TNY - 16 May 2016

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MAY 16, 2016
THE INNOVATORS ISSUE

MAY 16, 2016
11 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

31 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
George Packer on Donald Trumps class appeal; Trump, Jr.,s sport; elevator
man; playing Camus; James Surowiecki on the banks and Dodd-Frank.
ANNALS OF EDUCATION
D. T. Max
40
Jen Spyra
47
Lizzie Widdicombe
48
Adam Gopnik
56
Alexandra Lange
68
Mary Karr
Charlie Brooker
Carrie Brownstein
Lee Child
Alexandra Kleeman
Ted Chiang
45
52
60
67
70
77
Akhil Sharma
78
A Whole New Ball Game

A rolling robot teaches kids to code.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
To the Class of 2050

OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS
Happy Together
A startup re-creates dorm life for millennials.
SENSORY STUDIES
Feel Me
Exploring the new science of touch.
PROFILES
Play Ground
Adriaan Geuze reimagines the city park.
UNINVENT THIS
High Maintenance
Dance, Off
Call Me Crazy
Telling Tales
Seeing Double
Bad Character
FICTION
A Life of Adventure and Delight

THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Adelle Waldman
84
Louis Menand
90
95
Hua Hsu
96
Peter Schjeldahl
98
Samuel Richardson invents the modern novel.

BOOKS
The irrationality of sports fans.

Briey Noted
POP MUSIC
Drakes Views.
THE ART WORLD
A Nicole Eisenman retrospective.

THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 100 The Lobster, Captain America: Civil War.

POEMS
Rebecca Hazelton
Kevin Young
43
58
Letter to the Editor

Little Red Corvette
COVER
Christoph Niemann
DRAWINGS
On the Go
View this weeks cover in augmented reality. See page 4 for details.
Will McPhail, Brian McLachlan, Jason Patterson, Mick Stevens, Benjamin Schwartz, Pat Byrnes, Danny Shanahan,
John Klossner, David Sipress, Jack Ziegler, Trevor Spaulding SPOTS Hudson Christie
CONTRIBUTORS
Adam Gopnik (Feel Me, p. 56) has been
a staff writer since 1986. His books include Paris to the Moon and The
Table Comes First: Family, France, and
the Meaning of Food.
George Packer (Comment, p. 31) won
a National Book Award for The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New
America.
Mary Karr (High Maintenance, p. 45)
recently published The Art of Memoir and Now Go Out There.
Lizzie Widdicombe (Happy Together,
D. T. Max (A Whole New Ball Game,
p. 48) is a New Yorker writer and an editor of The Talk of the Town.
p. 40), a staff writer, is the author of

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story:
A Life of David Foster Wallace.
Charlie Brooker (Dance,Off, p. 52), a
former columnist for the Guardian,

hosts the BBC comedy show Weekly
Wipe and is the writer and creator of
Black Mirror, which airs on Netix.
Kevin Young (Poem, p. 58) was inducted

into the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in April. Blue Laws is
his latest collection of poetry.
Carrie Brownstein (Call Me Crazy,
Alexandra Lange (Play Ground, p. 68),
p. 60) is a writer, a musician, and an actress. She is the author of the memoir
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.
an architecture and design critic, is the

author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities.
Elisabeth Zerofsky (The Talk of the Town,

p. 36) is a member of the magazines
editorial staff.
Rebecca Hazelton (Poem, p. 43) has pub-
Jen Spyra (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 47), a
Lee Child (Telling Tales, p. 67) is the

author of the Jack Reacher novels, including, most recently, Make Me. He
will publish another, Night School,
in November.
former senior writer for the Onion, is

a staff writer for The Late Show with
Stephen Colbert.
lished two books of poetry, Fair Copy

and Vow.
Alexandra Kleeman (Seeing Double,
p. 70) will publish Imitations, a shortstory collection, in September.

Akhil Sharma (Fiction, p. 78), the author
of the novel Family Life, is working
on a book of short stories, entitled Cosmopolitan. He teaches at Rutgers.
Christoph Niemann (Cover) will pub-
lish Words, a visual dictionary for

children, and Sunday Sketching, a
book of illustrations of his creative process, in the fall.
Ted Chiang (Bad Character, p. 77) is a

science-ction writer. His book Stories of Your Life and Others comes
out in paperback in June.
Adelle Waldman (A Critic at Large,
p. 84) writes for the Page-Turner column on newyorker.com. The Love

Affairs of Nathaniel P. is her rst novel.
Explore Christoph Niemanns animated cityscape by downloading

the free Uncovr app and pointing your tablet or phone at the magazine. Move your device
around the cover to find moments hidden in the metropolis.
SUBSCRIBERS: Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the
App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by location and device.)
4
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
THIS WEEKS COVER: ON THE GO

An augmented-reality journey illustrated by Christoph Niemann.
THE MAIL
FAMILY MATTERS
Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his article on

genetics and mental illness, reects that
our psychoses, anxieties, and manias,
however destructive, are inextricable parts
of our identity (Runs in the Family,
March 28th). The complexities of the
self is a conversation we begin even in
childhood. In my school cafeteria, a group
of classmates began talking about a friend
who had been prescribed antidepressants to treat manic depression. Having
grown up with a mother who suffered
from clinical depression, I suggested that
maybe she needed the medication, saying, It might make her brain go back
to how it should be. But other friends
insisted, When she takes the pills, shes
just not herself anymore. Like Mukherjee noticing his uncles sweetness despite
his schizophrenia, we could see the paradox of a cure that might diminish our
friends exuberance and warmth.
Diya Kazmi
Weston, Mass.
Muhkerjees piece emphasizes the link
between heredity and mental illness. I
would add that the knowledge of this link
can itself provide a measure of healing.
As a college student, I developed agoraphobia so intense that I had to drop out
of school. When a doctor explained that
genetics predisposed me to mental-health
issues, because family members on both
sides, for multiple generations, had suffered
from mental illness, I remember feeling
that a burden had been lifted. It was not
that I could now blame my panic attacks
and suicidal depression on my parents or
grandparents but, rather, that none of us
could blame anyone. It was simply a problem that needed to be acknowledged and
accepted, without the shame that so often
accompanies mental illness.
Sara Benincasa
Los Angeles, Calif.
1
THINKING BIG
Nicholas Lemanns article rightly notes

the geographical divide in the conict
between the Hamiltonians, who sup-
ported centralized government and

big companies, and the Jeffersonians,
who preferred distributed power and
a largely agrarian economy (Notorious Big, March 28th). Even today,
many people on the Coasts lean toward Hamiltonian politics, while many
Midwesterners identify with Jeffersonian politics and resent large corporations that send jobs elsewhere and
that degrade our agricultural heartland. What was once a debate about
the size of government has become
linked to the power of large institutions. Bernie Sanderss supporters, for
example, believe that wealth concentration not only creates crushing student debt and endless wars but that
the Hamiltonian big-is-beautiful
mantra poses a profound threat to our
environment.
Bonnie Blodgett
St. Paul, Minn.
1
WHAT TO FEAR
I agree with Amy Davidsons views

on the Republican political spectacle
(Comment, April 4th). Regardless of
how Trump expresses his positions,
his fear-mongering about Muslims
and the other amounts to a policy
of appeasement toward terrorists, who
crave notoriety. The more our politicians make us afraid of them the more
we appease them. Obama has followed a useful rhetorical path, encouraging vigilance but also avoiding
empowering terrorists. Every time
Trump pushes us to surrender an
American principlesuch as religious
freedomor turns to combative rhetoric that promotes bigotry, torture, and
isolation, we play into the hands of
extremists.
William D. Stinnett
Phoenix, Ariz.
Letters should be sent with the writers 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.
MAY 11 17, 2016
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
New York City pigeons get a bad rap. But for every Woody Allen, who dismissed them onscreen as rats with
wings, theres a Nikola Tesla, who fell in love with a female bird that flew into his room at the St. Regis. The
artist Duke Riley sides with ardor in Fly by Night, his new piece for Creative Time. Each weekend until
June 12, Riley will tie little L.E.D. lights to two thousand homing pigeons and release them at sunset from
a Vietnam-era aircraft carrier, docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Somewhere, Tesla is smiling.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORDIE WOOD
1
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Metropolitan Museum
Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of
the Ancient World
Closed for renovations until 2019, Berlins Pergamon Museum has sent the Met its greatest
marbles and effigies from the centuries after Alexander the Great, resulting in this epic study
of how Greek ideas and images were transmitted and transformed in western Asia. The city
of Pergamon (present-day Bergama, Turkey)
was the capital of the Attalid dynasty, whose
power in the third and second centuries B.C.
was expressed through a new style of art, less
idealistic and more baroque than its Athenian
counterpart. A towering, ten-foot-tall statue of
Athena, now armless, shows the scale of Pergamons new artistic ambitions. Even the smaller
works convey the shifts in regional power: a delicate terra-cotta statuette of a victorious athlete has the washboard abs and strong thighs of
the Greek original on which it was based, but
the figure was elongated for Asian tastes. The
transition from Athenian restraint to Hellenistic luxury comes through in a display of opulent
jewelry, including a gold diadem topped by a
figure of Nike. War, too, offered a pretext for
Pergamons artists to Hellenize a dying Gaul,
seen bleeding from his abdomen. More than
a mere blockbuster, this show is a radical and
wholly rewarding rethinking of the art we call
Greek. Through July 17.
Marionette Maker, a diorama installed in a

trailer, which suggests both an autobiographical
reverie and a horror-film Nativity scene. Panels cut in the caravan (whose license plate reads
Beautiful British Columbia) reveal a modelmaker hunched over his worktable, crafting
the latest addition to the battalion of trolls and
goblins that surround him. Hes accompanied
by a sleeping womanmodelled on Cardiff herselfand an unnerving rock-music soundtrack,
which occasionally gives way to Tchaikovsky,
sung by a marionette on a stage. Installed in
another room is a seventy-two-channel sound
piece, activated by visitors shadows. Through
June 11. (Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24th St. 212206-9100.)
Anne Collier
In these elegantly spare pictures of pictures,
women are defined by the camera, whether
behind or in front of the lens. Extending the
Pictures Generation legacy of appropriation,
Collier exhibits images of album covers, book
spreads, and advertisements. A naked woman
strides into the surf in a huge, grainy black-andwhite shot that feels like a sixties flashback. Its
mood of exhilaration and freedom is offset by
closeups of other women, including Ingrid Bergman, crying on record sleeves. The tears, while
Henry Horenstein
The American photographer is best known for
documenting the country-music scene, and
this show of black-and-white work from the
nineteen-seventies includes pictures from the
Grand Ole Opry (notably, a portrait of a dewy
Dolly Parton). But theyre overshadowed by
subtler and more probing images, which recall
Diane Arbus. A boy in glasses, alone in an audience, looks startled by the cameras attention;
by contrast, two women, arm in arm in clashing checks and stripes, beam happily. A masseur stands outside a steam room full of young
jockeys like a sentry. Through May 21. (ClampArt, 531 W. 25th St. 646-230-0020.)
Tom Wesselmann
An entertaining attempt to boost the reputation of the Pop-art paladin, who died in 2004,
soft-pedals his specialty of pneumatic nudes in
favor of the inanimate: foodstuffs, household appliances, cigarettes, a Volkswagen Beetle. Wesselmanns grabby colors beguile, and he had a winning way with shaped canvas, cutout metal, and
vacuum-molded plastic. Nonetheless, all the images and forms still orbit the rejoicing sensuality
of the Great American Nude, as the artist called
his signature thememonumentalized breasts,
lips, and feet, like an explorers happy sightings
of a carnal Xanadu. Through May 28. (MitchellInnes & Nash, 534 W. 26th St. 212-744-7400.)
Museum of Modern Art

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty
This wonderful but oddly finicky showthe
museums first devoted to Degasmakes a
big deal of an uncommon printmaking medium: monotype. The unfamiliarity of most of
the workssome hundred and twenty monotypes, from museums and collections worldwide, augmented with more conventional picturesmakes the show special, in both the good
and the pejorative senses. Magnifying glasses
are provided to let us feel like hot-shot connoisseurs, bending in to delectate in the nuances.
The occasion might rankle without its payoff
of a final room of first-rate paintings, pastels,
and drawings: Degas hitting on all cylinders.
On its own limited terms, the show yields useful insight into the artists modernizing transition from careful to spontaneous style, starting in the eighteen-seventies. It underlines the
truth that his genius was essentially graphic,
on a historical arc of linear sorcery from Ingres to Picasso. You sense his delight, in dark
field monotypes, at the effects enabled by attacking spreads of wet ink with incising tools,
rags, and his hands. Shapes and atmospheres
loom in whites and textured grays from Stygian blackness: sculpted light, with a muscular feel. Through July 24.
1
GALLERIESCHELSEA
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

The Canadian gothic of this audio-inclined duo
reaches David Lynchian heights in the intense
12
In her new photographs, at Metro Pictures in Chelsea, the brilliant Cindy Sherman turns a
bittersweet gaze on women in the autumn of life, as ready as theyve ever been for their closeup.
COURTESY THE ARTIST/METRO PICTURES
ART
theatrical, are oddly touchingCollier doesnt

mock artifice, she revels in it. Through May 14.
(Kern, 532 W. 20th St. 212-367-9663.)
ART
1
GALLERIESDOWNTOWN
Caleb Charland
The title of one work here, Camera Placed
on My Solar Plexus While Laying on the
Ground at Night for Several Hours, says
a lot about the artists dedication to his process. The image merits the effort: stars skitter across a midnight-blue expanse high above
a broken red line, evidence of an airplanes
tail-lights. Other pictures record more discrete phenomena, including what look to be
science experiments with pendulums and a
horseshoe magnet. A series of intricately plotted photogramsgeometric abstractions that
range across a shaded spectrum from black to
whitesuggest a lost Op-art period of M. C.
Escher. Through June 4. (Wolf, 70 Orchard St.
212-925-0025.)
Mangelos
This vital showcase of one of the most important figures of the Yugoslav avant-garde re-creates five witty, metaphysical, and sometimes
clandestine shows mounted in Zagreb between
1972 and 1981. Dimitrije Baievic, who died in
1987, was an art historian who worked in state
institutions by day but on his own time, under
the alias Mangelos, he produced a wide-ranging
uvre, including globes (in which the world
map is obscured by philosophical inscriptions
and black, white, and red paint) and collages
(packed with references to Heidegger, Dostoyevsky, and Gertrude Stein). One piece here reproduces Picassos declaration of allegiance to
the French Communist Partya biting irony
coming, as it did, from the other side of the Iron
Curtain. Through May 27. (Freeman, 140 Grand
St. 212-966-5154.)
Jon Pilkington
The young British painter makes an intriguing
New York dbut with soft-toned abstractions
that at first appear intuitively gestural but turn
out to be more calculated. Hazy backgrounds
of brown, pink, and malachite green subtend
proficiently executed cross-outs, zigzags, and
curlicuesmarkings so tight and agglutinated
that the action of their making seems immaterial. There are some jejune citations of Laura
Owens (flowers), Albert Oehlen (squiggles),
and other -la-mode painters, but the appeal
here is the ease with which such quotes get
emulsified in Pilkingtons cloudy fields of color
and line. One work is even called Typical Pilkington, as if to confirm that the true subject
of his paintings is style itself. Through May 22.
(247365, 57 Stanton St. twentyfourseventhreesixtyfive.biz.)
Pedro Wirz
The organic, often fragile sculptures of this
Swiss-Brazilian artist draw on time spent in
the Paraba Valley, a once lush, now industrialized region in Brazil, north of So Paulo. Irregularly scythed bands of tree bark, which Wirz has
coated with latex, are studded with holes that
contain eyeball-like globules. Spiders and other
creepy-crawlies are suspended in amber-colored silicone; a roughly cast door ornament in
the shape of a dragon plays cats cradle in its little claws. What prevents the show from feeling
like warmed-over Arte Povera is Wirzs evident
love for a disappearing landscape, in which the
supernatural retains a power thats on the brink
of extinction. Through June 5. (Matsumiya, 153
Stanton St. 646-455-3588.)
14
DANCE
New York City Ballet
Robbins or Balanchine? Thats the question
this week at N.Y.C.B., which will offer programs devoted to each choreographer. The
all-Balanchine bill combines the bubbly Ballo
della Regina (set to ballet music from Verdis Don Carlo) with the angular and antic
Kammermusik No. 2 and the swooning opulence of Vienna Waltzes. The Robbins program opens with what may be his greatest
work, Dances at a Gathering, followed by
his suite of dances from West Side Story.
If you can catch Tiler Peck in Ballo della Regina and Teresa Reichlen in Tales from the
Vienna Woods, from Vienna Waltzes, you
wont regret it. May 10 at 7:30 and May 12 at
8: Ballo della Regina, Kammermusik No. 2,
and Vienna Waltzes. May 11 at 7:30, May
13 at 8, May 14 at 2 and 8, and May 15 at 3:
Dances at a Gathering and West Side Story
Suite. May 17 at 7:30: Serenade, Hallelujah Junction, Duo Concertant, and Western Symphony. (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-496-0600. Through May 29.)
(May 14-17), an older troupe with an aesthetic

closer to that of European dance-theatre. Its
Showroom offers an ironic, critical, beneaththe-mask view of tourist stereotypes of the islands music and dance. (175 Eighth Ave., at 19th
St. 212-242-0800. Through May 22.)
American Ballet Theatre

The company takes up residence at the Metropolitan Opera House, where the season kicks
off with a week of performances of Sylvia.
This stylish period piece is Frederick Ashtons homage to the French mythological ballets of the late nineteenth century. The story,
drawn from Tasso, deals with a proud nymph
(Sylvia) who, with some help from Cupid, falls
in love with a beautiful, love-struck shepherd
(Aminta). Various adventures ensue, leading
to a big, happy finale and one of the most ravishing pas de deux ever made. (The score, by
Dlibes, is reason enough to see it.) At the gala
on May 16, the company will introduce Alexei
Ratmanskys newest ballet for the company,
a work for seven men and one woman, set to
Leonard Bernsteins Serenade, After Platos
Symposium. Alessandra Ferri, who is scheduled to give a single performance of Romeo
and Juliet later in the season, will also make
an appearance, in the mournful Pie Jesu solo
from Kenneth MacMillans 1976 Requiem.
May 11 at 2 and 7:30, May 12-13 at 7:30, and
May 14 at 2 and 8: Sylvia. May 16 at 6:30
(gala): excerpts from Sylvia, The Sleeping
Beauty, and La Fille Mal Garde, the Pie
Jesu solo from Requiem, the new Ratmansky ballet, and Firebird. May 17 at 7:30:
Shostakovich Trilogy. (Lincoln Center. 212362-6000. Through July 2.)
La MaMa Moves!
The festival continues with the premire of Tiffany Millss After the Feast, which applies her
signature style, heavy on partnering, to a dystopian environment and a struggle to reform
human bonds. In Supper, People on the Move,
Cardell Dance Theatredirected by the Argentine-born, Philadelphia-based choreographer
Silvana Cardellinvestigates the dislocation
caused by migration, with performers clambering across folding tables and climbing up walls.
At the end, the audience joins the dancers for
a meal. The husband-and-wife flamenco team
of the singer Ismael Fernndez and the dancer
Sonia Olla lead a large cast of mixed generations and experience in Al Son Son. (66 E. 4th
St. 646-430-5374. May 12-15. Through May 29.)
Cuba Festival
In opening up cultural exchange between the
United States and Cuba, the Joyce Theatre has
been out ahead of the Obama Administration.
This appearance of Malpaso Dance Company
(May 10-12), one of the only dance troupes in
Cuba that isnt dependent on the government,
is the third in as many years. Along with a piece
by the companys leader, Osnel Delgado, the
program includes a Joyce-commissioned work
by one American choreographer (Ronald K.
Browns Why You Follow) and a gift from another (Trey McIntyres Bad Winter). Following Malpaso in a ten-day festival is DanzAbierta
Mark Morris Dance Group

Always appealing, this group is especially so
in the small theatre of its Brooklyn home,
where all the details of choreography and the
live music that it illuminates register in the
intimacy of a salon. This program is notable
for the world premire of A Forest, set to a
Haydn piano trio, and the first New York performances of The, which finds victory and
the shadow of death in a piano-four-hands
arrangement of Bachs Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F Major. (Mark Morris Dance
Center, 3 Lafayette Ave. 929-399-6634. May 17.
Through May 22.)
Keely Garfield and Mariangela Lopez

As part of its Repertory Initiative for Tomorrow, the Gibney Dance Center presents a revival of Keely Garfields well-received 2014
work WOW, along with a new dance by the
Venezuelan-born Mariangela Lopez. In WOW,
the usually deadpan Garfield makes an impassioned (and partly tongue-in-cheek) plea for sincerity, as dancers leap and mime and gaze into
the eyes of audience members. The piece is also
a bit of a throwback to nineteen-eighties fabulousness: the dancers wear sequins and bodysuits, and move to reinterpreted versions of
throaty Kate Bush ballads. The combination is
strangely moving. Lopezs new Repairing Permissions is a large work, for twenty-five dancers. (280 Broadway. 646-837-6809. May 11-14.)
Juliette Mapp
Though elliptical and open-ended, Mapps intelligent, finely wrought pieces often have an
autobiographical character. Luxury Rentals
is about dancers: Mapp and three of her peers
and old friends, the highly distinctive Kayvon Pourazar, Levi Gonzalez, and Jimena Paz.
Its about dancers lives, inside and outside
the studio, in a city where its ever more difficult to find space to live and work. (Danspace
Project, St. Marks Church In-the-Bowery, Second Ave. at 10th St. 866-811-4111. May 12-14.
Through May 21.)
THE THEATRE
Gross Indecency
Rupert Everett takes the role he was
born to play: Oscar Wilde.
On April 5, 1895, Oscar Wilde was
holed up at the Cadogan Hotel, in
London, torn between fleeing the country and facing a parlous fate. Spurred
by his sometime paramour Lord Alfred
Douglas, known as Bosie, Wilde had
brought a libel suit against the Marquess
of QueensburyBosies fatherwho
had publicly called Wilde a sodomite.
But the plan backfired disastrously.
During the trial, Queensburys lawyer
threatened to produce a number of
young men who could testify to Wildes
degeneracy, and the case fell apart. It
now seemed inevitable that Wilde himself would be arrested for gross indecency if he didnt leave England. Why
did he stay? Thats the question posed
in Act I of David Hares 1998 play, The
Judas Kiss, which comes to BAMs Harvey Theatre May 11June 12, starring
Rupert Everett.
Reflecting on Wilde, Everett said
recently, Hes a very touching, human
16
character, because hes incredibly brilliant but at the same time he does some
really idiotic things. For the fifty-sixyear-old actor, Wilde has become less
a character than a way of life. Everett
has spent the past eight years developing The Happy Prince, a film about
Wildes disconsolate last days, but the
financing has been slow to materialize.
In 2012, he starred in a revival of The
Judas Kiss, in London, then toured the
U.K. with it. Hes a natural for the role.
Since his breakout performance, in the
1997 film My Best Friends Wedding,
he has proved adept at blithe disdain,
often with an undercurrent of melancholy. As one of the only openly gay
actors working in movies in the nineties, he saw his sexuality, like Wildes,
become a topic for public consumption.
I suppose in that sense hes like a patron saint, he said.
Everetts memories of Wilde
stretch back to his own Norfolk boyhood, when his mother read him
Wildes childrens stories, including
The Happy Prince. As a young stage
actor, he appeared in The Importance
of Being Earnest and The Picture

of Dorian Gray, and he later starred
in film adaptations of Earnest and
An Ideal Husband. Still, hes drawn
less to Wilde the writer than to Wilde
the tragic figure, destroyed by the era
he anatomized so tastily. He was crucified by society and then, through
that crucifixion, became immortal,
Everett said. The fall, I think, is an
artistic statement of its own.
In Act II of The Judas Kiss, Hare
imagines Wilde, having served two
years of imprisonment and hard labor,
reuniting with the insolent Bosie in a
run-down hotel in Naples. Wilde
would die soon after, penniless and exiled, at the age of forty-six. It was a
riches-to-rags story, Everett said. He
found enormous reserves of sympathy
and compassion in himself when he
was down, although there was a bitter
side to him as well. Asked if he had
ever longed to meet his patron saint,
Everett delivered something like a Wildean epigram: Meeting people is always, I think, one of the great mistakes.
Michael Schulman
ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY
David Hares play The Judas Kiss, at BAMs Harvey Theatre May 11-June 12, imagines Oscar Wilde before and after his downfall.
1
OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
A Better Place
Evan Bergman directs Wendy Becketts comedy,
presented by the Directors Company, about a
gay New York couple obsessed with their neighbors real estate. (The Duke on 42nd Street, 229
W. 42nd St. 646-223-3010. In previews. Opens May 15.)
Cal in Camo
In William Francis Hoffmans drama, directed
by Colt Coeurs Adrienne Campbell-Holt, a new
mothers neer-do-well brother comes to visit her
and her husband. (Rattlestick, 224 Waverly Pl. 866811-4111. In previews.)
Daphnes Dive
Thomas Kail directs a play by Quiara Alegra
Hudes, featuring Vanessa Aspillaga and Daphne
Rubin-Vega, about the owner of a cheap bar in
North Philly and her adopted daughter. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212244-7529. In previews. Opens May 15.)
Do I Hear a Waltz?
Encores! stages the 1965 musical, with music
by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, in which a middle-class woman (Melissa Errico) saves up for a trip to Venice. (City Center, 131
W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. May 11-15.)
A Dolls House
At Theatre for a New Audience, Arin Arbus directs John Douglas Thompson and Maggie Lacey in
Thornton Wilders adaptation of the Ibsen drama,
in repertory with Strindbergs The Father. (Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn.
866-811-4111. In previews.)
Hadestown
Anas Mitchells folk opera, developed with and
directed by Rachel Chavkin, is a retelling of the
Orpheus and Eurydice myth. (New York Theatre
Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475. In previews.)
Himself and Nora
A new musical by Jonathan Brielle explores the
romance between James Joyce and his wife and
muse, Nora Barnacle. Directed by Michael Bush.
(Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane. 800-7453000. Previews begin May 14.)
Indian Summer
In Gregory S. Mosss comedy, directed by Carolyn
Cantor, a city kid spends the summer at a Rhode
Island beach town, where he meets a feisty local
girl. (Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212279-4200. Previews begin May 13.)
Peer Gynt
Gabriel Ebert plays the Norwegian adventurer
in the Ibsen drama, adapted and directed by John
Doyle and featuring Becky Ann Baker and Dylan
Baker. (Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. 866811-4111. In previews.)
The Ruins of Civilization
In a new play by Penelope Skinner (The Village
Bike), directed by Leah C. Gardiner for Manhattan Theatre Club, a married couple living in a ravaged future open their doors to a stranger. (City Center Stage II, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. In previews.)
Shining City
The Irish Rep returns to its renovated home with
Conor McPhersons drama, directed by Ciarn
OReilly and starring Matthew Broderick as a
18
THE THEATRE
widower who seeks counselling after he sees his
wifes ghost. (132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737. Previews begin May 17.)
Signature Plays
Lila Neugebauer directs a trio of one-acts: Edward Albees The Sandbox, Mara Irene Fornss
Drowning, and Adrienne Kennedys Funnyhouse of a Negro. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. In previews.)
Skeleton Crew
A return engagement of Dominique Morisseaus
play, part of her Detroit trilogy, in which the
workers at an auto plant face the threat of foreclosure. Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs. (Atlantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St. 866-8114111. Previews begin May 13.)
Spermhood
Mike Albo (The Junket) recounts his experiences trying to make a baby with a lesbian couple, in his new one-man show, directed by David
Schweizer. (Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St. 866-8114111. Opens May 13.)
The Total Bent
This new musical by Stew and Heidi Rodewald
(Passing Strange), directed by Joanna Settle,
follows a black musical prodigy in midcentury
Alabama, whose father is a famous gospel healer.
(Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. In previews.)
1
NOW PLAYING
Dear Evan Hansen

