student, when he
guessed an e-mail address in Indone-
sia that led him to strike up a corre-
spondence with the country’s minister
of telecommunications. After graduat-
ing, Freed built computer networks in
Russia and drafted policy papers for
the World Bank and the United States
Agency for International Development.
He felt that every organization he ad-
vised failed to take advantage of all the
opportunities created by the Internet.
He moved to the West Coast, where
he became an expert in streaming net-
works. Then he joined Amazon, as a
director of its fledgling mobile-services
team. During an orientation that in-
cluded a warehouse stint unloading
boxes of shampoo and stocking shelves
with toothpaste, he realized that peo-
ple at the company saw things in a fun-
damentally different way.
Most firms have a mission state-
ment that even the C.E.O. has trou-
ble remembering. Amazon employees,
Freed discovered, studied the Leader-
ship Principles like Talmudic texts. Dur-
ing his first few years, he occasionally
Bezos, reportedly worth a hundred and fourteen billion dollars, has donated less than three per cent of his wealth to charity.
ILLUSTRATION BY TODD ST. JOHN THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 43
pulled colleagues, and even Bezos, aside
to ask questions. What, for example,
does “leaders are right a lot” really mean?
Bezos explained, “If you have a really
good idea, stick to it, but be flexible on
how you get there. Be stubborn on your
vision but flexible on the details.” Ex-
ecutives at other companies tended to
lay out definitive plans. But Bezos urged
his people to be adaptable. “People who
are right a lot change their mind,” he
once said. “They have the same data
set that they had at the beginning, but
they wake up, and they re-analyze things
all the time, and they come to a new
conclusion, and then they change their
mind.” Freed often felt an impulse to
answer his subordinates’ questions, but
at Amazon leaders are encouraged to
let team members puzzle out problems
on their own.
About a year after joining the com-
pany, Freed became Bezos’s techni-
cal assistant, which gave him entrée
to almost any meeting and provided
a deep education in the company’s
culture. Amazon’s internal processes
were “mechanisms,” Freed learned, as
in “What’s the mechanism for talking
to the press?” Executives were expected
to reduce “complexifiers,” and some-
one who failed to suggest ways to sim-
plify a process might be interrupted
by Bezos asking, “Are you lazy or just
incompetent?”
The Leadership Principles were
never paraphrased; when a question
over wording arose, the
laminated cards were often
whipped out. PowerPoint
was discouraged. Product
proposals had to be writ-
ten out as six-page narra-
tives—Bezos believed that
storytelling forced critical
thinking—accompanied by
a mock press release. Meet-
ings started with a period of
silent reading, and each pro-
posal concluded with a list of F.A.Q.s,
such as “What will most disappoint the
customer on the first day of release?”
Tech companies are often profligate,
but Amazon had an ethic of thrift. Freed
learned to anticipate the eye rolls that
greeted new employees who printed on
just one side of paper, or the admon-
ishment coming to anyone who wanted
to book a business-class seat. When-
44 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
ever Amazon moved to new offices,
Bezos had them furnished with cheap
desks made from wooden doors.
Whereas other tech companies sup-
plied employees with an array of free
meals and snacks, Amazon offered only
coffee and bananas. (In a statement,
Amazon said that it is “frugal on be-
half of our customers.”)
Freed and other Amazonians were
delighted by the company’s quirks.
Bezos amused his colleagues when he
humble-bragged about being such a
sci-fi nerd that he owned a Jean-Luc
Picard uniform from “Star Trek: The
Next Generation.” And staffers loved
it when Amazon offered a promotion,
known as Share the Pi, in which cus-
tomers were given a discount of 1.57
per cent (3.14 divided by two). When
Amazon leaders joined the low-carb
craze, they ended meetings debating
the finer points of ketosis, and raced
one another up the stairs. It wasn’t fair
to call Amazon a cult, but it wasn’t en-
tirely unfair, either. “We never claim
that our approach is the right one,”
Bezos wrote, in a 2016 letter to share-
holders. “Just that it’s ours.”
Above all, Freed loved Amazon’s
focus on spinning its flywheels faster,
and finding new markets where they
could whirl. “Amazon’s culture is de-
signed to prevent bureaucracies,” he
told me. “Everything Jeff does is to
stop a big-company mentality from
taking hold, so that Amazon can con-
tinue behaving like a group
of startups.” Among the
worst sins was doing any-
thing that slowed the com-
pany down. (As the Lead-
ership Principles put it,
“Speed matters.”) Freed
was soon assigned to help
oversee the creation of a
new e-reader, the Kindle.
His team expanded quickly
(“Hire and Develop the
Best”), came up with dozens of con-
cepts and prototypes (“Invent and Sim-
plify”), and, in just a few years, deliv-
ered a device of startling simplicity and
elegance. W hen the Kindle was
launched, in 2007, it sold out in less
than six hours, and soon became one
of the most popular gadgets of the past
quarter century.
As Freed learned, it was also fine to
stumble at Amazon, as long as the ex-
perience yielded strategic insight. After
overseeing the Kindle, Freed was asked
to help lead a team developing the com-
pany’s first smartphone. Bezos had be-
come enamored of a sophisticated dis-
play that approximated 3-D. For four
years, Freed oversaw a group that grew
to a thousand employees, and spent
more than a hundred million dollars.
But when the Amazon Fire Phone was
released, in 2014, it was a flop. No mat-
ter: when Freed had presented an early
prototype of the phone’s software to
Bezos, he’d shown him how it included
voice recognition that could hear, and
then play, any popular song whose title
a user said aloud. “I can ask for any
song?” Bezos asked. “What about ‘Hotel
California’?” The tune began playing.
“This is fantastic,” he said.
A few days after that presentation,
Bezos asked Freed to help build a cloud-
based computer that responded to voice
commands, like the one in “Star Trek.”
Freed started amassing a team that even-
tually reached two hundred people, and
was given a fifty-million-dollar bud-
get. The Fire Phone’s voice-recognition
technology had been licensed from an-
other firm, and wasn’t an exact fit for
what Amazon was seeking. So Freed
and his team hired speech scientists
and artificial-intelligence experts, and
created new software that could com-
prehend someone from Louisiana as
well as someone from Liverpool—and
distinguish the babble of a toddler from
parents talking with food in their
mouths. The team chose a name (and
a “wakeup” word) for the device by con-
sidering hundreds of possibilities, be-
fore landing on Alexa—a name that
was sufficiently familiar yet unusual
enough to avoid too many accidental
commands. Just four months after re-
leasing the disastrous Fire Phone, Freed
revealed the Echo, a voice-activated
speaker that can tell you the weather,
compile a grocery list, remind you to
take a pie out of the oven, and play
“Hotel California.” The initial price
was a hundred and ninety-nine dol-
lars. Today, you can buy one for half
that, and fifty million homes have them.
Around the time of the Echo’s
launch, Amazon wrote off more than
a hundred and seventy million dollars
in costs associated with the Fire Phone.
Bezos told Freed, “You can’t, for one
minute, feel bad about the Fire Phone.
Promise me you won’t lose a minute of
sleep.” By 2015, Freed was a vice-pres-
ident and Amazon was the most valu-
able retailer in the world.
Identifying and building flywheels
became second nature to Freed. When
a junior executive came by his desk with
an idea—“What if we made a streaming
device that you could plug into a tele-
vision?”—Freed invited him to lunch,
coached him through writing a mock
press release, and took him to pitch the
idea to Bezos. They reminded Bezos
that, with existing streaming devices,
searching for content was difficult. “It’s
really hard to type ‘Gene Hackman
movies from the nineteen-seventies’
when you’re using a remote control,”
Freed explained. Amazon’s product, he
said, would allow customers to simply
say what they wanted to watch. The
flywheel began spinning. If Amazon
sold a streaming device, it could col-
lect more data on popular shows; if
Amazon had that data, it could begin
profitably producing its own premium
movies and television series; if Ama-
zon made that content free for Prime
members—customers who already paid
ninety-nine dollars per year for two-
day delivery—then more people would
sign up for Prime; if more people signed
up for Prime, the company would have
greater leverage in negotiating with
UPS and FedEx; lower shipping costs
• •
would mean bigger profits every time
Amazon sold anything on its site. The along the way. In 2006, the company couldn’t otherwise attract much atten-
Amazon Fire TV, as the device was had launched Fulfillment by Amazon, tion on Amazon.com, or ship prod-
named, soon became one of the most an initiative in which outside sellers— ucts inexpensively enough to compete
popular streaming devices on the planet. everyone from mom-and-pop venders with rivals.
Amazon Studios began producing pre- to major Chinese manufacturers— Today, Amazon.com lists more
mium shows, and before long it had housed inventory inside Amazon’s giant than three hundred and thirty million
won two Oscars for “Manchester by warehouses and paid a fee for Ama- products sold by other companies. Scott
the Sea” and eight Emmys for “The zon to handle logistics, such as pack- Needham, whose company, BuyBoxer,
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” In 2017, the ing and shipping products and field- sells about seventy thousand products
number of Amazon Prime subscribers ing customer-service calls. Companies on Amazon, ranging from toys to sport-
surpassed a hundred million. enrolled in Fulfillment by Amazon of- ing goods, paid the company roughly
Although Freed was thriving at ten appeared in the Buy Box, the top twenty million dollars in fees last year.
Amazon, he could see that there was search listing on Amazon.com. To par- “There’s really no other choice,” Need-
something dizzying about its flywheel ticipate, many venders had to pay about ham said. “There’s a lot of things I don’t
mentality. “It was hard,” he said. “That’s two dollars per item. They also had to like about Amazon, but that’s where
the culture—do whatever it takes, even let Bezos collect valuable data on which all the customers are.” Recently, the
if it seems impossible.” Amazon’s ob- products were becoming popular and U.S. House of Representatives and the
session with expansion made it the cor- which companies were having trouble European Union began scrutinizing
porate equivalent of a colonizer, ruth- satisfying demand. Soon, some ven- Fulfillment by Amazon and similar pro-
lessly invading new industries and ders felt as though they had to partic- grams, out of concern that they impede
subjugating many smaller companies ipate in Fulfillment by Amazon; they competition. “Amazon is the gatekeeper,”
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 45