The most charming male performer in the womenled Pitch Perfect movies was Ben Platt, who played
an awkward college student with an unlikely gift for
a cappella. In this new musical, with a book by Steven Levenson and music and lyrics by Benj Pasek
and Justin Paul, Platt plays a similar kid in a darker
key. Evan is a nearly friendless high-school senior
who stumbles on a social opportunity when a classmate commits suicide. What follows, for a while, is a
satirical take on teen-age life, fuelled by propulsive
songs in a familiar emo-musical style. But this isnt
Heathers: its all headed for a sincere emotional
landing that the show cant entirely stickeven if
Rachel Bay Jones, excellent as Evans harried mom,
provides much needed ballast. It seems certain, regardless, that earnest theatre kids across the country will be singing these songs, over and over, very
soon. (Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.)
Kentucky
The playwright Leah Nanako Winkler has created
a sort of millennial Odyssey, chronicling the rustic
homecoming of a New York City transplant. Long
in flight from a troubled upbringing, Hiro (Satomi
Blair) returns to her native Kentucky in the hope
of preventing the marriage of her younger sister
Sophie. But Sophie (Sasha Diamond) has found
her own kind of escape, in born-again Christianity, and confounds the alienated Hiro with her
church-centered contentment, which the play treats
with sensitivity. Hiros sense of autonomy is further challenged by her abusive father, her immigrant mother, and the childhood friends she left
behind. Morgan Goulds lively production, which
includes a Greek-style chorus and a talking cat, has
an antic, unruly spirit. Still, Winklers story is ultimately a serious one, about the commonplace nature of childhood trauma and the radically different paths people take to recovery. (Ensemble Studio
Theatre, 549 W. 52nd St. 866-811-4111.)
Long Days Journey Into Night

In the Roundabouts revival of Eugene ONeills
unsurpassable drama, Mary Tyrone (Jessica
Lange) longs for a real home, if only she knew
what that was. For most of her adult life, she has
lived in hotels with her husband, James Tyrone
(Gabriel Byrne), an actor who tours year-round
which is why he thinks of their summer abode as
a stable resting place, one that he and Mary can
share with their sons, Jamie (Michael Shannon)
and Edmund (John Gallagher, Jr.). Lange is entirely free onstage, because shes sure of her craft,
of how to move when going in for the kill or just
trying to show interest in someone other than herself. The actress forces us to listen more acutely
to what Mary is saying, to register how her body
language contradicts her brazen imagination. The
director, Jonathan Kent, handles Langes genius
the way it should be handledby stepping to the
side, letting you see that its there but not interfering. (Reviewed in our issue of 5/9/16.) (American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300.)
Shuffle Along
The director George C. Wolfe mounts one showstopper after another in this razzle-dazzle history
lesson, choreographed with panache by Savion
Glover. In 1921, the musical Shuffle Along, written by and starring black entertainers, opened on
Sixty-third Street and became a pioneering hit.
Aided by sumptuous costumes (by Ann Roth)
and sets (Santo Loquasto), Wolfe grandly resurrects Noble Sissle and Eubie Blakes jazzy score,
including Im Just Wild About Harry, jettisoning the original book for his own story of the musicals squabbling creators (Brian Stokes Mitchell,
Billy Porter, Brandon Victor Dixon, and Joshua
Henry) and its hopeful cast, led by Lottie Gee
(Audra McDonald, sterling as usual). Though
he tries to avoid making a musicalized PBS special, Wolfe finds much importance, but too little
drama, in his behind-the-scenes story. Still, his
stagecraft is insurmountable, and the syncopated
thrill of the original speaks, sings, and taps for itself. (Music Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.)
A Streetcar Named Desire
This execrable production of a great play is yet another example of the director Benedict Andrewss
desire to upstage artists more significant than
himself. The wonderful actress Gillian Anderson is Blanche, but she plays her as though shes
a madcap heiress, now down on her luck. Presumably, this is because Andrews wants to bring
out the humor in the play, but its already there
if you listen to what Williams wrote. As Mitch,
Corey Johnson easily gives the best performance
in the show, understated and centered, while Ben
Fosters Stanley, though sexy at first, ultimately
devolves into a parody of butchness. Vanessa
Kirby does the best she can as Stella, but even
her strengths are not enough to combat Andrewss
use of contemporary songwriters like PJ Harvey
to jazz the piece up and make it sexier. (St. Anns
Warehouse, 45 Water St., Brooklyn. 718-254-8779.)
Toast
The English playwright Richard Bean hymns the
pleasures and the sorrows of hard work in this genial comedy, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival. Set in the flour-caked canteen of a rundown
bread factory in nineteen-seventies England, liberally strewn with the tea bags of yore, the action follows the grudging efforts of a motley crew of yeast
monkeys to meet a large last-minute order. Amid
cigarettes, endless cuppas, and roistering banter,
they manage to get a little baking done, but the
THE THEATRE
factorys comfortable rhythms are thrown off by a
dough error. Tragedy is narrowly averted, but its
clear that the crew is working on borrowed time:
mechanization looms on the horizon. Leavened
with pungent slang and bawdy humorthe ensemble works together as smoothly as the best assembly
linethe play conjures a bygone world of industrial work, as doomed to obsolescence as the bakers
themselves. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbitt hit on something elemental with
her 1975 childrens novel, about a family that
drinks from an enchanted spring and receives
eternal life. What child doesnt wonder at the
idea of immortalityits possibilities and its terror? In this bighearted musical adaptation, the
talented eleven-year-old Sarah Charles Lewis
plays Winnie, the young girl who discovers the
clan in her familys woods and befriends Jesse
Tuck (Andrew Keenan-Bolger), forever seventeen. Casey Nicholaws production matches the
storys sweet simplicity with visual dazzle: translucent storybook sets by Walt Spangler and fanciful costumes by Gregg Barnes. The score, by
Chris Miller (music) and Nathan Tysen (lyrics), is mostly schmaltzy and generic, held up by
Claudia Shear and Tim Federles snappy script.
But the shows trump cardits only real innovationis the balletic finale, choreographed by
Nicholaw: wordless, time-hopping, and lovely.
(Broadhurst, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.)
1
ALSO NOTABLE
American Psycho Schoenfeld. Bianco St.

Anns Warehouse. Blackbird Belasco. Blood
at the Root National Black Theatre. Through
May 15. Bright Star Cort. Cirque du Soleil
Paramour Lyric. The Color Purple Jacobs. The Crucible Walter Kerr. The Dingdong
Pearl. Through May 15. Eclipsed Golden. The
Effect Barrow Street Theatre. The Father Samuel J. Friedman. Fiddler on the Roof Broadway Theatre. Fully Committed Lyceum. Fun
Home Circle in the Square. Hamilton Richard
Rodgers. The Humans Helen Hayes. Incognito City Center Stage I. Mike Birbiglia: Thank
God for Jokes Lynn Redgrave. The Place We
Built Flea. Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.
SoHo Rep. The Robber Bridegroom Laura
Pels. School of Rock Winter Garden. She
Loves Me Studio 54.
20
Musicians will play in several spaces within the Cloisters, an increasingly popular tourist attraction.
Romanesque Riffs
Audible Cloisters brings a gaggle of
guitarists to Fort Tryon Park.
When the Metropolitan Museum decided to lease the Whitney Museums
old building, on the Upper East Side
(now reopened as the Met Breuer), it
re-purposed a structure that many New
Yorkers have admired for its unrepentant
Brutalist ugliness. But just about everyone loves the Cloisters, the Mets branch
in Fort Tryon Parkincluding the residents of Hudson Heights, who marvel
at how their unshowy neighborhood has
begun to feel just a little bit touristy. The
beautiful building, assembled from fragments of Romanesque and Gothic architecture that were shipped over from
Europe in the mid-twentieth century,
draws crowds as much for its own recumbent glory as for its exceptional collection of medieval art, tapestries, and
manuscripts. Now the Met, collaborating
with the New York Guitar Festival for
the first time, will show off its prize like
never before, with Audible Cloisters
(May 14), a six-hour marathon of fourteen free concerts spread throughout the
hallowed spaces and gardens.
Previous editions of the Festival have
concentrated on specific repertories, but

these concerts will be as much about the
intangible qualities of space as about the
virtuosity and style of the musicians
themselves. Dylan Carlson, the lead (electric) guitarist and singer of Earth, the
doom-drone metal band from Seattle,
will ply his dolorous gifts in the spacious
Pontaut Chapter House, where Benedictine monks once discussed issues both
sacred and profane. The Early Gothic
Hall, graced with stained glass from cathedrals in England and France, hosts
Min Xiao-Fen, on pipa, whose repertory
extends from Chinese folk songs to Monk
and Cage; Simon Shaheen brings his
renowned mastery of the oud, the Middle
Eastern lute, to the twelfth-century Langon Chapel. But the buildings most familiar space for concerts, the Fuentiduea
Chapel, offers the broadest selection of
events. Amid the architectural grandeur
of twelfth-century Spain and Tuscany,
one can appreciate music by Britten and
Bach, in the hands of Colin Davin; Purcell and Biber, performed by the lutenist
Nigel North; or Gyan Riley, a one-man
American-music machine, amicably
ranging across the fields of jazz, world
music, and post-minimalism.
Russell Platt
ILLUSTRATION BY LESLIE HERMAN
Waitress
Jenna (the astounding Jessie Mueller), the heroine of this winning new musical, based on
Adrienne Shellys 2007 film, is a server at a
small-town diner, caught between her genius
for making pies and a redneck husband (Nick
Cordero) who doesnt want her to have any independence. When she finds out shes pregnant, she
starts an affair with her bumbling gynecologist
(Drew Gehling)its less creepy than it sounds
and leans on the sisterhood of her gal pals at the
restaurant (Kimiko Glenn and Keala Settle). The
celebrated singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles wrote
the music and lyricsethereal, gorgeously harmonic, and even funnyand Mueller (Beautiful) is just the performer to put them over,
with equal parts warmth and grit. Diane Pauluss production boasts an all-female creative
team, and the show is mindful of the obstacles
that working women face, even as it dusts them
with show-business cinnamon. (Brooks Atkinson,
256 W. 47th St. 877-250-2929.)
CLASSICAL MUSIC
1
OPERA
Vertical Player Repertory
Though he wrote more than eighty operas in his
lifetime, the bel-canto master Giovanni Pacini
has been effectively blocked from entering the
canon by his more stylistically distinctive contemporaries Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. The
adventurous Brooklyn-based company, however,
is giving his late-career work Malvina di Scozia
its first airing in more than a hundred and fifty
years, using a new performing edition of the
piano-vocal score created by Hans Schellevis.
Judith Barnes directs. (Christ and Saint Stephens
Church, 120 W. 69th St. malvina.brownpapertickets.com. May 11 and May 13 at 7:30.)
Center for Contemporary Opera
The librettist Royce Vavrek has been much in demand for daring, often high-concept works by
David T. Little, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Missy
Mazzoli, and he now joins the composer Rachel Peters for The Wild Beast of the Bungalow, which has a concert reading with piano at
the Center for Contemporary Opera. (National
Opera Center, 330 Seventh Ave. centerforcontemporaryopera.org. May 12 at 8.)
1
ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES
New York Philharmonic

The stalwart Finnish conductor John Storgrds,
admired for his mastery of music by his countrys greatest composer, makes his dbut with
the orchestra in a program featuring not only
Sibeliuss limpid Second Symphony but, beforehand, a fascinating rarity by Schumann (the
Genoveva Overture) and magisterial songs
by Mahler (from Des Knaben Wunderhorn,
intoned by the compelling bass-baritone Eric
Owens). (David Geffen Hall. 212-875-5656. May
12 at 7:30 and May 13-14 at 8.)
Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble:
Stockhausen and Cage
The conductor Petr Kotiks ensemble, enduring ambassadors of the Euro-American experimentalist tradition, marks the seventieth anniversary of the Darmstadt Institutea place
where the course of Western music was decidedly changedwith concerts honoring two of
its leading lights. This extensive performance
at Roulette (in collaboration with the Talea Ensemble) features major works not only by Stockhausen (Zeitmasse) and Cage (Concert for
Piano and Orchestra) but also by Alvin Singleton, Kotik, and Feldman (Why Patterns?). (509
Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn. roulette.org. May 11 at 8.)
Philadelphia Orchestra
Mahlers Tenth Symphony, a daring and dauntingly complex work (heard here in the performing version by the musicologist Deryck Cooke),
can easily take up a program all by itself. But
Yannick Nzet-Sguin has Lang Lang on hand,
so he will pace the pianist and his refulgent orchestra in a generous prelude, the Concerto No. 1
in F-Sharp Minor by Rachmaninoff, Mahlers
contemporary and colleague. (Carnegie Hall.
212-247-7800. May 11 at 8.)
Trinity Church: Revolutionaries
The great churchs festival celebrating the music
of two forthright personalities, Beethoven and
Ginastera, is in its final month. One of this
weeks concerts (free, as always) is especially
CLASSICAL MUSIC
grand, offering the Argentinean masters vivid
Cello Concerto No. 1 (with a distinctive soloist, Matt Haimovitz) and the Viennese titans
major sacred work, the Missa Solemnis. Julian Wachner conducts Downtown Voices, the
Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and the NOVUS
NY ensemble. (Broadway at Wall St. May 15 at 5.
No tickets required.)
1
RECITALS
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

May 13 at 7:30: In celebration of Friday the 13th, the
Society presents a program devoted to the macabre,
with C.M.S. regulars, including the pianist Inon
Barnatan, the violinist Sean Lee, and the Escher
String Quartet, as well as the baritone Yunpeng
Wang, performing works by Caplet, Ravel (Gaspard de la Nuit), Schubert (Erlknig, and the
String Quartet No. 14, Death and the Maiden),
and even Bernard Herrmann (music for strings
from Psycho). May 15 at 5: In Spring Winds,
some of the Societys finest instrumentalists (including the oboist Stephen Taylor, the clarinettist David Shifrin, the bassoonist Peter Kolkay,
and the hornist Julie Landsman) present cornerstone works for woodwind ensemble by Beethoven
(the Octet in E-flat Major), Gounod (the Petite
Symphonie), Ibert, and Mozart (the Serenade in
C Minor). (Alice Tully Hall. 212-875-5788.)
Jennifer Johnson Cano and Dimitri Pittas
The twentieth season of the George London Foundation recital series concludes with a concert from
two past winners of its annual competition. Each
performs a sparkling set pieceJohnson Cano sings
La Maja y el Ruiseor, from Granadoss Goyescas, and Pittas delivers Bellinis La Ricordanza
in addition to songs by Wolf, Brahms, Duparc, and
Jonathan Dove. The mezzo-soprano and the tenor
will be accompanied at the piano by their spouses,
Christopher Cano and Leah Edwards, respectively.
(Morgan Library & Museum, Madison Ave. at 36th St.
212-685-0008. May 15 at 4.)
NIGHT LIFE
1
ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; its advisable to check
in advance to confirm engagements.
Cage the Elephant

This years SummerStage concert series kicks off
with a set from these Kentucky rockers, whove
taken many shapes. Since its start, in 2007, Cage
the Elephant has jumped between jazz-punk funk
and loud-quiet-loud shredding, before Come a Little Closer, off of its Grammy-nominated album,
Melophobia, took on the noblest cause in rock:
embarrassing honesty. The groups latest release,
Tell Me Im Pretty, takes the best of its disparate
sounds and molds them into perfect pop forms.
The excellent single Trouble lands somewhere
between dewy surf punk and whiskey-stained rockabilly. You know what they say, the wicked get
no rest, Matthew Shultz sings, in winking reference to a Cage jam from 2008. There will be little downtime at this opener for a long summer of
events on the Great Lawn. (Rumsey Playfield, Central
Park, mid-Park at 69th St. 800-745-3000. May 16.)
Clams Casino
The twenty-eight-year-old Michael Volpe spurred
a tectonic shift in rap sounds in 2009, from his
sleepy attic in Nutley, New Jersey, while studying to become a physical therapistan unlikely
innovator, he shows just how tightly webbed hiphops social network has become. The strained cacophonies of hazy Lite FM samples, stadium-sized
drums, and wall-to-wall bass lines bewildered and
transfixed fans in equal measure. Some critics tried
to get the categorization cloud rap to catch on,
and notable, Web-savvy startups like A$AP Rocky
and The Weeknd floated off with the style. Volpe
hasnt exactly come full circle, but hes consistently

broadened his scope. This springs excellent Psycho, by A$AP Ferg, loops together strings and
horns, over which Ferg tells the wrenching story
of a slovenly uncle whom he grew up admiring for
all the wrong reasons. The producer will share a
rare d.j. set of the instrumentals and collaborations hes self-released since 2010. (Trans-Pecos,
915 Wyckoff Ave., Queens. thetranspecos.com. May 11.)
Freestyle!!!
One urban legend that has persisted for decades
suggests that New York Citys 1977 blackout
helped to spur a musical movement, after teenagers ransacked audio and electronics stores for
d.j. equipment and production gadgets. Whether
the tale is true or tall, the proliferation of audio
technology during the late seventies and early
eighties fuelled countless innovations and subgenres that kept kids dancing in the street. Uptown, the densely Puerto Rican enclaves of the
Bronx offered freestyle music, which laid R. & B.
over hard-bopping electronic dance beats built for
boxy subwoofers and sweaty nightclubs. Freestyle
spread to Miami, L.A., and Chicago, with each
city adding its own twist. As part of this years
excellently programmed Red Bull Music Academy Festival, two of the eras fixtures, Jellybean
Benitez and Louis Vega, help revive the scene for
an evening of freestyle, with live performances by
the hit vocalists Shannon and Lisa Lisa. (Capitale,
130 Bowery. nyc.redbullmusicacademy.com. May 13.)
Gallant
Its nice that R. & B. has become broader, darker,
and more eclectic in recent years, with many
breathless hat tips to Frank Ocean for leading
a new generation of songwriters. Chris Gallant
has a sinister falsetto and writes ambling ballads
that flaunt it well, but his most interesting move
Emerson String Quartet

The eminent group has been exploring some welltrod territory this spring: late string quartets by
Haydn and early quartets by Beethoven, written
at almost the same time. Its final concert brings
two of Haydns Op. 76 Quartets (including No. 3
in E-Flat Major, Emperor) together with two
works from Beethovens Op. 18 (No. 2 in G Major
and No. 6 in B-Flat Major). (Alice Tully Hall. 212721-6500. May 12 at 7:30.)
Metropolis Ensemble: Brownstone

Give these young performers points for novelty.
Their latest venture, a multisensory exploration,
mounted inside various rooms of the American
Irish Historical Society (just down the road from
the Met Museum), combines electro-acoustic
compositions by Jakub Ciupinski, Christopher
Cerrone (Memory Palace), and Ricardo Romaneiro, who co-curates the event with the prodigy
chef Jonah Reider (known for his Columbia University dorm-room restaurant, Pith). (991 Fifth
Ave. metropolisensemble.org. May 16, beginning at 7.)
22
Sadie Dupuis, Mike Falcone, Darl Ferm, and Devin McKnight punch out clever, laggard noise punk as
Speedy Ortiz. Theyll stop by Greenpoints Warsaw before touring through the heartland.
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL KRALL
Yuja Wang
Lang Lang is not the only Chinese piano superstar
at Carnegie Hall this week. Wang, a consistently
charismatic artist, offers a solo recital, performing
repertory nuggets by Brahms, Schumann (Kreisleriana), and Beethoven (the Hammerklavier
Sonata). (212-247-7800. May 14 at 8.)
NIGHT LIFE
might have been skipping past R. & B.s new it
kids. At this years Coachella Music Festival, he
was joined by Seal during a cover of the Brit stars
Crazy, before they dove into Gallants slow-snapping Weight in Gold. Gallant is on tour, offsetting the headlining electronic producer ZHU with
a softer sound that hits just as hard. (Terminal 5,
610 W. 56th St. 212-582-6600. May 11-12.)
Glenn Brancas Symphonies

When the gallery rockers Y Pants decided to record an album, in 1980, they grabbed a toy piano,
a ukulele, a Mickey Mouse drum kit, and Glenn
Branca. The composer and No Wave icon had developed an ear for eclectic arrangement while
collaborating with avant-garde bands throughout the early eighties, stretching the electric guitar to its technical limits and eventually stacking dozens of them to create his own ethereal
symphonies. Celebrating his influence and legacy, Red Bull Music Academy gathers an ensemble of young musicians, including Justin Frye, of
PC Worship; Mick Barr, of Krallice; and Randy
Randall, of No Age, to perform Brancas infamous guitar compositions, led by his longtime
conductor John Myers. (Grand Lodge of Free &
Accepted Masons, 71 W. 23rd St. nyc.redbullmusicacademy.com. May 15.)
Kode9
Steve Goodman founded Hyperdub as a Webzine, in 2000. By 2004, hed turned the platform
into a record label for the electronic sounds that
were brewing in underground clubs and on staticky broadcasts in London. Dubstep, jungle, grime,
footwork, Cooly G, Buriel, Wiley, Jokerthe spiritual commonalities across the labels diverse roster are audible in Goodmans grinding, adventurous mixes as Kode9, where all blips and kicks are
fair game. If the obtrusive synths of dubsteps midaughts explosion felt like a social-science experiment, consider that this scene stalwart split time
between club sets and university labs. Goodmans
first book, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the
Ecology of Fear, from 2009, examines the politics
of sound frequencies and their capacity to produce
discomfort, from auditory torture techniques used
by the military to sustained high-frequency notes
blasting on street corners to repel loitering teens.
Theres an ideology behind his earhear it in action after sets from J-Cush and Dutch E Germ, marquee names in their own right. (Trans-Pecos, 915
Wyckoff Ave., Queens. thetranspecos.com. May 14.)
Lpsley
On Station, this English singer-songwriter lays
down a line of leading vocals pitched several octaves lower than her naturally feathery singing
voice. In an accomplished bit of auditory illusion,
the two vocal tracks seem to harmonize, creating a one-woman duet. At just nineteen, Lpsleys garnered acclaim (and a record deal with
the cant-miss London label XL Recordings) for
her ambitious arrangements, and lyrics that go
just as far above and beyond the expected. So
if youre gonna hurt me, why dont you hurt me a
little bit more? she challenges, in the brooding
ballad Hurt Mea dark twist on overachievement that suits the brilliant and woeful singer.
(Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 718-486-5400. May 11-12.)
Speedy Ortiz
It makes sense that Massachusetts, with its
permanently installed student population
and near-endless winters, is incubating dedicated young bands like this Allston outfit. Self-
described as a group of French-club dropouts,

Speedy Ortiz is led by Sadie Dupuis, who nimbly pulls off smirking snark on the bands best
tracks. So if you want to throw, you better have
an awfully big stone, she sings on Raising the
Skateits slacker for sure, but the hopscotch
guitar changes are more complex than the groups
affect lets on. Speedy Ortiz released Foil Deer
last April, and this spring the group is touring with Philadelphias Hop Along. (Warsaw,
261 Driggs Ave., Brooklyn. 718-387-0505. May 11.)
1
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
Michael Feinstein
No, he wont address the repertoire of Muddy
Waters or Charley Patton, but, in a program declaring his Right to Sing the Blues, Feinstein
and his vocalizing guests will take on bluesinflected songs that have become popular standards, including Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercers Blues in the Night and Good Morning
Heartache, made famous by Billie Holiday.
(Appel Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at
60th St. 212-721-6500. May 11-12.)
Jose James
The singer James has more of a signature style
than a singularly identifiable musical identity,
but that may be just fine in an era that rewards
open-eared eclecticism. While his most recent
album, Yesterday I Had the Blues, was a highly
personalized tribute to Billie Holiday, dont assume that jazz is the path James is sticking to
hes surprised us before. (Blue Note, 131 W. 3rd
St. 212-475-8592. May 10-15.)
Joe Lovano
John Coltrane, like his onetime employer and
mentor Miles Davis, would have turned ninety
this year. Lovano, a contemporary Coltrane
acolyte of the highest rank, assembles a glittering ensemble to honor the master, which includes the pianists Geri Allen and Steve Kuhn and
the drummers Andrew Cyrille and Brian Blade,
as well as two players closely connected to Coltrane: his former bassist Reggie Workman and
his son, the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. Among
the spiritually inspired Coltrane work to be addressed is the half-century-old masterpiece A
Love Supreme. (Appel Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th St. 212-721-6500. May 13-14.)
Miles Davis: Sorcerer at 90
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will also
dive in deep for a celebration of what would have
been the ninetieth birthday of Miles Davis, presenting a panoply of refashioned Davis work
drawn from recordings stretching from Birth
of the Cool (1949-50) to the 1968 proto-fusion
album Miles in the Sky. The musical directors
will be the trumpeter Marcus Printup and the
drummer Ali Jackson. (Rose Theatre, Broadway
at 60th St. 212-721-6500. May 12-14.)
Jenny Scheinmans Mischief & Mayhem
A look at the audacious collaborators that the
violinist and singer Scheinman surrounds herself with in her Mischief & Mayhem outfitthe
guitarist Nels Cline, the drummer Jim Black,
and the bassist Todd Sickafoosespeaks volumes about her multifarious musical inclinations and the genre-morphing tangents (new
jazz, rock, Americana) that shes all too willing
to follow. (Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St. 212505-3474. May 12.)
23
MOVIES
Rebel in Disguise
Otto Preminger turned Hollywood
genres into social criticism.
Ineffectual or wounded men unfit
for military service, a tough cop in love with
the image of a dead woman he has never
met, the miraculous return of a person
marked missing in action: Otto Premingers
first hit film, Laura, from 1944, is steeped
in grief and mourning. A crime drama set
in New Yorks glossy stretches, it shows
an ambient violence that, without a word
about the Second World War, conjures
the jangled mood and the social turmoil
of the home front at the time. Preminger,
an Austrian-Jewish luminary of Vienna
theatre who emigrated to the United States
in 1935, had hypersensitive antennae for
societal breakdowns. As seen in the fifteen-film retrospective running at MOMA
through June 30, he perched his dramas
and his style on the leading edge of vast
cultural and political shifts.
Premingers romantically agonized
1947 drama, Daisy Kenyon, also set in
New York, is steeped in postwar trauma.
The title character (played by Joan Craw24
ford), an illustrator who lives in Greenwich Village, is juggling an affair with a

married Park Avenue attorney (Dana
Andrews) and the overheated attentions
of a recently discharged Army officer
(Henry Fonda) who is depressed, tormented by nightmares, struggling with
civilian life, and overwhelmed by the
changes that have occurred in his absence.
The depiction of high-powered operators
links traditional morality, with its winking
assumption of womens chastity and mens
prerogatives, to sexual violence (a recurring theme in Premingers work). The
fabric of city life seems torn by the fury
of warped and damaged men.
In Harms Way, filmed in 1964 and
released in 1965, just as the Vietnam War
was heating up, connects the disruptions
of war to predatory sexuality. Its a story
of the Second World War, in which John
Wayne plays a naval officer whose military career destroyed his family, and
whose brave maneuvering during the
Pearl Harbor Day attacks nearly gets him
court-martialled. Preminger offers an
unsparing view of war and its overturning
of the natural order, as the young die and
the old grieve, romance yields to blind lust,

and soldiers wounded in body and in soul
find victorious battle as tragic as defeat.
Premingers ultimate embrace of youth
culture, Skidoo, from 1968, is one of the
most wonderfully strange movies ever
made in Hollywood. It stars Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx,
Mickey Rooney, and a host of other brassy
old-school entertainers in a comic tale of
clashing cultures. Gleason plays a gangster
whose Vassar-bound teen-age daughter
(Alexandra Hay) joins a caravan of hippies.
Smuggled into Alcatraz to murder an inmate, he shares a cell with a draft dodger
(Austin Pendleton), who has a stash of
LSD. Premingers depictions of psychedelic fantasies result in his giddiest visual
inspirationswhich come with a sharp
political twist. He links these wild imaginings to the hippies repudiation of war,
rejection of conventional mores, and pursuit of a peaceful and egalitarian sexual
freedom. Premingers hallucinatory images dissolve narrative and moral norms
alike in a utopian vision that has yet to be
fulfilledin movies or in society at large.
Richard Brody
COURTESY OLIVE FILMS
Alexandra Hay, Carol Channing, and John Philip Law unite the brass-knuckle underworld and the hang-loose counterculture in the 1968 comedy Skidoo.
1
OPENING
High-Rise An adaptation of a novel by J. G.
Ballard, about residents of an apartment building that enforces rigid class distinctions. Directed by Ben Wheatley; starring Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, and
Elisabeth Moss. Opening May 13. (In limited
release.) The Lobster Reviewed this week
in The Current Cinema. Opening May 13. (In
limited release.) Love & Friendship Whit Stillman directed this adaptation of Jane Austens novel Lady Susan, about a widow (Kate
Beckinsale) who competes with her daughter (Morfydd Clark) for an eligible bachelor (Xavier Samuel). Opening May 13. (In limited release.) Money Monster Jodie Foster
directed this drama, about a TV financial adviser (George Clooney) whos held hostage by
a viewer (Jack OConnell) who lost money on
his advice. Co-starring Julia Roberts. Opening May 13. (In wide release.) Sunset Song Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening May 13. (In
limited release.)
1
NOW PLAYING
A Bigger Splash
Tilda Swinton teams up again with Luca Guadagnino, who directed her in I Am Love
(2009), for a more scorched and southerly affair. This time, she strikes the eye as gilded and
semi-divine; appropriately so, for her character is a rock goddess named Marianne. As with
almost everything in the film, though, hers is
a perilous condition: she is a singer who has
lost her voice. Accompanied and shielded by
her boyfriend, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts),
she goes to ground on a volcanic island between Italy and Africa. Their sequestered calm
is soon invaded by the arrival of Harry (Ralph
Fiennes), Mariannes raucous ex, and his daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson). These two
constitute a breach of the peace, not to mention a threat, and the movie, written by David
Kajganich, feels both as sly as a snake and brazenly open to carnal possibilities. (Fans of I
Am Love will be relieved to learn that food
is once more the object of worship.) The plot
takes a cruel turn, and the principal figures are
as likely to repel as they are to attract; yet they
fit the landscape in which they disport and disgrace themselves, and the whole film swelters
with a sense of mystery, never quite solved,
that reflects the beating sun. Also, when did
you last see Fiennes, in shorts and an unbuttoned shirt, gyrate to the Rolling Stones?Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 5/9/16.) (In
limited release.)
Elvis & Nixon
This comic fictionalization, directed by Liza
Johnson, of the events behind the famous 1970
Oval Office photo of the King and the President is a giddy historical delight. The premise
is rooted in pathos: Elvis Presley, no longer
at the crest of popularity, inveighing against
the Beatles in particular and the Age of Aquarius over all, wants to volunteer for the war on
drugs and wants Nixon to swear him in as a
federal agent. The main drama is whether the
meeting will ever take place; the story pivots on Elviss friendship with the film editor Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer), whose devotion hits its limit. Michael Shannon plays
Elvis with understated cool and sly swagger,
MOVIES
turning a skillful impersonation into a performance thats filled with empathetic energy.
The script, by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal, and
Cary Elwes, shows Presley in a startling range
of ordinary contexts that highlight all the
more his extraordinary character. As for Kevin
Spaceys incarnation of Nixon, it, too, passes
quickly from mannerisms into a thoughtful
effort to capture a singular world view. Johnson stages the action with delicate attention
to gestures as well as to visual and tonal balance. The dialogue sparkles with gems of historical allusion and perceptive asides, and
the actors virtually sing it; the film plays like
a whirling sociopolitical operetta.Richard
Brody (In wide release.)
Green Room
Things go wrong for the Aint Rights as soon as
the Virginia-based indie-punk quartet reaches
the Pacific Northwest town where theyve been
booked for a concert. The student organizer
has messed up, but compensates by getting
them a gig at a remote white-supremacist compound: What could go wrong? The writer and
director, Jeremy Saulnier, answers this question with an hour or so of bloody horror. Stumbling upon a murder scene, the band members
are held hostage by the brutal security forces
of a neo-Nazi cult headed by the coolly charismatic Darcy (Patrick Stewart), who plans
to pin the crime on the musicians. When they
resist, his idea is to kill them, and the movie
devolves into a tale of the raw will, strategic
calculation, and macabre happenstance of a
primal struggle to survive. A viewer may well
share the feeling of captivity, whether arising
from an interest in the amiable band members fate or from the narrow limits of the plot.
One screenplay riff, on the taking of good advice, is piquantly memorable, but Saulniers
clever methods are insubstantial and the movies stakes, though mortal, seem slight. With
Alia Shawkat, Imogen Poots, and Callum
Turner.R.B. (In limited release.)
A Hologram for the King
There may be no opening sequence this year
more exhilarating than the Talking Headsinspired musical number that the director Tom
Tykwer dreams up to introduce his gleaming
take on Dave Eggerss novel. Tom Hanks gives
a terrific performance as Alan, a struggling,
desperate American salesman of holographic
software who travels to Saudi Arabia to broker
a deal with the King, who wishes to expand his
rapidly growing tech sector. While waiting for
the King to appear, Alan and his team chat in
often comical I.T. jargon and meet a few local
charactersnotably, his wisecracking Saudi
driver (Alexander Black) and his doctor and
love interest (Sarita Choudhury)who keep
the Godot-like proceedings buoyant. The
story, about Alans impending midlife crisis
while he awaits the deal, offers a shaky, America-in-decline vibe as well as a technophobic
undercurrent that never really takes hold. In
one of Tykwers neatest visual tricks, Alan visits a sweltering world of empty skyscrapersa
desert illusion of a soulless future that looks
too fabulous to fear. The film plays like a science-fiction parable in which humor and pathos jostle for attention. Although it falters
in flashback sequences (which present a superfluous backstory), the unusual tone and
arresting visuals hold interest.Bruce Diones
(In wide release.)
The Jungle Book

The latest Disney movie is a loyal adaptation,
and the loyalty is strictly in-house. The director, Jon Favreau, and his screenwriter, Justin
Marks, honor Disneys own animated version,
from 1967, rather than Kiplings original texts.
Live action replaces the finely drawn cartoon;
given the tumult of computer-generated images (the whole thing was filmed in Los Angeles), viewers may struggle to establish where
the liveliness resides. Mowgli (Neel Sethi), at
least, is a recognizable human, but the urge to
root for him is tempered by the bumptiousness
of his tone; reassuring though it is to see him
befriended by Bagheera (voiced by Ben Kingsley) and Baloo (Bill Murray), you cant help
thinking that a more natural fate for such a child
would be to end up as breakfast for Shere Khan
(Idris Elba). Other old hands include Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) and King Louie (Christopher
Walken), both of whom appear to have suffered
a startling inflation since 1967; the coils of the
python are now as thick as a tree. The movie is
scrupulous and richly detailed, yet peculiarly
shorn of charm, and nobody seems to have decided how much of a musical it should be; Murray sings The Bare Necessities, Walken only
half sings I Wanna Be Like You, as if he were
Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, and Johanssons delectable crooning of Trust in Me is
consigned to the final credits.A.L. (4/25/16)
(In wide release.)
Keanu
A sketch comedy writ large by two masters
of the form, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan
Peele, and their longtime collaborators, Alex
Rubens (who co-wrote the script with Peele)
and the director Peter Atencio. The high-concept hijinksinvolving an abducted kitten,
some action scenes, and a generous ribbing
of old-school movie tropesrecall such nineteen-eighties blockbusters as Beverly Hills
Cop and Lethal Weapon. Key and Peele play
a couple of suburban guys who set out to rescue their kitten, Keanu, whos been stolen by a
cat-loving drug lord (Method Man). In order
to infiltrate the gang, they pretend to be swaggering thugs, giving rise to riffs on the subject
of black identity and Hollywood stereotyping.
Though the satire isnt always on-target, the
films loose tone gives the slackness of some of
its scenes a little leeway. Along the way, there
are many fine comic bits (featuring an addled
Anna Faris, a weed-dealing Will Forte, and the
great Luis Guzmn, as a rival drug lord) that
give the movie a genuine feel-good vibe.B.D.
(In wide release.)
Last Days in the Desert
Ewan McGregor plays both Jesus (here called
Yeshua) and the Devil in the writer and director Rodrigo Garcas dramatization of the
temptation in the desert, but the movies real
star is the location scout who found the spectacularly intricate and rocky California settings that turn the arid action photogenic.
In Garcas take on the New Testament tale,
Jesuss wanderings are interrupted by an encounter with a young man (Tye Sheridan)
whose father (Ciarn Hinds) keeps him in
the desert as they build an altar at the edge
of a cliff while the boy dreams of working in
the city. Meanwhile, the boys mother (Ayelet
Zurer) is seriously ill, but neither her malady
nor the old mans dangerous work prompts
Jesus to yield to temptation and show off his
25
MOVIES
miraculous powers. (Jesus must learn to accept human suffering as an aspect of his own
burden.) The story turns the Messiah into a
family therapist who reveals his own neuroses in snippy exchanges with the Devil about
their Father. To top it off, sunlight starbursts
sparkling in the lens and the honeyed tones
of late-afternoon magic hours turn the story
into postcard-ready religious kitsch.R.B.
(In limited release.)
Lothringen!
This short film, from 1994, has a vast historical purview and painful personal import. The
title is the German name for the French province of Lorraine, the subject is Germanys conquest of the region in the Franco-Prussian War
of 1870-71, and the setting is the city of Metz,
the home town of the filmmaker Jean-Marie
Straub (who co-directed with his wife, Danile
Huillet). The movies twenty-two-minute span
condenses Maurice Barrss 1909 novel, Colette Baudoche, into a handful of sharp-edged
and searingly declaimed recollections and a
tale of intimate protest. In 1872, after the Prussian conquest of the city, tens of thousands
of panic-stricken French residents, refusing
to become German citizens, abandon homes,
businesses, and families to flee to unoccupied
France. When Colette (Emmanuelle Straub),
a young woman who stays in the city, is befriended by a wise and benevolent German
professor, she exerts her own form of political
resistance. Filming the costumed performer
enacting the nineteenth-century story on location in current-day Metz, Straub and Huillet make the modern cityscape and countryside
resound silently with the bloody clashes of the
past. The blood may have dried, but the wounds
remain: the story recalls the Nazi occupation
of Metz in 1940, which Straub experienced as a
child.R.B. (MOMA; May 12.)
The Man Who Knew Infinity
Matt Browns film tells a remarkable tale thats
familiar to mathematicians, but less so to the
wider world. Dev Patel plays Srinivasa Ramanujan, a young Brahmin clerk from Madras who was invited to England in 1913 on
the strength of his mathematical powers. His
summoner was G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons),
himself a figure of repute in the field, who
forged with Ramanujan not just a professional
partnership, whose fruits are still being evaluated even now, but alsoinsofar as Hardy allowed himself such thingsa private friendship. Irons, though decades too old for the
role, gives it his all, providing a portrait of a
heavily defended yet far from dispassionate
soul. Regrettably, the rest of the movie cannot
match him; the scenes in Ramanujans homeland are notably thin (one dreams of what
Satyajit Ray might have made of the story),
and Patel doesnt plumb the unfathomable character of a hero whose scholarly exploits defy all dramatization. In theory, this
could have been absorbingbut where, as
Hardy would insist, is the proof? With Toby
Jones.A.L. (5/9/16) (In limited release.)
Ninotchka
Despite the bubbly erotic wit of Ernst Lubitschs 1939 comedy, the movies political satire is chillingly serious. Greta Garbo stars as
Nina Ivanovna Yakushova, a stone-faced Soviet agent who arrives in Paris to sell jewelry
confiscated from an exiled noblewoman, Grand
26
Duchess Swana (Ina Claire). There, she allows

herself to be seduced by Count Lon dAlgout
(Melvyn Douglas), a debonair French idler,
who happens to be Swanas lover. The romantic roundelay, linking fine emotions with fine
lingerie, is shadowed by the brutality of Soviet tyranny. Ample comic references to executions, forced confessions, Siberian prisons,
censorship, and the secret police are matched
by a sharp scene evoking the corrupt and bloodthirsty arrogance of the czarist aristocracy that
the Revolution overthrewas well as two jolting, pointed Heil, Hitler jokes that spotlight another menace. The movie was shot in
mid-1939. By the time it was released, later that
year, France was at war, and its painful to imagine how Ninotchka and the Count would fare
under the Occupation; the charming ending
gives them a surprising way out.R.B. (Film
Forum; May 15.)
Private Lives
An early talkie attempt at glittering theatrical
sophisticationand, somehow, in its own terms,
it works. This M-G-M version of the Nol Coward play was made soon after the play came out,
and perhaps the plays style and excitement carries the cast along. Norma Shearer isnt so bad,
and Robert Montgomery is very, very good. It
was a dazzling success. A performance of the
play was filmed so that the stars, the director,
Sidney Franklin, and a raft of adaptors would
get the idea; that may explain Franklins showing a little zip, for a change, and Shearers acting halfway human. With Reginald Denny, Una
Merkel, and, in a role added in the film, Jean
Hersholt. Released in 1931.Pauline Kael (Film
Forum; May 17.)
Sing Street
This insipid comic drama, about the fifteenyear-old Connor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a student in a tough boys school in Dublin in 1985
who starts a band and improves his life, feels
like a forced march to good cheer. Connors parents fight bitterly and loudly while his older
brother, Brendan (Jack Reynor), a reclusive
stoner, gives the diffident guitar-strummer
stern lessons in musical taste. Connor falls
for Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a much worldlier sixteen-year-old girl, and starts a band (the
movies title is the groups name) solely to include her in its music videos (which are shot
on VHS). Confronting a bully in the courtyard
and a brutal headmaster in the corridors, and
facing his parents impending divorce, Connor
seeks refuge in his music and finds friendships,
a social identity, self-confidence, and even the
spirit of revolt. Its all too sweet and easy, and
the bands musicwhich is composed by John
Carney, the movies writer and director, and
Gary Clarkis bland and overproduced. The
songs sound like the work of prematurely old
teen-agers.R.B. (In limited release.)
Sunset Song
This mighty drama of emotional archeology,
adapted from a novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, deepens the director Terence Daviess career-long obsession with memory and its blend
of the intimate with the historical. The movie
traces the fortunes of a young woman, Chris
Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), who lives in an isolated farm village in Scotland, from around
1910 until the end of the First World War. Brutalized by her tyrannical father (Peter Mullan)
and unprotected by her long-suffering mother
(Daniela Nardini), the sharp-minded Chris

plans to leave the farm and become a teacher.
But after her parents die in quick succession
(in separate, gravely dramatic incidents) she
marries Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie), a
young farmhand, and settles down with him on
her familys property, until theyre wrenched
apart by his military service in the war. Chris
bears the drudgery of farming and the stifling
norms of rural society in order to realize her
private passion, which is greater than romantic love or intellectual fulfillment: an ecstatic
devotion to the land, which she realizes only
by liberating it, and herself, from the dominion of men. Davies depicts Chriss dedication
in frankly sensual and glowingly lyrical images
that compress grand-scale melodrama into the
quietly burning point of a single soul.R.B.
(In limited release.)
Tale of Tales
The Italian director Matteo Garrone is best
known for Gomorrah (2008), a plunge into
the criminal clans of Naples. At first glance,
his new movie, set in imaginary lands, deep
in the myth-riddled past, seems like quite a
swerve. But his source is also Neapolitan, Giambattista Basile, whose collection of fairy storiesearthy, bracing, and unsentimentalwas
printed in the sixteen-thirties. Three of the fables, with monarchs at their heart, have been
plundered for the film. The first king (Toby
Jones) rears a giant flea and sees his daughter
(Bebe Cave) carried away by an ogre, the second (John C. Reilly) battles a sea beast for the
sake of his childless wife (Salma Hayek), and
the third (Vincent Cassel) is an inexhaustible
satyr, tricked by a pair of wizened sisters (Shirley Henderson and Hayley Carmichael). Garrone makes only a paltry attempt to interlock
the narratives, and the final convocation is an
awkward affair; yet the movie nonetheless holds
firm, bound by its miraculous mood. Wonders
are everywhere (if you slice into a tree, it will
bleed water, like a spring), as is a casual carnality. Luxury entwines with filth. Following Basile, Garrone grasps a basic rule of folklore: nobody must flinch at prodigious events, for they
are part of the mortal deal.A.L. (4/25/16) (In
limited release.)
Viktoria
The Bulgarian director Maya Vitkovas epoch-spanning family drama about Communism, motherhood, and freedom ingeniously
blends personal life and grand history, earnest
passion and tragic absurdity in a mighty outpouring of imagination. The action starts in
1979, when a young librarian, Boryana (Irmena
Chichikova), refuses to have a child with her
husband (Dimo Dimov), a doctor, unless they
emigrate to the United States. But when an attempted self-induced abortion fails, the baby,
Viktoria, bears the mark: shes born without a
belly button. This odd distinction is given a political slant. Viktoria is publicly celebrated by
the countrys real-life dictator, Todor Zhivkov
(played by Georgi Spasov), who envisions a
workforce of women freed from pregnancy.
Nine years later, the child, granted a chauffeur and a hot line to Zhivkov, is a Communist spoiled brat and the terror of her classmates. Meanwhile, Boryana refuses to let her
mother (Mariana Krumova), a lifelong Party
member, see Viktoria. Then, the Iron Curtain
falls and the balance of family power shifts.
Vitkovas spare, precise yet richly textured
MOVIES
images sing with restrained emotion and natural metaphors and catch the characters in
self-revealing gestures of an overwhelming intimacy. Womens bodies are the center of the
film, with milk, blood, and even intrauterine
images joining political pageantry and protest in a quietly fierce yet compassionate vision.R.B. (In limited release.)
Zootopia
Disneys new animated film is about a rabbit cop, eager and optimistic: Thumper with a
badge. Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), raised on a peaceful farm, comes to the
city to fight crime, undismayed by being the
smallest mammal on the force. As in The Lion
King, the world presented by the movie is entirely human-free, although, in this case, no
friction exists between predators and the lesser
beasts. In Zootopia, everybody lives pretty
much in harmonya mushy conceit, yet the directors, Byron Howard and Rich Moore, take
care to suggest how vulnerable such peace can
be. Only by a whisker is it preserved, thanks
to Judy and her sidekick, a hustling fox (Jason
Bateman), who have two days to crack a difficult case; their comradeship, unlikely as it
sounds, is a furry sequel to that of Nick Nolte
and Eddie Murphy, in 48 Hrs. There are no
songs, apart from those performed by a superstar gazelle (Shakira), but the beat of the movie
barely dips, sustained by a steady profusion
of gags. With the voice of Idris Elba.A.L.
(3/14/16) (In wide release.)
1
REVIVALS AND FESTIVALS
Titles with a dagger are reviewed.
ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO
Anthology Film Archives Qubec Direct Cin-
ema. May 12 at 9: Genevive (1965, Michel

Brault) and Between Sweet and Salt Water
(1967, Brault). BAM Cinmatek Labor of Love.
May 13 at 2 and 7: Clueless (1995, Amy Heckerling). May 13 at 4:30 and 9:30: American
Psycho (2000, Mary Harron). Film Forum Nol
Coward. May 13 at 2:10, 5:40, and 9:40 and May
14 at 2:45 and 6:40: Design for Living (1933,
Ernst Lubitsch). May 17 at 12:40, 4:10, and 7:35:
Private Lives. F May 17 at 9:25: Boom!
(1968, Joseph Losey). Hollywoods Happiest Couple: Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.
May 15 at 5:20: Ninotchka. F May 16 at 8:20:
Sunset Blvd. (1950, Wilder). IFC Center Becoming Meryl Streep. May 12 at 7:30: Kramer
vs. Kramer (1979, Robert Benton), followed by
a Q. & A. with the director, moderated by Michael Schulman, a contributor to The New Yorker
and the author of Her Again: Becoming Meryl
Streep. Metrograph The films of Amy Heckerling. May 14 at 6 and 8:30: Fast Times at
Ridgemont High (1982). May 15 at 6 and 8:30:
Clueless (1995). Museum of Modern Art The
films of Otto Preminger. May 11 at 1:30:
The Moon Is Blue (1953). May 12 at 1:30: The
Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The films
of Jean-Marie Straub and Danile Huillet. May
12 at 4: Short films, including Lothringen! F
May 13 at 6: Antigone (1992). Universal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries,
19281937. May 14 at 7: Broadway (1929, Paul
Fejos). May 15 at 2:30: Air Mail (1932, John
Ford). Museum of the Moving Image The films
of Terence Davies. May 13 at 7: The House of
Mirth (2000). May 14 at 2:30 and May 15 at
4:45: The Neon Bible (1995).
ABOVE & BEYOND
Bayou N Brooklyn Music Festival

The Louisiana spirit descends on Kings County
for a three-day festival of Creole and Cajun food,
music, and entertainment. The sixth annual Bayou
N Brooklyn Music Festival gathers top talent, both
local and Louisiana-native, for workshops, dance
lessons, and a jambalaya supper. On Friday, Blake
Miller and Courtney Granger perform; on Saturday, a community jam and open stage invites the best
local players; and Sunday closes out the fest with the
Cest Bon Cajun Dance Band and the Dirty Water
Dogs. (Jalopy Theatre and School of Music, 315 Columbia St., Brooklyn. bayou-n-brooklyn.com. May 13-15.)
Spring Fling
Lincoln Center hosts this spring welcome weekend, which invites parents to bring their children
out to the plazas for an afternoon of activities and
performances. The Fling offers the best of Lincoln Centers arts and culture, shrunken down to
knee height: the schedule includes a reading at
the Atrium, featuring the childrens author Todd
Parr; a performance by the string quartet from the
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; and a
concert by the Verve Pipe, followed by a private
meet and greet for lucky contest winners. Pintsized attendees can try out an instrument with
the New York Philharmonic, chalk up the plazas
with imaginative drawings, and scale the grounds
during a scavenger hunt. (10 Lincoln Center Plaza.
212-875-5456. May 14 at 11.)
1
AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES
The spring extravaganza of high-priced Impressionist, postwar, and contemporary art is in full
swing at the big auction houses. Hoping to repeat
its success from last year, Sothebys leads its auction of contemporary art on the evening of May
11 with two canvases by Cy Twombly, Untitled
(New York City) and Untitled [Bacchus 1st Version V]. Francis Bacon, another top performer, is
represented by a pair of studies for a self-portrait,
from 1970. The less overheated sale the following
day includes works by Dubuffet, Calder, Lee Ufan,
and Richard Prince. (York Ave. at 72nd St. 212-6067000.) After two additional sessions of postwar
and contemporary art, on May 11, Christies moves
on to the Impressionists and modernists, on May
12. The evening sale is filled with familiar images:
Monet waterlilies, a melancholy young woman by
Modigliani (Jeune Femme la Rose), a French
village by Czanne (Village Derrire des Arbres). And, for the first time since 2006, a Frida
Kahlo painting: two women in a dreamlike landscape (Dos Desnudos en el Bosque). Earlier in
the day, the house holds a single session of African and Oceanic art, containing eleven sculptures from the Ivory Coast, Mali, Cameroon,
Gabon, and Congoan attempt to capitalize on

the connection between African art, which fascinated painters like Modigliani and Picasso, and
early modernism. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St.
212-636-2000.)
1
READINGS AND TALKS
Maple Street School