“My situation may not be the greatest, but I’ll tell you
this—I’m worth two of you!”
• •
Needham said. “It makes all the rules.” is digitally tracked and evaluated,
Tim Wu, a law professor at Colum­ meaning that if someone falls behind—
bia, said, “Amazon is a microecono­ even for just a few minutes—it can be
mist’s wet dream. If you’re a consumer, grounds for reprimand. Many employ­
it’s perfect for maximizing the efficiency ees carry handheld scanners that de­
of finding what you want and getting liver a constant stream of instructions,
it as cheap and fast as possible. But, the such as a countdown clock detailing
thing is, most of us aren’t just consum­ how many seconds remain until the
ers. We’re also producers, or manufac­ next item must be plucked from a shelf.
turers, or employees, or we live in cit­ Workers can walk more than fifteen
ies where retailers have gone out of miles a day, and their breaks, includ­
business because they can’t compete ing trips to the bathroom, are brief and
with Amazon, and so Amazon kind of closely measured. A company docu­
pits us against ourselves.” ment explains, “Amazon’s system tracks
the rates of each individual associate’s
reed loved how things whizzed productivity and automatically gener­
F along at Amazon headquarters, but
he understood that the “Speed mat­
ates any warnings or terminations re­
garding quality of productivity with­
ters” credo meant something different out input from supervisors.” A former
at the warehouses. “Is it the role of a warehouse employee told me that she
company to only do what’s best for knew of people who got fired largely
shareholders?” he asked me. “Yes, share­ “because they were too old, or their
holders are critical, but it’s also impor­ knees started acting up, or they just
tant to understand the impact on em­ had a bad week.” She added, “Manag­
ployees.” More than a hundred thousand ers are always vague about what will
people work at Amazon’s fulfillment get you fired, which creates this para­
centers, and nearly everything they do noia.” Employees, she said, sometimes
46 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
ask questions about “what exactly will
get them fired, and the responses are
so vague that you basically know that
if you’re not constantly moving, you’re
probably gone.” Employees line up at
vending machines that dispense free
over­the­counter painkillers. For years,
some Amazon warehouses lacked suf­
ficient air­conditioning; this changed
only after reports emerged, in 2011,
of workers passing out and requiring
emergency medical treatment for heat­
related problems.
William Stolz, who has worked for
two years at an Amazon warehouse in
Shakopee, Minnesota, told me that he’s
expected to grab an item every eight
seconds, and has seen co­workers in­
jure their wrists, knees, shoulders, and
backs by repeatedly kneeling, or by
rushing up and down ladders. “There’s
a constant pressure to hit your num­
bers,” he said. If you get four writeups
within ninety days for falling below the
expected productivity rate, you will be
fired. Stolz said, “I’ve seen people who
aren’t even thirty years old get injuries
they’re going to have for the rest of
their lives, but whenever we ask for the
speed of work or the repetitive motions
to be changed we’re told that’s not going
to happen.”
When Safiyo Mohamed moved from
Somalia to Minnesota, in 2016, at the
age of twenty­two, she found work at
the Shakopee warehouse, sorting prod­
ucts and moving boxes on and off con­
veyors. The job was taxing and the pres­
sure relentless, she said. One day, when
she picked up a heavy box, she tore an
intervertebral disk in her back. The
pain was excruciating, but Amazon
didn’t offer her time off; her managers
seemed not to care. “If you can’t work
all the time, you are nothing to them,”
she said. A doctor told her that the in­
jury was pinching a nerve, and that the
discomfort might never abate. She quit
Amazon, and got an office job that al­
lows her to pause, or stretch, when her
back hurts. “How am I going to have
a baby when I can’t pick him up, when
I’m worried about being pregnant?”
Mohamed said. “I’m so angry. Amazon
doesn’t want humans, they want robots.
I will have this forever because of them.
They don’t care at all.”
At Amazon’s corporate headquar­
ters, many executives’ performances are
similarly quantified and ranked. “It can
be a hard place for women,” a former
executive told me. “If you have a kid,
it’s a disadvantage to your career, un-
less your husband is the primary par-
ent.” (Amazon said, in a statement, that
it “disagrees strongly with this perspec-
tive,” and noted that it offers twenty
weeks of paid parental leave.) A for-
mer senior female executive told me
she counselled younger colleagues that
“it’s not the company’s job to create a
work-life balance—it’s your job,” add-
ing, “The idea of a company as a care-
taker is not our culture.” There is only
one woman on Amazon’s S-Team, the
group of eighteen executives who largely
run the firm. The lack of female rep-
resentation is a sensitive topic at the
company. A current high-ranking ex-
ecutive told me, “I’m not sure it would
be any different for a woman at an in-
vestment bank or a big law firm. The
pace is fast, yes, and it’s not for every-
one or every stage of life, but these are
highly compensated people who know
they can easily get other jobs. No one
works at Amazon—at least, in corpo-
rate—unless they want to.”
Amazon argues that criticisms of
working conditions in its warehouses
are unfair. Dave Clark, the senior
vice-president for worldwide opera-
tions, told me that work expectations
at its facilities “are very achievable for
folks.” He said that the company has
increasingly automated its warehouses,
to ease physical tasks. “We make mis-
takes,” Clark said. “And, when we do
hear about it, we learn from it, and we
go out and fix it.” Amazon pays all
U.S.-based employees at least fifteen
dollars an hour—more than the min-
imum wage in many places—and full-
time warehouse workers have access to
the same health and retirement plans
as executives. A company statement
noted that workers at Amazon begin
and end every shift with a short meet-
ing and a group stretching session; it
also said that employee performance
is evaluated over extended periods, not-
ing, “We would never dismiss an em-
ployee without first ensuring that they
had received our fullest support, in-
cluding dedicated coaching.”
Many Amazon executives have be-
come defensive about the fact that even
centrist politicians like Joe Biden see
the company as a symbol of capitalism
gone awry. (On Twitter, Biden recently
said of Amazon, “No company pulling
in billions of dollars of profits should
pay a lower tax rate than firefighters
and teachers.”) Jeff Wilke, one of
Bezos’s top lieutenants, told me that
Amazon “tries to be a good corporate
citizen,” and added, “We’ve built a for-
profit enterprise that is improving the
lives of customers and taking great care
of employees. There’s a lot to be proud
of.” The company, he said, has com-
mitted to spending seven hundred mil-
lion dollars to train its workers in such
subjects as coding and robotics. One
senior Amazon executive said of its
warehouses, “It’s a hard economy for
people without college degrees right
now. We can’t run a philanthropy, but
we’re trying to be the best of those bad
kinds of jobs.” Another top executive
suggested that Amazon was merely a
cog in the American economic ma-
chine—and inevitably reflected how
contemporary inequality had created
winners and losers. “We’re doing what
we can,” he said. “But ultimately this
is a problem only the government can
really solve—by changing how the econ-
omy works.”
Amazon has always been unabashed
about being a cutthroat competitor.
When the company started, in 1995,
with fewer than a dozen employees,
Bezos considered naming it
Relentless. (The company
still owns the URL for re-
lentless.com—it redirects
you to Amazon.com.) Am-
azonians know that outsid-
ers want them to change,
but listening to outsiders is
not one of the Leadership
Principles. One executive
told me, with barely sup-
pressed resentment, “What
has made us great for so long is sud-
denly being seen as something we ought
to be ashamed of !”
n 1913, an employee of the Ford Motor
I Company went to the Swift & Co.
meatpacking plant, in Chicago, to study
how hogs moved through the facility
on conveyor belts while butchers stayed
in place, making the same cut again
and again. Someone prepared the car-
cass; another person cut the left haunch;
another was responsible for incisions
along the shoulder. The knives never
stopped moving as the animals sped
through the plant. When the Ford em-
ployee returned to headquarters, he told
his colleagues, “If they can kill pigs and
cows that way, we can build cars that
way.” The man’s boss, Henry Ford, a
lifelong tinkerer, had developed a rad-
ical new product: an automobile, with
an inexpensive internal-combustion en-
gine, that could be manufactured in a
couple of days and sold for less than a
thousand dollars. When Ford manag-
ers heard about the meatpacking plant,
they began work on another major
innovation: the mechanized assembly
line. Within four years, Ford’s plants
could manufacture a car in less than
two hours and sell it for about four
hundred dollars.
In 1918, a man named Alfred P. Sloan
began working as an executive at a much
smaller company, General Motors. Sloan
wasn’t especially interested in automo-
biles. He loved making money—and
figuring out how to manage people
in order to make profits grow faster.
Once installed at G.M., Sloan staged a
coup by way of a memo, “Organization
Study,” which eventually reoriented the
firm around himself and a set of foun-
dational credos that included five “objec-
tives.” A chart of eighty-nine boxes con-
nected by a blizzard of lines mapped out
each executive’s place in the
hierarchy. It was the first
org chart of its kind. Sloan’s
theory was that G.M. could
codify the processes that
delivered information up
to headquarters and guid-
ance down to managers. “If
the whole General Motors
central organization should
be hit by an atomic bomb,
Pontiac could go on just ex-
actly the same,” Sloan boasted to a re-
porter. Soon, the company had standard
procedures for budgeting, hiring, firing,
prototyping, promoting, and resolv-
ing disputes. Within this rigid frame-
work, executives were given the free-
dom to be creative; G.M. essentially
became the first company to segment
the automobile market, selling Chev-
rolets to the middle class and Cadillacs
to the wealthy.
When Sloan joined the company,
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 47
G.M. was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Within a decade, it had outpaced Ford,
becoming the nation’s largest carmaker,
and for the next eighty years it dom­
inated the auto business and, even­
tually, a wide variety of other indus­
tries. Sloan’s systems made G.M. one
of the country’s biggest loan finan­
ciers and a powerful real­estate in­
vestor, and placed it among the largest
manufacturers of refrigerators, indus­
trial magnets, home appliances, aero­
nautic equipment, military gear, and
medical equipment. In 1952, G.M.
made the first mechanical heart. Sloan
launched a sophisticated corporate
polling division—another first—that
uncovered customer tastes that other
companies had overlooked; the R. & D.
department used this information to
create new products. The same play­
book that dreamed up Cadillac’s space­
age tail fins was soon designing sleek
Frigidaire iceboxes. G.M., in other
words, was adept at creating flywheels.
It sold plenty of cars, but, unlike Ford,
it wasn’t a product company—it was a
process company.
Silicon Valley is filled with prod­
uct companies. Google invented two
products—a spectacular search en­
gine and a set of algorithms for match­
ing people’s online behavior to ads—
that today deliver eighty­five per cent
of its revenue. Facebook invented (and
acquired) addictive social­media prod­
ucts and then basically imitated Goo­
gle’s ad­matching algorithms, and gets
ninety­eight per cent of its revenue from
those products.
Amazon is a process company. Last
year, it collected a hundred and twenty­
two billion dollars from online retail
sales, and another forty­two billion
by helping other firms sell and ship
their own goods. The company col­
lected twenty­six billion dollars from
its Web­services division, which has
little to do with selling things to con­
sumers, and fourteen billion more from
people who sign up for such subscrip­
tion services as Amazon Prime or Kin­
dle Unlimited. Amazon is estimated
to have taken in hundreds of mil­
lions of dollars from selling the Echo.
Seventeen billion came from sales at
such brick­and­mortar stores as Whole
Foods. And then there’s ten billion
from ad sales and other activities too
numerous to list in financial filings.
No other tech company does as many
unrelated things, on such a scale, as
Amazon.
Amazon is special not because of
any asset or technology but because
of its culture—its Leadership Princi­
ples and internal habits. Bezos refers
to the company’s management style
as Day One Thinking: a willingness
to treat every morning as if it were the
first day of business, to constantly reëx­
amine even the most closely held be­
liefs. “Day Two is stasis,” Bezos wrote,
in a 2017 letter to shareholders. “Fol­
lowed by irrelevance. Followed by ex­
cruciating, painful decline. Followed
by death. And that is why it is always
Day One.”
For many entrepreneurs, Amazon
has been a godsend. David Ashley,
who sells handcrafted address signs
from Jackson, Mississippi, told me,
“We probably wouldn’t be in business
without Amazon.” The 2008 reces­
sion almost killed Ashley’s small com­
pany. Then he began selling his signs
on Amazon and discovered that—
for forty dollars a month and fifteen
per cent of each sale—Amazon would
handle such tasks as processing credit­
card transactions, identifying poten­
tial customers, and helping to insure
that products were delivered on time.
“But the biggest thing is that people
trust Amazon,” Ashley said. “And so
they trust us.” More than 1.9 million
small businesses in the United States
take advantage of Amazon’s services.
Last year, nearly two hundred thou­
sand sellers earned at least a hundred
thousand dollars each on the site.
Other retailers, however, don’t share
Ashley’s enthusiasm. When David
Kahan became the chief executive of
Birkenstock Americas, in 2013, he began
to discover how thoroughly Amazon
had changed his industry. Kahan had
started his career as a shoe salesman
at Macy’s; he went on to become a
sales manager at Nike and, eventually,
a top executive at Reebok. Birkenstocks
have been made by hand, in Germany,
for two hundred and forty­five years—
thirty­two workers touch every pair.
When Kahan became C.E.O., Ama­
zon was among the company’s top three
shoe sellers. “They sold millions of dol­
lars’ worth of our shoes,” Kahan told
me. “But during my first year I was sit-
ting in my office, where I can hear the
customer-service department, and we
were getting a flood of people saying
their shoes were falling apart, or they
were defective, or they were clearly
counterfeits, and, every time the rep
asked where they had been purchased,
the customer said Amazon.”
Kahan investigated, and found that
numerous companies were selling coun-
terfeit or unauthorized Birkenstocks
on Amazon; many were using Fulfill-
ment by Amazon to ship their prod-
ucts, which caused them to appear
prominently in search results. “We
would ask Amazon to take sellers
down—or, at least, tell us who is coun-
terfeiting—but they said they couldn’t
divulge private information,” Kahan
told me.
Kahan also discovered that Ama-
zon had started buying enormous num-
bers of Birkenstocks to resell on the
site. The company had amassed more
than a year’s worth of inventory. “That
was terrifying, because it meant we
could totally lose control of our brand,”
he said. “What if Amazon decides to
start selling the shoes for ninety-nine
cents, or to give them away with Prime
membership, or do a buy-one-get-one-
free campaign? It would completely
destroy how people see our shoes, and
our only power to prevent something
like that is to cut off a retailer’s supply.
But Amazon had a year’s worth of in-
ventory. We were powerless.”
Kahan spent months trying to ne-
gotiate with Amazon executives in Se-
attle. At the Birkenstock Americas
office, in Marin County, California, he
and his deputies would spend hours
preparing arguments about why stop-
ping unauthorized sellers would help
Amazon’s customers, and then they’d
crowd around Kahan’s desk and turn
on the speakerphone. Sometimes the
Amazon executives would let them go
on; other times, they’d cut them off
midsentence. It wasn’t Amazon’s place
to decide who could and couldn’t sell
on the site, the executives explained,
as long as simple guidelines were met.
“They basically didn’t care,” Kahan
said. “We’re just one company, and
there’s millions of companies they deal
with every day. But this is the biggest
thing on earth for us. Amazon is the
shopping mall now, and, normally, if
you open a store in a shopping mall,
you can expect certain things—like
the mall operator will clean the hall-
ways, and they’ll make sure Foot
Locker isn’t right next door to Pay-
less, and if someone sets up a kiosk in
front of your store and starts selling
fake Air Jordans, they’ll
kick them off the prop-
erty.” He continued, “But
Amazon is the Wild West.
There’s hardly any rules,
except everyone has to pay
Amazon a percentage, and
you have to swallow what
they give you and you can’t
complain.”
Hundreds of other com-
panies have told Amazon
about counterfeiting or what they see
as unfair competition—some of it gen-
erated by Amazon itself. In the early
two-thousands, a San Francisco firm
named Rain Design began selling an
aluminum laptop stand that had a
graceful curve, and it became an un-
expected best-seller on Amazon. Am-
azon then released its own stand, with
a nearly identical design, under the
brand AmazonBasics, at half the price.
Rain Design’s sales fell. In 2016, Wil-
liams-Sonoma had started selling a
low-backed mid-century-modern chair
called the Orb. A year later, Amazon re-
leased an almost identical chair, which
they also called the Orb. Last Decem-
ber, Williams-Sonoma filed a lawsuit
claiming that “Amazon has unfairly
and deceptively engaged in a wide-
spread campaign of copying.” Earlier
this year, a judge denied Amazon’s mo-
tion to dismiss the case, ruling that the
company might be “cultivating the in-
correct impression” that ersatz products
were authorized by Williams-Sonoma.
Critics say that Amazon uses the
torrent of data it collects each day—
how long a customer’s cursor hovers
over various products, how much of a
price drop triggers a purchase—to di-
vine which products are poised to be-
come blockbusters, and then copies
them. In July, the E.U. announced an
investigation into whether Amazon
uses “sensitive data from independent
retailers who sell on its marketplace”
to unfairly promote its own goods, or
to create imitation products. Europe’s
top competition regulator, Margrethe
Vestager, told me that Amazon is “host-
ing thousands and thousands of smaller
businesses, but at the same time it is a
competitor to them.” She added, “This
deserves much more scrutiny.”
In a statement, Amazon said that
many other retailers also produce their
own versions of best-sell-
ing items, that such goods
make up only one per cent
of Amazon’s sales, and that
Rain Design’s stands con-
tinue to sell well, despite
competition from Ama-
zon’s stand—which, it in-
sists, isn’t a replica. The
company added that it does
not use “data about individ-
ual sellers to decide which
products to launch.” (Company insid-
ers, however, told me that Amazon does
use aggregate data from multiple sell-
ers to make such decisions.)
Kahan, of Birkenstock, eventually
decided to take extreme measures. He
announced that his firm would no lon-
ger sell shoes on Amazon, and he sent
a letter to retailers declaring that if they
listed Birkenstock products on Ama-
zon they would be “severing” their
“relationship with our company.” Ac-
cording to Kahan, Amazon began con-
tacting authorized retailers, inviting
them to sell their supply of Birken-
stocks to the site. Kahan wrote to his
retailers, “To me, the solicitation is quite
frankly a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’ . . .
I take their desperate act as a per-
sonal affront and as an assault on
decency. . . . Amazon can’t get Birken-
stock by legitimate means so why not
dangle a carrot in front of retailers who
can make a quick buck.”
Kahan’s outrage hardly mattered.
Today, despite Birkenstock’s refusal to
do business with Amazon, there are
numerous resellers—some overseas,
others with names that obscure their
true identities—offering Birkenstocks
on Amazon. Kahan has no idea who
these resellers are, and Amazon won’t
tell him. Birkenstock requires authorized
retailers to charge roughly a hundred
and thirty-five dollars for its classic Ar-
izona sandal. On October 8th, Arizo-
nas were going on Amazon for as lit-
tle as fifty dollars—which is great for
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 49
customers looking for cheap shoes but
potentially disastrous for Birkenstock,
which relies on those higher prices to
pay for marketing, product design, and
the salaries of customer-service em-
ployees (who replace defective shoes
for free).
Amazon says that it has spent
hundreds of millions of dollars on
anti-counterfeiting efforts, includ-
ing machine-learning technology that
identifies suspicious items. Neverthe-
less, the site remains full of dubious
products. A recent investigation by
the Wall Street Journal identified thou-
sands of products for sale on Ama-
zon that “have been declared unsafe
by federal agencies, are deceptively la-
beled or are banned by federal regu-
lators,” including children’s toys con-
taining dangerous levels of lead. Many
of these products were shipped from
Amazon warehouses, some through
the Fulfillment by Amazon program.
And Birkenstock’s customer-service
department still gets calls from cus-
tomers who bought fake sandals on
Amazon and expect Birkenstock to
provide a refund.
Amazon says that it cannot accom-
modate the demands of Birkenstock
and other companies that wish to “limit
availability of competitively priced
products.” In a statement, Amazon said
that it is not its role to decide who is,
and is not, authorized to sell various
items. Amazon isn’t a mall, a current
executive told me. He described it as
a Web site that offers unlimited shelf
space for an almost unlimited number
of products and sellers. Some might
call this a platform. Other tech giants,
such as Facebook and Twitter, describe
themselves as platforms, partly as a
way of justifying spotty oversight of
their sites.
Kahan told me that, with the rise of
Amazon, the give-and-take that has
long undergirded the retail economy
has become lopsided in a titan’s favor.
“Capitalism is supposed to be a system
of checks and balances,” he said. “It’s a
marketplace where everyone haggles
until we’re all basically satisfied, and it
works because you can always threaten
to walk away if you don’t get a fair deal.
But when there’s only one marketplace,
and it’s impossible to walk away, ev-
erything is out of balance. Amazon
50 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
PITTSBURGH
isn’t there anymore
rode by it
on the gray horse and instead
a place where they go sick
a place of only mist
To properly understand the twelve
Pittsburghs of the heart
but nothing to grasp or die for
and when the adults told me to cry
I sang on the uneven riser that swirls
like northern lights in the ear
In 1955
my mother’s father, a steelworker,
was shot and killed in his hotel
intervening in an attempted abduction
the shooter “crazed and lovesick” according
to his mother
my mother only met him
a few times, the last time
shortly before the murder, she said
she took a train.
In the testimony of another tenant
his face, after he staggered
out of the apartment, had “an iron color.”
He fell into her arms. “I was
holding him, trying to help,” she said.
“But he was dead.” The kidnapper
escaped with his ex
and they drove the outskirts of Pittsburgh
Tarentum, Aspinwall, Turtle Creek
all night
before she talked him into turning
himself in at dawn
owns the marketplace. They can do dozens of questions about Bezos’s in-
whatever they want. That’s not capi- volvement with Lauren Sanchez, a he-
talism. That’s piracy.” licopter pilot who had founded a com-
pany, Black Ops Aviation, that filmed
n January 7, 2019, as public criti- promotional videos for Bezos’s rocket
O cism of Amazon’s excesses grew
louder, Jeff Bezos received an e-mail
company, Blue Origin. Reporters for
the Enquirer had been trailing Bezos
from Dylan Howard, the chief con- and Sanchez for months, the e-mail in-
tent officer of American Media, the dicated, photographing them in hotels
parent company of the National En- and at airports, and compiling a dos-
quirer. “I write to request an interview sier of trysts. Bezos and Sanchez were
with you about your love affair,” the both married, and the Enquirer was
message began. Howard then asked prepared to expose it all.
 ticed, and he often attended events
without MacKenzie. Now the En-
clouds are in a composition useful quirer was accusing Bezos and San-
to fill space around the invisible chez of hiding their assignations from
in moonlight the murderer MacKenzie and from Sanchez’s hus-
and the owl who buries and the bull who rings band, Patrick Whitesell, a powerful tal-
ent agent whom Bezos had socialized
drove rural Allegheny County with as Amazon expanded into Holly-
wood. A former American Media ex-
stopped at midnight for hot dogs and milk ecutive said of the Enquirer investiga-
according to the transcript tion, “It was a kind of weird story for
of the trial us. Enquirer readers don’t really care
heard the luminous about C.E.O.s. But everyone was all
processes of the dashboard worked up and excited about it—cack-
ling about blackmail and dick pics. It
I suppose he sang was like the unpopular kids had finally
like a scarf found something embarrassing about
gone out long behind the quarterback.”
like magnetism Two days after Bezos received How-
ard’s e-mail, he posted a message on
like thorn bushes Twitter. “We want to make people aware
of a development in our lives,” he wrote,
like wind in a note co-signed by MacKenzie. “Af-
around a highway sign ter a long period of loving exploration
he went up and and trial separation, we have decided
asked if anyone was dead again to divorce and continue our shared lives
why they have to as friends.” Hours later, the Enquirer
assert themselves started publishing articles about the
even after we told them about sorrow affair, making reference to “sleazy pho-
think my grandfather’s ghost rode tos” and “X-rated selfies” exchanged by
alongside them eleven miles Bezos and Sanchez. The tabloid quoted
some texts that he had sent her—“I
peering in want to smell you”—which suggested
before departing that his or her phone had been com-
promised. But the tabloid did not end
who wasn’t with him the night he was killed up publishing racy photographs; it ran
mundane images of Bezos and San-
like hearing a stranger’s headphones chez, some of which had already ap-
in the spirit of cancelled flight and a storm coming peared online. According to the for-
she missed mer American Media executive, the
the beard he was growing publication might not actually have
we put our gods in clouds had explicit images. “If we had pics of
we hide in clouds Jeff Bezos’s dick, I would have seen
—Ed Skoog them,” the former executive told me.
“That’s standard operating procedure—
you pass them around. But whenever
Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, a spirational. Like, if they could stay to- I asked I was told, ‘Well, we don’t ac-
novelist, had been together for twenty- gether and keep their family sane, with tually have them here right now.’ I was,
seven years. When executives went to all the work and money and stress, then like, ‘You’re bluffing the richest man in
their house for weekend meetings, it the rest of us could, too.” the world?’ ” (A representative of the
wasn’t unusual to see them reading the Around the time that Bezos became Enquirer said that the publication had
newspaper together or helping their the world’s richest man, his life style “acted lawfully and stands by the ac-
kids with homework. “They seemed to changed. He appeared on television curacy of its reporting.”)
have the perfect marriage,” a former at the Academy Awards. He bought a Marriages break up all the time, yet
Amazon executive told me. “I once saw mansion in Beverly Hills, and he threw many of Bezos’s colleagues felt disori-
them get out of the car at our holiday a party co-hosted by Matt Damon. He ented by the fact that he had been so
party, when they thought no one was was following an intense weight-train- undisciplined as to let his personal life
looking, and hold each other’s hand. It ing and diet regimen. He was in Se- become tabloid fodder. “The basis of
was that kind of relationship, real in- attle less frequently, employees no- Jeff ’s stature was a lot of things, but
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 51
integrity was No. 1,” a former colleague
told me. “The way he dealt with his
family, and customers, and the people
around him—that was at the core of
why we respected him so much. And
then this thing happened, and it was
so hard to make that fit into the pic-
ture of the person we knew.” Even
Bezos’s friends were concerned. “It
was like Jeff had been ab-
ducted by aliens and re-
placed,” one told me. “It’d
been going on for about a
year—the bodybuilding
stuff, and Hollywood, and
just a big change in how
he was—and then this
came out, and I still don’t
know how to process it.”
Once Bezos’s affair be-
came public, more main-
stream publications began digging
around. When the Wall Street Journal
prepared a story about how Bezos’s
divorce might affect his company,
Amazon’s P.R. department, which had
been known for using mild language,
responded acidly. The company’s
communications and policy chief, Jay
Carney, told the paper, “I didn’t real-
ize the Wall Street Journal trafficked
in warmed-over drivel from super-
market tabloids.” Meanwhile, Bezos
launched an internal audit of his cell-
phone data. If someone had gained ac-
cess to his private texts, what else had
been collected? E-mails? Business
plans? Bezos ordered his personal head
of security, the consultant Gavin de
Becker, to scrutinize electronic records
and to conduct interviews. Was the
breach part of a sophisticated attack
whose purpose was larger than simply
to embarrass Bezos?
ezos had plenty of enemies, and
B not just aggrieved companies like
Birkenstock. For years, he had been
battling various groups, from pro-
union organizers to activists critical
of Amazon’s tax practices, and some
of the clashes had been nasty. Labor
organizers had been a particular source
of conflict. In 2000, when the Com-
munication Workers of America tried
to unionize four hundred of Amazon’s
customer-service representatives in
Seattle, the company closed down the
call center where those employees
52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
worked, as part of what it said was a
broader reorganization. In 2014, when
a group of technicians at an Amazon
warehouse in Delaware petitioned the
National Labor Relations Board to
allow them to vote on whether to
unionize, Amazon hired a law firm
that specialized in fighting organized
labor, and held meetings warning that
unionization could be bad
for workers’ jobs. Employ-
ees voted against joining
the union. According to
the Times, when other
workers in Delaware tried
to unionize, their manager
gave an emotional speech
about his youth: after his
father had died, steps from
his front door, the union
had offered no support.
The speech apparently worked—em-
ployees did not authorize a union
vote. After the speech, outside or-
ganizers found an obituary of the
man’s father: he had been a partner
at an insurance agency, not a union
member, and had died while jog-
ging, on vacation in South Carolina.
After Amazon bought Whole Foods,
in 2017, and workers began exploring
unionization, store managers report-
edly received a video explaining that
“you might need to talk about how
having a union could hurt innovation,
which could hurt customer obsession,
which could ultimately threaten the
building’s continued existence.” The
union push stalled.
Dave Clark, the senior vice-presi-
dent for worldwide operations, told me
that Amazon already provides many of
the benefits that a union would de-
mand, and so “there’s really no reason
to put an interstitial layer between em-
ployees’ ability to directly come tell
their manager that something is bro-
ken.” Amazon, in a statement, said that
it complies with the National Labor
Relations Act, and that any member
of the public can sign up for a free tour
of its warehouses. “Our direct connec-
tion with our people is the most valu-
able way to run the business,” Clark
said. “It’s the fastest way to run the
business. It’s the most innovative way
to run the business.” He added, “I can’t
see how unions add any value to our
current operations.”
Groups unrelated to organized labor
also had an incentive to embarrass
Bezos. In 2018, when Seattle’s city coun-
cil, facing a homelessness crisis, unan-
imously passed a measure that would
have required the city’s largest compa-
nies to pay a tax of two hundred and
seventy-five dollars per local worker to
build homeless shelters and affordable
housing, Amazon balked. The law
would have initially cost Amazon less
than twenty million dollars per year, at
a time when its annual revenue ex-
ceeded two hundred and thirty billion
dollars. Before it passed, Amazon an-
nounced that it had halted construc-
tion on a new tower in Seattle and was
reconsidering an expansion into seven
hundred thousand square feet that it
had leased. A company spokesperson
implicitly blamed the tax for these
shifts, telling local reporters that Am-
azon was “apprehensive about the fu-
ture created by the council’s hostile
approach and rhetoric toward larger
businesses.” Amazon donated twen-
ty-five thousand dollars to No Tax on
Jobs, a group opposing the initiative.
The tax’s supporters pushed back, ac-
cusing Bezos and others of being “O.K.
with the city having shantytowns and
favelas,” but within a month the city
council surrendered, and repealed the
tax measure. “This is not a winnable
battle at this time,” one councillor ex-
plained. “The opposition has unlim-
ited resources.” Seattle’s homeless pop-
ulation rose four per cent that year. The
city has the third-largest population of
homeless residents in the nation.
Activists have also noted that Bezos
is much less philanthropic than many
of his peers. Among America’s top five
billionaires, he is the only one who has
not signed the Giving Pledge—a pro-
gram, created by Bill Gates and War-
ren Buffett, that encourages the world’s
wealthiest citizens to give away at least
half their wealth.
Amazon, meanwhile, has drawn par-
ticular criticism for its approach to fed-
eral taxes. Financial filings show that
Amazon likely paid no U.S. federal in-
come tax in 2018. The company re-
ported a negative federal-tax charge on
$11.2 billion in profits, in part because
it received tax benefits by paying em-
ployees in stock rather than in wages,
giving it a $1.1-billion deduction, and
because of research-and-development lead Jeff threatened to leave. It’s how be counted among decent men.” Soon
credits that yielded a four-hundred- he sees the world.” afterward, G.M. agreed to recognize
and-nineteen-million-dollar tax break. Every billionaire has critics and en- the union.
Most large tech firms avail themselves emies, but, when the Enquirer pub- In 1937, the Treasury Secretary ac-
of similar opportunities—and Ama- lished Bezos’s secrets, people close to cused Sloan of “moral fraud”—“the de-
zon, unlike Apple or Google, doesn’t him wondered if the disclosure might feat of taxes through doubtful legal de-
transfer profits to foreign countries, be part of a gambit to embarrass him vices.” Sloan insisted that he’d actually
thus avoiding U.S. taxes. However, the and weaken him at, say, the union bar- paid sixty per cent of his income from
company’s low reported tax bill has in- gaining table, or to force him to change the previous year in taxes, and given
furiated its detractors on the left. In his philanthropic habits. Such tactics half of what remained to charity, but
one of several criticisms levelled at Am- have a surprising history of success. the attack further blighted his reputa-
azon in a recent Democratic debate, When Alfred Sloan and G.M. were tion. Eventually, Sloan caved. He do-
Andrew Yang said that Amazon was fighting labor unions and tax foes, in nated fifteen per cent of his wealth—
closing “America’s stores and malls and the nineteen-thirties, the company’s the modern equivalent of a hundred
paying zero in taxes while doing it.” critics began providing tabloids with and eighty million dollars—to fund
(Amazon says that last year it paid $1.2 photographs of G.M. executives en- the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and he
billion in income taxes globally, but de- joying their luxury sailboats and ca- eventually gave hundreds of millions of
clines to disclose how much it has paid vorting with showgirls. In 1936, the dollars more to universities and other
in the U.S.) United Auto Workers staged a weeks- organizations.
Some of Bezos’s close friends and long sitdown strike in Flint, Michi- Bezos, who is reportedly worth a
colleagues say that Amazon’s tightfist- gan, and labor activists smuggled gos- hundred and fourteen billion dollars,
edness reflects his political leanings. sip about Sloan to reporters. Walter has so far donated less than three per
“Jeff is a libertarian,” a close acquain- Lippman soon declared that Sloan was cent of his wealth to charity. Three
tance, who has known Bezos for de- a “bungling” menace. When Sloan re- months after the homelessness-tax in-
cades, told me. “He’s donated money fused to meet with union representa- cident, he pulled a Sloan-like move: he
to support gay marriage and donated tives, the Secretary of Labor, Frances announced the launch of a two-billion-
to defeat taxes because that’s his basic Perkins, took him to task publicly, yell- dollar foundation named the Bezos
outlook—the government shouldn’t ing at him, “You are a scoundrel and a Day One Fund. Since then, it has given
be in our bedrooms or our pocket- skunk, Mr. Sloan! You don’t deserve to grants to advocates for the homeless,
books.” One of Bezos’s earliest public
donations was to the Reason Founda-
tion, a libertarian think tank and pub-
lisher. In 2013, he bought the Wash-
ington Post and invested heavily in its
editorial operations, which remain in-
dependent; the effort has helped re-
store the paper’s journalistic lustre (and
expanded its readership). Yet he also
froze the company’s pension plan—a
move that offered no real financial
benefit to Bezos, given that the plan
was already significantly overfunded—
leaving some Post employees with the
prospect of fewer benefits when they
retired. Fredrick Kunkle, a reporter
who is part of the newsroom’s union
leadership, said of Bezos, “He doesn’t
think companies have obligations to
employees beyond paying wages while
they work.” Bezos’s close acquaintance
agrees: “There’s an empathy gap there,
something that makes it hard for him
to see his obligations to other people.
Seattle is filled with businesspeople—
Gates and the Costco founders and
the Boeing leadership—who have in-
vested in this city. But the one time
Amazon could have pitched in, on the
homelessness tax, instead of taking the “Oh, God—I can finally do laundry!”
and it is creating a network of Mon-
tessori-inspired preschools in low-in-
come communities.
Fortunately for Bezos, the labor
movement does not have as much
power as it did in Sloan’s day. When,
earlier this year, Amazon cancelled
its plans to open a second headquar-
ters, in New York City, in part be-
cause of disputes with local unions,
some politicians, rather than attack-
ing Amazon, blamed the unions for
scuttling the deal. In an open letter,
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget
director wrote, “Some labor unions
attempted to exploit Amazon’s New
York entry. . . . The union that opposed
the project gained nothing and cost
other union members 11,000 good,
high-paying jobs.” Amazon currently
has more than a hundred and fifty
warehouses, and many of them are in
economically depressed areas, where
employment is scarce and politicians
and workers are less likely to com-
plain. Emily Guendelsberger, a jour-
nalist who briefly worked in an Am-
azon warehouse in 2015, said, “People
really want those jobs. It’s gruelling,
miserable work—I was taking Advil
like candy. But one woman told me
she drove an hour each way because
Amazon paid more than the pizza
place in her home town.”
Some economists say that focussing
on Amazon’s miserliness or on the con-
ditions inside its warehouses obscures
larger, more positive truths. Michael
Mandel, an economist at
the Progressive Policy In-
stitute, told me, “These are
hard jobs, no one disputes
that. They are definitely
harder than office jobs, and
they are harder than work-
ing in a clothing store or
at a movie theatre. But
wages in clothing stores
have been declining for
forty years, and wages have
also gone down in manufacturing, and
what I see is Amazon creating tens of
thousands of jobs that pay thirty per
cent more than competitors, that offer
real benefits, that help high-school
graduates get skills they need. Even-
tually, workers will demand that Am-
azon’s pie gets divided more evenly. But
the only reason we’re even having this
54 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
conversation is because Amazon has
been expanding the pie for the people
left behind.”
avin de Becker concluded that
G the National Enquirer’s publica-
tion of Bezos’s personal data was in-
deed intended to serve political ends—
but he didn’t blame Amazon’s critics
on the left. De Becker began speak-
ing with reporters, claiming that he
had evidence that the Enquirer’s re-
porting was “politically motivated.” He
eventually claimed that the exposé was
related to Bezos’s ownership of the
Washington Post.
In March, de Becker laid out his ac-
cusations in the Daily Beast. “Our in-
vestigators and several experts con-
cluded with high confidence that the
Saudis had access to Bezos’s phone, and
gained private information,” de Becker
wrote, alleging that there were links
between the hacking and a conspiracy
related to the 2018 murder of the Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi, inside a
Saudi consulate in Turkey. “The Saudi
government has been intent on harm-
ing Jeff Bezos since last October, when
the Post began its relentless coverage
of Khashoggi’s murder,” de Becker
wrote. Now the Saudi government, with
help from the Enquirer, was “trying to
strong-arm an American citizen.” Pre-
cisely why the Saudis wanted Bezos’s
selfies, and what they hoped to accom-
plish by passing them to a tabloid,
de Becker did not say. (Nobody con-
nected to the internal in-
vestigation would discuss
in detail any of its findings.)
De Becker, in his article,
pointed out that in recent
years the Enquirer had be-
come overtly political. It
was so closely aligned with
Donald Trump that, dur-
ing the 2016 Presidential
race, its publisher paid hush
money to silence one of
the candidate’s alleged mistresses.
When the Enquirer’s stories on Bezos
appeared, President Trump—who has
accused Bezos of buying the Post to
wield political influence and keep Am-
azon’s taxes low—tweeted, “So sorry
to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being
taken down by a competitor whose re-
porting, I understand, is far more ac-
curate than the reporting in his lobby-
ist newspaper, the Amazon Washing-
ton Post.”
Reporters at mainstream publica-
tions found little evidence to substan-
tiate de Becker’s claims. The Enquirer,
which was having financial difficulties,
was wary of getting drawn into a pos-
sibly expensive political fight. (It was
easy to imagine subpoenas coming from
Capitol Hill.) The publication strenu-
ously denied de Becker’s accusations.
The former American Media execu-
tive said, “We were hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars in debt, our hedge-fund
owner was getting freaked out, and it
was, like, what’s the endgame here?
This had been a bad idea from the be-
ginning. They wanted out.”
A representative of American Media
sent a private communication to Bezos:
if he would release a statement saying
that he had “no knowledge or basis for
the suggestion” that American Media’s
“coverage was politically motivated or
influenced by political forces,” Ameri-
can Media would agree “not to pub-
lish, distribute, share or describe un-
published texts and photos.” In a
separate letter, Dylan Howard, the
American Media chief content officer,
described images that he claimed to
have, among them a “below the belt
selfie—otherwise colloquially known
as a ‘d*ck pick.’”The company provided
no evidence of having such photographs.
(Their existence has never been verified.)
“It would give no editor pleasure to
send this email,” Howard wrote to
Bezos’s representatives. “I hope com-
mon sense can prevail.”
Howard’s strategy backfired. Bezos
posted the tabloid’s correspondence on
the Web site Medium, alongside an
open letter. “Rather than capitulate to
extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided
to publish exactly what they sent me,
despite the personal cost and embar-
rassment they threaten,” he explained.
(The letter was written by Bezos and
edited by his lawyers.) “It’s unavoid-
able that certain powerful people who
experience Washington Post news cov-
erage will wrongly conclude I am their
enemy. . . . If in my position I can’t
stand up to this kind of extortion, how
many people can? . . . I don’t want per-
sonal photos published, but I also won’t
participate in their well-known prac-
tice of blackmail, political favors, po-
litical attacks, and corruption. I prefer
to stand up, roll this log over, and see
what crawls out.”
It was a brilliant act of jujitsu. For
the first time in years, Bezos was widely
hailed in the mainstream media. (A
typical tweet was “Just in: Jeff Bezos’
dick pic reveals he has balls of steel.”)
Meanwhile, reporting by the Wall Street
Journal and other outlets offered a sim-
pler explanation for the hacking: the
purloined messages had come from
Lauren Sanchez’s brother, Michael, a
reality-television talent agent. The En-
quirer had paid him two hundred thou-
sand dollars for the texts. Michael San-
chez was a Trump supporter, and it
was possible that the Enquirer had
learned of the affair and had urged him
to peek at his sister’s phone. De Becker,
however, still believed that his boss was
the victim of a plot, and said that he
was forwarding his intelligence to fed-
eral officials. For most Americans,
though, the mystery seemed solved: a
tabloid, not for the first time, had paid
for gossip.
Within six weeks, the owners of the
Enquirer had announced its sale. Jeff
and MacKenzie Bezos finalized their
divorce in July, and she received a thirty-
eight-billion-dollar settlement. Shortly
afterward, she announced that she was
signing the Giving Pledge.
ezos’s personal tumult distracted
B Amazon’s leaders at a particularly
fraught time. The company’s headlong
growth has led to a series of scandals,
and executives have been unsure how
to contain the damage. Like other pro-
cess companies, Amazon is learning
that a flywheel, once spinning, is very
hard to stop.
Several years ago, Amazon built a
vast network of independent couriers
to provide what’s known as “last-mile
delivery”: the final leg of a package’s
journey to a customer’s door. For years,
Amazon had relied upon UPS, FedEx,
and the U.S. Postal Service to deliver
packages. But in 2013 that system broke
down; at Christmastime, tens of thou-
sands of orders were stranded in ware-
houses. Amazon began constructing a
delivery network of its own. Rather
than build internally, however, the com-
pany signed contracts with hundreds
• •
of local drivers and courier firms, in
cities across the country.
The benefit of outsourcing was that
Amazon could build a delivery network
quickly. Brittain Ladd, a former Am-
azon senior manager who specialized
in logistics and operations, told me ear-
lier this year that “it was really easy to
scale up—there’s thousands of courier
services out there, and so once you figure
out the model you can expand it al-
most overnight.”
Still, some people within Amazon,
including Ladd, thought that these
partnerships were a bad idea: it would
be impossible for Amazon to insure
that delivery companies were hiring
responsible drivers and using rigorous
safety protocols. “Frankly, you have very
little control over these individuals,”
Ladd told me. He said that he had
hand-delivered to multiple colleagues
a memo, marked “PRIORITY: HIGH,”
in which he expressed “grave reserva-
tions” about relying on contractors,
warning, “I believe it is highly proba-
ble that accidents will occur resulting
in serious injuries and deaths.” He rec-
ommended instead that the company
carefully build its own last-mile-deliv-
ery network, one with a “zero-toler-
ance policy” for safety violations. Ladd
said to me, “I attended meetings, and
I told them that the last thing you want
is a newspaper article reading ‘Ama-
zon driver high on drugs hits and kills
family.’ But we were growing so fast,
and there was so much pressure, and
if we tried to build this internally it
would have taken at least a year. And
so a decision was made that the risk
was worth it.”
Amazon tried to work solely with
courier services that met basic safety
requirements, according to a current
executive who helped establish the pro-
gram. But Amazon pushed only so far,
deciding that it wasn’t practical to com-
pel firms to give drivers regular drug
tests or to require extensive training.
Local courier services are often run by
inexperienced businesspeople. Mean-
while, the pressure to expand remained
intense. “We were moving very, very
fast,” a former manager who helped
build the network recalled. “We were
learning as we went.”
In 2015, Amazon contracted with a
courier company called Inpax Shipping
Solutions, and it began delivering pack-
ages for the company in Atlanta, Cin-
cinnati, Miami, Dallas, and Chicago.
Amazon executives apparently failed
to note that Inpax’s chief executive had
once pleaded guilty to conspiracy to
distribute cocaine, and had declared
bankruptcy after defaulting on debts.
After Amazon signed the deal, its ex-
ecutives seemed not to notice that the
Department of Labor was investigat-
ing Inpax, or, later, that federal regula-
tors had found that the company had
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 55

• •
committed numerous labor violations.
Amazon also overlooked a lawsuit filed
by an Inpax employee against his boss,
which was documented in public records.
On December 17, 2016, a dispatcher
working with Inpax received an e-mail
from Amazon declaring that “we are
officially into ‘no package left behind’
territory.” Five days later, an Inpax
driver, Valdimar Gray, was rushing to
deliver Christmas packages in Chicago
when he flew through a crosswalk, hit-
ting Telesfora Escamilla, an eighty-
four-year-old woman walking home
from a hair salon. Escamilla, who was
dragged under the van, died. Escamil-
la’s grandson Anthony Bijarro, who was
at the scene, told me, “Amazon killed
my grandmother because they wanted
packages delivered a little faster. Am-
azon doesn’t care who’s driving, they
don’t care if they’re reckless.” Escamil-
la’s family has sued Inpax and Ama-
zon. Amazon, in a statement, said that
it regularly audits its delivery partners
to insure that they are in compliance
with the law and with Amazon’s pol-
56 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
icies, and takes action “when they
aren’t meeting our high bar for safety
and customer experience.” The com-
pany has terminated its relationship
with Inpax. (Inpax and Gray declined
to respond to questions.)
ProPublica has identified more than
sixty accidents involving Amazon, all
since 2015, that resulted in serious in-
juries or deaths. Reporters at BuzzFeed
have found records naming Amazon
in at least a hundred lawsuits related
to accidents involving package deliv-
eries, which have included at least six
deaths. Those are likely just a fraction
of such collisions, because in many cases
delivery vehicles were unmarked, and
victims weren’t aware of Amazon’s role.
Ladd, the former senior manager, said,
“Amazon could have built this network
in-house, or they could have acquired
a logistics company to really teach them
last-mile delivery, or they could have
chosen partners more slowly, to make
sure the right safety procedures were
in place. But this was not a well-oiled
machine—this was a bunch of people
thrown together. They asked me for
advice, and I was saying, ‘There’s an-
other way to do this.’ ” If Amazon had
found another way, Ladd said, “it would
have been a hell of a lot better for the
people who were killed—but once the
machine starts moving it takes on a life
of its own.”
As Amazon executives were be-
coming increasingly worried about the
hazards of warp-speed growth, other
pressures inside the company kept
ratcheting up. Earlier this year, Am-
azon announced that it would soon
start guaranteeing to many customers
delivery in one day, rather than two,
putting even more stress on couriers
and workers.
growing number of regulators in
A Washington, D.C., and in Europe
argue that Amazon, along with other
tech giants, needs to be reined in. Until
the nineteen-seventies, many process
companies were constrained by a fear
of U.S. antitrust enforcement. Alfred
Sloan always kept a close eye on the
size of G.M.’s market share. “Our bogie
is forty-five per cent,” Sloan told a re-
porter, in 1938. “We don’t want any more
than that.” His trepidation was justified.
The federal government repeatedly
sued G.M., once charging Sloan per-
sonally with criminal antitrust activity.
Almost none of the suits prevailed in
court, but they cowed the company.
Sloan died in 1966, and, in the de-
cades that followed, the government’s
attitude toward antitrust enforcement
changed. During the Reagan Admin-
istration, regulators and courts decreed
that antitrust decisions should largely
be based not on a company’s size or on
its bullying tactics but, rather, on any
price hikes imposed on customers. By
the time Facebook and Google ap-
peared, giving away their products for
free, and Amazon arose, with its devo-
tion to keeping prices down, antitrust
enforcement was a remote concern. The
legal scholar Lina Khan, writing in the
Yale Law Journal in 2017, observed, “It
is as if Bezos charted the company’s
growth by first drawing a map of an-
titrust laws, and then devising routes
to smoothly bypass them.”
Things began changing earlier this
year. In June, the head of the U.S.
Department of Justice’s antitrust divi-
sion, Makan Delrahim, a Trump ap-
pointee and a respected authority on
economic competition, gave a speech
declaring that antitrust regulators would
no longer be constrained by “the in-
correct notion that antitrust policy is
only concerned with keeping prices
low.” Delrahim’s address was the equiv-
alent of firing a starter’s pistol. In a re-
cent conversation, he told me that tech
companies “should think very seriously
about their conduct,” adding, “If you’re
one of the big guys, you should be care-
ful to make sure you don’t snuff out
competitors because you think that’s
good for your business. That’s not what
free markets really mean, and we’re
going to come down on you like a ton
of bricks if that’s what you do.”
Soon after Delrahim’s speech, it was
reported that the F.T.C. had issued
subpoenas for data regarding third-
party sales on Amazon. In July, the
E.U. declared that it was investigat-
ing Amazon, and the U.S. House of
Representatives held a hearing and in-
terrogated an Amazon lawyer about
how the company harvests data. Rep-
resentative David Cicilline, a Demo-
crat from Rhode Island, asked the law-
yer, “You’re saying that you don’t use
that in any way to promote Amazon
products? I remind you, sir, you’re under
oath.” The attorney replied that the
firm shows customers only the best
product, regardless of who profits from
the sale, and that Amazon did noth-
ing untoward.
Many members of Congress suspect
otherwise. Cicilline, who chairs the
House’s antitrust subcommittee, told
me, “There’s bipartisan consensus that
we have a responsibility to get these
markets working again. More compe-
tition means better protection of pri-
vacy. It means better control of your
data. It means more innovation.” Eliz-
abeth Warren, one of the most force-
ful critics of the tech industry, has said
that, if she wins the Presidency, she in-
tends to break up Amazon, Facebook,
and Google. She has proposed making
it illegal for companies such as Ama-
zon to own online marketplaces and at
the same time to sell goods on those
platforms. “Amazon crushes small com-
panies,” Warren wrote, in a plan for ex-
panding online competition. If she is
elected, she said, “small businesses would
have a fair shot to sell their products
on Amazon without the fear of Ama-
zon pushing them out of business.”
Other regulators and lawmakers are
more measured in their proposals and
their rhetoric, but a loose consensus
has emerged around a group of con-
cerns, which some people refer to as
the Four “C”s. The first is concentra-
tion. A high-ranking F.T.C. official told
me, “The bigger a tech company be-
comes, the more they can bully, so we
need to put hard caps on how big com-
panies like that can grow, on what they
can acquire.”
Rohit Chopra, one of the F.T.C.’s
five commissioners, told me that the
second “C” is the conflict of interest
that comes from “both controlling the
pipe and selling the oil.” Chopra, who
agreed to speak only about antitrust
generally and not about Amazon spe-
cifically, explained, “If you do both, you
will structure your marketplace in a
way that ultimately is self-dealing, and
you will use the data from those who
sell on your marketplace to benefit your-
self.” There’s a long history of the gov-
ernment forcing industries to separate
distribution and sales; for years, movie
studios have generally been prohibited
from owning movie theatres.
The next area of concern is con-
tracts. Big tech companies often make
highly restrictive deals with smaller
venders. Amazon retains a contractual
right to hold sellers’ reve-
nues for long periods after a
sale, and imposes limits on
what data sellers can share
with other companies. An-
other F.T.C. commissioner,
Rebecca Kelly Slaughter,
told me, “There are a lot of
terms that go into boiler-
plate contracts that con-
sumers or workers don’t re-
ally have an opportunity to
negotiate. It is absolutely appropriate for
us to be thinking about banning those.”
Lastly, regulators worry about the
complexity of current antitrust law. “You
really have to be an expert, or hire an
expert attorney, if you feel like one of
these companies is acting inappropri-
ately,” an F.T.C. official said. “The law
only works when it is simple enough
for the little guy to bring an action on
their own.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar, the rank-
ing member of the Senate’s subcom-
mittee on antitrust, told me that such
reforms are bound by a central idea:
“The big tech companies are com-
pletely reshaping the way we buy goods
and sell goods in the marketplace, our
privacy rules, and our democracy rules,
without any checks and balances from
the government.” She continued, “So
many people are finally getting tired
of the dominance. When Amazon starts
owning Whole Foods, when they con-
trol the producers, when they control
all the parts of the supply chain—peo-
ple deserve a level playing field.” Amer-
ican history, Klobuchar said, shows
that such imbalances can spark wide-
spread activism. “This goes back to the
Founders and the Boston Tea Party,”
she said. “These are highly emotional
political moments.”
mazon has responded to the
A mounting political threat by ex-
panding its lobbying efforts. Federal
records indicate that, in 2018, Amazon
lobbied more government bodies than
any other U.S. tech company. It has
made its case across Washington, to
senators, representatives, the Treasury
Department, the Department of Jus-
tice, even nasa. Much of Amazon’s
lobbying has been devoted to win-
ning government contracts: it is a lead-
ing contender for a ten-billion-dollar
project to centralize the
Department of Defense’s
cloud computing. But a for-
mer federal official who
works on antitrust issues
told me that the company’s
other lobbying was “about
telling us that, if you even
think about breaking up
Amazon, you’re going to
make markets less efficient,
and there are going to be
a lot of lost jobs—and Amazon em-
ploys a ton of people in your district.”
Amazon has a Twitter account de-
voted to cheery photographs and vid-
eos of lawmakers touring warehouses,
posing alongside rows of Amazon
trucks, and putting items in boxes. (If
the videos are any indication, legislators
are permitted to work much more slowly
than Amazon productivity standards
require.) Such theatrics used to serve
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 57
the company well. However, a regula-
tor who is familiar with Amazon’s lob-
bying said that “there’s been a bit of
hubris, because, in the past, they were
able to tell a story about how consum-
ers love them. But now that’s chang-
ing, and it’s very concerning to them.”
According to Amazon insiders,
Bezos adamantly refuses to consider
slowing the company’s growth, fearing
that its culture will break down if the
pace slackens. He is determined to de-
fend his creation aggressively. For years,
Amazon was largely content to remain
silent amid criticism—one Leadership
Principle is “We accept that we may be
misunderstood for long periods of
time”—but the company now responds
to nearly every provocation. In June,
after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez said on television that Bezos’s
wealth is “predicated on paying people
starvation wages and stripping them
of their ability to access health care,”
Amazon’s communications and policy
chief, Jay Carney, went on the attack,
tweeting, “All our employees get top-
tier benefits. I’d urge @AOC to focus
on raising the federal minimum wage
instead of making stuff up about Am-
azon.” That month, the Times ran
an article accusing the company of “a
kind of lawlessness” in its bookstore:
counterfeit medical textbooks were for
sale, and Amazon seemed unconcerned
with “the authenticity, much less the
quality, of what it sells.” A long rebut-
tal appeared on Amazon’s
blog, arguing that “noth-
ing could be further from
the truth” and accusing
the reporter of cherry-
picking examples. Last
year, Amazon tapped a
group of warehouse work-
ers to be a kind of Twit-
ter rapid-response army,
deputizing them as “am-
bassadors.” When a Bernie Sanders
supporter tweeted that Amazon was anti-
union, a fulfillment-center employee,
@AmazonFCJanet, fired back, “Unions
are thieves.”
Amazon offered few specifics on its
lobbying activities. “There is abundant
competition in the retail sector, and
many retailers are thriving,” the com-
pany wrote in response to questions.
“There is no power imbalance between
58 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
Amazon and the sellers and vendors
who work with us.”
Executives at Amazon have argued
to regulators and lawmakers that the
company is distinct in fundamental
ways from Facebook and Google.
Whereas those firms essentially cre-
ated their industries, Amazon’s realm—
the retail marketplace—has existed
since the dawn of commerce. “The idea
that there is only one marketplace is
demonstrably false,” the company wrote
in a statement, noting that Walmart
still brings in more revenue than it
does. Amazon executives point out
that, if you ignore the distinction be-
tween online and real-world sales, Am-
azon is responsible for about four per
cent of U.S. retail transactions. “If we
do not compete on prices, selection,
delivery speed and customer service,
customers will choose other competi-
tors,” the company statement noted.
Part of Amazon’s defensiveness stems
from executives’ conviction that regu-
lators’ concerns are based not on logic
but on a misguided understanding of
retail. One executive told me that the
real problem is that Amazon is dispro-
portionately popular among lawmak-
ers. Congressional aides, high-profile
journalists, and other élites often use
Amazon to buy kitchen supplies and
Christmas gifts. They watch “The
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and shop at
Whole Foods. They don’t even know
the location of the nearest Walmart,
the executive said, and
therefore think that Am-
azon is much more pow-
erful than it really is.
Perhaps it’s true that
policymakers would have
a broader perspective if
they logged more hours at
Costco. But, in any case,
Amazon now has such a
severe image problem that
it can no longer count on being able to
do whatever it pleases. High-ranking
executives allow that there are some
limited concessions Bezos is willing to
make, such as donating more of his
wealth to charity. And Amazon may
agree to strengthen its oversight of driv-
ers and of workers’ safety. One execu-
tive told me that Amazon is determined
to remain open-minded and polite with
regulators; one of Microsoft’s missteps
in the nineties, he said, was that it was
dismissive. But few of the current Am-
azon executives I spoke with said that
the company needed to make major
changes. And few believed that regu-
lators would compel them to do so.
After all, Amazon employs hundreds
of thousands of people across the na-
tion, many of them voters, and has ware-
houses in dozens of states. A tech lob-
byist told me, “Neither Facebook nor
Google has that. Sometimes you sur-
vive just because there are other targets
to absorb the blows.”
ezos, after attracting scandal ear-
B lier this year, has lately sought to
recede. His media appearances have
become rare and highly scripted. When
he was onstage this past summer at one
of his few recent public outings—an
Amazon conference in Las Vegas—the
performance was studiously boring, a
clear attempt to rob himself of glam-
our. While Bezos was droning on, a
protester jumped on the stage, shout-
ing something about chickens and ter-
rible conditions on industrial farms.
Bezos froze, as if worried that the small-
est bacterium of controversy might
prove contagious. After the woman was
removed, he glanced around and said,
“I’m sorry—where were we?”
Within Amazon, there are concerns
that, no matter how strenuously Bezos
embraces banality, he can’t be dull
enough. “We have all this attention now,”
a former executive complained. Since
Bezos and Lauren Sanchez went pub-
lic with their relationship, they have
regularly appeared in gossip columns.
The New York Post’s Page Six has re-
ported on the swimsuit that Bezos wore
in Saint-Tropez (“quirky, octopus-print
trunks”), and how he met Sanchez’s
parents at the N.F.L. Hall of Fame
(“This all leads Amazon sources to
ponder how long it will be before the
couple say ‘I do’ ”).
The government’s scrutiny of Gen-
eral Motors never scored any fatal hits—
one antitrust lawsuit dragged on for
years, ending in a dismissal—but the
scar tissue was damaging enough. David
Farber, a University of Kansas histo-
rian who wrote a biography of Alfred P.
Sloan, told me that the G.M. exec-
utive “didn’t see himself as someone
that needed to be loved or respected
by the public, but eventually even he
gave in.” He noted a pattern in Amer-
ican history: “There’s an economic rev-
olution, it creates amazing new oppor-
tunities, and then the companies that
seize those opportunities become so
powerful that the people revolt—they
say the winners have become too pow-
erful, they start attacking the people
who are the embodiments of winning,
sometimes with gossip, sometimes with
facts. And then we have an era of con-
straint enforced by the federal govern-
ment.” We may be at a breaking point
now. “It’s like the eighteen-eighties or
the nineteen-thirties all over again,”
Farber said. “The pressure is going to
continue building, the powerful are
going to continue being watched and
criticized and gawked at, until some-
thing pops.”
Jeff Wilke, the Bezos deputy, told
me that all process companies eventu-
ally falter. The challenge is to stave off
decline as long as possible. Day Two,
he said, “is inevitable—the question is
when.” When Day Two does arrive at
Amazon, at least Ian Freed, the exec-
utive who oversaw the Kindle and the
Echo, won’t have to suffer through it.
A few years ago, he consulted an inter-
nal Amazon application called the Old
Fart Tool, which shows employees how
many new people have been hired since
their first day, and discovered that more
than three hundred thousand workers
had joined Amazon since he started “Open it.”
there. Freed had come to Amazon be-
cause he loved being at a place that
moved fast and did the impossible. He
• •
was proud of his work—once, while on
vacation in Mexico, he had peeked into they seemed satisfying enough. And feel like I’m contributing in a differ-
his sons’ hotel room and seen their Freed no longer had to worry about ent way. If this succeeds, we’ll bring
Game Boys lying on the nightstand earning a salary: during his tenure at education to parts of the world where
while they read on their Kindles. “That Amazon, its stock price had gone from you can’t get print books, where com-
was pretty special,” he told me. “For forty-three dollars to $1,052 a share. panies don’t deliver things overnight,
the rest of my life, I can tell my grand- And so in 2017 he quit Amazon, and where it’s not even guaranteed that
children that I built the Amazon Kin- not long afterward he founded Bam- people are literate.”
dle and the Amazon Echo.” boo Learning, a company that builds Freed is building something that is
Yet Amazon had changed, and Freed voice-activated education software. neither strictly a product company nor
missed the old days. He wanted to One product teaches kids how to do a process company. It will be both
spend more time living by Leader- division when they say, “Alexa, open grander and more modest in its ambi-
ship Principles that were loftier than Bamboo Math.” The startup has only tions than Amazon, which Bezos has
simply selling everything as fast and two full-time employees. Freed just famously described as “the everything
as cheaply as possible. He wanted to signed his first big contract, with the store.” Freed told me, “It’s another
see if his next flywheels could power a publisher Highlights for Children. “It chance to change the world. A smaller
project with higher ideals. Such goals just got to the point where I wanted change, but it’s real, and it feels im-
wouldn’t likely have satisfied Ama- to do something different,” he told me. portant to me. It’s something that de-
zon’s constant hunger, but to Freed “I wanted to work with nonprofits and serves all of what I’ve learned.” 
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 59
60 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
 PORTFOLIO