Elizabeth Isadora Gold writes vividly and humorously about the trials and trip-outs of newmotherhood. Her recent book, The Mommy
Group, turns the lens outward: instead of a dosand-donts list for young mothers, it examines the
lives of seven Brooklyn women, who discuss the
challenges that they faced during early parenting
and the political blind spots that have left mothers
to fend for themselves. Golds subjects are educated and financially stable, privileges that do not
insulate them from the traumas that many mothers may face, including postpartum depression,
infidelity, and raising children with developmental disabilities. Gold reads from The Mommy
Group at this local grade school in partnership
with Greenlight Bookstore. (21 Lincoln Rd., Brooklyn. 718-246-0200. May 12 at 7.)
BookCourt
In Boy Erased, an autobiographical record
of his upbringing and experience as the son
of a Baptist pastor in Arkansas, Garrard Conley traces his tumultuous experience reconciling his faith with a conflicted understanding of
his sexuality. After being outed to his parents at
nineteen, Conley faced an ultimatum: attend a
conversion-therapy program, sponsored by his
church, in order to be cured of his homosexuality or lose the love and support of his family and
close friendsas well as the spiritual core hed depended on for his entire life. Conley and the Narrative Prize winner Maud Newton will discuss
the new book after readings of select passages.
(163 Court St., Brooklyn. 718-875-3677. May 16 at 7.)
New York Public Library
The New Yorkers Claudia Roth Pierpont connects
several pivotal works of art, literature, and criticism in her new book, American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars and One Great Building. Tracing the development of modern culture
through benchmark moments and figures, from
flapper girls to Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, and
Peggy Guggenheim, Pierpont highlights the patterns and parallels that have driven American innovation in the face of various challenges. Shell
read from this collection, along with the author
and publishing veteran Jonathan Galassi. (Celeste
Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. 5th
Ave at 42nd St. 917-275-6975. May 17 at 6.)
27
FD & DRINK
El Atoradero
708 Washington Ave., Brooklyn
(718-399-8226)
As the chef Denisse Lina Chavez
pushes out of the kitchen of her new Mexican restaurant, in Prospect Heights, people on bar stools tower over her. Shes tiny,
but as electric as her hot-pink bandana:
Chavez has famously gone on spice pilgrimages through drug-cartel-controlled
stretches of the Mexican desert to collect
chilis and anise-flavored avocado leaves
for her Poblano cuisine. She surveys the
room. Micheladas slosh to cheers of Mexicans in a Mexican restaurant!; a couple
whispers, Huevo, thats Spanish for egg.
Chavez is a long way from the South Bronx
bodega where her reign as the Queen of
Carnitas began, in 2002.
The stringy carnitas available elsewhere
in New York had nothing on Chavezs bodega offerings, corn tortillas stuffed with
juicy cubes of pork and melting strips of
fat. Demand was so great that she opened
a restaurant next door. The craze continued. When her landlord made noise about
raising the rent, she shuttered the restaurant
(the bodegas still there, but carnitas production ceased last month) and moved the
operation to Brooklyn.
The new place bumps with hip-hop
and Mexican pop; a bar TV plays Yankees
games on mute; hand-painted pineapples
on the walls brighten the candle-lit room.
28
The portions are enormous, and the price

just right, inspiring diners with even the
most abstemious of intentions to indulge
in an artery-corking feast. But, four months
after the restaurants opening, the food is
inconsistent. The albondigas enchipotladaspork meatballs drenched in chipotle
sauceare dry and dull one meal, transcendent the next. The mixiotes, masterfully undersold by the bartender one night
as a mixture of dark chicken in a bag, is
a standout. The meatdrowned in orange
juice, covered in those hard-earned avocado leaves, and steam-braised in a plastic
baggyis impossible to stop eating. Meanwhile, the squash-blossom quesadilla languishes, stuffed with a sad vegetable hash.
Most sacrilegious of all, those famous carnitas are disappointing, with grizzled bits
of fat and cartilage.
Chavez knows that things arent up to
snuff. The spit-fired al pastor basting in
fresh pineapple juice one evening is gone
a week later. Chef wasnt happy with it,
the bartender says. Chavezs daughter Diana,
behind the counter of the Bronx bodega,
attests that compromise does not exist for
her mother. Abducted by Los Zetas in 2013,
the fearless chef returned to Mexico in February for more spices. Theres a great chance
that, by the time the back patio opens and
the liquor license finally comes through,
Chavez will have things whipped into shape.
As her daughter says, she will stop at nothing short of perfection. (Dishes $3.50-$20.)
Becky Cooper
1
BAR TAB
The Ship
158 Lafayette St. (212-219-8496)
Some evenings ago, a pair of drinkers moored
themselves at the bar of this cocktail lounge, at
the bottom of a long staircase, reached through
an unassuming black door on Lafayette Street,
near Grand. There are no prizes for guessing
the decorative theme of the Ship, but, thankfully,
its not so excessively nautical as to present a
drowning risk: benches and booths are subtly
upholstered with off-white sails, and large ships
vents hang from the two-story-high ceiling, like
Cyclopean worms poking their heads in to check
out the space. Its where Captain Haddock would
meet Tintin, if he trimmed his beard and had a
loft in SoHo. The conditions outside were cold
and windy, so the Where Theres Smoke ($14),
a steamed mix of mezcal, pear liqueur, lemon
juice, and agave syrup, was a pleasant way to
warm up. It makes me want to take a bubble
bath, someone said. In a drinking scene in
which overwrought cocktails can sometimes
have the bitter taste of competitive machismo,
the Ships crew do a good job of not throwing
their expertise in your face; theyll happily serve
you a drink that will delight the palate without
going on about muddling techniques or stirring
directions. Instead, the bartender plays an insouciant magician, conjuring a drink from a
customers suggestion of flavors. One wore a
single black latex glove and smashed a large ice
cube with a wand-like spoon to make the ginbased Gloria, with Campari, dry vermouth, and
triple sec, from a recipe hed found in a book
not too long ago. A patron was enchanted. Do
you find its like a rabbit hole? she asked.
Cocktails? Kind of.Colin Stokes
PHOTOGRAPH BY LAUREN LANCASTER FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
TABLES FOR TWO
THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT
HEAD OF THE CLASS
ast week, Donald Trump became the leader of the
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
L Republican Party. He thrashed his way to this summit
by understanding what many intelligent people utterly failed

to see: the decline of American institutions and mores, from
Wall Street and the Senate to cable news and the Twitterverse, made the candidacy of a celebrity proto-fascist with
no impulse control not just possible but in some ways inevitable. It shouldnt have been such a surprise. An early
tremor came in 2008, in the person of Sarah Palin, who endorsed Trump before almost any other top Republican. In
her contempt for qualications, her blithe ignorance, she
was an avatar for Trump. A lot of Republicans, many of
them female, saw in the small-town common woman an
image of themselves; many men see in the say-anything
billionaire an image of their aspirations. Palin showboated
her way from politics to reality TV, while Trump swaggered
in the opposite direction. Together, they wore a path that
is already almost normal.
Trump also grasped what Republican lites are still struggling to fathom: the ideology that has gripped their Party
since the late nineteen-seventiesantigovernment, pro-business, nominally
pioushas little appeal for millions of ordinary Republicans. The base of the Party,
the middle-aged white working class, has
suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization,
low-wage immigrant labor, and free
trade. Trump sensed the rage that ared
from this pain and made it the fuel of
his campaign. Conservative orthodoxy, already weakened by its own extremism
the latest, least appealing standard-bearer
was Ted Cruzhas suffered a stunning
defeat from within. And Trump has replaced it with something more dangerous: white identity politics.
Republican Presidential candidates
received majorities of the white vote in
every election after 1964. In 2012, Barack Obama won about

forty per cent of it, average for Democrats in the past half
century. But no Republican candidatenot even Richard
Nixon or Ronald Reaganmade as specic an appeal to the
economic anxieties and social resentments of white Americans as Trump has. When he vows to make America great
again, he is talking about and to white America, especially
the less well off. The ugliness of the pitch will drive some
more moderate and perhaps more affluent Republicans to
sit out the fall election, or even to vote for Hillary Clinton,
the nearly certain Democratic nominee. #NeverTrump and
#ImWithHer are trending on select Republican Twitter feeds.
Trumps toxicity, combined with a decline in the white electoratewhich, since 1976, has dropped from eighty-nine
per cent of the American voting public to seventy-two
per centmight make this a year of Democratic routs.
The Democratic Party has a strange relationship with the
white working class. Bernie Sanders speaks to and for it
not as being white but as being economically victimized. He
kept his campaign alive last week, in Indiana, in large part by
beating Clinton nearly two to one among
whites without a college degree. Coverage of Sanders has focussed on his support among the young and the progressive, but he has also outperformed Clinton
with the white working class. Even in
losing, Sanders has shown that a candidacy based on economic populism can
win back some voters who long ago deserted the Democratic Party. Its hard to
know whether these voters, faced with a
choice between Clinton and Trump, will
revert to the Republican side, stay home,
or vote for a Democrat who until now
hasnt known how to reach them.
Identity politics, of a different brand
from Trumps, is also gaining strength
among progressives. In some cases, it
comes with an aversion toward, even
31
contempt for, their fellow-Americans who are white and

sinking. Abstract sympathy with the working class as an
economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with
disturbing beliefs and powerful resentmentswho might
not sound or look like people urban progressives want to
know. White male privilege remains alive in America, but
the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixtyyear-old man working as a Walmart greeter in southern
Ohio. The growing strain of identity politics on the left is
pushing working-class whites, chastised for various types of
bigotry (and sometimes justiably), all the more decisively
toward Trump.
Last fall, two Princeton economists released a study showing that, since the turn of the century, middle-aged white
Americansprimarily less educated oneshave been dying
at ever-increasing rates. This is true of no other age or ethnic group in the United States. The main factors are alcohol, opioids, and suicidean epidemic of despair. A subsequent Washington Post story showed that the crisis is
particularly severe among middle-aged white women in
rural areas. In twenty-one counties across the South and the
Midwest, mortality rates among these women have actually
doubled since the turn of the century. Anne Case, one of the
SCION DEPT.
TARGET PRACTICE
ast Monday afternoon, in Trump
L Tower, twenty oors up from the
Trump campaign headquarters, Donald Trump, Jr., surveyed his desk, on

which sat a bronze statue of Theodore
Roosevelt, a rie cradled in his arm
and a Cape-buffalo skull at his feet.
He was a big hunter and started much
of the conservation movement in this
country, which is why we have as much
public land as we do, Trump, Jr., said,
adding that, as a brash New Yorker,
Roosevelt might seem an unlikely advocate for such things. But he was all
about getting away from the city and
out into the woods. On a table lay a
camo cap bearing the words Make
America Great Again.
Trump, Jr., the thirty-eight-year-old
eldest son of the presumptive Republican candidate for President, and an
executive vice-president of the Trump
Organization, has been running the
family business while his father makes
a case for why he should run the coun-
32
Princeton studys co-authors, said, They may be privileged

by the color of their skin, but that is the only way in their
lives theyve ever been privileged.
According to the Post, these regions of white workingclass pain tend to be areas where Trump enjoys strong support. These Americans know that theyre being left behind,
by the economy and by the culture. They sense the indifference or disdain of the winners on the prosperous coasts and
in the innovative cities, and it is reciprocated. Trump has
seized the Republican nomination by nding scapegoats for
the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites, while giving these voters a reassuring but
false promise of their restoration to the center of American
life. He plays to their sense of entitlement, but his hollowness will ultimately deepen their cynicism.
The Democrats probably wont need the votes of the
white working class to win this year. Demographic trends
favor the Party, as does the bloated and hateful persona of
the Republican choice. Nonetheless, the Democratic nominee cant afford, either politically or morally, to write off
those Americans. They need a politics that offers honest
answers to their legitimate grievances and keeps them from
sliding further into self-destruction.
George Packer
try. He had spent Saturday night at the

White House Correspondents Association dinner, catching a 5 a.m. ight
home for an archery tournament. Although he is more mild-mannered than
his father, he has a trace of the family
braggadocio. I won both the traditionalbow category and the compound-bow
category, he said.
He took the elevator down to Fifth
Avenue and headed to Central Park,
walking faster and talking more loudly
than everyone in his path. Trump, Sr.,
has been courting the votes of the nations nearly forty million sportsmen,
and Trump, Jr., a less bronzed but amply
gelled reection of his father, often
serves as his proxy. The son has given
interviews to Bowhunter and Deer &
Deer Hunting, and frequently appears
in full camo. He and his brother Eric
shot pheasants in Iowa and talked with
reporters while wearing neon-orange
vests, shotguns slung over their shoulders. In 2012, photographs of the brothers posing with animals theyd killed
in Zimbabwe caused a stir, particularly one in which Trump, Jr., held a
severed elephant tail in one hand and
a knife in the other. (PETA referred to
the killings as two young millionaires
grisly photo opportunity.)
Trump, Jr., owns dozens of re-
arms, which he keeps in a gun safe or

two. For shooting waterfowl, he uses
a Benelli Super Black Eagle II, a utilitarian twelve-gauge shotgun; when
hunting big game or shooting competitively, he favors a modied Remington Model 700 rie, or an ARplatform semiautomatic rie. He considers proposed measures to curb the
easy availability of weapons like the
AR to be un-American. If someone
wants to commit mass homicide, that
person is going to do it whether he
drives a car into a crowd or builds a
bomb, he said.
Like his father, he breaks with Republican orthodoxy when he feels like
it. Trump, Jr., is a defender of keeping
public land public, a contentious issue
among sportsmen. Im in the fortunate position to be able to buy some
land on my own, but not everyone has
that ability, he said. Near the zoo, he
bought a Diet Coke from a hot-dog
vender. As it stands, if the states get
the lands back, they could remain public or they could be sold off. So, say
you have a ten-thousand-acre area.
Well, a state could turn that into fty
golf courses that would be private and
exclusive.
Trump, Jr.,s affinity for the outdoors comes from his mother, Ivanas,
side of the family. It bloomed during

summer visits with his maternal grandfather, Milo Zelniek, in Czechoslovakia. He was a blue-collar electrician, he said. In Communist Czechoslovakia, in the eighties, hunting was
reserved for Party lites. But he was a
sherman, and he taught me woodsmanship. Hed say, There are the
woodsIll see you at dark. He added,
He taught me how to shoot an air
rie; I was a total natural.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Trump, Jr.,
spent a year working in a Colorado
bar, hunting in his free time. He has
pursued Cape buffalo in Zimbabwe,
caribou and Dall sheep in the Yukon,
and sockeye salmon in Alaska. He
and his wife, a former model named
Vanessa, who have ve children, live
on the Upper East Side (he used to
have an archery range in his apartment) and spend weekends in the
Catskills, where he likes to go trout
shing. I dont want my kids growing up to be city kids, he said. You
cant stay out all night partying if
youre waking up at four or ve to
head to the tree stand.
Trump the candidate has ipopped on gun control and doesnt share
his sons sportsmanship. Hes shot before, but his only real thing is work,
with some golf mixed in, Trump, Jr.,
said. To try something new and to be
an amateur again, that doesnt appeal
to his competitive side. He knows what
hes good at, and he likes to win.
J. R. Sullivan
1
AT THE MUSEUM
LOVE OF THE ELEVATOR
ine years after the popping of
N the last real-estate bubble, we may
be in the latter stages of another. The

market for super-luxury apartments that
no one ever seems to occupy (lets call
them billionaeries) has softened, but in
the rst quarter of 2016, for the rst time
ever, the averageaveragesale price of
an apartment in Manhattan was more
than two million dollars. The high costs
still trickle down. Low interest rates manifest as tall towers, steep rents, vacant
storefronts, and long commutes.
How does this make us feel about elevators? Vertical-transportation enthusiasts often remind us that elevators enable height, and therefore density, and
therefore energy efficiency and cultural
fermenturbanity itself. Opponents of
tall buildings, sometimes citing Jane Jacobs, say that they cast a pall over neighborhoods, like gated communities stacked
skyward. Both sides have a point.
The citys keenest vertical-transportation enthusiast may be Patrick Carr,
who has spent sixty-one years in the elevator tradeas a repairman, a manufacturer, a consultant, and an expert witness. In his zeal, he even disdains the
cardiovascular fad of taking the stairs.
You should reserve those heartbeats for
Well, this is troubling.
sex, he said the other day. Carr, who recently changed his name from Carrajat,
is seventy-two, stocky and cantankerous,
with white hair and a beard. When he
says hes a cousin of Ian McShane, the
English actor who played Swearengen
in Deadwood, you believe him.
Five years ago, Carr opened the Elevator Historical Society, the worlds only
museum devoted to elevators, escalators,
dumbwaiters, and outside hoists. It consisted mainly of artifacts from his personal collection, which he has been assembling since he started working, at the
age of eleven, as an apprentice to his father, an elevator mechanic. Carr tried to
get people in the industry to help him
fund the museum. He raised three hundred and fty dollarsnot even enough
to pay my lighting bill, he said. The publisher of the magazine Elevator World
donated a grand, and some press, but
apart from that Carr carried the weight.
Last month, Carr announced that he
was closing the museum. Its a sad day,
he told a visitor. The museum, which
did not charge admission, was on the
second oor of the so-called Taxi Building, in Long Island City. It was cluttered with several thousand pieces of
vintage bric-a-brac, among them an
array of analog oor-indicator dials (both
half-moon and full moon), which
summoned memories of old-movie elevator scenes. Above the entrance, altarlike, there was an airbrushed painting of a topless elevator girl. On a wall
nearby was a photograph labelled Elevator to Hitlers Summer Retreat.
Helping to move the tour along was
Carrs associate director, Daniel Levinson Wilk, who, as an associate professor
of American history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, often gets to indulge his inner elevator evangelist. The
elevator industrys lack of support for the
Elevator Historical Society is typical of
a lack of vision that goes back more than
a hundred and fty years, he said. The
elevator industry could help save the
world, but it hasnt tried hard enough.
Carr opened an Otis Elevator Company order book from the eighteen-seventies, with purchases entered in the medieval-seeming script of one of the sons
of Elisha Otis, the companys founder.
He and Wilk advanced the hot take that
it was another Otis, a Massachusetts inventor named Otis Tufts, who deserved
more credit for the introduction of the

elevator as a passenger conveyance. Tufts
had designed a vertical railway that ascended on a giant screw thread, in the
old Fifth Avenue Hotel.
Above a sign that read My First Item
1955 was a small brass plate from Perth
Amboy, New Jerseya cover for an interlock, the mechanism that keeps the
doors closed when an elevator is on the
move. Carr and Wilk discussed an accident that Carr blamed on an interlock
situation. (A woman had died after being
pulled into the shaft.) Still, riding an
elevator is safer than walking in a straight
line, Wilk said.
Carr lives in Long Island City, on the
water, facing Manhattan. The dominant
feature of his view is 432 Park Avenue,
the slender new ninety-six-story luxury
tower on East Fifty-seventh Street.
What a friggin abomination, he said.
Thats empty verticality, Wilk said.
Its not creating density. Its ironic that
the best residential space in the city is
empty most of the time. I wish there
were more Kato Kaelins.
Carr was in conversation with people from the International Union of
Elevator Constructors Local 1, in New
York, and Local 4, in Boston, who were
coming to have a look at the collection.
Wilks favorite item: a photograph of a
Pinkerton agent holding a double-barrelled shotgun, protecting a lift from a
mob during the elevator-operator strike
of 1936. Wilk said, People understood
you control the elevators, you control
the city.
Nick Paumgarten
1
DO-OVER DEPT.
CAMUS AGAIN
lexandre Alajbegovic, a thirty-
A two-year-old Frenchman, strolled
through the campus of Columbia University the other day, freshly arrived from
Lourmarin, a small town the color of a
sunset, concealed in the hills above the
Cte dAzur, where Albert Camus is
buried, and where Alajbegovic helps manage the writers estate. Camus made a
similar voyage to New York when he was
36
thirty-two, in 1946, on his only visit to

the U.S. The war had ended, and Camus
watched with relief, from the deck of the
S.S. Oregon, as the very edge of a
wounded earth receded and gave way,
several weeks later, to the orgy of violent lights of Manhattan. He complained
that he was the only passenger to be detained at immigrationthe F.B.I. had
heard that he ran a Paris newspaper with
the motto From Resistance to Revolutionand he found New York, at rst,
to be a hideous, inhuman city. But the
city liked himA. J. Liebling described
him as unduly cheerfuland his American host noticed that in the elevator of
his hotel, on West Seventieth Street, an
attractive girl glanced longingly at him.
Alajbegovic was at Columbia to meet
the actor Viggo Mortensen, who, that
evening, was to renact a lecture that
Camus had given at the university during
his trip, on no less a topic than The Crisis of Humankind. Camuss daughter,
Catherine, who also lives in Lourmarin,
had sensed something in Mortensens
pensive performance in a lm adaptation of her fathers short story The
Guest. Alajbegovic had reached out to
MortensenI just threw my bottle at
Viggos sea, he saidand a week later
had a response in the affirmative.
The Danish-American actor appeared
in a black suit over a tight-tting navy
T-shirt, an American Spirit dangling,
Camus-like, from the corner of his
mouth. Mortensen, who speaks Quebecois French, Argentine Spanish, and a
bit of Algerian Arabic, and can get by
in the Russophone underbelly of London, had helped transform the text into
an English version that he considered
faithful to the author. Im so delighted
that you tinkered with the translation!
Shanny Peer, the director of Columbias
Maison Franaise, told him when he
arrived at the Miller Theatre. Mortensen
shrugged.
He did a sound check on the stage,
in the same place where, exactly seventy
years earlier, Camus had stood.
We received an e-mail from a student who was at Brooklyn College when
Camus was here, Alajbegovic said. The
students went and saw him at his hotel,
and she remembers how gentle and simple he was.
The students went to his hotel room?
Madeleine Dobie, a French professor at
Columbia, said. Can you imagine if

Camus came today?
He would have to have an obligatory sort of sex-ed workshop, Alice
Kaplan, the chair of the French department at Yale, said.
The academics agreed that Camus
is enjoying a comeback. He is facing
and answering the questions that torment us today, Souleymane Bachir
Diagne, the chair of Columbias French
Viggo Mortensen
department, said. Camus had initially
declined the universitys invitation to
speakIm not old enough to give lectures, he wrotebut had nonetheless
delivered a sprawling treatise on his generation, which came of age in a world
of terror, ruled by a political machine
that had erased the individual.
What he was saying is that politics
as we know it needs to take a secondary position, Mortensen said. He added
that he admired the writers independence in standing up to both the left
and the right: He was fearless. Camus
felt that an absence of values had led
Europe to disaster, that societies had decided that a leader was right merely because hed succeeded. Mortensen said,
All of these things Camus is saying
about politicians, buffooneryits like
this respect for Trump. Hes winning,
hes the strongest, so that makes it good.
After the talk, which he delivered before an enchanted crowd, Mortensen
suddenly realized he had to get going.
As part of his attire for the evening, hed
left off an article of clothing that he holds
dearhis Bernie Sanders watch.
Elisabeth Zerofsky
f you listened only to speeches from the Presidential
I campaign trail, youd come away with the strong impres-
sion that, eight years after the nancial crisis, Wall Street reform has been a bust. Every Republican candidate called
Dodd-Frank, the centerpiece of the Obama Administrations
reform effort, a dismal failure. Donald Trump called it terrible; Ted Cruz said that it had only helped the big banks
get bigger and bigger and bigger. Hillary Clinton has been
tepid in her defense of Dodd-Frank, and Bernie Sanders
called it a very modest piece of legislation that changed little about the way the Street does business.
Tell that to the bankers. Banks performed dismally last
year, and their 2016 rst-quarter-earnings reports show that this one is off to
an even worse start. Returns on equity
have fallen. Bonuses and salaries are being
slashed; in the past quarter, Goldman
Sachs cut the amount it set aside for
compensation by forty per cent. Payroll
is down, too: banks have eliminated tens
of thousands of jobs in the past couple
of years and are now embarking on a
new round of severe job cuts. Some of
these struggles can be attributed to shortterm factors, such as low interest rates
and unusually volatile markets. But theres
no avoiding the deeper conclusion: regulations have simply made banking less
protable than it once was. Before the
nancial crisis, nancial companies (not
including the Federal Reserve banks) accounted for nearly thirty per cent of U.S. corporate prots. By
2015, that number had fallen to just seventeen per cent.
Dodd-Frank was supposed to curb certain kinds of risky
behavior on Wall Street, Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who studies nancial reform and inequality,
told me. And by that standard its gone very well. Big banks
now have to carry almost twice as much capital as they did
before the crisis, and new Fed rules will require them to set
aside another two hundred billion dollars on top of that. Those
capital requirements should be even higher, but the current
ones have already made the system safer. And, since the bigger the bank, the bigger the capital requirements, there has
been a welcome move toward downsizing. Citigroup has shed
seven hundred billion dollars in assets over the past seven
years, while Goldman and Morgan Stanley have shed a quarter of their assets. JPMorgan cut assets last year to avoid a
capital surcharge. And G.E. effectively got out of the nancial business altogether by selling off most of G.E. Capital.
Prot-making opportunities for banks have also shrunk.
Thanks in part to the new capital requirements and to new
38
rules curbing banks proprietary trading, xed-income trading

has dried up, costing banks billions of dollars in revenue. DoddFrank has also reduced the middleman fees that banks collectfor instance, by moving much of the trading of derivatives onto the open market. More than half of credit-default
swaps and seventy per cent of currency swaps now trade through
a public clearinghouse. (Before the crisis, only a small percentage did.) Until recently, big banks were able to borrow money
much more cheaply than small ones, because investors assumed
theyd be bailed out in a crisis. But recent studies suggest that
that funding advantage has nearly disappeared.
Dodd-Franks success is important in its own right. But
it also teaches us an important lesson about regulation more
generally. For decades, the debate over regulation in the U.S.
has been dominated by those who believe that, in the words
of the Chicago School economist Eugene Fama, even the
best-constructed regulation is bound to fail. As Fama put
it a couple of years ago, Eventually, the regulators get captured by the people they regulate. Regulatory capture is always a danger. But
the history of nancial reform after the
crisis shows that its not inevitable: if
you have well-designed rules, and if regulators have the resources and the public support to enforce them, industry
does not always win. Before Dodd-Frank
became law, Wall Street lobbied furiously to emasculate it, but the attempt
failed. Likewise, the banks efforts at
softening the bills provisions during its
implementation have often been unsuccessful. A paper by the political scientists John T. Woolley and J. Nicholas
Ziegler looks in detail at the ght over
derivatives-trading regulations. Most
of the industry was violently opposed
to the new rules, Ziegler told me. But
a combination of small but very engaged advocacy groups
and gutsy regulators made sure they got through.
Of course, theres much about Wall Street that DoddFrank has not changed. Bankers still make absurd amounts
of money. Hedge-fund and private-equity managers still
benet from the carried-interest tax loophole. The big banks,
though smaller, are still too big. If you wanted nancial reform to radically downsize the nancial sector, or thought it
was going to make a major dent in income inequality, youre
bound to be disappointed, Konczal says. And Dodd-Franks
work is still unnished: many of the rules it authorized have
yet to be written, and the banks are lobbying to have them
written in their favor. As Ziegler told me, The progress thats
been made is precarious. It can be unravelled. But precarious progress is progress. Regulation involves a constant struggle to keep rules in place and to enforce the ones that are
there. Dodd-Frank shows that that struggle is not necessarily a futile one: sometimes government really does regulate
business, and not the other way around.
James Surowiecki
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
THE FINANCIAL PAGE

BANKINGS NEW NORMAL
ANNALS OF EDUCATION
A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME

The rolling robot that teaches kids to code.
BY D. T. MAX
t Trail Ridge Middle School,
A which is forty minutes north of
Denver, in Longmont, the old Colorado is giving way to the new. A stuffed
grizzly that once stood at the entrance
has been banished to a dusky back hallway, and many of the students are the
children of tech workers. On a recent
weekday morning, Anna Mills, a sixthgrade science teacher, shouted from the
front of the classroom, Grab your iPads
and your Spheros! When her command didnt work, she clapped twice,
and this code was successful: her two
dozen students clapped back, roughly
in unison, and began getting up from
their desks. Mills had divided her class

into groups of three, and the leaders of
each trio hurried over to a counter
where ten Spherosmilky white orbs
about the size of navel orangessat in
blue charging cradles. The leaders
grabbed their Spheros and hurried with
the other students to the schools former library, now known as the Digital
Commons.
You tap a Sphero twice to turn it
on, and it ashes three colors in quick
succession; once it has established a
wireless link to your iPad or your smartphone, it strobes like a fortune-tellers
crystal ball and is ready to move. A
Children can program Sphero, a white plastic orb, to traverse land and water.
40
Sphero, which costs a hundred and

thirty dollars, is chiey a toy. Its outof-the-box experience, to use the industry parlance, is excellent. You download an app, and, by pressing and swiping
and swirling your nger on your smartphone or tablet screen, you can command the ball to travel a zippy ve or
so miles an hour on land. It also moves
in water, though much more slowly. A
Sphero can make hairpin turns, and,
thanks to its gyroscope, it is aware of
your location; with one gesture, you
can order it to roll back to you. It will
vibrate softly, like a purring cat, and
you can code it to do a lot of fanciful
things: dance to the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy, perform playful ips,
nd its way around the things it bumps
into, and blink if it falls over an edge.
(It has an accelerometer.) Because it
looks like an ordinary ball, it outperforms your expectations. The makers
of the device, a company that is also
called Sphero, are in Boulder, and at
their offices I was encouraged to toss
one of the balls out a second-story window. It bounced off the concrete sidewalk, hit my rental car, and came to a
stop. As soon as we linked it up with
a smartphone, off it rolled.
Spheros arent just fun; they are also
an excellent teaching tool. Students
have begun using them to learn everything from geometry to genetics. They
can code them, too, to take a rst step
into computer programming. The toys
inltration of the classroom came about
mostly by accident. Ian Bernstein and
Adam Wilson, the inventors who came
up with the Sphero, six years ago, were
immersed in hacker culture, and they
planned to disseminate portions of their
code to anyone who wanted to improve
on it or add to it. Eventually, they realized that if the app came with a simplied form of that code, kids would
ddle with it.
It was a fortuitous moment to create such a crossover product. The stem
movementthe effort to incorporate
science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics into the classroomwas
gaining in popularity. Educators avidly
debated how to help kids transition
from the analog world of early childhood to the digital world of adults.
Many teachers foresaw a crisis: only
sixteen per cent of high-school seniors
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HERSEY
contemplate a career in stem elds,

even though the number of stem jobs
is increasing rapidly. Sphero and similar toys like Lego Mindstormssimple robots that you build and then
codehave come to be seen as stops
on the road to the well-salaried position of programmer.
There are objections to this framework. Putting young children in front
of screens will likely make them better coders, but what will go unlearned
during those hours? Education is not
merely job training. And some studies
suggest that the more children interact with devices the harder time they
have interacting with one another. Yet
technical xes are often seductive to
educators, especially a technical x like
Sphero, whose surface has two cute
blue dots and an upswept blue coif,
suggesting a tiny face.
Millss goal that day was to harness
the classs ongoing study of the environment to promote some basic programming skills. The students, in their
groups of three, gathered around low
tables, and Mills, projecting PowerPoint slides, described a process of design thinking that would be familiar
to any Silicon Valley entrepreneur:
Empathize, Dene, Ideate, Prototype,
Test. She reminded the students that
feedback sessions should begin with
such phrases as I like and You all
have done a great job with rather than
with criticism. The students tables had
whiteboard surfaces, and the children
wrote down conservation goalssaving gorillas from poachers, keeping sea
turtles out of shermens netsand
tried to ideate how a Sphero could help.
Go for volume! Mills advised. And
include ten lines of code.
Some students seemed reluctant to
leave their analog idylls. Earlier in the
environmental unit, one of the groups
had constructed a sea turtle out of cardboard, and a boy asked Mills for green
polyester fabric to cover it. I love that
you guys want to make your turtle, but
what should we be focussing on? she
replied. What role would a Sphero
play in helping a turtle avoid a trap?
Another group wanted to use Spheros
to reduce smoking and, thus, air pollution. They proposed coding their Sphero
to run over and crush all the cigarettes
in a house. The group that hoped to
save gorillas from poachers suggested

strapping a banana to their Sphero; they
imagined a gorilla following its favored
fruit to safety. At feedback time, Mills
praised the students idea but asked
them if it would be unwieldy to attach
a lure to the device.
Soon, most of the threesomes had
left the Digital Commons and headed
into the schools large atrium, where
the rasp of unspooling masking tape
dominated. The children were marking out simple mazes on the carpet;
the nut of the exercise was to code
the Sphero to navigate a course accurately. When Mills was busy elsewhere,
Spheros were often skidding and skipping and rolling underfoota toy is a
toybut she is a talented teacher, and
when she got down on the oor to review their coding the students focussed.
Afterward, Mills told me that middle-schoolers nd it surprisingly difficult to understand the correlation between a numerical value and a physical
movement.
One of Spheros design strengths is
its exibility. You can be anything from
a novice coder to a high-school computer student and still get something
out of programming it. The orbs app
has a dual interface. The students in
Millss class used simple drag-and-drop
balloon commands to make their
Spheros move, but by swiping on a button they could also see some of the raw
computer syntax that lay behind the
commandsin Oval, a subset of the
canonical programming language C.
The balloon command Set heading
178 degrees reveals itself to be controlSystemTargetYaw = 178 in Oval.
The children who wanted to save
the gorilla had abandoned the banana
idea and now wanted to douse the
Sphero with the odor of foods that gorillas crave. They taped a curving maze
to the carpet. But the fun of just making a Sphero move competed against
the strictures of making it go someplace in particular. The students were
able to complete just two lines of code:
[Start] [Roll 3 seconds].
The real world kept intruding on
the experiments: there are limits to
what a little plastic ball can do. In a
later class, I watched Jack, a spirited
boy who wore the jersey of the Colorado Avalanches star forward Nathan
MacKinnon. Jacks two companions

were sick that day, so he worked alone.
His project was to make a vehicle that
could be dispatched quickly to naturaldisaster sitesoods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptionsand provide food
to survivors. The truck was a copierpaper box on wheels; Sphero was supposed to pull it. When I asked Jack if
the ball was strong enough for its load,
he shrugged. Well, were going to nd
out, he said.
His more immediate problem was
his food supplyboxes of macaroni.
Other kids had ripped open one of the
packages and tossed the pasta around.
Jack put the noodles back into their container. Then it turned out that he had
only one caster. Mills had promised to
get her hands on three more, from wherever teachers nd such things. But when
would this be? In the meantime, Jack
attached a string to his Sphero with pink
duct tape, threaded the string through
a cardboard paper-towel tube, and taped
the reins to the box. A girl wandered
over to watch. Jack tapped his Sphero
twice and used his iPad to connect to it.
By swiping the screen, he tried to get
the Sphero to pull the box, but it struggled on the Digital Commons carpet. It
looked like a rodent with a pinned tail.
The girl wandered off.
Yeah, Jack told me, resigned.
Wheels are going to be necessary.
Hope and achievement sometimes
coincided. That day, three students posited that they could save a koala from
hunters by attaching a Sphero to its
back. They created a maze shaped like
the number three to simulate a path
out of the forest. Their code reached
twenty lines, starting with Roll .5 seconds at 57% of Spheros maximum
speed, direction 0 degrees, Roll 0.4
seconds at 78% of speed, heading 45
degrees, and Roll three seconds at
55%, course 106 degrees. After two
dozen twists and turns, the Sphero,
weaving and bobbing nimbly, found its
way to safety.
ll happy tech stories are alike:
A two geeks and junk food, a lucky
meeting with a well-connected mentor,

a product they didnt even mean to make
that people turn out to want desperately. Bernstein and Wilson, Spheros
founders, were both in their twenties
41
when a mutual friend decided that they

should meet. Wilson, a Colorado Springs
native, was a reformed hackera black
hat turned white hat, as Paul Berberian, the chief executive officer of Sphero,
describes him. Bernstein was the homeschooled child of a classical guitarist
in New Mexico; he had moved to Colorado for college. They were both
conrmed tinkerers, Wilson on the software side, Bernstein on the hardware
side. Bernstein had become an inventor when he was young. His father gave
a local professor of electrical engineering free guitar lessons in return for instruction for his son, and soon Bernstein was studying with Mark Tilden,
a researcher at Los Alamos National
Laboratory who was interested in robots. Before getting a drivers license,
Bernstein had built a solar-powered
robotic orb.
One day this winter, I met Wilson
and Bernstein in Spheros research
lab, an unmarked studio in a strip
mall about two miles from the companys main offices. Now both thirtytwo, they slouched on beanbags and
told me how Sphero had come to be.
Wilson had on a backward gimme
cap; Bernstein wore a woollen ski hat.

One night in 2009, Bernstein was
messing around with an iPhone and
playing with a robot, and he wondered
why the one couldnt control the other.
Soon he was introduced to Wilson,
then a temporary instructor at the University of Northern Colorado. Wilson
remembers the rst contact: A guy
comes out of the woodwork and says,
Dude, we should be controlling robots
with phones. Wilson disdained most
phone appshe didnt even own a
phonebut he was enticed by the challenge; they agreed to collaborate.
After Bernsteins father lent them
two thousand dollars, they bought an
Android phone and went to work. Google had recently released a protocol
that allowed Android phones to interface with non-phone devices through
Bluetooth, the short-range wirelessconnection protocol. Bernstein made
a printed circuit board while Wilson
developed software. Their rst goal was
to create a Bluetooth platform that permitted a phone to control anything
from home lights to a television set.
It took them just a day to gure out
how to use Bernsteins phone to start
his car and roll down the windows.

Bernstein and Wilson had skill and
they had timing: the Internet of Things,
which enables smoke detectors and other
appliances to transmit data to the digital cloud, was just beginning to attract
attention. But they did not have a lot
of business experience. The tech world
has ways of assisting young entrepreneurshelp with brainstorming and
with attracting venture capital. In 2010,
Bernstein and Wilson were accepted to
a mentoring program in Boulder called
Techstars. There they were told that no
one would buy a Bluetooth communications platform from a couple of nobodies; they needed a product. What
did they want to make? They arrived at
an answer late one night. Bernstein remembers, At, like, three in the morning, I was just like, We just need something simple, something I could keep
in my pocket, pull it out, throw it on
the table, and it does something cool.
And Adam said, What about a marble? And I thought back to this robot
ball I had built when I was fourteen.
Wilson and Bernstein developed
a robotic ballthe original plastic shell
came from Hobby Lobbyand the
code to guide it using a phone. At Techstars, they met Berberian, who became
Spheros C.E.O. He was an appealing
mixture of high and low, serious and
larky, and he had founded or run six
startups. Some had failed, but one company, a Web conferencing service, had
sold for a hundred and sixty million
dollars. Berberian was impressed with
Sphero and its creators. They were
smart, coachable, and passionate, he
remembers. And I believed the area
would be huge.
The Sphero was launched at the end
of 2011. The new company shipped ve
hundred balls for the holidays, to mixed
response. Wired.com dismissed the
product as the future of cat toys. But
luck was again on Wilson and Bernsteins side. One day in April, 2012, President Barack Obama came to the University of Colorado at Boulder to give
a speech on the importance of a college
education. Two Sphero employees drove
around the campus until they spotted
yellow police tape, waited nearby, intercepted the President and his entourage,
and persuaded Obama to try a Sphero.
Once a phone with the app was placed
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
I do not think you cannot have meant I assume its in error

it comes to my attention it rises from the muck it sways
elephantine in a Gulf Stream breeze you surely meant
other you must have encountered others you are much
mistaken in this and in all other circumstances I assume
its in error I cannot think you mean to suggest it comes
from a childhood spent waiting for someone to notice
it comes from an unexamined life it clings to your skin
like gold leaf there is no other explanation for your hubris
your Jacobean politics your glitter and spit I assume
its in error you cannot mean what I have meant but
I have taken it back you must take it back also you must
scoop up its sagging esh and ball it up tight you must
open your mouth and shove it all in every tentacle I assume
its in error you cannot mean you must take it in you must
expand your mouth your argument you must assume
responsibility for your childhood you must assume the past
is the past you cannot retract anything youve said I assume
in error I do not think you meant what you said
about your parents about the elephant in the room you are
mistaken
I do not think it was harmed by the hooks or the electric whip
its feet were already painted gold it cannot remember it already
knew
the circle but I assume they remember those elephants
they do I assume in error your childhood this dust.
Rebecca Hazelton
in his hand, Obama quickly grasped
what to do. Give me some space to
drive my ball, he called out to the crowd.
This is cool. Whooah! He sent the ball
whizzing into a womans foot.
The company had fewer than twenty
employees at the time, but one of them
was a full-time videographer, and his
camera captured the Presidents emerging inner boy. It was a vignette perfectly formed for YouTube. (The clip
has been viewed more than a quarter
of a million times.) Soon Apple was
stocking the product in some of its
stores, and in 2013 a much improved
Sphero 2.0 went on the market.
The next leap came in the summer
of 2014, when Bernstein, Wilson, and
Berberian met with executives at the
Disney Accelerator, a division of the
entertainment company, which invests
in new technologies. Robert Iger, Disneys chairman, showed the Sphero contingent something condential: a picture of BB-8, a white-and-orange robot
that Disney had designed for the new

Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. It was a clear opportunity. Berberian remembers telling himself, We
make robot balls, and that looks like
a robot ball. The main difference
was that the BB-8 had a littler sphere
perched on top of the main one, as in
a snowman. In short order, Bernstein
and Wilson had attached a smaller ovoid
to a Sphero using magnets. They had a
prototype. Soon afterward, Disney gave
them a license to make a BB-8 toy.
Models and drawings had to be stored
in a locked room, and the startup raced
to have the product ready by the movies opening weekend, in December,
2015. They can make a movie faster
than we can make a toy, Berberian jokes.
Like the Sphero, the BB-8 had
whimsical touches. As soon as you plug
it into a charger, even before you link
it to a smartphone, BB-8 swivels its
head around, as if looking for its master. The tech press was smitten this
time. At a demonstration of Star Wars

tie-ins in September, 2015, Wired.com
reported that Spheros BB-8 was the
only gasp-inducing moment of the entire presentation.The product received
twelve hundred media mentions in a
day. Sphero sold three hundred thousand BB-8s in its rst four days on the
market and quickly ran out of stock.
The Creamsicle-colored robot became
the most coveted Christmas gift of
2015. Last year, the BB-8 made up
three-quarters of the companys sales;
Sphero now has a hundred and sixty
employees, and Disney has become an
investor.
lay is a kind of learning, and the
P culture that Sphero emerged from
is a teaching culture. In the winter of

2012, about a year after the toy dbuted,
the company invited kids to come to
its offices and program a simplied version of its code. There was a major
snowstorm, Berberian remembers.
Still, fteen people showed up, and
they loved it. The parents loved it, too.
The company held such events regularly and called the young attendees
Sphero Rangers.
Teachers, meanwhile, were using
Sphero alongside other tech tools such
as Arduinoscircuit boards that can be
used to make robotic devices. Sphero
provided student worksheets and created lesson plans, and ultimately started
an education division. Teachers began
sharing online the most interesting activities that theyd devised: using Spheros
to act like atoms; substituting a Sphero
for the ball in a game of miniature golf.
There were plenty of educational robots on the market, but Sphero stood
out for the simplicity of its coding; moreover, unlike robotic cars, tanks, or dolls,
a ball was equally inviting to boys and
girls. And there were no pieces to lose.
Teachers are like parents whose children never grow up, and one after another told me how glad they were that
a Sphero has no extra parts.
In a bid for classroom adoption,
the company began offering a discount for twelve-packs of previously
owned Spheros. The company also sent
free twelve-packs to some teachers in
the Apple Distinguished Educator programin which the company recognizes teachers who have done innovative
43
things with its products. According to

Sphero, since 2014 it has sold robotic
balls to more than a thousand schools;
it estimates that more than a hundred
and fty thousand students have used
them. The Sphero now has four iterations. sprk is a transparent version,
permitting children to examine the machinery that powers it. Ollie is shaped
like a barrel with treads and, to the surprise of your pets, it can go fourteen
miles an hour.
I love the Sphero and have one in
my classroom, Vicki Davis, a technology instructor from Georgia, wrote last
year on her blog, Cool Cat Teacher, adding, Happy Hour of Code week! Coding can be tedious for novices, and teachers like Davis see robotic toys as a way
around this hurdle. As children, many
of them had slogged through educational programming languages such as
Logo, which, like Sphero, emphasized
directional commands, but offered half
the fun: instead of moving a ball around
a room, you directed a turtle around a
screen. These teachers, who have Twitter handles like @apptasticteach and
@MrJTechCoach, now write and share
programs that make Spheros pull tiny
chariots and knock down bowling pins.
Jon Corippo, an education-technology
consultant in California, told me that
Spheros have a stealth quality: when students use them to replicate the motion
of the planets or delineate complex geometric shapes, they dont realize that
theyre doing really advanced math. An
elementary-school class in
Wisconsin built a Sphero
solar system that was displayed at the White House
one night last year.
Many schools wouldnt
be able to pay for Spheros
were it not for the money
that stem and related initiatives provide. In some
ways, the guiding concern
of stemthat other nations are outcompeting the United States in the race
to educate new engineers and scientists
is merely a revival of the worry that followed the Soviet Unions launching of
the rst Sputnik satellite, in 1957. But
stem is also a response to fresh anxieties. In the aughts, researchers observed
that many American students were initially enthusiastic about science and math
44
but eventually lost interest. Moreover,

though girls do well in math and science, they tend not to end up in coding
jobs, and many students of color dont
have access to adequate tech facilities.
Right now, its mostly white and Asian
men, Ruthe Farmer, of the National
Center for Women and Information
Technology, told me. Were not tapping
seventy-ve per cent of the population.
American education also tends to
be stovepiped: you learn English from
English teachers, math from math
teachers, and biology from biology
teachers. A stem curriculum is predicated on the notion that the best teaching is interdisciplinary, because similar
patterns of thinking underlie many subjects and integrating them makes students smarter. Taking a sculpting class
can help researchers understand protein folding; a course in storytelling can
aid doctors in communicating with patients. A stem class in English might
use computer algorithms to explore literary style. Richard Perry, a high-school
teacher on Long Island, has his students code Spheros to trace the path
of the Joad family in The Grapes of
Wrath. Along the way, the children
write down observations about what
their arduous virtual trip from the
Dust Bowl to California feels like.
The robots allow the students to get
into the heads of the characters through
direct tangible experiences, Perry told
me, in an e-mail. Many Sphero teachers buy a Nubbya bumpy ball cover
that allows students to
dip their Spheros in paint
and leave a literal paper
trail. Teachers often compare the results to a Jackson Pollock. (No one
mentions Michelangelo.)
Even in a time of tight
education budgets, stem
funding is plentiful: the
federal government currently contributes three billion dollars
a year to stem-related curricula. (The
Spheros I saw at Trail Ridge Middle
School were paid for with funds from
a Race to the Top grant that has a stem
focus.) Last year, the city of Boston
declared itself committed to giving all
its middle-school students access to
high-quality stem experiences.
Not everyone who is interested in
childrens education is impressed by the

stem concept. Does Sphero actually
make Tom Joads frustration more visceral or just help you through a reading assignment that doesnt much interest you? In a eld that loves data,
the benet of moving young children
from tactile experience to the world of
screens is unclear. After all, Steve Jobs
wouldnt allow his children to use iPads,
steering them instead toward books
and conversation. Bernstein, by contrast, told me that if he had children
he would denitely encourage them to
be online. Everything I know I learned
from the Internet, he said.
Even within the tech eld, some
people are skeptical of stems voguishness. David Wells, who runs a Maker
Space, a high-tech version of a shop
class, at the New York Hall of Science,
told me, When I hear people say, I
want stem learning, I think, What
does that mean, exactly? He does not
see much new in its cross-disciplinary
emphasis: If you take a look at educational theory through the ages
Dewey, Vygotsky, Freirethey all say
that independent thought inuences
the creative process. Moreover, the
concerns about a shortfall in tech workers may be overblown: last fall, thirtysix per cent of undergraduates at the
University of Texas at Austin were majoring in stem elds; at Stanford, computer science is now tied with biology
as the most popular major for women.
Nevertheless, stem, with its combination of the high tech and the vocational, is likely here to stay. The stem
educator has become a familiar gure
in schools, with some of the cool of a
guitar teacher in the sixties.
stem has bipartisan political support. Many high-paying jobs in the
future economy are expected to be in
elds where technical expertise is valued, and, appealingly for scal conservatives, the expertise could be taught
without the inconvenient cost of a
liberal-arts curriculum. In other words,
stem may lead to the revival of the
trade school. Steve Robinson, a former
education adviser to the President, told
me, The Republicans have been opposed to pretty much everything Obama
has done, but less opposed to things in
the stem areas.
As I watched children play with
UNINVENT THIS
MARY KARR
high maintenance
his spring, I donated to Dress for Success a box
JOON MO KANG
T of high heels that Iover decadesalmost bank-
rupted myself for: four-inch sandals with leafy vines

that twine up your leg, ve-inch leopard pumps I
could lurch about ve feet in. The money I spent on
them might have freed me to retire by now.
And had the high heel never bulldozed its way back
into popularity, in the nineteen-fties, thanks to designers like Dior, who never suffered a womans social mandate of daily wear, I wouldnt be visiting a
pricey podiatrist. Add on the four-gure plaster foot
cast, which gets tossed at years end, because the bastards know your beleaguered and bunioned foot will
keep spreading like yeasty dough. The neuroma between metatarsals will iname more nerve endings.
(For the uninitiated, a neuroma is like a stone in your
shoe that you cant shake out.)
Before I taped up that container of shoes, I stared
into its abyss. Wasnt I perpetuating misery by passing
these along to hobble my sisters-in-arms/-feet? The
vision of my young foot that came made me misty.
While the rest of my physique is mediocre by the laxest standards, I started adulthood with an exemplary foot.
My toes tapered evenly, and my high arch was ballerinaworthy. I even copped a job as a foot model for an exercise sandal. Yes, I am bragging.
By sixty, those feet had gnarled up like gingerroot.
I dont grieve my less than pert tatas. When my ass lies
down on the back of my leg, I think, Oh, rest, you poor
thing. Given new bra technology and some spandex, I
can squish stuff in andspray a little PAM on mestill
slither into a size 4. But standing for an hour in heels
sets red lightning bolts blazing off my feet.
And no one warned me about this! In the healthand-booty-obsessed age I came up in, every woman
enjoined me to take care of my teeth and skin, heart
and bones. But no one detailed how those stilettos
named for a daggerwould irreversibly cripple me.
(Yes, there is a surgery sometimes involving metal and
screws which no one I know had any luck with.)
Only one loafer-wearing detractor, in long-ago Puritan Boston, scolded my spikes: If God wanted you
in those, hed have made your feet different. Yet, I said,
He made my legs look like this in them.
For I was a slave to the desire that rules our libidinal
culture. And an elongated foot and leg just announces,
Hey, yall, theres pussy at the other end of this. Yet every pair
of excruciating heels also telegraphs a subtle masochism:
i.e., I am a woman who can not only take an ass-whipping;
to draw your gaze, Ill inict one on myself.
Hope came from a lunch with the style prophet
Andr Leon Talley. He predicted that ats were rushing into fashion. As smoking is to human breath, so
the stiletto is to a womans stride. Soon, I spied a fashionable writer I know at a gala in wingtips, then Michelle Obama in kitten heelsboth women plenty
tall. I just wasnt ready to scuttle around at belt level in
clodhoppers.
Then, this past Fashion Week, Victoria Beckham was
snapped on the runway in sneakers, claiming that she
cant do heels anymore. Weensy Beckham, once photographed on a treadmill desk in a needle heel, had come
to my rescue.
Thanks to her, a womans comfort nally meant more
than her signicance as a brood sow. I hobbled out to buy
slides, then shipped off my old tormentors. Parties no
longer meant popping anti-inammatories and slipping
heels off under a tablecloth. My feet rejoiced. I snagged
every taxi I loped after, took subway stairs at a sprint.
But recently I spotted Beckham jammed into spikes
again. Traitor! Then, at a soire, a concerned friend
asked, Whats with the shoes? Looking down, I suddenly saw myself shod in large loaves of rye bread.
Oh, womenfolk, as we once burned our bras could
we not torch the footwear crucifying us? How about
this Independence Day? Our feet and spines will unknot, and high heels will fade from consciousness along
with foot-binding and rib removal to shrink your waist.
The species may stop reproducing, but who the hell
cares. Come back, Victoria. Your sisters await you.
45
Spheros and other robotic toys, the debate over stem seemed obsolete. The
question of whether to integrate the
digital more fully into childrens lives
has already been decided, and not just
because so much time outside school
is spent in front of screens. For many
kids, the boundary between analog and
digital no longer exists. Adults like to
make distinctions; childhood is lived
as a continuum.
In April, I visited the Academy of Our
Lady of Peace, a small Catholic school
in New Providence, New Jersey.The archdiocese had bought a dozen Spheros to
circulate among its schools, but Our Lady
of Peace got the funds to pay for its own
from a private donor. The balls are locked
up in the computer lab, like children in
a Grimms fairy tale, but one of the days
I visited, four students had the opportunity to fool around with them in a long
hallway by the art classroom. The children were trying to get their Spheros to
go thirty feet down a hallway, loop under
a track hurdle that had been borrowed
from the gym, then return to the starting point. There was a cheat: they could
just drive them with their ngers, using
the preinstalled software. Sometimes the
children did this, sometimes they coded.
They itted in and out of the two without particular concern. Meghan, a fth
grader, smoothly pulled down commands
and got her Sphero to roll, execute a
nice circlet, and come back. She also programmed it to light up in different colors to make it pretty.
Kieran, a sixth grader, boasted, Coding is my second language. At home, he
uses Scratch, a drag-and-drop programming language, and does animation with
judo, a simplied version of Java. His
regulation white button-down shirt was
untucked, and it hung below his regulation navy-blue sweater vest. Kierans face
glowed as he added commands with easy
swipes; he clearly had the gift. He set
his Sphero to go, but it stopped well
short of the hurdle. I will get this,
he said. I think I got it. I think I got it.
Nope? O.K. He began furiously editing his program. The route could be navigated with just three commands, and,
looking over his shoulder, I saw that he
had put in a bunch of extraneous steps.
He explained that this was deliberate.
He was trying to fashion a more winding path through the courseanother
46
kind of pretty. Kieran never did quite

nd the aws in his program, but a few
days later he and Meghan met in the
gym and shared a Sphero. Meghan controlled the iPad, and Kieran suggested
additional commands. Coding was at
once thought and gesture. Was it playful coding or code-lled play? Together,
they got the ball to roll to the gym wall
more than a hundred feet away, while
changing colors constantly. They kept
rening the steps, chasing their Sphero
down and doing it over again. I had
brought a BB-8, and the two robots did
a nice minuet at mid-court.
n February, at the annual Toy Fair
I held at the Javits Center, in New
York, Paul Berberian trawled an area

reserved for tech products, affably examining displays of MaKey MaKeys
and Cubelets. Theres a ton of drones,
he said, as one launched in front of us.
But at the end of the day how do you
differentiate between them? He liked
Kamigamis battling robotic bugs,
whose movements werebased on real
insect motion. You guys have done a
great job, he told the employees at the
display. Ill come back and chat. At
another booth, someone asked Berberian about Spheros funding. Weve
raised, like, ninety million dollars, Berberian said. He added that BB-8 had
changed everything: We dont need
any more money!
Berberian may not need money, but
he does need something new to sell.
You cant sustain a company with one
successful productnot even with four
versions of that product. What does
Sphero want to be when it grows up?
Berberian noticed a huge poster of
Edwin the Duck, a bathtub toy with
simple programming tools. Its kind
of bringing connected play all the way
down to two-year-olds, he said, impressed. The manufacturer calls Edwin
a duck with personality, and thats
what interested Berberian most. He
wants to start building robots that forge
an emotional attachment with their
owners. Sphero encourages users to
name their orbs, and the children I saw
playing with them clearly regarded
them as more than machines. BB-8 is
greeted like a class pet, a hamster or
turtle, Chris Schmitz, a teacher in Erie,
Colorado, wrote to me. Such bonds, he
said, promoted learning. He told me

about a difficult kindergartner in his
class who, when he rst saw Schmitz
playing with a BB-8, greeted it like a
long-lost friend. Schmitz went on,
He was very gentle toward BB-8, and
he wanted to know how I made BB-8
go around my legs.This led to a conversation about the program, and then
he wrote a program of his own. Last
month, I visited a San Francisco school
and watched two second graders play
with Dash & Dot, a pair of robots that
have anthropomorphic features. After
programming them, one girl set them
face to face. Im going to make them
kiss, she said.
To promote this sort of connection,
Bernstein and Wilson have hired experts on humanlike computer interfaces and natural languages. (One young
employees job description is Robot
Brain Architect.) And at Spheros
headquarters a veteran gaming programmer is creating backstories for future products. The rst one, out in the
fall, will be a robotic incarnation of a
well-known comic-book superhero.
Berberian promises, Youll be able to
bring him into your home and have a
conversation with him where he engages and asks you questions and starts
to learn about you.
For Sphero, this is just a beginning;
it wants its robots to not only learn your
needs but communicate their own.
Bernstein told me that he wants their
next brainchild to become the friend
you call on to listen to your problems
or help with your homework. His models are the beloved robots of the movies, like Johnny Five, from the 1986 lm
Short Circuit, and Wall-E, the winsome trash-collecting robot from the
2008 Pixar movie. Its gotta become
part of the family, Berberian said. And,
by becoming part of the family, it has
to know its environment and know the
people in the family, and change its
behavior based on who its interacting
with. Pixar is routinely invoked as a
model at Sphero. Were not trying to
make a robotic pet, Wilson points out.
Were making a pet robot, really. Theyll
come with a brain and a past. When
I told Bernstein Id like such a robot as
long as I could turn it off, he smiled a
gentle smile. If their robot was successful, he answered, Id feel bad if I did.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
TO THE CLASS OF 2050