GHOST TOWERS
The view from Iran’s housing crisis.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HASHEM SHAKERI

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 61

 fter the Iranian Revolution, in 1979, the
A theocracy called on women to breed a
new Islamic generation. It lowered the
marriage age to nine for girls and fourteen for
boys; it legalized polygamy and raised the price
of birth control. By 1986, the average family had
six children. A leading cleric said that the govern-
ment’s goal was to increase the number of people
who believed in the Revolution in order to pre-
serve it. The population surge coincided with mass
migration to Iran’s cities, spurred first by Iraq’s in-
vasion, in the eighties, and then by the lure of jobs
and education, in the nineties. The government
introduced family planning, which brought the
average family size down to two children, but Iran
still struggled to feed, clothe, educate, employ, and
house its people. Four decades after the Revolu-
tion, the population has grown by almost fifty mil-
lion; the number of households has quadrupled.
Teeming, polluted Tehran can no longer hold all
those who need or want to live there.
The government responded to the housing
shortage by building satellite towns of sterile high-
rises on barren land far from the capital. They
were supposed to be affordable, ready-made uto-
pias with modern utilities for low-income and
middle-class workers who couldn’t afford Tehran.
But the early apartments had faulty sewage sys-
tems and heating, inadequate access to water, and
only intermittent electricity. Many were destroyed
in the earthquake of 2017.
Hashem Shakeri first glimpsed some of these
ghostly concrete towers on a weekend drive in
2007. He was baffled by the idea that Iranians
would be expected to live in the austere structures.
“They were like a remote island,” he told me.
“When I thought about the people who were sup-
Previous spread In Pardis, a satellite city northeast of Tehran, nearly half the buildings remain
unfinished. Right A man sells balloons at an ad-hoc street market in Parand.
posed to come and live there, I couldn’t even
breathe.” In 2016, he began to photograph the sat-
ellite towns and their residents. He started in
Pardis; the name is Persian for “paradise.”
“Most of the people who came there had lost
something in their lives,” Shakeri said. “They had
been employees who used to receive monthly pay-
ments. After the economic crisis, they couldn’t
make ends meet.” There were few parks, play-
grounds, or social outlets, and limited signs of life
outside the high-rises. To capture the sterility and
the eerie quiet in the satellite towns—including
Pardis and Parand—he took the photographs using
medium-format film, in direct sunlight, and over-
exposed them.
He said, “I wanted my audience to see the bit-
terness that applies to all of those towns,” many
of whose residents travel hours each day to jobs
in Tehran. “There is a recurrent, vicious cycle where
people are sleep-deprived—they have to wake
early and work until late to commute to Tehran,
which takes a lot of time. They only sleep in the
towns. Like Sisyphus, they have to repeat the cycle
over and over.”
The country’s housing crisis deepened after
President Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear
deal, in May, 2018, and reimposed economic sanc-
tions six months later. The rial is now down by
sixty per cent, and real-estate prices in Tehran
have more than doubled. Yet tens of thousands of
apartments in the new towns are empty, because,
though they are cheaper, many Iranians still can’t
afford them. Shakeri, like other Tehran residents,
feels the squeeze. He told me that, as he took the
photographs, “I was worried that I may be one of
the people who have to leave Tehran and move
into one of these apartments.”
—Robin Wright
 On the outskirts of Parand,
a makeshift fruit stall sits
next to a billboard depicting
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
the Supreme Leader of Iran.
There is no subway between
Tehran and the satellite cities.
For residents who work in
the capital, the commute can
take hours each way.
Above In Abshenasan, parks, playgrounds, and gathering places are scarce.
“Children have no space for self-actualization, to develop, to grow,” Shakeri said.
Right A family packs up its tent after a camping trip on the outskirts of Parand.
 “I asked people if they were
satisfied living in these cities,”
Shakeri said. “Most of them
answered, ‘Thank God—we
have no other way.’ ”
 FICTION

TYPOGRAPHY BY DAN CASSARO

72 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 PHOTOGRAPH BY EUGENE RICHARDS

 hey dropped late in the morn-
T ing and then sat for an hour si-
lently waiting for the kick in Bil-
ly’s boarding-house room, the grove of
aspen trees on the edge of the field out-
side quivering in the summer breeze. The
house was situated along the old road to
the beach, not much more than ten miles
from Lake Michigan. Inside, she sat look-
ing at the poster Billy had tacked to the
wall: a cartoon figure with a big leg ex-
tended, presenting an oversized shoe and,
below the heel, the words “Keep On
Truckin’.” She was waiting for it to move,
which it did, eventually, dancing in a way
that seemed remorseful, trying to lure
her in, until it turned into an aberration
that somehow mirrored Billy himself,
thinning out into a slim boy, with a never-
ending array of plans, brilliant with his
own energies, performing a little gyrat-
ing dance—the heavy shoes falling away,
becoming dainty little feet (because Billy
did have small feet), the hand waving at
her to come on in, to join the fun, the
way you’d expect an older man to lure a
girl in—and she was a kid that summer,
just sixteen, and Billy was at least nine-
teen and, unbeknownst to either of them
at the time, about to head off to war.
Billy held himself over her dramati-
cally, tossing back his hair, gazing with
his blue eyes, giving out a single hoot-
like laugh when he came. When he was
in bed, and high, he was a gentle and
beautiful boy, with a faraway look in his
eyes, and irresistible sandy-blond hair,
long and tangled. (Some said he looked
a little bit like Jim Morrison, but, really,
the resemblance lay in the way he moved,
suddenly swaying his hips in his leather
pants, radiating a charisma that seemed
on the very edge of violence, launching
into fits of jubilation.) Part of what held
her in his thrall, she’d later think, was
the way he seemed able to grapple time
into submission by proposing schemes;
he operated on constant speculation, al-
ways heading into the future, and that
night after they made love, as they came
down from their highs, he flipped onto
his side and began talking about reality,
about prospects for cash, about keeping
their experiment—as he called it—in
alternative consciousness up and run-
ning and financially viable.
She listened as plans emerged from
Billy in soliloquies that sometimes lasted
for hours: he rambled on about a sad gas
station—the kind with old pumps and
a grease pit—he might rob outside Al-
pena. A package store near Benton Har-
bor, set back among weeping willows,
that was dying for a stickup. A blueberry
farm near the Indiana border that would
offer easy pickings if they were ever
blighted with hunger. He spoke of these
plans using the words he had acquired
during his year at a prep school out East
before he’d returned home to work for
a year at Checker Cab. As he liked to
explain it, he had come home and begged
his parents to disown him, saying, Please,
please, let me go, cast me out, I beg of you,
go down to the police station and list me as
incorrigible, if you do anything. I’ve always
wanted to be incorrigible. Do it for the sake
of our lineage, for the entire family right
down the line. Cast me out in honor of the
toil and tribulation of our forefathers. In
honor of the original Miles Thomas, who
never foresaw a guy like me, a long-haired
hippie. Not in his wildest fantasies.
Beside her that night, in bed, he
began to talk out his latest scheme: My
Uncle Rex and Aunt Minerva were
farmers, he said. But now they live in
the city of Lansing. We’ll distract my
uncle, get him talking, and I’ll go up
and get the box of cash he has up there
under the floorboards, the old farm
money he just doesn’t have the heart to
spend. Money that came from the soil,
and all that, because he lost his farm a
few years back and he’s still not over it,
so it’s just sitting there, with no real use.
She listened and sank deeper into
the bed, wondering how they’d pull up
and away from the coziness of the room,
with the darkness outside and dawn
scratching at the horizon. Eventually,
they found the energy, got up and pulled
on their jeans, got dressed, and scrawled
a note for the landlord: Dear Dan: Went
on an adventure to re-establish our funds.
We will be returning by evening, and upon
our return we will be fully equipped to re-
imburse you for the back rent. Faithfully
yours, Meg and Billy.
hen they got to Lansing the sun
W still wasn’t up, and the heavy gov-
ernment buildings were straining to ma-
terialize out of the dark, their white lime-
stone walls emitting an eerie iridescence
while a few sad orphaned houses stood
nearby, shabby and out of place, shed-
ding shingles and curlicues of lead paint.
Billy’s uncle lived in one of these, just
down from the Board of Water & Light
building, on a plot of land held above the
sidewalk by a crumbling retaining wall.
I’m really not sure about this, she told
Billy as they swung up the driveway and
spotted a brutal-looking farm imple-
ment, hook-shaped blades attached to
a long wooden handle, leaning against
the side of the house. She stared at it
and glanced around for signs of move-
ment. Billy looked the house over, took
a drag on his cigarette, and began to ex-
plain: We’re not going to steal, if that’s
what you’re thinking. You’ve got to un-
derstand that. We’re not the types to go
in and take something from old folks,
not at all. We’re upstanding end-of-the-
era hippies who just need some help,
that’s all, so look at it like that, Meg,
look at it like a simple thing, like see-
sawing, or jumping jacks, or doing cart-
wheels. We’re not going to upset the sta-
tus quo, because money passed between
family members sustains stability.
Billy would’ve gone on that way if
she’d let him, waxing philosophical,
bending the truth, trying to fit the round
peg of their need into the square hole
of his uncle’s life, so finally she said,
Let’s go on in and say hello, and she got
out of the car, closed the door softly,
and went up to the front porch.
At the front door, he had his knife
out and was sliding it around the latch,
flicking it urgently, until there was a click
and the latch gave, opening into a stale
darkness, a vestibule filled with the smell
of wet wool, rubbing ointments, dust,
moth flakes, and furnace oil. A door led
to a large hall with a stairway that went
up past a stained-glass window. They
stood for a moment at the foot of the
stairs, listening to the silence of sleep-
ing inhabitants, until Billy called up, say-
ing, Uncle Rex? Aunt Minerva, Uncle
Rex, Aunt Minerva? From upstairs there
came a grunt, the clearing of phlegm, a
cough or two, more grunting, and then
a voice that said, Who’s that? Who’s
there? It was a tart, central-Michigan,
farmhand voice, confined within the
nose. (Meg didn’t know it at the time,
but she was hearing the intonations of
a widower, the voice you’d hear from
someone interrogating himself in the
mirror with total contempt: a voice that
made complete sense when the old man
finally came down the stairs, dressed in
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 73
a tattered old maroon robe, and pre-
sented a toothless mouth set in a gaunt
face. Staying on the bottom step, he
looked at Billy, coughed twice, and said,
What the hell do you want from me?)
Billy tossed the hair out of his eyes
and said, We were just in the neighbor-
hood and thought we’d pay a friendly
visit to say hello and see how you were
and how the crops are this year.
A look of thoughtfulness entered the
old man’s face, and while his lips mulled
his answer he went to the window, parted
the curtains, and gazed up at the sky
visible between the buildings.
Since when did you ever give a damn
about farming?
I’ve got farm blood and a farming
soul, Uncle Rex, Billy said. So get the
coffee going and then come back to the
parlor and fill me in on the details, give
me a complete crop report, the whole
thing, right down to the latest commod-
ity update, or whatever. I’m eager to hear.
Meg wants to hear, too. There’s nothing
like farming. It’s the only respectable
profession left, that’s for sure, and there
are plenty who are returning to the soil,
Uncle Rex. You know me well enough
to know I’ve got farm blood. I’ll buy that
farm back, rebuild it, and get it up and
running again. You won’t have to do a
thing but sit in your chair on the front
porch and give me occasional advice.
Uncle Rex went down the hall to the
kitchen and began banging around mak-
ing coffee while they stood in the par-
“So where do you see yourself fitting into late-stage capitalism?”
lor amid the clutter of knickknacks and
tchotchkes, old souvenirs from across
the country, spoons and miniature stat-
ues, a plate that said “Kentucky, Abra-
ham Lincoln Birthplace” above an etch-
ing of a log cabin; another plate that
said “Virginia” below a gold-leaf min-
iature of Monticello; a horseshoe from
Wisconsin with the words “Good Luck.”
At the windows, heavy drapes held back
the dawn light. A velour love seat, two
small straight-backed chairs, and, in the
corner, against the wall, a pump organ.
Billy looked at the pump organ, said,
Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Then he
sat down and began pedalling, filling
the bladder with air until the instru-
ment was wheezing and panting. He
continued pumping, throwing his head
back dramatically, holding his hands up
above the keys until finally he unleashed
an organ riff, da da da, da da da dadada,
and began singing the Doors’ song
“Touch Me,” twisting himself down on
the little stool, wagging his head around,
consumed with the music.
The percolator is going, the old man
said, materializing suddenly in the door-
way. The coffee should be ready shortly.
Billy got up and went to him, told
him to sit, and then said, What about
the farm? Give me the lowdown, please.
I need to know everything so I can go
and help. I’ll hire out the combining to
Hank. I’ll get the whole thing operat-
ing, and then I’ll come and get you and
Aunt Minnie and bring you over, he said.
Your aunt’s dead, the old man said.
What? Aunt Minerva’s dead?
She died peacefully in her sleep. Last
year. I woke up and she was gone.
When, exactly, was this?
I believe it was last July.
Jesus, no one told me a thing, Billy
said. I’m sorry. Really, Uncle Rex. I’m out
of the loop. I didn’t know or I would’ve
come and said a few words at the ser-
vice or something.
There wasn’t any service, he said. Her
ashes are upstairs in the bedroom.
Well, in that case, you just go ahead
and give me the skinny on the farm,
Billy said. Just lay it all out, Uncle Rex.
The old man cleared his throat and
began to speak, going into detail about
his farm and its operation and the price
of feed corn on the Chicago exchange,
and the crooked Detroit bank, and the
seven-year drought, starting back in ’51,
that caused a plague that spread over the
land. As he spoke, a wistful tone entered
his voice. You’ll want to rebuild the barn,
make it a post-and-beam mortise-and-
tenon with queen posts, and don’t put a
ridgepole in to support the rafters, you
won’t need that, and put plenty of ven-
tilation louvres along the forebay walls,
and get one of those steel Martin silos
in, too, and maybe a manure-cleaning
system, and clear out the burdock grow-
ing through the windows, and the stalls
will need new railings, and the corn crib
needs new chicken wire, and the old wind
pump needs lubrication and a new valve,
and the tractor needs a new camshaft;
you’ll want to intercrop carrots in with
the rye and barley, get them in close to
protect the young seedlings; and so on
and so forth, while out in the kitchen
the percolator sputtered.
When Meg got back from the kitchen
with the coffee, the old man was sitting
alone in the parlor expounding on soil
types and the history of soil itself, the
glacial loess deposits and how Paw Paw
soil was better than the upstate junk
spodosol, with a pure O horizon, the
best you could hope for. Then he talked
about soybean rust and luck farming, as
opposed to chance farming, as his father
had called it. If someone had been there
taking notes, they might’ve reconstructed
the farm in its entirety, from the foun-
dation of the farmhouse itself to the raf-
ters of the barn and to the fields, which
the old man insisted were square and
stately, just outside of Paw Paw, in par-
cel No. 55, State of Michigan, Van Buren
County, a farm that sent its produce to
the granary in Dowagiac, which in turn
was freighted to the exchange in Chi-
cago, just one more load from the hin-
terlands thrust into the great maw of
commerce. From the way he was talking,
it seemed he was determined to unfold
the entire history of agriculture from the
first primal seed on, because he was still
speaking as they left the house, mum-
bling something about cut nails, circa
1850, and then a few words about the
use of clapboard peaks as a way to ward
off shingle damage. His voice was bright,
happy to be drawing upon past experi-
ence, making something from words, at
least, detailing the material of his for-
mer life while they went out to the car,
got in, started the engine, and drove up
the wide Lansing streets.
He was still talking while in the car
they pried open the cash box and saw
the tightly bound stacks of green, neatly
arranged, with tags on them that named
the years they were earned. Hard-won
money that he’d hoarded and hidden
away from his creditors at the bank.
That’s wholesome cash, Billy said.
It’s money that won’t mind being spent.
It’s not from a downer source. It’s not
factory money, or slave money. That
green came out of the soil itself, the
bountiful fucking fruit of Mother Earth.
That’s money that came out of sun and
sky. There’s no guilt in this money be-
cause it’s devoid of weight, he said, as
she counted it carefully, leaving the tags
on each stack in case they wondered
what year they were spending. No, that’s
money that came from sunlight and air
and dirt, nothing else.
ack in Billy’s room that night, they
B were speculating about Uncle Rex.
Was he still there, ten hours later, in that
house in Lansing, continuing to lay out
the statistics and data of his farm? Out-
side, the wind was lifting through the
fields, turning up the silvery leaves on
the aspens. In the clouds to the west,
heat lightning fluttered and laced. All
day the heat had thickened. It would
break soon. In a few minutes, most cer-
tainly, they’d be in the middle of a storm.
Everything would cool down and shift.
I think he’s sitting in that parlor in
that chair, rattling on. I’m sure of it, Billy
said. We got him started, but it was just
the beginning. Uncle Rex is a store-
house of wisdom and knowledge on the
subject of his farm, he said, leaning down,
plucking seeds, rolling joints atop the
Hendrix album cover. His idea was to
roll twenty fat joints and hand them
around in the morning as a good-will
gesture, to open up the hearts of his cus-
tomers. He sprinkled and rolled, sprin-
kled and rolled, stopping only to lick
the papers and to smooth and tighten,
working with a fantastic efficiency,
cuffing the loose weed with the side of
his palm, keeping it neatly in the cen-
ter of the album cover obscuring the
circle with Hendrix and his band.
Yeah, for sure. Uncle Rex is still talking
up a storm, but he’s closing in on the end
now. He’s getting to the finest of partic-
ulars. He’ll be too tired to talk much lon-
ger. He’s building up to the grand finale.
He’s talking about the financing. About
the interest rates, farm subsidies, and the
Nixon Administration. He’s talking corn
prices in the month of May, the Year of
our Lord Nineteen Sixty-one. That’s
when it all came down for him. He’s
talking up the numbers, big time, and the
fact that he had to take out a second
mortgage on the farm. Most likely, right
about now, he’s getting to the part about
walking his property line from point to
point, and how he likes to stand there on
the western side, at the windbreak of oaks,
and connive over how he might force the
Nugent farm into a buyout. The old fuck
was always trying to buy the Nugent
farm. He hated Nugent.
Billy went on like that, expounding
on Uncle Rex’s story, until suddenly,
through the rattle of his words, it be-
came clear to her (and it did come on
like that—a fearsome revelation, a sud-
den sharp insight that she would carry
with her into the future) that he and his
uncle had the same habits of mind, the
same inclination to fall into a ramble, a
widower’s intonations. It wasn’t just the
drugs, either. Cosmic forces wouldn’t
save him from the kind of fate his uncle
had faced, and she felt sure he’d be there,
one day, husky-voiced after telling his
tale in the same way, going on and on
about it for days on end after some fuck-
ups came in to loot his cash box. Instead
of farming, he’d be talking about drugs:
the price of a lid in Bay City back in
the day, dime bags and shortages in the
Upper Peninsula; the problems of get-
ting the Detroit supply line going during
the aftermath of the riots; how hard it
was, back in the mid-seventies, to get a
dependable connection in Chicago. He’d
be going on in that soft, speculative
voice, landing hard on the specifics, the
price of STP in the Keweenaw Penin-
sula; the Traverse City acid freak-out;
the Grand Rapids meth crisis; the Gay-
lord sheriff ’s department’s pot bonfire;
and he’d mention her, too, little Meg
Allen, who got slapped in the face by
her mother and took off on an adven-
ture, and he’d say that he had this old
lady back then who was useful, busi-
nesswise, this girl, just sixteen and in
thrall to his body and voice; a girl who
made wild love and was pure as soap.
Then he’d go deeper into his story, in
the most spectacular precision, the way
his tongue tasted when he was tripping
and the various vagabond colors that
came flowering up out of the quaking
aspens as they lifted their wet leaves in
the lightning.
On the bed that night, as Billy rolled
his joints and kept on speaking, ignor-
ing the wind that was swishing the cur-
tains, bringing the smell of the trees and
the lake inside, all this became clear.
While the stacks of cash on the bed be-
side her ruffled and the tags—each with
a date, 1955, 1959, 1960—fluttered. While
his fingers busily swept the pot into lit-
tle formations. While the breeze tried
to brush the pot off Jimi Hendrix’s face
and onto the bedspread, she imagined
him alone in some dusky house, baking
in an eternal heat, in Kansas or Nebraska,
hiding out from the law, which had long
since stopped looking for him, in an age
that was cleaner and tidier, working him-
self into a fit over what had happened
on this day, August 5, 1971. He was alone
in that house, without her and without
love, trying to reconstruct what was gone
while those who had started him speak-
ing in the first place, who had offered
up the initial opening question, were
long gone with his loot, the earnings of
an entire life, heading west toward the
California coast, leaving a cloud of dust
in their wake, laughing at the image of
him back there, somewhere, still ram-
bling on about his life. 
THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
David Means reads “Are You Experienced?”
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 75