BY JEN SPYRA
WALTER GREEN
lass of 2050, faculty, alumni, fam-
C ily, and friends:
I remember when I sat where you

sit today. The year was 2020. The res
from the Impact still smoldered in their
craters. Madonnas Dance Dance Boom
Boom had just hit the airwaves. Athleisure was bigger than ever, and it
seemed like everyone I knew was either dead or enslaved by the Tall Ones.
I had no idea what I wanted to do
say, Hi, I can use the theories of Derrida and Lacan to deconstruct your
companys use of language? Fat chance.
Plus, like many survivors, I no longer
had skin on my face or my hands.
Luckily, it didnt take me long to
learn that theres only one thing you
have to worry about. And thats following your passion. If you do what
you love, youll never work a day in
your life. So let your heart sing. Maybe
with my life. I was all over the place.

A couple of friends were talking about
combing the wreckage for survivors,
and a couple of other friends were
talking about combing the wreckage
for food. Meanwhile, my boyfriend was
begging me to come with him to Chicago, to do improv. It all sounded good,
and I didnt know where to start.
I had no money, no int, and no
plan. Sure, I had a bachelors degree in
English, but what was I going to do
with that? Walk into some office and
youre passionate about making spears,

or cudgels, or daggers, to fend off our
oversized invaders. Perhaps youre more
interested in nunchakus, or spikes, or
clamps. Whatever it iswhether its
slingshots, pikes, axes, or even maces,
hammers, sickles, and arrows, simply
follow your interest and have at it.
If you take away anything from this
speech, let it be this: dont buy into societys denition of success. Success
doesnt mean having a big house or a
fancy corner office. Its not about how
much money you have in the bank or

how many cars you have in your garage. Theres only one true measure of
success, and thats how close you can
get to deciphering the Mayan hieroglyph that will show humanity how to
defeat the Tall Ones.
And keep in mind that you dont
know how your life will turn out. When
I was your age, I had big plans for myself. I was going to nd the glyph, which
legend says is carved into a stalactite
in a cenote, a freshwater underground
pool. I was going to decode it and use
its ancient wisdom to free my fellow-humans from our tragic captivity.
But then you know what happened?
I fell in love with long-form journalism. I met the love of my life at
U.S.C. We had two beautiful children,
and, eventually, the cenote and the ancient hieroglyph and being humanitys
savior fell by the wayside.
Do I have regrets? Sometimes. The
Tall Ones tore my husband and my
children apart in front of my eyes. As
I stared at their bodies melting in the
pyre Id lit to ward off marauders who
would sell their corpses for meat, did
I wish that Id put in a little more glyph
time? Sure. I made mistakes. Thats
called being human. Remember: life is
ten per cent what happens to you, ten
per cent how you respond to it, and
eighty per cent how good your reexes
are when the Tall Ones come at your
throat with their pincers.
Today, you guys are going to be
awarded diplomas. And thats wonderful. Youve earned it. But remember
that a diplomas just a piece of paper.
What really matters is what you do
with that piece of paper. And I strongly
recommend burning it to ward off the
Tall Ones, for they fear an open ame.
So, in conclusion, as my husband
said right before he was ripped apart
by the Tall Ones, Karen, go to the garage and get the backup generator.
Crank up the oodlights to six hundred to scare the fuckers off while you
take the kids through the tunnels for
help.
So, Class of 2050: go to your garage,
and get your backup generator. Laugh,
love, take risks, and, if you nd the carcass of a Tall One, preserve it in snowpack. They will barter for their dead.
Thank you, and good luck.
47
OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS
HAPPY TOGETHER
Why give up dorm life?
BY LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE
ole Kennedy moved to New York
C a year ago. He was twenty-three and
had recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in English.
He applied for copywriting jobs all over,
and assumed that hed end up in the Midwest. Moving to New York seemed cool,
but it was, like, a thing that happens to
other people, he told me. Then his lottery ticket arrived: a paid internship at
Foursquare, the search-and-discovery app,
which is based in Manhattan.
First stop: Craigslist, for a place to
live. Kennedy was unfamiliar with the
citys neighborhoods, but hed seen
HBOs Girls, and, he said, I pretty
much knew I was going to be in Brooklyn. He checked out one-bedroom apartments in Williamsburg, where the average monthly rent is around three thousand
dollars. Nope. He eventually landed in
Bedford-Stuyvesant, where a guy named
Patrick was subletting a room in his
two-bedroom apartment for a thousand
and fty dollars a month.
The annals of Craigslist are lled with
roommate horror stories: the scammer,
the party animal, the creep. But Patrick
turned out to be an easygoing twentynine-year-old photographer from South
Carolina. Kennedy liked him immediately, even though the two-bedroom
Co-living startups promise to wait for the cable guy and replace the toilet paper.
48
apartment turned out to be a one-room

loft. Patrick slept upstairs. Kennedys room
was a former closet. Still, he was excited.
His job was great. He was in New York.
But what to do when work ended?
He loved Jane Jacobss evocations of
Greenwich Village, with its friendly
shop owners and its ballet of the city
streets. But, he said, Id end up going
to a bar and just sitting there, talking to
a bartender and staring at Twitter. A
thought surfaced: Im surrounded by
people and things to do, and yet Im so
fucking bored and lonely.
All of this seemed very far away on a
Sunday night this winter, in the basement
of a renovated four-story brownstone in
the Crown Heights neighborhood of
Brooklyn. The building, Kennedys new
home, is run by the co-living startup Common, which offers what it calls exible,
community-driven housing. Co-living
has also been billed as dorms for grownups, a description that Common resists.
But the company has set out to restore a
certain subset of young, urban professionals to the paradise they lost when
they left college campusesa furnished
place to live, unlimited coffee and toilet
paper, a sense of belonging.
Common has three locations in
Brooklyn: the brownstone in Crown
Heights, on Pacic Streetwhich, when
it opened, received more than a thousand applications for eighteen roomsa
second, smaller brownstone in the neighborhood, and a fty-one-bedroom complex in Williamsburg, which opens this
week. Instead of signing a lease, residents sign up for a membership. On
average, they pay eighteen hundred dollars a month for a furnished bedroom
and common areas. The company solves
what it calls the tragedy of the commonswaiting for the cable guy and
hiring housecleaners.Theres a chat room
on Slack, where members can plan activities, and a house leader, who functions a bit like a college R.A.
Kennedy, who is now a copywriter for
the startup Handy, found Common
through a BuzzFeed article. Initially, he
was put off by the price tag. A room at
Common doesnt just cost more than a
room in a shared Brooklyn apartment (average price: twelve hundred dollars); it
costs more than some studio apartments on
Manhattans Upper East Side, which Gary
Malin, the president of the real-estate
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL
broker Citi Habitats, told me can be obtained for fteen hundred dollars and up.
But Kennedy did a little math. Eighteen hundredif you want to pay that
little for a studio or one-bedroom, youre
going to get a really junky place, he said.
With a discount for promising to stay
at Common for at least a year, he now
pays a little less than fteen hundred
dollars a month.
Co-living businesses are still in the
startup phase. Some people are incredulous. Under an article about the phenomenon on Curbed, a commenter wrote,
Why the fuck would anyone want that?
But Common, which is based in midtown and has twenty employees, recently
raised more than seven million dollars
from investors, including Maveron, a
venture-capital rm started by Dan Levitan and Howard Schultz, the chairman
of Starbucks. Jason Stoffer, a partner at
Maveron, anticipates that companies like
Common will transform residential housing by creating a brand that is emotionally and culturally resonant with millennials who arent served by some aspects
of apartment living. (Instead of landlord-ese, Common uses startup argot,
advertising its core values. In his application, Kennedy wrote that he most appreciated the value Be Present.) Stoffer
brought up AirBnb, the vacation-rental
business valued at twenty-ve billion
dollars: People sleeping on couches in
someone elses apartment for thirty dollars a night felt absolutely crazy ten years
ago! But now its normal.
Common encourages its members to
organize group activities. I thought they
were going to force me to do these events
I dont want to do, Kennedy said. Like,
lets sit in a drum circle and do basket
weaving. But the events turned out to
be things like movie nights and bowling. He decided to organize a book club.
The night of its rst meeting, the
brownstones basement was clean and
warm. At the back of the room was a
screening area, where four members
lounged on modern couches and adultsize beanbags. Kennedy, who has chinlength, sandy-colored hair, was wearing
jeans and a annel shirt. Most of his
housemates were in their twenties, recent transplants to New York. Kennedys selection was The Art of Fielding,
by Chad Harbach, and he led the discussion. He mentioned the ctional base-
ball manual at the center of the plot:

Did any of you guys look to see if The
Art of Fielding is real?
Another Common member, Jeremy
Schrage, spoke up. At forty-four, Schrage
was the oldest member of the group. He
makes a living ipping apps and advising startups,and had recently moved from
California. I actually put it into Google and read the Wikipedia, Schrage said.
There was a pause. Kennedy asked,
What else, guys?
Annelie Chavez, the brownstones
twenty-seven-year-old house leader, grew
up in a large extended Filipino family in
California. After being in New York for,
like, a year and a half and not really
having that many overlapping circles of
friends, it made me a little homesick for
the connections that the four or ve main
characters have with each other, she said.
Kennedy agreed. New York is the
loneliest city in the world, he said. You
basically go to work, work ridiculous
hours, and come home.
Schrage offered a theory: Its where
the headquarters of all these corporations are, and people are coming here
and they want to kick ass. During the
day, everybody just has horse blinders
on. Theyre getting on the 6 train and
going to work and stepping over some
bum and not thinking about it. He
sighed. Its kind of crazy, he said. I
dont want to lose that California part of
me. That compassion or empathy.
Kennedy looked at his phone. It
was getting late. What book should we
read next?
Matt, another housemate, asked,
Have you guys read The Poisonwood
Bible?
first met Kennedy in December,
I after most of Commons members had
moved in. The company threw a holiday

party in the brownstone on Pacic Street.
A at-screen by the door showed which
oors were serving which ethnic cuisine,
all catered by nearby restaurants. In the
basement, where people were drinking
wine from plastic cups, Kennedy dispensed advice about restaurants in the
area. (After his time at Foursquare, he
considers himself the houses concierge.)
At the Pacic Street brownstone, the
smallest social unit is the oor. Each oor
includes four single bedrooms off a long
hallway, with a shared living room and
kitchen, and a door that can be unlocked

with an iPhone app. The rst oor is
male, the second oor is female, and the
third and fourth oors are mixed. Kennedy lived on the third oor, along with
Leon Thorne, a twenty-year-old who
had taken time off from Brandeis to attend a coding course at Fullstack Academy. He told me that he was happy about
his choice: Everyone here I can have a
conversation with! In college, there were
a lot of very unengaged people who were
just there because they needed to go to
college and get a job.
Kennedy confessed, Yesterday, I sat
on the couch and literally watched Netix
for twelve hours.
Chavez is a kind of co- professional.
During the day, she is a community manager at Industry City. Before moving into
the Common brownstone, she lived in
a house run by a now defunct co-living
company called Campus, which she also
worked for. I get to learn a lot about
sharing, she said. Organizational behaviors and communities are interesting
to me. In college, at U.C.L.A., she studied cultural anthropology.
Brad Hargreaves, Commons founder
and C.E.O. , was at the party. An affable,
nerdy twenty-nine-year-old with a scruffy
beard, Hargreaves grew up in rural Arkansas before going to Yale, where he
ran intercollegiate computer-game tournaments called GoCrossCampus. After
graduation, he moved to New York, with
plans to turn the gaming tournaments
into a business. On Craigslist, he found
a roommate in the nancial district: a
real-estate broker with a taste for marijuana and, consequently, bacon.
When Hargreavess gaming company
didnt pan out, he and a few techie friends
started a co-working spacea coffeeshop alternative for freelancers and nomadic tech entrepreneurswhich in 2011
became a programming school called
General Assembly. General Assembly
now has twenty-ve thousand students
taking classes in everything from data
science to stress management. Its fteen
campuses are mostly in major cities
New York, San Francisco, Washington,
D.C. Students often move to a city to
take classes, and, Hargreaves said, they
would usually end up in really sketchy
roommate situations. He had an alternate vision: roommate communities.
Instead of leasing properties and then
49
subletting them, Common acts as a

property-management company. Realestate developers hire the rm to operate a building in exchange for a percentage
of the income. We look at our audience
as people who make between forty and
a hundred thousand dollars a year,
Hargreaves said. Theres a certain set of
neighborhoods that t that price point
really well.
Inevitably, the company has been
caught up in larger tussles over gentrication. In Crown Heights, traditionally
a West Indian enclave, vegan cheese
shops, wood-red pizza ovens, bourbonspiked milkshakes, and uke seviche are
springing up alongside restaurants serving jerk chicken. Hargreaves told me,
Its a friendly neighborhood. People
say hi to you on the street. Its convenient to mass transit. There are some really cool bars. And we were able to nd
a wholly vacant multifamily building.
We dont want to evict people.
Some locals are wary. Ayanna Prescod,
a twenty-eight-year-old blogger whose
family has lived in the area since the
nineteen-fties, said that many friends
have been forced out by rising rents. She
added, Im a young professional, and Im
denitely not spending eighteen hundred dollars on a room. She worried that
an inux of transient young people would
erode the community. It started with
AirBnb, she said. When I grew up, you
knew who your neighbors were, you actually looked out for each other. Now we
say hi in passing to be courteous. But you
see someone going into a house, and
its, like, What? Who is this person?
The contemporary phenomenon of
co-living began in San Francisco, with
hacker mansions, rambling Victorians
that programmers furnished with bunk
beds and turned into startup factories. In
2014, Campus, founded by a twentythree-year-old named Tom Currier, attempted to formalize the process. It leased
homes in San Francisco and began selling memberships. When you joined Campus, you werent just joining a house; you
were choosing a life style. You could
bounce among the companys various
locations. Houses were equipped with
hot tubs, and members had access to
vacation houses in Tahoe and Napa.
(Hargreaves, too, has network ambitions:
he hopes that members will eventually
be able to move around Common loca50
tions, spending a week in Los Angeles,

a week in Brooklyn.) By last year, Campus had rented thirty-four properties, including several brownstones in New York,
when, like many startups whose dreams
are bigger than their wallets, it ran out
of money and folded.
Other companies have not been deterred. They range from Pure House,
which is based in Williamsburg and advertises an intentional way of living for
those committed to transforming their
lives (and has hosted a group storytelling session called Collective Sex),
to WeLive, a spinoff of WeWork, a
co-working company that was recently
valued at sixteen billion dollars. WeWork describes itself as a physical social network, and most co-living companies see themselves as participating
in the sharing economy, with their buildings a blend of residential hotel and
Facebook group. WeLives rst residential space, at 110 Wall Street, features
small apartments and shared common
areas, which include yoga studios and
screening rooms. Eventually, the space
will house four hundred and fty people on twenty oors. In a leaked pitch
document from 2014, WeWork projected that co-living would account for
twenty-one per cent of its revenue
$605.9 millionby 2018.
Hargreaves took me on a tour of
Commons brownstone, pointing out the
laundry room, the back-yard patio, and
the bike rack by the stairs. Bike racks
were the No. 1 thing people requested

on our surveys, he said. He referred to
the homes dcor as its user experience.
It channels a familiar Brooklyn aesthetic:
hardwood oors, exposed brick walls,
midcentury-modern furnishings from
stores like West Elm. Sophie Wilkinson, the companys design director, told
me that a member once described it as
someone awesomes parents house,
without any of the parents. In a living
room, the design staff had stuffed a book-
shelf with quirky tchotchkes: a bronze

armadillo, plants in geometric planters.
Common members share bathrooms
with one other person. The kitchenliving room on each oor is shared by
four people. (A cleaner comes once a
week.) Hargreaves said that the arrangement was meant to create a family atmosphere: If you give people an opportunity to eat dinner alone in their
bedroom, theyll do it.
We looked into a bedroom on the rst
oor, and I felt a pang of envy. It was spare
but chicly furnisheda double bed with
a fabric-covered headboard, a Scandinavian-style nightstand, and a small Aztec
rug. Hargreaves noted that the mattress
and the uffy white bedding were from
the of-the-moment companies Casper
and Parachute. We try to work with other
startups whenever we can, he said.
In the kitchen-living room, three men
of the rst oorincluding Jeremy
Schrage, the forty-four-year-old appipperwere drinking beer and eating
nouveau-Caribbean food from a nearby
restaurant called Gladys. Schrage predicted that co-living would soon become
normal: Twenty or thirty years from
now, well look back and be, like, how
did we ever question it?
His suitemate, Mike Walsh, said, Im
from Madison, Wisconsin, and you hear
about co-op living all the time there.
How is this any different?
Another suitemate, Danny Pirajan,
twenty-seven, had hair shaved on one side
and wore Elvis Costelloesque glasses. He
had spent the past few years working at
design-related jobs in Chicago and Miami
and was trying to decide on a permanent
location. Im city shopping, he told me.
Walsh said that he had moved to New
York to study user-experience design at
General Assembly. Before that, he lived
in Colorado for ten years, working as a
professional mascot for the Colorado
Rapids, a major-league soccer team, and
for the Denver Broncos.
Schrage raised his eyebrows: You
were the Bronco?
I was just a backup, Walsh said. I
didnt do all the games.
Can you do your horse sound?
Schrage asked, making a little whinny.
Tell everyone about being a mascot, he
continued. What do people not know?
Walsh sighed. Wow, he said. Well,
its a lot of fun. People assume that. You
CHARLIE BROOKER
dance, off
ancing. Ban dancing. Break its legs and bury it.
D And dont make me do it. Dont make me dance.

Jesus, the indignity. Id sooner defecate on live TV than
dance at your wedding.
I vaguely remember my rst visit to a night club;
mustve been around 1988. I was seventeen and sober;
the music was shockingly loud and my limbs had no idea
what was expected of them. I tried to join in, but it was
immediately clear that this was a physical language I was
never going to grasp. A hundred years later and nothing
has changed. People who dance voluntarily are unknowably alien to me. I dont relate.
See, Im awkward at the best of times. Expecting me
to cordinate my movements in time to music, in what
amounts to an unofficial public assessment of perceived
sexual competence, is astronomically cruel. Push me onto
the dance oor and Im like a pig repeatedly losing its
footing, a malfunctioning distress signal made esh.
Dancing forces me to engage with corporeal reality. I
resent it for that. Having to endure any kind of physical
existence whatsoever alarms and annoys me. There are
things out there that you can bang your knee on. And
haircuts. You have to get haircuts. Again and again and
again. Its relentless. Its awful. I cant wait till some alcoholic research scientist unleashes the nanobot horde
and we all get knitted into a single, superintelligent sentient gas with no dividing lines or toenails. Until then,
Im stuck here, awkward and clumsy and not knowing
52
JOON MO KANG
UNINVENT THIS
what to do with my face, let alone my arms and legs. So

please dont make me dance. When my parents celebrated
their golden wedding anniversary, I refused to dance. I
felt guilty at the time. Youd think that guilt would fade,
but no: it sits there, inside, undiminished, a deep black
stone. This is what society has wrought. Because society
keeps expecting me to dance.
Oh, whats that? Dance like no ones watching? Imbecile. You fucking imbecile. Im watching, even when I
close my eyes. Watching and judging. My brain wont
wander away. It stands there with its arms folded, loudly
asking me what the fuck me thinks its doing.
So you, at the party. Stop trying to make me dance.
Cajoling. Bullying. Grabbing my arm and jerking me toward the dance oor. Do you want me to start crying?
Sobbing in front of you? Is that what you want? How
come this tyranny is socially acceptable?
I know the theory. They repeat it over and over: Hey,
Grumpybones, just get on the dance oor. Youll enjoy it once
youre on it.
I wont. Ill shift from foot to foot with the lumpen
gracelessness of a deck chair unexpectedly granted the
power of motion, worrying about what to do with my
elbows and screaming in silence at the inside of my own
face. Youll enjoy yourself. I will not.
I know youre worried about looking stupid, but, honestly,
no one cares.
Thanks for the pep talk but I already look stupid. Sitting rigid at the periphery of the wedding, like an exileI care about that.
Look! Theres even a guy in his seventies up thereterrible dancer, but by Christ he looks happy.
And Id settle for that. I would. But its not going to
happen. So go now. Leave me here to die.
Off they slink, radiating pity. And then they dance till
four in the morning, guffawing like ancient kings. Theyre
lucky.
Society judges the dance-averse harshly. As party
poopers. Sticks in the mud. Cowards. It doesnt help that
dancing is widely portrayed as the most life-affirming
thing a human body can do short of giving birth. I know
you havent sat through a TV ad in two years, but did
you realize that ninety-ve per cent of all commercials
now depict overweight people dancing for comic effect?
Things are worse at the movies. C.G.I. animation is
a wonderful thing, but, on the downside, it makes convincing dance moves comparatively simple to create. In
1967, Disneys Jungle Book animators had to painstakingly craft the I Wanna Be Like You routine by hand.
These days, they synch their animation software with a
Spotify account, hold down the function key, and count
to ve while it shits out an end-credits sequence in which
a trio of lovable gophers triumphantly shake their rumps
to La Bamba. Id rather see a cartoon end with the
Zapruder footage. At least then the kids would leave the
auditorium in silence.
And not one of them would be dancing. Victory.
get beat up. At the end of the day, youre

exhausted physically.
Schrage did a lightning round of
app-development research. Is there a
market for Uber ice delivery for mascotsyes or no?
Walsh considered. A Common
member stuck his head in the door to
announce a delivery from Elsies: Care
for a doughnut? Fourth oor!
eople live in group homes for many
P reasons, and in many circumstances
think of retirement homes, rehab centers, and communes and kibbutzes. But
co-living isnt just about a living situation. Its about a specic stage in the
modern bourgeois life cycle: the period
that sociologists call extended adolescence. This phase of experimentation
and transition is generally associated
with people in their twenties, but its
boundaries are uid. It has appeared in
endless TV incarnations, where its
mocked and worshipped in equal measure: The Real World, Melrose Place,
Friends, and Girls. The comedian
Aziz Ansari has described it as the dicking around and having brunch stage.
Paul Groth, a professor of urban geography at the University of California,
Berkeley, told me, In the nineteenth
century, the single person was sort of a
social problem. What do you do with a
single person? In cities, the solution was
the boarding house, often run by a matron, who served meals family style and
might scold you if you got home too late.
In 1842, one resident, Walt Whitman,
declared that Americans, or at least New
Yorkers, were a boarding people: Married men and single men, old women
and pretty girls, mariners and masons,
cobblers, colonels, and counter-jumpers,
tailors and teachers; lieutenants, loafers,
ladies, lackbrains, and lawyers; printers
and parsons . . . all go out to board.
As a new, mobile workforce ooded
into cities, demanding more freedom,
boarding houses were largely replaced by
cheap hotels designed for long-term stays.
Groth said, As late as 1930, maybe one
housing unit in ten was some variation
of a residential hotel. The Barbizon, a
womens-only establishment at Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street, opened
in 1927, when large numbers of women
were beginning to work outside the home.
To its guests, the Barbizon offered closet-
size rooms and lavish shared facilities: a