WHO SINGS ALONG?
n 2014, Laetitia Tamko, who records
I as Vagabon, released an EP called
“Persian Garden.” Her singing was fitful
and jagged, soaring one moment and
sighing the next, all of it matching the
flickers and moans of her electric gui-
tar. She measured out small helpings
of her transcendent voice, rather than
showing it off all at once. The album
ended with a song called “Sharks,” which
she rerecorded and released under the
name “The Embers” a few years later.
“I feel so small,” she sings over a meek
guitar line, sounding resigned but not
despondent. “My feet can barely touch
the floor / On the bus, where everybody
is tall.” But then the band crashes in,
and her voice surges from a shy whis-
per to a wailing laugh. “Run and tell
everybody/Run and tell everybody that
Laetitia is / A small fish,” she cries out,
delicately leaning into the syllables of
her own name and stretching out the
word “is” as though her whole being de-
pended on it. She basks in being the
“small fish.” “You’re a shark that hates
everything,” she sings, breaking into a
teasing giggle.
When I first heard her say her own
name, I felt chills. I couldn’t remember
hearing a singer do that in a way that
felt tentative and even a bit hopeful,
rather than bold and boastful, like it
was just branding. It was as if she were
reminding herself that these songs
were primarily for and about her—that
she needed them more than we did.
Throughout “Persian Garden” and “In-
finite Worlds,” her full-length album
from 2017, there is a playful hesitancy
Pop songs are often about the listener; in the songs of Laetitia Tamko, the listener is a witness as she figures things out.
76 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
THE CRITICS
POP MUSIC
Vagabon’s circuit of outsiders.
BY HUA HSU
to her singing, and to the way that her
snarling electric guitar takes up the lines
that she leaves unresolved. The songs
feel deliberate, like she wants to enter
into the world at her own pace. She is
the protagonist of her own story.
t’s remarkable that Tamko, who is
I twenty-six, makes such uninhibited
music, given the secrecy that surrounded
her artistic evolution. She was born and
raised in Cameroon, and her family
moved to the United States when she
was in her teens. At the time, she didn’t
speak English. After a spell in Harlem,
the family settled in Yonkers. When she
was in high school, her parents bought
her a guitar from Costco. She figured
that it was an easy and quiet enough in-
strument to teach herself, and she did,
watching tutorials on DVD. But the
idea of being a proper musician seemed
impossibly far away. Her sense of the
world then was that you were either Be-
yoncé or someone messing around in
your bedroom, and that there was noth-
ing in between. While in college, how-
ever, she found kindred spirits in a small
D.I.Y.-rock scene in Brooklyn. At home,
she played the part of a model student,
but the late nights supposedly spent at
the library were actually spent at re-
hearsals with her band. Her first per-
formance—at the Silent Barn, an event
space in Bushwick—was also her first
concert. Until the release of “Persian
Garden,” Tamko’s parents didn’t know
that she was a professional musician.
Tamko found an audience among
enthusiasts of intimate, often home-
recorded pop, drawing comparisons to
artists like Frankie Cosmos and Mitski,
who make up something like a circuit
of outsiders. People are drawn to these
musicians’ imperfections and emotional
rawness—seeing someone who is com-
fortable with discomfort can be life-
changing. Music has always been a fickle,
unpredictable career path, yet the dis-
tance between writing a song, or mak-
ing a beat, and finding faraway admirers
has been radically compressed. Increas-
ingly, the challenge isn’t just in getting
your art out there but in dealing with
the logistics: being homesick, eating
well on the road, and negotiating the
projections and scrutiny of others. Per-
haps you’ve captured in words some-
thing others can only feel or sense. But
you’re still the same work in progress,
splitting time between careers, uncer-
tain of what to do now that you’re in a
state-of-the-art recording studio.
This sudden immersion has become
part of Tamko’s narrative. She left her
job as a computer engineer and went on
tour to promote “Infinite Worlds,” which
included many of the first songs she had
written. But she began experimenting
with music that strayed from the guitar-
driven indie she was known for. She
composed and self-produced her new
album, “Vagabon,” largely while she was
on the road. Where her previous songs
boomed and crashed, her new songs
wobble and glow. Many of them mix
the raw materials of R. & B. and dance
tunes, producing something a bit quieter.
There’s a familiar earnestness to a
singer cradling a guitar, a ready-made
OPPOSITE: PHILIPPE PETIT-ROULET

PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSICA PETTWAY THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 77

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Crafted from Gold and Platinum still / be here, uh-huh.” An apology or
JOHN-CHRISTIAN.COM explanation dissolves into a line of “mm,”
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“huh,” and “yes,” which, in the end, are
the most articulate expressions of heart-
ache. Her songs often leave you with
the sense that she’s encircling some-
thing that she can’t quite reach. Her
singing offers structure to textures that
are ethereal, moody, and ever-shifting.
Sometimes her vocals and her produc-
Extraordinary... tions seem at odds with each other.
“Please Don’t Leave the Table” proceeds
over a soft gurgle of a beat and an en-
Luxury Barge Cruises chanting, seesawing synth line. Tamko
sings softly, with a kind of clarity that
evades her elsewhere, repeating the
song’s title in different ways, emphasiz-
ing different words, hopeful that some
combination will work: “Please don’t
leave the table / I’m still eating.” But the
P.O. Box 2195, Duxbury, MA 02331 beat continues, an unforgiving metro-
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and you get the feeling that it’s all just
beyond her control.
A DVERTISE MENT
agabon” begins and ends with
“ V “Full Moon in Gemini.” Tamko
sings about bodies lying under the moon,
WHAT’S THE and she elongates her syllables and lines,
BIG IDEA?
like they’re blankets she’s trying to drape
over a lover. She invokes scenes of “driv-
Small space has big rewards. ing through Arcata/Past the Mad River
and the mountains I wrote this about.”
She pulls you out from inside the song,
TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT much like when she says her own name,
JILLIAN GENET 305.520.5159 in “The Embers.” A specific shade of
jgenet@zmedia-inc.com
sky, the angle of the mountains through
a car window: the song is her evidence
78 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
that this moment happened. Pop songs
are often about our place in the world;
the listener dreams of being somewhere
or somebody else. Yet, in Tamko’s songs,
we are witnesses as she figures things
out for herself.
Part of this dynamic is a result of her
sudden visibility as a black woman
emerging from an indie-rock commu-
nity defined largely by the tastes and
emotional registers of white fans. Fa-
miliar notions of alienation or disaffec-
tion, recognition or pride, might seem
a little different to the daughter of im-
migrants. And, even in a community of
outsiders, everyone’s highs and lows
don’t emanate from the same sources.
“Wits About You” slowly builds from a
heartbeat and churning synths. Just as
the chorus trembles to life, the song cuts
out, leaving Tamko singing coolly over
a piano, “I was invited to the party/They
won’t let my people in/Well then never
mind/never mind, never mind/We don’t
wanna go to your function.”
Instead, they go their own way. Sadek
Massarweh, of the German-Canadian
band Monako, sings a reprise of “Full
Moon in Gemini,” which closes “Vag-
abon.” In his version, the song becomes
patient and sensual. A chorus of friends
backs Tamko on “Home Soon.” One of
the last songs on the album is “Every
Woman.” “All the women I meet are
tired,” Tamko sings over spare guitar
strums. The song was initially inspired
by a line from the poet Nayyirah Wa-
heed: “all the women./in me./are tired.”
But Tamko expands on that line, writ-
ing a song that connects everyone she
beholds. “All the women I meet are fired
up /They get ready to kill with / their
luck,” she sings. Throughout her career,
Tamko has written songs about com-
ing and going, searching and wander-
ing, trying to figure out if any of these
new places are home. Each song on
“Vagabon” feels like a small world—the
view from a car window while driving
through the forest, the itinerant life of
a gigging musician, the utopian inti-
macy of a warm bed. “Every Woman”
sounds quiet and solitary, until you re-
alize that it could be a sing-along. It’s
just Tamko, a guitar, and whoever chooses
to sing with her, conjuring their own
party. “’Cause we’re not afraid of / the
war we brought on,” she sings, “and we’re
steady while/holding you all.” 

BOOKS
SHOOTING AT JESUS
The great Danish novel and its deeply perverse hero.
BY JAMES WOOD
magine a novel about an ambitious,
I slightly coarse, provincial young man,
determined to make his name in the
capital city. He is tall and strong, with
uncanny blue eyes—“sea-cold,” “mer-
man” eyes. He talks too loudly. One of
the capital’s most polished journalists
dismisses him as a “swaggering farm-
boy.” Even the rich heiress who almost
marries him agrees with him that he is
like a mountain troll from a fairy tale;
her sister, on first meeting him, noticed
his “slightly provincial shoes.” But he
has brilliance and will, and others wel-
come this young engineer with a head
full of projects as “the prototype of the
active man of the twentieth century,” a
Henrik Pontoppidan, a winner of the Nobel Prize, completed “Lucky Per” in 1904.
ILLUSTRATION BY HUGO GUINNESS
figure from a different, luckier tale, an
Aladdin (as one of his friends crowns
him) who will surely prosper and tri-
umph. The novel describes this journey.
Now imagine that the novel system-
atically subverts the swelling arc of the
bildungsroman—that, on the cusp of
each achievement, some ghostly hand
pulls our hero back from victory. He is
about to leave his mark in the capital
city, but eventually withdraws. He is about
to marry the rich heiress, but calls off
the engagement. He returns to the coun-
try and starts a family with a modest
country girl, but he isn’t happy there, ei-
ther: “He was like a clock whose insides
had been carefully removed, piece by
piece.” In fact, our Aladdin seems des-
tined to follow the serial emaciations of
“Hans in Luck,” one of the Grimms’ fairy
tales, in which Hans, having been paid
in gold by his master, is persuaded to ex-
change his gold for a horse, then his
horse for a cow, then his cow for a pig,
and so on, until finally he loses every-
thing, and returns home happy and un-
encumbered. His luck is his reduction.
The hero of this novel comes to the
conclusion that all worldly treasures
“lost their worth as he got closer to
them.” He spends his final years living
in virtual isolation in a remote rural area
in the north of the country. After his
untimely death, a notebook of his is
found, which contains these beautiful
words of fatalism and rebellion:
When we are young, we make immoderate
demands on those powers that steer existence.
We want them to reveal themselves to us. The
mysterious veil under which we have to live
offends us; we demand to be able to control
and correct the great world-machinery. When
we get a little older, in our impatience we cast
our eye over mankind and its history to try to
find, at last, a coherence in laws, in progres-
sive development; in short, we seek a mean-
ing to life, an aim for our struggles and suffer-
ing. But one day, we are stopped by a voice
from the depths of our beings, a ghostly voice
that asks “Who are you?” From then on we
hear no other question. From that moment,
our own true self becomes the great Sphinx,
whose riddle we try to solve.
This shattering, sometimes unbear-
ably powerful novel, completed in 1904,
was written by Henrik Pontoppidan,
who won the Nobel Prize in 1917. It is
considered one of the greatest Danish
novels; the filmmaker Bille August
turned the story into a nearly three-hour
movie called, in English, “A Fortunate
Man” (2019). The novel was praised by
Thomas Mann and Ernst Bloch, and is
effectively at the center of Georg Lukács’s
classic study “The Theory of the Novel”
(1920). In Danish, it is called “Lykke-
Per”; in German, it was given the title
of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale “Hans
im Glück.” And in English? In English,
it didn’t exist, having gone untranslated
for more than a century, until the scholar
Naomi Lebowitz administered the trans-
lator’s equivalent of a magic kiss and
roused it from shameful oblivion. Pub-
lished nine years ago in academic for-
mat, “Lucky Per” has finally appeared
in Everyman’s Library, in Lebowitz’s
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 79
fluent and lucid version, with an excel-
lent introduction by the novelist and
critic Garth Risk Hallberg. Our luck
has caught up with everyone else’s.
Have I spoiled the plot by revealing
the ending? The critic only gives away
in silver what the great novel eventually
releases as gold. Besides, it’s almost im-
possible to discuss “Lucky Per” without
discussing the shape of its plot, because
the radical oddity of the book is so bound
up with the hero’s final renunciations.
At first sight, “Lucky Per” looks like a
stolid work of realism. It is almost six
hundred pages long. Through its ample
halls moves a large cast of characters,
from several layers of Danish society—
middle-class clergymen, rich merchants,
lawyers and politicians, writers and in-
tellectuals. There is much conversation
about the coming century: the fate of
the nation, the future of technology.
But one reason it’s generally unwise
to talk about a single style called “real-
ism” is that prose narrative is so often
lured away from conventional verisimil-
itude by rival genres, notably allegory
and fairy tale. The book’s opening chap-
ter is at once familiarly “realistic” and
heavy with the ironic fatalism of the
folktale. In a small market town in East
Jutland, Per Sidenius is one of eleven
children growing up in an austerely re-
ligious family. His father is a pastor with
an ascetic hatred of the body. His mother
is bedridden. While his brothers and
“O.K., it’s time you guys got your own HBO subscriptions.”
sisters mutter their prayers “in a sort of
underworld blindness to the light and
full of a dread of life and its glory,” Per
is a singular, rebellious life force. He
sneaks out of the house to go sledding,
he flirts with a local girl. When a pa-
rishioner complains to the pastor that
Per has been stealing apples from his
garden, the wayward son is severely ad-
monished at family dinner, warned that
he could end up like Cain, the first mur-
derer, whom God cursed thus: “You will
be a wandering fugitive in all the earth.”
His siblings weep in dismay, but Per si-
lently scoffs. At the age of sixteen, he
escapes this prison, and goes to Copen-
hagen to study engineering at the Poly-
technic Institute. The coming-of-age
novel, Per’s sentimental education, will
now begin in earnest, as the dark, reli-
gious family grotto recedes into the dis-
tance of legend.
Alas, the past cannot be escaped so
easily. Fable and allegory curl themselves
like creepers around our hero’s feet. Per
has, in effect, been exiled from Eden,
for the Adamic sin of stealing apples.
But his home wasn’t Edenic, and be-
sides, he doesn’t share his father’s Chris-
tian faith. If he hasn’t committed a sin,
how can he be cursed? All the secular
energy of this novel—and it has a mag-
nificent, liberating secular power—
pushes against the reality of the pastor’s
Old Testament damnation. Yet Per is
cursed: he’s destined to wander, destined
to quest, and destined to fail. With a
steady, returning beat, closer to allegor-
ical verse than to realist fiction, the novel
reminds us of its guiding theme: the
homelessness of its hero, condemned to
spend his life in the lonely quest for a
metaphysical safe harbor. So is Per’s
curse a religious curse or a fairy-tale
curse? And what is the difference be-
tween the two?
Per’s odd life path might simply be
the result of being born into the Side-
nius family. The Sideniuses, we learn at
the novel’s opening, trace their lineage,
through generations of ministers, all
the way back to the Reformation. It’s
a family tree of unimpeachable piety
and dreary episcopal conformity, with
one exception. An ancestor, also a pas-
tor, known as Mad Sidenius, somehow
went off the rails. He drank brandy with
the peasants, and assaulted the parish
clerk. In a novel haunted by insanity
and suicide, the memory of this family
outcast is important. The potentially
blasphemous question rears its head
again: if it’s a curse to be a Sidenius, is
Per cursed by generations of unerring
piety, or by that ancestral aberrant flash
of madness?
enrik Pontoppidan’s life began
H much like his fictional hero’s. He
was born in 1857, the son of a Jutland
pastor, into a family that had produced
countless clergymen. Unlike Per, Pon-
toppidan seems to have remained on
friendly terms with his family, despite
drifting away from his inherited Chris-
tianity. In his memoir, published in 1940,
three years before his death, he declared
himself to be an out-and-out rational-
ist, dismayed by the tenacity of religious
superstition. Like Per, he left the prov-
inces to study engineering at the Poly-
technic Institute in Copenhagen.
Copenhagen of the eighteen-seven-
ties and eighties has been described (by
the critic Morten Høi Jensen) as “the
first real battleground of European Mod-
ernism.” A parochially Protestant cul-
ture was beginning to do intellectual
trade with the rest of Europe: French
realism and naturalism, Darwinism
and radical atheism were the imported
goods. The two most talented conduits
of these new freedoms were the novel-
ist Jens Peter Jacobsen and the critic
Georg Brandes, both of whom make
appearances in fictionalized form in
“Lucky Per.” Jacobsen translated Dar-
win’s major work into Danish, and wrote
what is surely one of the most fanati-
cally and superbly atheistic novels in ex-
istence, “Niels Lyhne” (1880). A lyrical
aesthete and a Flaubertian prose pol-
isher, he is pictured, in “Lucky Per,” as
the sickly poet Enevoldsen, fussing with
his lorgnette at a Copenhagen café while
worrying about “where to put a comma.”
Jacobsen was championed by Brandes,
whose lectures at the University of Co-
penhagen in 1871 were an inspiration for
a generation of Scandinavian writers.
(Brandes and Pontoppidan corresponded
for decades.) Brandes had read Mill,
Hegel, Feuerbach, Strauss. A fervent
atheist, he introduced Danish readers to
Nietzsche and, late in life, wrote a book
entitled “Jesus: A Myth” (1925). He was
an advocate of European naturalism, and
of fiction that attended to the social and
political moment. It was time, he argued,
to open Denmark up to the outside—a
movement that became known as the
Modern Breakthrough. In “Lucky Per,”
Brandes appears throughout the novel,
more invoked than encountered, as the
dominating Dr. Nathan, sometimes nick-
named Dr. Satan. Brandes was Jewish,
and Pontoppidan, remarkably alert to
European anti-Semitism throughout
the novel, writes that Per had kept his
distance from Dr. Nathan because of
this: “He simply didn’t like that foreign
race, nor did he have any leaning to-
ward literary men.”
But Per’s life will soon be changed
by another Jewish character, and one
who shares the bulk of the novel with
him: the fierce, brilliant, troubled Jakobe
Salomon. Per meets Jakobe through her
brother, Ivan, who decides, early in the
novel, that Per has the potential of a
Caesar on whose brow God has written
“I come, I see, I conquer!” Per’s imperial
impulses are manifest in his vast uto-
pian engineering project, which envis-
ages “a system of canals on the Dutch
model” that will connect Denmark’s riv-
ers, lakes, and fjords with one another,
“and put the cultivated heaths and the
flourishing new towns into contact
with the sea on both sides.” His dream
is a physical enactment of Brandes’s
Modern Breakthrough. He also shares
Brandes’s atheism. “There was no hell,”
Per reflects, “other than what mankind,
afraid of love’s joy and the body’s force,
created in its monstrous imagination.”
The Anglophone reader is sometimes
reminded of Thomas Hardy or D. H.
Lawrence. Per exults in the healthy sec-
ularism of the body: “The embrace of
man and woman was the heaven in which
there is oblivion for all sorrows, forgive-
ness for all sins, where souls meet in
guiltless nakedness like
Adam and Eve in the gar-
den of paradise.”
With the ruthlessness
of the provincial hero, Per
decides that marriage to
an heiress of the vast Salo-
mon merchant fortune will
speed him on his way. At
first, though, he stirs in Ja-
kobe a deep-seated hatred
of Christian culture, and
she treats him with an insulting haugh-
tiness. Bookish, sensitive, twenty-three,
and already considered a bit of an old
maid by her family, Jakobe had been a
sickly child, and the target of anti-Semitic
bullying. Per triggers in her a memory,
at once sharp and hallucinatory, nar-
rated with dreamlike indulgence by Pon-
toppidan, and one of the novel’s most
potent scenes. Four years earlier, Jakobe
had been in a Berlin railway station.
Her eye was caught by a group of “piti-
able, ragged people surrounded by a cir-
cle of curious, gaping onlookers.” When
she asked a station official how to get
to the waiting room, he replied that with
her nose she should find it easy to smell
her way there. On the floor of the wait-
ing room were hundreds more desper-
ate, emaciated paupers. Suddenly, she
realized that they were Russian Jews,
on their way to America via Germany.
She had heard of the pogroms, and was
astounded that this “infamy crying out
to heaven could happen right before
Europe’s eyes with no authoritative voice
raised against it!” Per’s Nordic frame
and blue eyes make her think of two
police officers she glimpsed in Berlin,
who seemed the embodiments of the
“brutal self-righteousness” of the Chris-
tian society she lives in.
With great ironic power, Pontoppi-
dan convinces us that Jakobe and Per
must inevitably hate each other, and
then, soon enough, that these two dam-
aged creatures could have found com-
fort only in each other. Their relation-
ship is passionately erotic and ardently
intellectual; Jakobe, again like some her-
oine out of D. H. Lawrence, is help-
lessly attracted to Per, despite the blar-
ing correctives from her conscience. The
couple have in common their commit-
ted atheism, their hatred of the estab-
lished church, and a sense of being “cho-
sen”—by theology, by race, by similarly
heroic notions of destiny.
Garth Risk Hallberg, in
his introduction, says that
Jakobe Salomon is “as in-
telligent as anyone out of
James, as bold as anyone
out of Austen, as perverse
as anyone out of Dosto-
yevsky,” and adds that,
“with all due respect,” the
frankness and amplitude
of Pontoppidan’s depiction
of the Salomon household leaves George
Eliot’s Daniel Deronda “in the dust.” I
like it when writers are made to run races
with one another, precisely because we’re
supposed to be above such competitions,
and I also think that Hallberg is right.
Jakobe is utterly alive and complex, and
burns at the living center of the book.
Pontoppidan endows her with an ex-
traordinary intellectual restlessness, and
allows her some of the most movingly
lucid secular proclamations I have ever
encountered in fiction.
One of these statements, a long let-
ter that she writes to Per, becomes an
eloquent, scalding testament to her athe-
ism and her faith in the known limits
of our worldly existence. She excoriates
Christianity’s “exaggerated anxiety about
death” and, following Nietzsche, com-
plains about the link between the fear
of death and “slave morality”:
Never will I forget the impression that
some plaster casts of bodies excavated in Pom-
peii made on me. There were, among others,
a master and his slave, both evidently caught
by surprise in the rain of ash. . . . But what a
difference in the facial expressions! On the
slave’s face, you could read the most confus-
ing puzzlement. He was overturned on his
back, his eyebrows were raised up to his hair-
line, the thick mouth open, and you could vir-
tually hear him screaming like a stuck pig. The
other, by contrast, had preserved his mastered
dignity unto death. His almost-closed eyes,
the fine mouth pressed shut, were marked by
the proudest and most beautiful resignation in
relation to the inevitable.
My primary complaint against Christiani-
ty’s hope of eternal life is that it robs this life
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 81