beauty parlor, a swimming pool, a sun
deck, Turkish baths, a coffee shop, squash
and badminton courts, a solarium, and a
roof garden. To their parents, it offered
the assurance of respectability: chaperones roamed the hallways, and men were
not allowed above the rst oor. Sylvia
Plath, a resident in the nineteen-fties,
featured the Barbizon in The Bell Jar,
where it appears as the Amazon, a hotel
for rich young women who were all going
to posh secretarial schools.
By the nineteen-sixties, hotel life had
given way to the new dream: a place of
ones own. In the sitcom That Girl,
which premired in 1966, Marlo Thomas
played an aspiring actress, Ann Marie,
who moves to New York to try to make
it while working a series of odd jobs:
waitress, department-store elf. In the
shows second episode, a friendly doorman helps her move into her own apartment. Standing on the threshold, she announces, Im my own occupant! Like
Ann Marie, young women seized
one-bedrooms near First and Second
Avenues, which became known for singles bars and stew zoosbuildings
packed with female ight attendants.
The inaugural issue of Cosmopolitan called
the neighborhood The Girl Ghetto:
Thousands upon thousands of single
girls ock to the upper East Side, cramming themselves into small apartments,
subsisting on an apple and a quart of diet
soda a day, waiting for a telephone to
ring and having a mad, wonderful time.
In Going Solo, from 2012, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg describes how
these trends persisted, leading to our
current state of affairs: a third of households in New York consist of one person. Klinenberg told me that, based on
his surveys, most people who can afford
it want and feel great pride in getting
a place of their own.
These days, however, the most popular citiesnotably New York and San
Franciscoare mired in a housing crisis, the result of fty years of underbuilding combined with the desire of
wide-eyed youngsters to move to them.
A modern Ann Marie would have a
hard time nding her own place in Manhattan, where the average studio apartment goes for between two thousand
and three thousand dollars. Instead, she
would probably spend a few weeks couch
surng, perusing Craigslist postings inviting her to Share My Apartment

and rent a Great Room for a Girl.
The proposed solutions to the housing crisis are endless: more zoning (so
that luxury apartments dont take over
the city); less zoning (so that developers
are encouraged to build more); microapartments (a tower of three-hundredsquare-foot units is currently being leased
in Kips Bay). Adam Neumann, the cofounder and C.E.O. of WeWork, told
me, The future is more expensive and
less room! Thats just a fact. Co-living
is about rejiggering our expectations.
n marketing to its rst members,
I Hargreaves said, Common hoped to
include people from different age

groups and professions. We didnt
want it to just be housing for the tech
industry. Many applicants have come
from overseas, because foreigners have
a hard time renting from New York
landlords, who usually require credit
and background checks. (Common
uses other methods, like bank accounts
or paycheck stubs, to evaluate tenants.)
And yet tech workers predominate.
Chavez, the house leader, had a theory about co-living, borrowed from a
music lesson she learned in high-school
band. You need balance, patterns, and
timing, she said. Balance: There needs
to be a balance between the company
dening what the community is and taking suggestions from the group. Patterns: Things need to be consistent.
Timing: Three monthsits still pretty
chaotic. At six months, you start seeing
what people are drawn to.
In January, I attended a cheesethemed Sunday potluck dinner at the
brownstone on Pacic Street. The offerings included mozzarella sticks and
cheese-stuffed peppers. In February came
an event called a Pecha Kucha, coorganized by Mike Walsh, in which each
person presented a slide show with
twenty pictures. The prompt was Describe something you love. Everyone
crowded around a projector in the basement, and Chavez gave a talk on pancakes. Its my passion, she said. Im
the one setting the re alarm off making pancakes on the second oor, in case
you havent noticed.
The oors had different personalities,
which were, to a large degree, shaped by
53

the amount of turnover they experienced.
The fourth oor was the most transient.
The third oor, which included Kennedy and Thorne, the college student,
was more of a party oor. (Thorne was
becoming a kind of house pet. We all
make fun of him for being young, a
member told me.)
The second oor, whose residents
were all women, was known for its domestic rituals. People are always cooking and making tea, Chavez said. On
Monday nights, the women watched
The Bachelor together. Lauren, a thirtyone-year-old lawyer, had left a onebedroom apartment on the Upper East
Side. (Rent: twenty-four hundred dollars.) I wanted to know what it would
be like to have people be there when I
get home, she told me.
The gender ratio at Common tilts
male. Lauren offered a few theories about
why women might be reluctant to move
in: concerns about safety in Crown
Heights (which she hadnt found to be
a problem), and the fact that they tend
to move in groups. I think often with
girls its hard to do things on their own.
On the rst oor, Schrage and Pirajan, the city-shopping designer, liked to
go out to bars. Walsh, the former mascot, was more business-oriented. We go
to startup events together, like tech stuff,
Schrage told me. The fourth suitemate,
Steven She, was a thirty-one-year-old
software engineer from Toronto. Schrage
said, He got a girlfriend after, like, a
month. She met his girlfriend on the
dating app Coffee Meets Bagel. He liked
54
living in Common, he told me. But, he

said, having any roommates makes it a
little more difficult with a girlfriend,
which is why I ended up spending more
time at her place.
I think the neighborhoods not the
best thing to tell women, Schrage said,
claiming that some potential dates had
dropped him on Tinder, assuming that
he couldnt afford a more expensive area.
Pirajan said, I explain that I share
an apartment with three other guys
and a building with eighteen people.
They always ask the same question: Do
you have your own bathroom? Hed
noticed that the single people often reacted badly, and that the people who
seem really interested are engaged or living with someone as a couple. Theyre,
like, Oh, this is like living in a dorm with
your friends! They always ask me to invite them if I throw a party.
ot long ago, I stopped by the
N headquarters of WeWork to talk
to Adam Neumann about WeLive.There

seemed to be a hint of curiosity and rivalry between members of the two buildings. A couple of us went and checked
out WeLive, Lauren told me. From
what I saw, it seems like thats way more
of a 24-7 party atmosphere. A WeWork
employee lived briey at Common, and
Hargreaves told me, half joking, We
think he was a spy.
WeWork started as a co-working company, leasing office space and converting
it into a trendy zone for startups and
itinerant laptop workers, complete with
arcade games and beer on tap. It is now

used by organizations ranging from General Electric to Lululemon. The company has an app, which its more than
fty thousand members can use to network; it hosts events like mixology labs
and offers accounting services. WeWork
has raised more than a billion dollars
from Fidelity and other investment banks,
part of which it plans to use to branch
out into co-living. Within three years,
WeLive expects to have 10.3 million
square feet of real estate, housing thirtyfour thousand people.
Neumann is a tall Israeli with owing black hair and a strong accent. His
T-shirt read, Do What You Love. As
a teen-ager, in Israel, he spent several
years living on a kibbutz. The joy I felt
living on a kibbutz! he said. My parents were divorced, it was a tough time
in my life. The fulllment I felt being
part of a community was so real, gave me
so much strength to deal with my own
personal challenges, that its always been
ingrained in me that being together is
better than being alone. At nineteen, he
moved to New York to study entrepreneurship at Baruch College. He lived in
the nancial district with an older sister,
who was a model. Neumann recalled, I
said to my sister, Something really weird
has happened. Every time I take the elevator with other people no one says hello
to me. He went on, I said to her, Lets
play a game. The game was to knock
on the door of every apartment in the
building and try to wrangle an invitation for coffee. After they met everyone,
he said, the building changed. It became a community. I saw how excited
everyone was getting about it, and I was,
like, Wow! This is what I should do
here. It was called Concept Living.
Neumann imagined the New York
City apartment building as a kind of urban
colony. His plan was rejected by judges
in a business-school competition, but,
with the success of WeWork, hes bringing it back, with some tweaks. In WeLive buildings, the apartments come in
different congurations. You can rent a
suite with up to four bedrooms, for ten
thousand dollars a month, or a one-bedroom apartment, for less than four thousand dollars.
Unlike those at Common, WeLive
apartments have their own bathrooms
and kitchens. The shared amenities on
each oor are a bonus: they include a

terrace with multiple hot tubs, a chef s
kitchen, and a copious supply of beer
on tap. For the tightest spaces, WeLive
is designing eight types of nooks
podlike enclosures, with a bed, airconditioning, and a sound systemthat
allow you to get away from your roommate. The idea is to provide everyone
with both privacy and a social layerIf
they want to, they can be alone, but if
they dont want to they will never be
alone in their life! Neumann said.
The rst WeLive building, at 110
Wall Street, only recently opened to
the public, and some residents are
WeWork employees. The hallways are
painted in bright greens and purples
and furnished with thrift-store-style
furniture. Decorations include framed
album coversTaylor Swift, the Postal
Serviceand posters with jokey slogans created by the companys design
staff: Home Is Where Your Pants Are
Off, Home Is Where Pizza Gets Delivered, Home Is Where the WiFi
Is. It feels like stepping into Urban
Outtters Instagram feed.
I visited the studio apartment of a
twenty-ve-year-old WeWork employee
named Kley. The four-hundred-andfty-square-foot space contained a
kitchenette, a couch, and a bathroom,
and two beds, tucked into nooks. A atscreen TV played Morning Joe. Kley,
who wore a white polo shirt and red
pants, told me that hes from Greenville, South Carolina. Id always loved
the hustle and ambition of the city, he
said. Hed come North with a thousand
dollars in cashI thought that was a
lotand wound up in Bed-Stuy, living in a hostel. He then moved into a
series of informal barracks in the West
Village, packed with young men toiling
in the lower levels of nance and P.R.
The WeLive room had come eightyve per cent furnished, which he appreciated. Frankly, no one under the
age of thirty has the capital to drop ten
grand and get everything from West
Elm that actually makes your home
look beautiful, he said. Its easy to
make it your own with a few little
touches. Hed added a shelf of books
(The Power Broker), Mason jars lled
with pasta on the kitchenette shelves
(to show that I cook), and some ags
above the bed in his nook.
He showed me the buildings communal spaces, which included a whiskey

lounge (an empty bar area), a laundry
room-arcade with a Ping-Pong table, and
a ex space, where a yoga class was running through poses. In one corner was a
feature called the Corner Store: shelves
of products, like laundry detergent and
Listerine, that members could pay for
using the WeLive app. Dance music was
being piped in through hidden speakers.
Kley took out his phone and changed it
to Im in a Hurry, by Alabama.
The contrast between Common and
WeWork reminded me of the difference
between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Common was domestic, with hints of pseudobohemianism. WeWork was slicker, with
shades of Wall Street. (I sensed a culture
clash when Kennedy, from Common,
described spending a Friday night at WeWork: It was total bro. Like, dudes in
tank tops drinking beer.)
In the communal kitchen, where
platters of yogurt parfaits and breakfast burritos had been set out, members
were streaming in after the yoga class.
One of them didnt seem to t the demo:
Joe Leggio, WeWorks chief information officer. Leggio, who is fty and
married, with two kids, lives in Long
Island. He was renting a WeLive studio as a Manhattan crash pad, for late
nights at the office. Its been fun, he
said. You dont have to do anything.
You just bring your clothes.
o-living skeptics doubt its long-
Cterm appeal. Its like a shiny penny,

Malin, the president of Citi Habitats,
said. The excitements going to wear
off. After six months in Common, Kennedy told me, the novelty had faded: Now
its just, like, this is where I live. This is
my home. (The founders of both Common and WeLive told me that, ultimately,
they hope to build co-living facilities that
are designed for people with families: instead of whiskey bars, the shared zones
will include playrooms.) Kennedy was,
however, wondering how Commons culture would change with the opening of
the Williamsburg building. Theres no
way that you can be friends with all the
people in every house, he said. I wonder what will happen. Will the community start shrinking into individual houses?
Will there be networks? Boroughs?
The Williamsburg property has a
different aesthetic from the Crown

Heights brownstone, according to Wilkinson, Commons design director. Its
much more minimalist, she said. It has
more of an industrial, exposed-cement
vibe. Hargreaves noted that it also incorporates learnings from the rst venture: rooms for couples, with a private
bathroom, entrances and exits designed
so that you dont have to chitchat with
roommates when you dont want to, fewer
tchotchkes. People wanted to do more
of their own decoration, he said. It will
not include the most requested feature:
a hot tub. Commons Crown Heights
members had rst dibs on the rooms,
and many are relocating, including
Chavez, who wants to try out a new
neighborhood, and She, who wants to
be closer to his girlfriend.
Jeremy Schrage is moving to WeLive,
on Wall Street. It was about wanting to
be in Manhattan, he told me, sounding
a bit guilty. That was the main thing.
And getting my own place. Hed signed
up for a studio plus, which goes for
about three thousand dollars a month.
He said that he felt apprehensive about
the move. I have really strong relationships in Common.
Late one night, after the Pecha Kucha
presentation, I followed Schrage and his
suitemates back to their rst-oor common room. Pirajan changed into plaid
pajama pants and ip-ops. Walsh sank
into an armchair, and Schrage curled up
on the couch. (Steven She was at his
girlfriends apartment.)
Schrage said, We had a night where
it was the three of us and Steven and
Lauren were here. We were laughing
hysterically.
We were screaming and chanting
until 1 a.m., Pirajan said. We didnt
even drink!
I brought up the television version of
their lives: Friends and The Real
World.
I dont think this is anything like
that, Schrage said. People want you to
tell them theres crazy orgies going on!
Walsh said, We come home from
work and watch Broad City and TED
videos.
Schrage added, Lying on Fatboy
beanbags.
So, nothing like The Real World?
No, Schrage said. This is just real
life.
55
SENSORY STUDIES
FEEL ME
What the new science of touch says about ourselves.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
n a bitter, soul-shivering,
damp, biting gray February day
in Clevelandthat is to say,
on a February day in Clevelanda
handless man is handling a nonexistent ball. Igor Spetic lost his right hand
when his forearm was pulped in an industrial accident six years ago and had
to be amputated. In an operation four
years ago, a team of surgeons implanted
a set of small translucent interfaces
into the neural circuits of his upper
arm. This afternoon, in a basement lab
at a Veterans Administration hospital,
the wires are hooked up directly to a
prosthetic handplastic, esh-colored,
ve-ngered, and articulatedthat is
affixed to what remains of his arm. The
hand has more than a dozen pressure
sensors within it, and their signals can
be transformed by a computer into
electric waves like those natural to the
nervous system. The sensors in the
prosthetic hand feed information from
the world into the wires in Spetics arm.
Since, from the brains point of view,
his hand is still there, it needs only to
be recalled to life.
Now it is. With the stimulation
turned onthe electronic feed coursing from the sensorsSpetic feels
nineteen distinct sensations in his
articial hand. Above all, he can feel
pressure as he would with a living hand.
We dont appreciate how much of our
behavior is governed by our intense
sensitivity to pressure, Dustin Tyler,
the fresh-faced principal investigator
on the Cleveland project, says, observing Spetic closely. We think of hot
and cold, or of textures, silk and cotton. But some of the most important
sensing we do with our ngers is to
register incredibly minute differences
in pressure, of the kinds that are necessary to perform tasks, which we grasp
in a microsecond from the feel of the
outer shell of the thing. We know instantly, just by touching, whether to
56
gently squeeze the toothpaste or crush

the can.
With the new prosthesis, Spetic can
sense the surface of a cherry in a way
that allows him to stem it effortlessly
and precisely, guided by what he feels,
rather than by what he sees. Prosthetic
hands like Spetics tend to be superstrong, capable of forty pounds of pressure, so the risk of crushing an egg
is real. The stimulation sensors make
delicate tasks easy.
Spetic comes into the lab every other
week; the rest of the time he is busy
pursuing a degree in engineering, which
he has taken up while on disability. The
researchers try to use their time with
him energetically, so there is an excited
murmur while the experiments go on
shoptalk conducted mostly in acronyms
and initials. It is perfectly possible to
hear a sentence beginning One of the
difficulties about being the P.I. on a
DARPA-funded study, post I.R.B. . . .
and see gentle nods of agreement.
Though Spetic is an industrial worker,
he has been in the study long enough
to have absorbed the language of the
investigators, and he now speaks easily of the double-blind data and following the expanding parameters of
the experiment.
Spetic, burly and broad-faced, with
the quietly powerful look of someone
accustomed to working hard with his
arms and hands, is undertaking a new
set of tests: with no prosthesis on at
all, simply by willing the nervesin
what is crudely called his stump, what
is politely called his residualhe is
manipulating a virtual hand in a virtual space, represented on a at screen
in front of him. He moves his hand
through the muscles in his arm by using
his head, and the hand on the screen
moves, too, reaching out and grasping
the ball.
Turn the stim on, he says, almost
longingly. An experimenter raises an
eyebrowprotocol stipulates that the

subject should not know when the stim
is turned onbut he does, and immediately Spetic begins to pick the ball
up easily. I can feel it in my thumb
and my ngers, he says. Then he corrects himself: In this space. Tyler whispers to an observer, He began saying
the thumb or the nger. Now he says
my thumb, my nger!
Touch is not a one-way deduction
of sensation but a constant two-way
interchange between what Tyler calls
the language of sensation and the raw
data of reception. What weve discovered is that the language of touch is
what matters most, he says. When
we rst fed the stimulus in, Igor only
felt a tingle. The question was, how do
we go from tingle to touch? By analogy, pure sound is something we readily do. Tyler stops and makes a kind
of inarticulate cry. I make a noise, but
theres no information in it. Break it
up in the right way, and its words.
Thats what happens when you have
epilepsyits a kind of constant brain
sound. But the healthy body works with
patterns of information. And theres a
narrow window within which the body
interprets. Shouting Baaah! is not very
different from talking sense.
Tylers lab is a hive of busy graduate students and assistants, monitoring screens and ddling with cables.
Tyler glides among them encouragingly. When we started, he says, we
couldnt get past the tingle. We couldnt
make the tingle become touch. Theres
a nerve called the digital nerve, and
its supercial, close to the skin, so we
hooked me up to the stimulus, and I
started to feel sensation. It took forever, ninety-eight per cent failure and
two per cent success. There were so
many things to vary! But nally one
pattern emerged: a sinusoidal envelope, modulating at one hertz, that ts
within the biological range of rhythm
Our skin is no neutral envelope; it is a busily sensing organ that situates us in relation to others and the world.
ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAN
57
and change. Tighten the wave, and tingle becomes touch. It may be coincidence, but that wave, the one that communicates touch, is just around the
rhythm of a heartbeat, a sort of essential bodily beat.
The day wears on; Igor Spetic gets
a little sad. I hate to go, he says, pausing in the doorway and looking back.
When I leave this room, I leave my
hand behind.
started thinking about how touch
happens when something buzzed in
my pocket that wasnt there. Sometimes we think were going crazy when
were actually in tune with our time
and in synch with our fellows. We go
to watch a high-delity, high-framerate movie, think it looks eerily like a
local television news show from our
childhood, and discover that this is a
well-noted phenomenon, called the
soap-opera effect. We feel a strange
compulsion to leap off a high cliff, and
discover that its the high-place phenomenon, and that, far from a death
wish, it may be a backward phenomenon of self-recording: we come to the
edge, instantly retreat, and then our
brain explains our actions to us and
retrospectively reorders our memory to
believe that we must have actually been
thinking of jumping. And we see a
blue-and-black dress and think its
white and gold, and everybody else in
the country has the same problem.
Or we begin to get the jumps at
feeling a cell phone vibrate that isnt
there. Id feel a distinct, small buzzing,
would reach down andnothing. I
thought maybe some nerve ending in
my thigh had become so habituated
to the vibration that it had gone into
permanent iPhone spasm. In fact, as
the neuroscientist David Linden explained to me, it involves a predictable
misread by something called a Pacinian corpuscle.
The phantom cell phone is such a
widespread thing, Linden says. We
were speaking in his office at Johns
Hopkins University, in Baltimore. I
think something like ninety per cent
of college students report it at one time
or another. Something else stimulates
the Pacinianone of the sense receptors in your thighand the skin says,
Oh, it must be that damn cell phone
58
LITTLE RED CORVETTE
When You Were Mine

Nothing passed us by. Baby,
youre much too fast. In 1990
we had us an early 80s party
nostalgic already,
I dug out my best
OPs & two polos, uorescent,
worn simultaneously
collar up, pretend preppy.
When Blondie came on
Rapture, be pure
things really got going & then
the dancing got shut down
by some square.
What was sleep even for?
again! Its a nice example of how our
entire skin is a sensing, guessing, logicseeking organ of perception, a blanket
with a brain in every micro-inch. So
any vibration near the pocket, and the
system organizes it in advance, and interprets it as the buzz of your phone.
Lindens original research involves
glow-in-the-dark neurons in mouse
brainshe manipulates the mouses
DNA, allowing its neural pathways to
shine under blue light like psychedelic
poster patternsbut he has written at
length about the science of touch and
has become widely expert in the eld.
For Linden, it is where the tingle is.
Only recently has brain science fully
grasped that skin and touch are as rich
and paradoxical as any other part of
our humanity. Touch is the unsung
sensethe one that we depend on most
and talk about least. We know the illusions that our eyes or ears can create. But our skin is capable of the same
high ordering and the same deceptions.
It is as though we lived within a veor six-foot-tall eye, an immense, enclosing ear, with all an eye or ears illusions, blind spots, and habitual
mistakes. We are so used to living within
our skins that we allow them to introduce themselves as neutral envelopes,
capable of excitation at the extremities
(and at extreme moments), rather than
as busy, body-sensing organs. We see

our skins as hides hung around our
inner life, when, in so many ways, they
are the inner life, pushed outside.
More papers have been published
on the molecular and cellular basis of
touch in the past decade than in the
past century, Linden says. Over the
past fty years, there have been probably a hundred papers about vision
for every paper about touch in the
scientic literature. Part of that is that
vision is more accessible to our experience. People go blind often. But almost no one is touch-blindthe fact
that you have to say touch-blind is
a hint of the problem. Being touchblind isnt compatible with life. There
are no national foundations for the
hard-of-touch.
David Ginty, a neuroscientist at
Harvard Medical School who studies
the low-threshold mechanosensory
neurons that allow our brains to interpret touch, emphasizes the breakthroughs in animal models that have
led to what he calls a renaissance in
touch science. For the basic research,
it was the conquest of mouse genetics, he says. Rodents as animal models have come of age, and our ability
to bring modern molecular-genetic
approaches to age-old questions on
somatic sensation is now incredibly
Housequake
What was sleep even for?
The year before, a freshman, I threw
a Prince party, re-screwed
the lights red & blue
the room all purple, people
dancing everywhereclicked
PLAY on the cassette till
we slow-sweated to Erotic
City or Do Me Baby. Im going down
to Alphabet Street. Did anyone
sleep alone that night? I Feel
For You. Shut up already, damn
cabbage patch, reverse running man
get some life wherever you can.
Kevin Young
powerful. He goes on to explain how
mouse genes allow us to explain human
touch: We can turn an itch system off
or turn it on. Were interested in the
sensory neurons that innervate the skin.
And we try to make sense of the complexity: Why are there so many kinds
of sensory neurons? What do they do?
How are they integrated to give rise to
the perception of a touch?
The world of tactile research is divided into a bewildering variety of
names and specialtieshaptics, prosthetics, somatosensory studies, haptic
feedback prosthetics, and on and on
but they all have in common the relations between our skin and our sense
of ourselves. Linden believes that,
among all the new discoveries about
touch and haptic sensation, the most
important are the least generalized.
Startlingly specic touch systems, or
labelled lines, as they are called, have
been identied. Each time we study
the touch system more deeply, we realize that it is more specialized than
wed known, Linden says. These systems arent usefully understood just as
different cognitive responses to the
same stimulitheyre completely
different integrated systems. There are
separate labelled lines for so many
seemingly intermingled systems. The
difference between affective toucha
loving caressand other kinds, like a

threatening or a clinical grope, involves
two different sensing systems working
in close concert.
Still more strikingly specic work
is being done, down the hall from Lindens office, by another Hopkins neuroscientist, Xinzhong Dong. Dong is
the Einstein of itch, the scientist who
established that the itch system qualies as a labelled line, with dedicated
neurons of its own. A native of China,
he speaks a clipped, intense, and amiable English. People used to assume
that itch was just small pain, the little brother of pain, he says. But not
so. Its a separate system loaded by itself. Theres a lot of debate about how
itch and pain are coded in the sensory
neurons. A few years ago, we discovered a group of cells that function as
a specic itch receptor. And that was
a breakthrough.
Dong bred mice whose gene for the
suspected receptor was turned off. But,
to test the itch system, a reliable means
of making mice itchy was required.
Many bodybuilders develop severe
itch, he said. If you go online to bodybuilders sites, you can nd a drug they
take to prevent acid buildup. Without
muscle fatigue, they say it feels like a
thousand mosquito bites! So we tried
it in mice and they scratched very ro-
bustly. And the ones without the receptors become insensitive. So that
showed the receptor we found was the
right one. For itch we have very dedicated behavior. Its really cool. We inject a chemical into a face. If its painful, the animals use a front paw to
gently rub it. If you inject an itchy substance, they use a hind leg to scratch.
Almost always animals use their hind
paw to scratch. So we can tell if they
are itchy or painful.
In videos, you see the difference:
mice delicately pawing their faces in
mild pain; mice scratching ercely at
an itchtwo separate systems, turned
on and off like porch lights. Even more,
the experiments suggest an odd asymmetry between the two systems. You
can trade pain for itch, Dong points
out: thats why mice and men both
scratch. But it wont work the other
way around: you can pain your itch,
but you cant itch your pain. A signature of itch is that its specic to the
skin. Your bones can ache, but they
cant itch. In still one more experiment,
Dong made his itch-specic bres uorescent. They appeared, as expected,
only in the skin.
Why should itch be so catchy? Why
should itch be, as it were, pre-installed
and so neatly differentiated from pain?
Several theories present themselves.
The most probable is that it arises from
the paramount adaptive need for animals to guard against parasites, which
are more likely to produce itch than
pain. If we put insect bites on a dimension measured in pain, they would not
register sufficiently or at all. There could
be survival value in being able, so to
speak, to tell a bug up the ass from a
pain in the rear.
ne strange thing about the un-
O sung sense is that it has no songs.
Every other sense has an art to go

with it: the eyes have art, the ears have
music, even the nose and the tongue
have perfume and gastronomy. But
we dont train our hands to touch as
we train our eyes to look or our ears
to listen. Every now and again, someone comes up with a touch museum
or starts a program for the visually
handicapped to experience art through
their ngers. But such enterprises often
have a hopeful, doomed feeling to
59
CARRIE BROWNSTEIN
call me crazy
hereby uninvent the conference call. Thats right,
I there is now no means by which six or twenty or
God forbida hundred people can all meet and discuss a topic over the phone. Personally, I feel like that
brief sentence alone should be enough for anyone to
pause and think, Multiple people trying to speak at
once? That sounds unwieldy and inefficient. It is. But,
for those of you who need further convincing that we
can do away with conference calling, allow me to
explain.
Imagine this:
You are collaborating on a project with a group of
people who live in different cities or work in separate
spaces. In an e-mail, someone blithely suggests, Lets
set up a call. Thirty to a thousand e-mails later, a day
and a time are established. We agree on Thursday at
9 A.M. P.S.T., noon E.S.T. Count on at least one person
to think that the meeting is at noon P.S.T. Get ready to
ll that person in later via a lengthy e-mail.
The conference-call details include a dial-in number followed by a PIN. The PIN is too long to memorize. (Wait, I just got a text message from the organizer: that pin isnt working, heres a new one.) Once
you enter your pin, you are prompted to state your
name, and then to press the pound key. This is the audio
version of your passport photo. Your name will never
60
JOON MO KANG
UNINVENT THIS
sound worse. I have entered the conversation as Rrie.