“I’d like to give you an allowance, but who carries cash anymore?”
• •
of its deep seriousness and, with that, its beauty.
When we imagine our existence here on earth
as only a dress rehearsal for the real perfor-
mance, what remains of life’s festiveness?
The powerful secular argument of
the novel resides in the freedom and in-
tensity of Per and Jakobe’s brief rela-
tionship. There’s a marvellous scene in
the Austrian Alps, where Per has trav-
elled after the couple’s engagement, and
where Jakobe has arrived without no-
tice. The time they spend together in
the Alps constitutes their true marriage,
“a new birth and baptism.” One day, out
walking, they come across a crude
wooden cross, a simple hillside shrine
with a rough painting of Jesus. Per tells
Jakobe a fable that he heard as a child,
about a farm boy who wants to become
a great shot, a “magic marksman.” But
in order to achieve this the boy must go
out at night, find an image of Christ,
and shoot a bullet through it. Every time
the lad tries to do it, his confidence wa-
vers, his hand shakes, and he fails the
test. He remains “a common Sunday
hunter” for the rest of his life.
Per turns back to the hillside shrine.
“Look at that pale man hanging there!”
he says. “Why don’t we have the cour-
age to spit from disgust right in his face.”
Per takes out his revolver and fires at
82 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
the image of Jesus, while yelling, “Now
I shoot in the new century!” As the cross
splinters, a second, hollow boom sounds
through the valley, like “infernal thun-
der.” Per blanches, and then laughs, re-
membering the signposts he had seen
earlier: “Take notice of the echo!”
eavy, God-infested, magnificently
H metaphysical, unafraid to court
ridicule, and playing for the highest
possible stakes—they don’t write like
that anymore. They didn’t write much
like that in 1904, though Knut Ham-
sun, in 1890, and Jens Peter Jacobsen,
in 1880, and above all Dostoyevsky, the
great progenitor, had all sounded some-
thing like this, not so long before. Given
the novel’s astonishingly raw atheism,
how are we to read the “religious” re-
nunciation of its ending? At the nov-
el’s close, Jakobe and Per appear to be
living alone, and each is now commit-
ted to a life of religious seriousness,
though neither is a religious believer:
Per in the remote north, living in monk-
ish retreat, and Jakobe in Copenhagen,
where she has founded a charity school
for poor children.
Throughout, Per is hard to compre-
hend in his cloudy questing. At one
moment—around the time of his moth-
er’s death—he is pulled back toward
his inherited faith, repenting his lust
for worldly success and begging for-
giveness from God. But fifty or so pages
later his recoil from Christian self-
sacrifice is palpable once again; he is
repelled, for instance, by Thomas à Kem-
pis’s lament, in “Imitation of Christ,”
that “truly, it is an affliction to live in
the world.” Per reflects that he is at
home neither among ascetic Chris-
tians—the piety of the Sideniuses—nor
among “the children of the world”: the
luxury of the Salomons. And yet, trou-
bled by this very homelessness, he feels
that one must choose: on one side, re-
nunciation; on the other, the world.
Which is it to be? For it is necessary to
take a stand, to “swear fidelity . . . to the
cross or champagne.”
In the end, Per surrenders to the re-
ligious impulses of a faith he seems to
stand outside of. We have been here be-
fore, in this world of a deformed and
contradictory atheism. Raging heroes
in Dostoyevsky, Jacobsen, and Hamsun
enjoy denouncing a God they don’t be-
lieve in. But Per Sidenius is stranger
still, because he seems to want to imi-
tate a Christ he doesn’t believe in.
Thomas Mann praised Pontoppidan as
a kind of gentle prophet, for having
“judged the times and, like the true poet
which he is, pointed toward a purer hu-
manity.” In a suggestive afterword, the
novel’s translator, Naomi Lebowitz,
notes how Per “restlessly evicts himself ”
from all those places which could offer
him refuge. Subtler than Mann, she also
sees Per’s journey as the discovery of,
finally, “an authentic and transparent
sense of self . . . the need to be himself,
by himself.”
The novel encourages such readings.
Per’s notebook, written in his final years,
contains the following entry: “Honor
to my youth’s expansive dreams! And I
am still a world conqueror. Every man’s
soul is an independent universe, his death
the extinction of the universe in min-
iature.” In this reading, “Lucky Per,”
though rather Scandinavian in its reli-
gious intensity, is a still familiar version
of the bildungsroman, in which our hero
ventures out into the world, tastes suc-
cess, tastes the ashes of success, and re-
treats to ponder, on his own authentic
terms, the riddle of the self that has al-
ways preoccupied him. Fredric Jameson
has suggested that we should see this
as a happy ending, albeit an ironic one,
in which Per has “managed to get be-
yond success or failure.”
Yet how can we accept the ironic
wisdom of this ending without smoth-
ering the vital force of the novel’s ear-
lier secularism? Where have the “magic
marksmen,” willing not only to spit at
Christ but to shoot at Christ, gone?
Where has Jakobe’s proud Roman mas-
ter scuttled away to? You don’t have to
be a fully paid-up Nietzschean to feel
that if you no longer believe in the
Christian God you should no longer
believe in that Christian God’s slave
morality. If you have rejected the con-
tent of the faith, why mimic its more
self-punishing practices? Per’s imag-
ined choice between cross or cham-
pagne is not only a false choice but a
mutilated one, posed by a reduced ver-
sion of Christianity. In fact, “Lucky Per”
emerges as a savage critique of the per-
sistence, in Danish culture, of a certain
Kierkegaardian masochism, in which
all choices are made religious rather
than secular, purifyingly negative rather
than complicatedly affirmative. Kierke-
gaard said that one had to be a kind of
lunatic in order to be a true Christian.
Is there a difference between this form
of religious madness and actual mad-
ness? “Lucky Per” inserts its secular,
novelistic lever into just this question.
What if Per’s final renunciation is a
narrative false flag? Instead of looking
at Per, we should perhaps look toward
Jakobe, whose own renunciation takes
her into the world, not away from it,
and who seems to manage this turn
without compromising her defiant sec-
ularism. She is the novel’s true hero.
How do you get back to Eden? Back to
the place you inhabited before the orig-
inal religious curse? Back to a home be-
fore religion made it a home you could
be exiled from? If you are a wandering,
homeless Christian, scarred by original
sin, the answer might be: in the arms
of a wandering Jew—but one whose
own itinerancy is unseduced by the lure
of religion, whose own secularism is not
tempted by the simplicity of religious
masochism. In the strange switchback
of their lives, Per and Jakobe each re-
defined the meaning of luck. The shame
was that they could not share it. Lucky
Jakobe, unlucky Per. 
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman (Knopf ). Lyra
Silvertongue, the child protagonist of Pullman’s beloved tril-
ogy “His Dark Materials,” is an undergraduate at Oxford in
this, the second installment of a follow-up trilogy. The plot
again involves the theocratic Magisterium (Pullman is an out-
spoken atheist) and a cosmology in which everyone has a “dae-
mon”—an externalized soul in animal form. What is new here
is the relationship between Lyra and her daemon, a pine mar-
ten called Pantalaimon, who disapproves of the philosophies
that captivate her at university. The antagonism between the
two, which borders on rejection, suggests that the adjustments
of adulthood may become an important theme in the trilogy.
Song of Songs, by Sylvie Baumgartel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
“You have shot your sunlight into my life,” a narrator named
Sylvie tells her absent lover, in the prose poems of this star-
tlingly intimate début. She recounts the thrills and the mun-
danities of her daily life—cooking, doing dishes and laundry,
masturbating—and launches into explicit, guileless descrip-
tions of sex, in which she cultivates a language that is both
playful and ferocious. The conventional power dynamics of
heterosexual love appear in grotesque extremity (“I want to
live forever chained at your feet”), but Sylvie’s wit and charm
make them more farcical than troubling. The result is a study
of devotion and a celebration of the rewards that come from
loving with abandon.
JGV, by Jean-Georges Vongerichten with Michael Ruhlman (Nor-
ton). Vongerichten, after years of working in Michelin-starred
restaurants in France and Asia, arrived in New York in his
late twenties. It was 1986, and chefs, as he writes in this mem-
oir, were just beginning to come “out of the kitchen” and es-
tablish themselves as brands. The fusion cuisine that he de-
veloped in the next years made him a star. Lush recollections
of how he dreamed up combinations like foie gras with mango
are the book’s most obvious delight. (Recipes are included.)
But there is also an absorbing narrative of empire-building.
Vongerichten, who has opened more than seventy restaurants
worldwide, provides a window into the mechanics of a glo-
balized restaurant industry that is based as much on licens-
ing and celebrity as on food.
Me & Other Writing, by Marguerite Duras, translated from the
French by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan (Dorothy). Duras
was famous for recycling her life in her fiction, and this non-
fiction collection shows her evaluating such figures as her
difficult mother, who “had all the attributes of a great char-
acter.” The book ends with a series of articles describing the
summer of 1980. As Duras tells us about the Moscow Olym-
pics, shipyard strikes in Gdańsk, her hopes for a proletarian
revolution, and her despair at the “misfortune of mankind,”
she weaves in a tender narrative about a small boy and the
adolescent girl who looks after him. This is entirely fictional—a
characteristic ploy from a writer who believed that under-
standing suffering was an act of the imagination.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 83

T H E A R T WO R L D
REHAB
The Museum of Modern Art enlarged.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
he Vatican, Kremlin, and Valhalla American artist Faith Ringgold, with
T of modernism—home of the faith,
the sway, and the glamour—that is the
Picasso’s gospel “Les Demoiselles d’Avi-
gnon” (1907). The renovation is a big deal
Museum of Modern Art is reopening, for the global art world, and certainly
after an expansion that adds forty-seven for New York. It runs up against prob-
thousand square feet and many new lems old and new. Generously enlarged
galleries, inserted into a moma-owned quarters will only marginally relieve a
apartment tower next door and built chronic crush of visitors, the museum
on neighboring land gobbled from the victimized by its own charisma. En-
late, by some of us lamented, digs of hanced representations of art by women,
the American Folk Art Museum. Far African-Americans, Africans, Latin-
more, though still a fraction, of moma’s Americans, and Asians can feel tenta-
nonpareil collection is now on display, tive, pitched between self-evident jus-
arranged roughly chronologically but tice and noblesse oblige. But such efforts
studded with such mutually provoking are important and must continue. We
juxtapositions as a 1967 painting that will have a diverse cosmopolitan cul-
fantasizes a race riot, by the African- ture or none worth bothering about.
Masterpieces dulled by overfamiliarity spring to second lives by being repositioned.
84 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
In addition, the design provides flex-
ible space for temporary installations
that will serve the museum’s duty to en-
tertain. A spectacular affair by the South
Korean artist Haegue Yang in the mu-
seum’s still space-squandering atrium
features wheeled assemblages that jin-
gle as, at intervals, they are pushed
around by performers, and colorful vinyl
reliefs that cling to the high walls like
mutant lepidoptera. The work’s politi-
cal, spiritual, and whatnot themes are
arcane, but never mind. It makes for an
elating circus atmosphere, hospitable to
audiences only cursorily versed in art
history. Popular engagement has be-
come a necessary face, or fate, of any
current art-making that isn’t adjudi-
cated by a plutocratic market. Without
it, contemporary art is a buyers’ club.
Decisions to stitch works of for-
merly segregated mediums, such as
graphic art, photography, design,
architecture, artists’ books, and film,
into the historic course of painting
and sculpture come off pleasantly—
the museum owns gems in all fields—
though you sense the strain of the
forced equivalencies of art and arti-
facts. Moma laid the groundwork for
this dilemma nine decades ago, when
the founders envisaged an encyclope-
dic approach to products of moder-
nity, eliding bohemian studios with
commercial industries. That mandate,
though still guiding new acquisitions,
has devolved from evangelical avant-
gardism to the preservation of multi-
tudinous brainstorms of yesteryear.
The adorable 1945-vintage Bell heli-
copter, acquired in 1984, yet hovers
above the stairs to the second floor,
gamely signifying something epochal,
or not so epochal, or bizarre, depend-
ing on your predilection. So vast is the
frame of reference adopted at the mu-
seum’s outset that, by now, no survey
of the collection can amount to more
than a walk-through brochure of choice
examples. Obligatory breadth renders
depth moot. There’s no help for this.
It’s time to say that the reconfigura-
tion of the museum is, all in all, terrific,
and that I don’t care very much about
the strenuous calculations that deter-
mined it. This is only another chap-
ter in the life stories of all of us who
were imprinted by our initial epipha-
nies with the museum’s treasures. Some
PHOTOGRAPH BY WARD ROBERTS
of the rehangs electrify, notably in the
first room of the permanent collection,
where a sequence of Symbolist work,
by the likes of Redon, Vuillard, Ensor,
Munch, Gauguin, and Henri Rousseau,
leaps (after a de-rigueur pause for van
Gogh) to Cézanne, who comes off more
than ever as revolutionary. An old for-
malist chronicle of the era thus gives
way to the torrid poetic intensities of
the nineteenth-century European fin
de siècle. But it’s plenty enough for me
to come upon Piet Mondrian’s “Broad-
way Boogie-Woogie” (1942-43) freshly
recontextualized, as an outrigger to
an eye-opening historical show of
Latin-American art, “Sur moderno:
Journeys of Abstraction,” which in-
cludes work by the ingenious Brazil-
ians Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica.
(The rationale for Mondrian’s place-
ment there is a Latin-American pref-
erence, after the Second World War,
for European rigor over New York’s
perfervid painterly originalities.)
How did Mondrian do it? And what
is it, exactly, and how does whatever
that may be matter? The fifty-inch-
square canvas presents rectangular
blocks and little squares of red, yellow,
and blue paint in and across asymmet-
rically gridded horizontal and vertical
bands, against an off-white ground.
Boogie-woogie is apt, like the left and
right hands at a piano seeming to ig-
nore each other but generating intri-
cate, exuberant rhythmic agreements.
The term “abstract” feels too dry—
the painting is so concretely active and
urgently optimistic. It motors along as
you look, engaging your attention in
hops, skips, and jumps. The excruciat-
ingly hard work that’s evident (try to
imagine any detail scaled, placed, or
colored differently) bespeaks a convic-
tion so compelling that your heart
pledges allegiance to it without your
mind having any clear idea of what
that involves. Call the value utopian
modernity. Call it anything. Only lux-
uriate in the good luck of having eyes
to see with and a body that responds
to bopping suggestion. “Broadway
Boogie-Woogie,” by a starchy Dutch-
man enamored of the foxtrot and ideal
democracy, feels foundational, as if
nothing in the world quite eludes its
gravitational tug. The excitement fades
from the mind as you turn away—it’s
only art—but the experience leaves a
moral residue of the strivingly good
and true.
he best time to visit the revamped
T moma is your first, punctuated
with reintroductions to old artistic com-
panions. Masterpieces dulled by over-
familiarity in an account that had be-
come as rote as a college textbook spring
to second lives by being repositioned.
(I left out, while describing the collec-
tion’s first room, the presence of six lyr-
ical ceramics by George E. Ohr, the
nineteenth-century “Mad Potter of Bi-
loxi”—one of several invigorating nods
to formerly scanted outsiders.) Re-
freshed, Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp,
and Pollock reaffirm, by our awe, their
trailblazing toward a future that, never
arriving, continues to beckon even as
it recedes in time, like the Doppler
effect of a train passing by. Anew, I
come to a dead stop in front of Ma-
tisse’s “The Piano Lesson” (1917), an
idyll of bourgeois family life and an ex-
ercise of formal audacity, made at the
same time that the abattoir battles at
Verdun were unfolding, some hundred
and sixty miles away.
The Matisse, like Arshile Gorky’s
“Diary of a Seducer” (1945), a plunge
into angst-ridden sensuality in another
time of crisis, is about art as a frivolity
indispensable to a civilization that pe-
riodically verges on bloody collapse—a
modest but robust instance of poise
amid rushing, dire events. Or don’t you
feel that way? Can we talk? Moma’s re-
vision of its master narrative should
trigger no end of conversations about
issues of the century past and how they
preface, or fail to, our anxiety-prone
times. Not despite but because the focus
is “only art,” it supplements serious
thought about the world with registra-
tions of what it’s like to live in it—the
out-there of news squared up to the in-
here of spirit. After absorbing the gen-
eral themes of the reinstallation, which
will take time, we can get down to the
quibbling that is the elixir of art talk in
the big city. Go with a gabby friend or
two, to jump-start your share.
As ever, the sharpest departure in
the hanging’s tale is between future-ori-
ented modernism and the shocks of
Pop art and minimalism, which com-
menced to bask or to brood in a dis-
continuous present tense: the tumbling
condition of culture both lofty and de-
motic since the rock-and-roll, corpo-
ratizing, brutally divisive nineteen-six-
ties. But history avenges itself as history
does, freezing the breaks for freedom
in their bygone day.
After this, avant-gardes turn inward.
Disproportionate space is given to con-
ceptual artists of the seventies: fledg-
ling baby boomers, for the most part,
who presumed to conjoin art and life
in the moment but mainly muddled
them with work that, as if on perverse
principle, is visually boring. To be im-
portant then as much as entailed being
unappealing. This is a gross generaliza-
tion, unfair to many, but the impression
of a slough in art history is unshakable.
The apposite galleries document the for-
mation of a bubble culture that, coast-
ing on institutional and academic em-
braces, drifted afield of aesthetic appe-
tite, which, from the eighties onward,
has become the criterion of a market-
defined alternate tradition of epicu-
rean chic. A few artists, such as Cindy
Sherman and (for a while) Jeff Koons,
now and then split the difference be-
tween artistic challenge and commer-
cial catnip.
I’m veering around here, as you will
in your turn. So many stories! One that
thrills me is that of a room devoted to
the work, the influence, and the aura
of the moma curator and major Amer-
ican poet Frank O’Hara. His acciden-
tal death, in 1966, at the age of forty,
ripped the heart out of an overlap of
artistic and literary communities in
New York. He couldn’t be replaced.
Prints by leading artists from a memo-
rial book that the museum issued in
1967, “In Memory of My Feelings,” em-
anate the deep charm of a moment
when a fully fleshed, buoyant, demo-
cratic sophistication seemed afoot. I
know. I was a kid poet and tyro critic
then. I met O’Hara. He inscribed my
copy of a catalogue that he had writ-
ten the introduction to: “For Peter with
palship, Frank.” He made pals of all
the world. He drank too much, as peo-
ple then tended to, gesticulating with
cigarettes in their other hands. For
many, with O’Hara gone, New York
took on the trembly cast of an inter-
minable hangover. Moma’s inclusion
of him gladdens. 
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019 85

T H E T H E AT R E
STAGE RIGHT
Degrees of conservatism in “Heroes of the Fourth Turning.”
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM
“ H eroes of the Fourth Turning,”
the new play by Will Arbery,
directed by Danya Taymor, opens on a
stage so dark that your eyes grope for
an anchor. They seize slowly into focus,
and you start to see a Doppler map of
finely parsed grays. At farthest stage
right, there’s the back door of a house
and a tiny patio. Off to the left, past a
dead campfire and some chairs, is the
true dark of the woods. By the door,
it’s just light enough to see the figure
of a man sitting improbably still, hold­
ing a rifle.
In the moments before he shoots the
gun—a real one (with blanks), startling
and resonant in the small Playwrights
Will Arbery’s play reveals the thin line between devotion and delusion.
86 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
Horizons theatre—the onstage scene
looks like a rural Hopper. The silence
around the man almost speaks, and its
intimations of impending loss are awful.
After the shot, the man guts his vic­
tim—a deer—but noticeably lacks any
hint of sporting exuberance. His hand
shakes, and he needs to steady himself.
Afterward, he’s mostly worried about
the blood on the ground.
The shooter’s name is Justin ( Jeb
Kreager), and, in the next scene, he’s
hosting a fraught party that’s begin­
ning to wind down. A group of young
acquaintances—not quite friends in
every case, but they share a kind of com­
pulsory intimacy—have converged on
the town in western Wyoming where
they attended a small conservative Cath­
olic college known for the rigors of its
classical education. They trade lines
from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great
poem “God’s Grandeur,” drop adoring
references to “my gal Flannery O,” and
ask one another questions like “How’s
your soul?”
As the party rambles on and the
guests flit in and out of the house, a
warm, yellow stream of light comes
from the door, heightening the drama
of shadow and light. Everybody’s face
is half lit. (Isabella Byrd offers a mas­
terpiece of lighting design, rich with
portent and glinting significance.) Peo­
ple step out of shadows, having heard
things not meant for their ears. Hop­
per becomes Caravaggio, and “Heroes,”
a formally lovely, subtly horrifying play
about the death rattle of ideologies and
the thin line between devotion and de­
lusion, echoes the interplay between
those two painters of profound psycho­
logical depth. Each of the characters is
in some ways terribly alone, like Hop­
per’s city zombies, vacant about the eyes,
but each one’s heart, poked into flame
by conversation, is, like the doubting
disciple in Caravaggio’s “The Incredu­
lity of Saint Thomas,” reaching out for
something solid to match the intensity
of his or her hopes and ideas.
They’re all conservatives, bewildered
by a world that no longer takes its shape
from the political and metaphysical as­
sumptions they share. Young though
they are, the spirit of the age is pass­
ing them by. Much of the thrill of the
play comes in hearing ultraconservative
ideas—scarce on New York stages—
discussed in earnest, and carried to their
most ominous conclusions. The timing
of the party, set in the very recent and
miserably memorable past, lends even
more symbolic weight: it’s just a week
after the white­supremacist riot and
murder in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Steve Bannon’s just been fired from the
White House.
ike Justin, Emily ( Julia McDer­
L mott) still lives in Wyoming. She’s
sick with a disease that’s never named
but which leaves her body in constant
pain and her mind, as we see it inexo­
rably revealed, open to a raw and some­
times unwelcome empathy with the
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE RÖSCH
world beyond this circle of friends. Her
mother, Gina (Michele Pawk), is the
college’s newly inaugurated president,
and the person in whose honor the group
has ostensibly gathered.
Kevin ( John Zdrojeski) works for a
publisher of Catholic textbooks whose
bland accounts of the lives of the saints
have become his bane. He’s too drunk,
close to a breakdown, and revelling in
the self­hatred and the religious anguish
that have become his entire personal­
ity. Incommensurably, he wants both a
girlfriend and a priest’s collar.
Teresa (Zoë Winters) lives in Brook­
lyn among the heathens, a Bannonite
rose grown from concrete. (“He’ll be
back,” she says of her fired hero. And,
who knows, she might be right.) Her
sentences are harsh, fascistic bullets, and
she advocates a Schmittian war against
abortionists and other apostates. Un­
like the softhearted, ecumenical Emily,
she sees Trump as a life raft; to her, he’s
a “Golem molded from the clay of mass
media, and he’s come to save us all.”
Winters plays Teresa with unnerving
precision, carefully walking the line be­
tween naturalism—some of us are truly
both this anxious and obnoxiously con­
fident—and a kind of stentorian, hys­
terical Fox News presentation.
Justin is gentle but equally afraid of
the outer world. He wants to withdraw
into a localism that sounds uncomfort­
ably like doomsday prepperdom. He
cites the “Benedict Option”—a strate­
gic Christian retreat promoted by the
writer Rod Dreher—and gives a short
speech that cools the blood: “There are
more of them.” More of the godless and
progressive, he means. “We lost the pop­
ular vote, by a lot. . . . And they’re mo­
bilizing. In many ways, they are in power.
And they’re trying to wipe us out.”
There’s just enough ideological and
attitudinal space between these char­
acters to make for revealing arguments
in each direction—for example: Can
one be pro­choice and, in any mean­
ingful way, also be a good person?—
and to reveal the despair lurking be­
hind their rhetorical and emotional
poses. To catch the nuances in their
differences—and to imagine what these
nuances might mean for the future of
people like these, and therefore for the
future of our country—is a bit like the
corneal adjustment required in the first
moment of the play: you’ve got to dis­
tinguish dark from dark, and perceive
a thousand darknesses in between.
rbery—who has said that he was
A brought up by “articulate, brilliant,
poetic” Catholic conservatives, and there­
fore knows whereof he writes—seems
to communicate his own frustration
most clearly when it comes to race. Jus­
tin, Emily, Teresa, and Kevin have been
sticking around with the understand­
ing that Gina, the woman of the hour,
will be swinging by the house. When,
belatedly, she does, feelings have been
hurt, and everybody’s looking to strike.
Gina’s an old­school Republican—a
Goldwater girl, and a former member
of the John Birch Society, but, temper­
amentally, she thinks, she’s a moderate.
Pictured: American Airlines team members surviving and
Trump will come and go, she hopes more co-surviving cancer with SU2C ambassador, Tim McGraw
than sincerely believes. When she real­
izes just how radical Teresa’s stance has
become, she comes down hard on the
younger woman. But what she intends
as a thorough and effective rebuke only Join American Airlines and Stand Up
goes to show how thin the tissue be­
tween their politics is, how her edifice To Cancer in our mission to help make
of decency hides a rotten foundation.
“You call us racist, we’ll call you racist,” everyone diagnosed with cancer a
Teresa says, playing out the argument
in her head. “You call us white, we’ll call long-term survivor. Donate $25 or
you black.” Gina doesn’t like the words, more and you’ll receive 10 American
but she doesn’t refuse to accept “us” and
“black” as racial and ideological oppo­ Airlines AAdvantage® Miles for every
sites. To her, as much as to Teresa, these
will never be equivalent terms. To say dollar you give.
“conservative” here is also to say “white.”
Justin never quite forgets that blood
on the patio, or the difficulty he had kill­
ing the animal. That’s never happened
before—hunting is a favorite pastime— Visit
and he sees the change in himself as just StandUpToCancer.org/
one more sign of the times’ palsying
effect on the simplicity of the old ways. AmericanAirlines
But nothing in this richly allusive to learn more.
play is exactly as it seems at first glance.
Justin’s fixation on the early sacrifice—
he keeps trying to scrub away the blood
when he thinks nobody’s watching—
put me in mind of Cain, fretting over
the spilled blood of his innocent brother,
Abel. Perhaps the blood in Charlottes­
ville, too, is crying out, however quietly,
from the ground. Whatever Justin’s be­
liefs, a war of all against all might not
suit his gentle nature, or sit right in his
simmering conscience. Maybe the guilt Stand Up To Cancer is a division of the Entertainment Industry
Foundation, a 501(c)(3)charitable organization.
he can’t shake is a kind of grace.  American Airlines, the Flight Symbol logo and the Tail Design are
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 perennially and pompously confident
THE CURRENT CINEMA that something will turn up. “We’re
gathered here today to celebrate the

INTRUDERS
“Parasite” and “Gemini Man.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
nce upon a time, there were two
O families. One was rich and the
other was poor. So, to redress the bal-
ance, the poor family, who liked the
idea of not being poor, moved in with
the rich family. Strange to tell, the rich
family didn’t even notice. For a while,
but only for a while, the two families
dwelt in peace. To say that they all lived
Domestic work links a poor family and a rich one in Bong Joon-ho’s film.
happily ever after, or even that they all
lived, would not be quite true.
Such is the tale told by the Korean
director Bong Joon-ho in his new movie,
“Parasite,” which won the Palme d’Or
at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
The judges at Cannes are no more in-
fallible than the voters at the Academy
Awards, but in this case the laurels were
well deserved, and, amid the plaudits,
there was a shade of relief. I know many
people who were captivated by “The
Host,” Bong’s twisted fable of eco-mu-
tation, but that came out in 2006, and
since then, especially in “Snowpiercer”
(2013) and “Okja” (2017), his fantasti-
cal ventures have strayed toward the
wanton. Now, with “Parasite,” he is back
on track with a vengeance.
88 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 21, 2019
The poor family is the one we en-
counter first. Their very first action, in-
deed, defines their plight. Inhabiting a
cramped apartment below street level,
with meagre resources, they rely on free
Wi-Fi from surrounding businesses,
and, at this moment, the hunt is on for
a signal. It’s the enterprising daughter
of the family, Kim Ki-jung (Park So-
dam), who finally gets a connection, by
crouching on a raised platform at one
end of the bathroom, beside the toi-
let—which will, before the movie is
done, erupt under the force of flooded
sewers. To add to the charm, the apart-
ment has an issue with stinkbugs.
When a fumigator approaches, up goes
the cry “We’ll get free extermination!”
What a boast.
Ki-jung has an older brother, a quiet
lad named Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik).
Their mother and father, Chung-sook
( Jang Hye-jin) and Ki-taek (Song
Kang-ho), are flustered and foul-
mouthed. At present, the family’s sole
source of income derives from folding
pizza boxes, although Ki-taek, like Mr.
Micawber, in “David Copperfield,” is
reconnection of our phones and this
bounteous Wi-Fi,” he declares. Every-
one is impressed, therefore, when Ki-
woo is visited by an old school friend,
who, unlike him, went on to college—
and who, moreover, arrives with a solid
proposal. Would Ki-woo care to take
over a private tutoring gig? He’s cer-
tainly bright enough. The trouble is
that he doesn’t have any suitable doc-
umentation, such as a printed diploma.
Correction: he does have a diploma,
thanks to his sister. She’s always been
a whiz at Photoshop.
The air in the Kim household is alive
with what you might call hecticity, and
Bong—whose compositional eye and
nose for atmosphere are keener than
ever—insures that, as Ki-woo walks to
his job interview, we sense the advent
of a blessed calm. Encastled behind
lofty walls and girdled by greensward
(sprinklers feed the greenness, with a
gentle hiss) is the home of Park Dong-ik
(Lee Sun-kyun) and his wife, Yeon-kyo
( Jo Yeo-jeong), who is somewhat less
serene than her surroundings. Their
offspring are Da-hye ( Jung Ji-so), the
girl whom Ki-woo will teach, and her
younger brother, Da-song ( Jung Hyun-
jun), who is a pest. He has a yen for all
things Native American, and there’s a
brief prick of unease as the new tutor
is shown around by a housekeeper. Stuck
to the wall is an arrow, tipped with a
sucker: a leftover from the kid’s unruly
games, though you wonder if it points
the way ahead. Will there be further
attacks, and will they all count as play?
Ki-woo fares well in his appointed
task, and thereby establishes a pattern.
Through cunning and calculation, his
sister is soon enlisted as an art thera-
pist for Da-song; his father is hired as
a driver; and his mother, to complete
the set, finds herself running the opu-
lent home, supplanting the luckless
housekeeper. (Not that we’ve seen the
last of her.) What matters is that each
of them pretends to be unrelated to
the others. As a result, although the
nest is under siege, the Parks have no
idea that they are being invaded by the
Kims. The collective noun for cuckoos,
by the way, is an asylum.
What sort of movie is this? It’s not
ILLUSTRATION BY LEONARDO SANTAMARIA
a home-intrusion thriller, like “Unlaw-
ful Entry” (1992) or “Panic Room”
(2002), though it’s often spikily tense.
It’s not a comedy of social upheaval,
like “Boudu Saved from Drowning”
(1932), though it does have wit to spare.
(Ki-woo praises one of Da-song’s hid-
eous paintings, saying, “It’s a chimpan-
zee, right?” “A self-portrait,” his dot-
ing mother replies.) And it’s not a
horror flick, despite a passing resem-
blance to Jordan Peele’s “Us,” released
this year. Like Peele, Bong makes the
eerie suggestion that the underclass
might literally exist below the feet of
the bourgeoisie. Both directors are at
pains to explore what lies beneath, in
cellars and basements, though Bong
goes one better with a sublimely cho-
reographed sequence in which three of
the Kims, needing to hide in a hurry,
seek refuge under a low table in the
living room—lying there and listening
while the master of the house and his
wife, in matching gray silk pajamas,
make out on the couch. “Buy me drugs,”
she suddenly moans, at passion’s peak.
That explains a lot.
Bong, in short, is a merchant of
stealth. There is no more frenzy in the
editing of “Parasite” than there are
shudders in the motion of the camera,
and, as with Hitchcock, such feline
prowling toys with us and claws us into
complicity with deeds that we might
otherwise fear or scorn. In paraphrase,
the politics of the movie (not to men-
tion the title) may smack of the sim-
plistic, and some of the dialogue lands
with a thud: “An opening for a secu-
rity guard attracts five hundred univer-
smell.” So says Dong-ik, who prefers
to lounge in the back of his chauffeured
Mercedes. Yet Bong doesn’t set out to
paint the wealthy—for all their hau-
teur—as monsters, or the impoverished
as saints, and you don’t emerge from
his film feeling bullied. You feel wor-
ried and seduced.
“Parasite” is too long, but then, these
days, what isn’t? When was the last
time that a movie left you wanting
more? In this case, to be fair, the length
is a pardonable fault, for there is plenty
here on which to feast. I loved the wide
walls of glass, in the Parks’ residence,
with a commanding view of the gar-
den. (Da-song pitches a tepee there: a
disturbing spectacle.) When Dong-ik
and his family go on vacation, Ki-taek
and his family take their place, unbid-
den, and it’s with deep satisfaction that
he sits and surveys the scene. “Rain
falling on the lawn, as we sip our whis-
keys,” he says. As his wife remarks,
money is like an iron: it smooths out
the wrinkles. Whether Ki-taek’s relish
of illicit pleasures makes him the ulti-
mate rebel or a gullible stooge for the
sweet life is open to debate, and it’s no
surprise that, with half an hour to go,
the plot of “Parasite” could yet turn in
many directions. In this unequal world,
it could be heading for class war or a
brokered peace—for savagery or still-
ness, or both. Which path Bong se-
lects, of course, I have no intention of
revealing. Go and find out for yourself.
he one thing that links “Parasite”
T to the latest Ang Lee film, “Gem-
ini Man,” is a dread of allergic reac-
wish her harm, you merely gather fuzz
from the soft skin of the fruit and waft
it over her, like perfume. By contrast,
the main menace to Henry Brogan
(Will Smith), the hero of “Gemini
Man,” is bee stings. Any assailants must
get hold of some venom, presumably
after putting in a polite request to the
bee, add the stuff to a dart, and then
fire the dart at Henry. Jeez, what a fuss.
How about offing the guy with a reg-
ular bullet?
No chance. Henry is all but invin-
cible. As a distinguished assassin, near-
ing the dusk of his career, he is alert to
every threat. That is a problem for his
brooding boss, Clay Verris (Clive
Owen), who entertains the hope that
Henry will not simply retire but expire
as well. In a bold gesture, and with the
covert assistance of special effects, Ver-
ris dispatches a younger, whippier
Henry—also played by Smith—to kill
the older man.
Imagine what wicked sport the
Smith of yore would have had with this
conceit. Imagine, that is, the Fresh
Prince of Bel-Air making fun, not just
mincemeat, of his middle-aged self. Re-
grettably, as we know from Smith’s per-
formance in “Suicide Squad” (2016), the
effusive joy that once ran through his
veins appears, for reasons unknown, to
have leaked away, and “Gemini Man”
is largely a sad affair. Fans of double
characters should stick with Austin
Powers, who, in “The Spy Who Shagged
Me” (1999), enjoys the rare privilege of
meeting the person he was ten minutes
ago. “You,” he says, “are adorable.” 

sity graduates,” for instance, or, “Peo- tions. The housekeeper in Bong’s film NEWYORKER.COM
ple who ride the subway have a special is so sensitive to peaches that, if you Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by David Borchart,
must be received by Sunday, October 20th. The finalists in the October 7th contest appear below. We will
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or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“Well, don’t put it on the menu if you can’t catch one.”

Liam Cornwell, Los Angeles, Calif.

“Aren’t you going to write this down?” “I always knew we’d wind up together.”
Marcel Dijkers, Berkley, Mich. Adam Wagner, Santa Monica, Calif.

“Is it too late to cancel the salmon?”

Martin Smith, Tewkesbury, England
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