Ephen, Ob, Nfer, Sbrfmewnlkk, and RICK!!!! have entered the call as well, but you dont know that. So we are
forced to play the game of Who do we have on? For
a moment, this roll call is amusing, like the opening
credits of The Brady Bunch: Hey, there you are! Here
I am! Then we all realize how outdated that reference
feels, and the frisson of nostalgia-meets-novelty is replaced by a redundancy-induced ennui.
The head count is over, but we cant get down to
business quite yet. First, we have to have a tangent
orgy. Voices tangle, its three on one, I cant always tell
whos who. Michael, or I think its Michael, notes that
Christine posted a picture from a Rihanna concert on
her Instagram. Was it good? That does sound like a
miserable Uber ride to the venue. Adams baby is how
old now? And Elizabeth is calling from her vacation
in Taos. OoooOooOoo. Shell forward the name of
the restaurant later. Theres a quick update on the unseasonal weather. Whats seventy degrees in Celsius?
(Mark is in London.) Wait, did we lose Beth? Shes
texted Graham that shell try us back when she has
better reception. Should we wait for her? Lets. O.K.,
so who watched Empire last night? Taraji P. Henson is killing it.
A few of the fellow-conferencers are in a room together. They are gathered around a special speakerphone
that resembles the Star Trek insignia. I nd this particularly egregious, because this plastic spaceship is pretending to be a cool invention when its really just a landline phone in a Halloween costume.
Were eight minutes into the call when Barb suggests that we get started. I agree. Except that I can
barely hear what anyone is saying once were no longer speaking in clipped or stentorian phrases. There is
a hiss, a delay, and two people who sound like ailing
robots. Any ideas told at length are as distinct as a voice
mail from a friend who pocket-dialled you while skydiving. It is for these reasons that most people prefer
to be silent during the call, with their phones in speaker
mode and muted. This is a good time to shower, write
the word Why? on a notepad until the ink runs dry,
or organize your closet by color. Every once in a while,
I like to unmute and chime in with a Yes, No, or I
agree. About what, I have no idea.
A conference call is over when someone uses one of
the many conversational gaps, false starts, or No, you
go truces to suggest that perhaps for clarity we should
put our ideas in writing. As if to say, Yeah, I guess ipops werent a good choice for this 5K run. Acknowledging that weve engaged in the discourse equivalent
of a toddlers squiggle drawing. Hinting that next time
we play Marco Polo we could try a swimming pool instead of the Indian Ocean.
Do you understand what Im trying to say with these
analogies? Phew. Because if we were on a conference call
none of this would make any sense.
them: they seem more willed than

wanted.
Is it possible that the absence of
tactile art is a mere accident of history? The historian Constance Classen reminds us that in the eighteenth
century touching the objects in protomuseumscabinets of curiosities and
amateur collectionswas invited and
expected and even, in a way, compulsory. When the underkeeper of the
Ashmolean in 1760 tried to prevent a
museum visitor from handling artifacts he was accused of incivility, she
writes, in The Book of Touch, an
anthology of writings on the tactile.
The current reign of the optical museumwhere all the objects are shut
away, even ones that demand to be
touched to be understood at all, like
scientic or musical instrumentsis,
Classen shows, in The Deepest Sense,
a cultural history of touch, a recent
one, due to the association of touch
with irrationality and primitivism.
The museumgoer who touched was a
woman or a child; the patriarchs shut
things up in cases and then looked at
them imprisoned.
Of course, there may be more insurance than episteme in this change:
when ten people a week come to see
your Greek bust, letting them caress it
is one thing; when ten thousand come,
it is something else. And, indeed, one
of the ways in which the ten still distinguish themselves from the ten thousand is that they are allowed to touch
the objects: seeing and handling art
objects out of their frames and cases
is one of the perks of becoming an art
professional. (Art pros will often, perhaps unconsciously, talk or even brag
about handling a famous thingI saw
The Scream without its frame and
held it up! The Jasper Johns ashlight was actually in my grasp and I
got a sense of its magic!to assert
their authority.)
In the absence of art, touch turns
easily to entertainment. The highwater mark of the touch world can be
found at the haptics conferences that
ll the calendar of hapticians everywhere, most notably the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers
annual Haptics Symposium, which this
spring was held at a hotel in downtown Philadelphia, on a perfect April
weekend. Since the upper hall of the

hotel is eerily like a high-school gym,
one can get the impression of being at
a science fair to which only really smart
kids can submit projects. It helps the
effect that, haptics engineers being professionally unpretentious, they customarily refer to their innovations as incredibly cool, as in Did you see the
locating device they developed at
M.I.T.? It s incredibly cool! An
I.E.E.E. haptics fair is exactly what
Ben Franklin would have dreamed of
for American sciencepracticalminded, eccentric, and, as with bifocals, solving problems that one was not
entirely aware were problems until an
inventor found a solution to them.
The crowd includes the usual engineering typesMidwesterners, AsianAmericans, Asians from Asiaand, in
a historically male-dominated discipline, a surprising number of women.
There are also numerous special visitors from Apple and Google, extremely
anxious about saying too much about
what, exactly, theyre looking for, the
wrong word likely both to spill the
beans to the competition and to boost
undue speculation about somebodys
startup. The air crackles with the distinctive combination of altruism and
entrepreneurialism which governs the
tech world.
Many and cool are the devices on
offer: a Novel Vibrotactile Feedback
Assisted Mid Air Writing device; a
New Wearable Fingertip Haptic Interface for the Rendering
of Virtual Shapes and Surface Features. And here is
the Animotus, designed by
Adam Spiers, of Yale, and
intended to communicate
proximity and heading to
navigational targets; its a
small white two-story cube
that sits innocently in your
hand, willfully changing
shape asWi-Fid or Bluetoothed to
a G.P.S. systemit nudges and pushes
you in the right direction down streets
and around corners and up alleys, leading you with silent efficiency to whatever destination you have entered. It is
like having a tiny guide dog in the center of your hand, nudging your palm
with his tongue. (Eventually, it might
be connected to an obstacle-spotter, so
that it actually could replace those guide

dogs for the blind.) Another new haptic device allows for long-distance
Swedish massage; created by a team of
Mexican engineers, it allows the masseuse to simply wave her hands over a
motion sensor, which reproduces the
precise sensitivities of her touch on
the back of a patient lying on a pinpoint-tuned motion-sensor pad. Swedish masseuses would no longer have
to leave Sweden; they could stay in
Stockholm and e-mail massages anywhere in the world.
The attendees like to assure you,
and one another, that it is only in the
past few years that they have really put
the happy in haptics. The haptics devices that most of us are familiar with
are the simple ones that make a controller vibrate when the assassin is killed
in Assassins Creed or the defenseman
crunches a forward in NHL 16. The
new generation of haptics-makers tend
to be a little embarrassed by these primitive devices, which they have been
known to refer to as joy buzzers or
even whoopee cushions, in comparison with the new generation of haptics. A standard trope in an I.E.E.E.
demo is to place the old trembly technology beside the new, sleek and persuasive full-range touch illusion.
William Provancher, formerly a
professor of mechanical engineering
at the University of Utah, now runs a
startup called Tactical Haptics, and
had the hit demo of the conference.
He can create astonishing
touch illusions using simple gaming controls. With
the HTC Vivethose
virtual-reality goggles
he conjures a vast, empty
white skin of space, stretching out to every horizon.
Life-size zombies come at
you from zombie-style
holes that expand within
the white sheets, like the resurrected
dead in Signorellis painting of the Last
Judgment. Armed only with a bow and
arrowthough what you are actually
clutching is a controller with a trigger,
shaped more or less like a gas-pump
nozzleyou can feel the tension on
your virtual bow as you release the arrow,
and then the utter of the arrow and
the thunk of the ground trembling when
61
Its a new service from Amazon. It sends you something every

day and if you dont like it you just send it back.
the arrow strikes an onrushing zombie and he falls.

Heather Culbertson, now a postdoc
at Stanford, worked at Penn in its famous GRASP labthe acronym stands
for General Robotics, Automation,
Sensing, and Perceptionand she has
returned to Philadelphia to show off
her own invention. It is a haptic system that can create the illusion of a
hundred distinct textures when you
hold it and drag it against a neutral
surface. Metal mesh, metal shelving,
sandpaper, linoleum, bubble wrap, cardboard, coffee lter, painted brick: holding a pen-shaped utensil in your right
hand, you touch the desired textures
name and then drag the utensil across
a countertop, say, and in your ngers
you feel exactly the sensation that
you would feel if the tool were being
dragged across the material you specied. You feel wood; you feel brick; you
feel paper. More astonishing, the virtual textures change in feeling, as real
ones do, depending on the force and
speed with which you move the tool
across them.
The Queen of Haptics is Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, the brilliant Stanford-trained engineer who oversees the
haptics group at the GRASP lab and supervised Culbertsons work. The daughter of a developmental psychologist
62
and, one is not surprised to learn, a

member of the Stanford volleyball team
that twice won N.C.A.A. titlesshe
recognizes the gratifyingly large number of women engineers in haptics. (It
was Kuchenbecker who trained Culbertson, then passed her on to her own
supervisor, the formidable Allison
Okamura, at Stanford.) She is understandably reluctant to say that women
study feelings better because they have
more of them than men, but then she
more or less says it. We have a long
tradition of women as team leaders in
haptics, she volunteersthe founder
of the GRASP lab is a legendary roboticist named Ruzena Bajcsyand I
think its fair to say that women are
drawn to areas of engineering with obvious human interface. Places where
what youre doing obviously reaches
people, touches them, you might say.
She likes the potential of haptic devices to serve both pros and amateurs.
Heather Culbertsons tool allows designers to choose fabrics at a distance
and someone searching for clothes online to feel the linen of a summer shirt
while sitting at her computer. What
Heather and I did was to take a haptic cameraa touch-based camera
and a swatch of material, and record
ten seconds of interaction, dragging
the tool back and forth, fast and then
slow, light and then heavy, she explains.

But the key to creating a compelling
illusion that youre touching a real object is that the sensations you feel match
all the motions that you make. So we
cut that recording up into tiny pieces,
fty milliseconds or a hundred milliseconds of touch, so that we got the
minute details rightexactly what you
felt on canvas when you moved fast
but pushed lightly, and the next time,
when you were going slower but pushing harder. The illusion of texture
arises when the vibration pattern is
played back. The sensing stylus you
hold, which resembles a very fat ballpoint pen with a cable attached to its
rump, transmits patterned vibrations
to your ngers. In a way, its something
like the needle in the groove of an
old-fashioned vinyl album, only it plays
back into your ngers rather than into
your ears. When you change how hard
you are pressing or how fast you are
moving, the spectrum of the vibration
waveform changes to match the spectral changes we measured during the
original data recording, Kuchenbecker
says. Its like recording a certain natural sound, like a waterfall, and then
being able to generate a synthetic sound
that sounds the same but goes on forever and never repeats, so its not just
a looped recording. The trick is that
we constantly change the properties of
the waveform to match the exploration conditions, like adjusting how fast
the waterfall seems to be owing. And
it creates a uid, moving, three-dimensional illusion of texture. Choose your
texture, drag the tool across nothing,
and you feel touch plus time, which is
all that texture is.
ressure is tone, and texture mel-
P ody, but touch presses itself on us
most urgently at the extremities, in the

experience of pain and of sexual pleasure. In phantom pain, limbs and appendages that no longer exist continue
to feel and even to suffer. In sexual
touching, as distinct from the affective
kind, touch seems driven toward necessity. Both are forms of hyperbolized
touch, making more of the stimulation
than the stimulation alone would suggest was plausible.
Igor Spetic, in Cleveland, suffered
after his amputation from extreme,
persistent pain, which he felt permanently emanating from the hand he no

longer had. It was unbearable, twenty-four seven, as though my hand were
in a clamp, he says. Since the last thing
he vaguely recalls about his accident is
his hand clutched in a vise as he reached
out toward the mechanical press that
crushed it, it seems that his mind had
continued to feel that nal moment,
like a clanging bell that is the last thing
remembered, and still heard on his hospital bed, by the victim of a train accident. His hand is so much there from
the brains point of view that the brain
may be creating the pain it thinks the
hand ought to be feeling, the last tactile sensation it can recall.
This kind of phantom pain in amputated limbs is a widely observed
phenomenon, but for a long time it
was thought to be a response to trauma
of the cauterized nerves in the residual limb. One of the things that
Dustin Tylers project in Cleveland
has helped conrm is that it is also a
cognitive phenomenon, placed much
higher up in the system. After the
sensors in Spetics arm were stimulated, his pain diminished, and then
vanished. Reassured that the hand had
moved on, that the trauma had passed
and was no longer in need of response,
the brain released it from the emergency state of feeling pain. Tyler thinks
that, given the extraordinary cost of
supplying his prosthetic hand to amputeesthe eventual cost of the operation and the equipment, if it ever
becomes widely available, would probably reach tens of thousands of dollarsits brightest future may lie exactly in this kind of therapeutic use
for patients with extreme neuropathic
and phantom pain. The stim can heal.
In a similar way, even normal pain
has turned out to be intricately storydriven. The severity of pain, as Ronald Melzack, of McGill University,
and his students showed many years
ago, varies dramatically according to
the context it takes place in: soldiers
getting wounds on battleelds which
can send them home from the war are
numb and happy; women in childbirthan off-the-charts agony, measured by any objective standardreport
it afterward as painful but productive
work, and rarely refuse to have another
child because of it. Its not that the

soldier doesnt feel the wound, or the
mother the labor; but they reorganize
their experience to suit their situation.
It is one reason that, as has often been
pointed out, those who suffer even
from debilitating neuropathic pain
often lead satisfying lives, while those
who are born unable to feel pain usually die young. We can retune the
warning system; we cant live without
one. Pain is, of course, a critical part
of the new science of touch: most of
the money for projects like Dustin
Tylers comes from a research arm of
the Department of Defense, and the
Department of Defense has invested
tens of millions of dollars in sensing
prosthetics because so many soldiers
came back from Iraq and Afghanistan missing arms and legshaving
survived injuries that in earlier wars
would have left them dead.
Most touch acts are surreptitious or
subconscious or quietly social, but sexual touching is sought, specic, pointed
in desire, and enormous in consequence.
It is, in its way, phantom pleasurean
experience so discontinuous with other
feelings that one expects it to be not
merely a labelled but a licensed line of
its own, as though there were a hundred things to hear and one that must
be listened to. Yet while we tend, experientially, to separate sexuality from
other forms of touchingor at least
men do, seeing sex not as a blossom
from the world of the tactile but as a
thing unto itselfsexual touch seems,
in the realm of neurophysiology, curiously unspecied.
Youd think this would be a real
obvious thing, with conferences about
it, David Linden says. But there
seems to be nothing special about the
sexual skin. Weve got this nerve ending weve looked at and we dont know
if its involved in sexual sensation.
There are a lot of them in the clitoris and a lot in the glans penis, at the
highest density where most men report the strongest sexual sensations.
But thats not proof. It has long been
established that on the somatosensory cortexthe map that exists in
the brain, relating specic areas of the
cortex to specic places on the skin
the genitalia are represented both in
their expected place (around the lower
trunk and upper leg) and then again
below the leg, around the feet and
toes. This may help explain why, as
How we doing on those commandments?
one student of sexual fetishism reports, in search data there were 93,885
sexual searches for feet and only 5,831
sexual searches for hands.
And then there are small meaningful oddities, Linden goes on. There
are people who have orgasm syndrome.
Theyre like what we call pain asymbolicspeople who lose the emotional
content of pain. You hit them with a
hammer, and they know theyve been
hit, but it doesnt trouble them. The
same thing is true of pleasurewe
think of orgasm as intrinsically pleasurable. But you can have an orgasm
that is more convulsive than compelling. All the same things happen on
the peripheryrhythmic contractions
of the rectum and so on. But it doesnt
feel like much more than a sneeze.
What are they missing? A favorite
case in the literature is that of a woman
who would get a seizure every time
she brushed her teeththe seizures
are probably triggered by the repetitive physical activityand then the
seizure would provoke an orgasm. The
steady regimen of tooth-brushing orgasms was exhausting, rather than exalting, and led to an unusual morning
dilemma: to brush or not to brush.
Among ordinary people, though,
the two touch systems that seem most
automatic and involuntary, relating to

hurting and wanting, turn out to be
among the most socially embedded.
Pain is not a shared illusion, and sex is
not a cultural condition: cut yourself
with a carving knife and it will hurt no
matter what company youre in; an orgasm felt like an orgasm to Cleopatra
as to a Meg Ryan character. But both
are surprisingly dependent on our ideas
about what they ought to be like. Itch
passes through our bodies in direct currents, as if from ancient history; sex
and pain enter our lives communally,
loaded with the local news.
And so if the acceptable frontier of
haptic technology is virtual-reality gaming, the unspoken but quietly recognized frontier is romantic. There is already a hug shirt that can transmit
touch from sender to wearer. It was designed by Ryan Genz and Francesca
Rosella, of the London fashion rm
Cutecircuit, who decided, more than a
decade ago, that touch was the missing link in modern talk: We can transmit voice, we can transmit images
but we couldnt transmit touch, Ryan
Genz says. Originally made as a sort
of giant blood-pressure cuff, constricting and releasing the wearer in haptic
harmony with another wearer, the shirt
proved alarming, and now one hug shirt
Then the messenger shouldnt have been such a jerk.
merely vibrates in long-range synch

with another. The rst transatlantic
hug happened during a conference in
2006, and still longer, ercer hugs can
be imagined. (The newest designs include L.E.D. elements, so that the trace
of the embrace lights up.) The hug
shirts love children are almost too obvious to be enumerated. The only logical advancement in haptics is to full-on
virtual sex, the sex-tech journalist
Emma McGowan writes. Full-body
haptic suits are no longer a far-fetched
sci- nerds dream. Haptics engineers
chat about allowing virtual sex with
ctional characters or famous celebrities.
At that point, haptics crosses over not
just into erotics but into accessories. As
the Canadian researcher Meredith Chivers points out, however, there is a demonstrable disconnect between what
women, at least, respond to physically
and what they self-report as provocative. When it comes to sex, the science
of touch conrms that stories, more
than sensations, are what stir us. A story-making machine is more likely than
a haptic suit to turn us on, as has been
the rule of the erotic life of touch since
it began.
very haptic application, once
E its cool stuff is demonstrated, is
followed by a sober explication from

its maker on its four potential uses, always offered in descending order of
piety: medicine, prostheses, commerce,
and gaming. A haptic device might
help you operate on a prostate, add
touch sensitivity to an articial hand,
allow you to assess the fabric on an online shirt, or make you feel the trigger
pressure when you shoot at zombies in
a virtual-reality game.
But the real apotheosis of the enterprise will be achieved when articial haptic intelligence is successfully
modelled in robots. As the long-standing dream of the articial-intelligence
community was to make a computer
that could defeat a chess master, it is
the dream of the robotics community
to make, by 2050, a humanoid-robotic
team that can defeat the World Cup
soccer champions. Kuchenbecker says,
smiling, Its our BHAGthe Big Hairy
Audacious Goal.
For her, the core discovery of the
past decades research in touch is that
skin-smart is as smart as any other kind

of smart. She talked about this in the
GRASP lab, while showing off a Da Vinci,
a robotlike surgical system. The Da
Vincia grinning panoply of robotic
arms and sharp tiny tools, like the torture device in a Bond lmcan operate internally and make incisions with
a precision that no human surgeon can
hope to have. Although temporarily
down for repairs, the Da Vinci bears a
sign warning visitors to keep clear of
it: Do Not Touch. Testing Is in Progress. Robot Is Active. Though down,
it is apparently far from out, and not
to be tried with. Nearby, a second,
chubbier robot, designed to have more
cushioned arms and less lethal swingback, keeps it consoling company. Both
reside in a room devoted to robots;
nearby are several knee-high would-be
soccer players on an undersized soccer
eld. They will, in principle, be scaled
up one day, as they are perfected to
meet the BHAG. (For the moment, they
tend to fall over and lose their heads
when trying to recover the ball and
kick it accurately in one move.)
Kuchenbeckers goal is to provide
robots with more than mere mechanical expertise. She wants them to have
haptic responsiveness, so that the surgeon operating the robot can feel in
her own hands the bounce or ab of
an internal muscle, or palpate a liver
from long distance. Ultimately, that intelligence could be infused in the robot
itself, so that it would need no human
to control it.
Haptic intelligence is vital to human
intelligence, she concludes. Its not
just dexterity. Its nding your way in
the world: its embodiment, emotion,
attack. Haptic intelligence is human
intelligence. Were just so smart with
it that we dont know it yet. Its actually much harder to make a chess piece
move correctlyto pick up the piece
and move it across the board and put
it down properlythan it is to make
the right chess move. She adds, slyly,
When I took A.I. as a student, I was
so dismayed to nd that most A.I. is
just stupid brute force, just running
through the possibilities a machine can
look at quickly. Computer chess looks
intelligent, but its under-the-hood stupid. Reaching and elegantly picking up
the right chess piece uidly and hav-
Aint no drab plumage at closing time.
ing it land in the right place in an uncontrolled environmentthats hard.

Haptic intelligence is an almost irreproducible miracle! Because people are
so good at that, they dont appreciate
it. Machines are good at nding the
next move, but moving in the world
still baffles them.
he study of haptic intelligence
T leads to even deeper questions
about the somatic self. Our skin is us

because it draws a line around our existence: we experience the world as ourself. We can separate ourself from our
eyes and ears, recognize the information they give us as information, but
our tactile and proprioceptive halos
supply us with the sense that we are
constant selves.
There are rare conditions in which
you come to believe that while, say, the
right half of your body is you being
yourself, the left half of your body is
someone elsessome uncomfortably
close-talking, peering stranger you
would like to get away from. Out-ofbody experiences are related to these
illusions, and they are probably key
both to religious experience and to tales
of alien abductions. The possibility of
such illusions suggests that their oppositeour agreed-on coherent sense
of a continuous selfmay be a convenient ction, an organized cognitive

heuristic that we impose on experience
to let us go on having it.
When somatic illusions strike, in
other words, they strike our very sense
of who we are. It is possible, by tapping at sequential spots on the skin, to
create the illusion of intermediate taps
between them, as though a rabbit were
hopping down our arm. The so-called
cutaneous rabbit, whose paws we feel
strongly, can even be made to hop out
of the body and leap onto a stick held
by a subject. (The stick shakes, or so
the subject feels, as though the rabbit
had jumped on it.) The rabbit is just
us, leaping out of our own skin.
In another way, it is increasingly
possible to imagine oneself as being
discontinuous with ones skin. Igor
Spetic feels something like this when
he leaves his hand behind. Think about
it, Dustin Tyler says. Theres no real
constraint on how far in space the connection could go. You could be sitting
here in Cleveland and performing surgery in Tahiti, and actually feel the esh
and organs of your patient. Actually
feel them. For that matter, you could
text-message a handshake to a friend.
Even a visitor, playing with Spetics
virtual hand, without the added bonus
65
of the stim that enables him to feel

the surface shapes of nonexistent objects, can nd the experience of solving problems so intense that he feels
that his hand, too, is in there, on a
screen, inside a box. You are here; your
hand is six feet away. The philosopher
Daniel Dennett, playing with this idea,
came up with a thought experiment in
which ones brain sits in a vat in Texas
while articial, remote-controlled hands
and eyes and limbs engage at its direction from Oklahoma. The essay he
wrote about this thought experiment
was titled, simply, Where Am I? For
the rst time, this fantasy is becoming
readily imaginable in the real world: in
a sense, Spetics hand is left in the lab
on the weekend. A bit of him is there.
t can sometimes seem as if the
I world of thinking about touch were
divided into that of philosophers and

students of culture who study the phenomenology of sensing, and that of
the scientists and engineers who study
its mechanics, with an abyss of understanding between them. In the introduction to The Book of Touch,
Constance Classen explains that the anthology does not offer any scientic
information about touch, because attempts to explain tactile culture through
scientic models tell more about the
culture of science than about the scientic basis of culture. The humanists are certain that what the scientists
are doing is really cultural studies that
dont yet know themselves.
One of the few multilinguals in the
eldsomeone equally at home with
neuroscience and with phenomenology, with the language of data and with
the talk of daily human experienceis
Dacher Keltner. A professor of psychology at Berkeley, he is a specialist in the
science of emotions; he was the scientic adviser on Pixars Inside Out, the
movie about the inner life of a little girl.
I dropped him a line one Sunday morning, and discovered that, serendipitously,
he was in New York that day. He suggested that I meet him that very afternoon, in Washington Square Park, where
he was going to spend some time watching people be embodied.
I found Keltner, calm and inquisitive, observing the world from a park
bench. He looks like a Pixar version of
66
the emotion of Benevolence: graying

blond hair, worn long and parted in
the middle, a serene smile always on
his lips, and creased eyes suggesting
perpetual, hope-lled curiosity mixed
with wisdom. He explained that he
likes to come out and watch emotions
becoming embodied, by which he
means seeing all the ways in which
people take on the poses of their feelings, with the additional twist that he
thinks, in effect, that the poses come
rst. In his view, touch is the primary
moral experience: it is morality as we
experience it in the rst instance in the
actual world. The thoughts come afterward to administer the thing. Touch
is the rst system to come online, and
the foundations of human relationships
are all touch, he says. Skin to skin,
parent to child, touch is the social language of our social life. It lays a basis
for embodiment in feeling.
Keltner has the power, shared by true
students of a science, to make one see
with his eyes: looking out across the
panoply of human interaction in the
sunlit square, one sees at once how much
depends on skin and near-skin encounters: dating couples lean forward, hair
brushes and ngertips touch; children
bump as they play, not too hard and
then hard enough to be warning and
instructing; chess players off in their
corner imply tentativeness, certainty,
triumph, and mid-game anxiety by the
sureness or the uncertainty with which
they grasp and move their pieces.
The foundation of human relationships is all touch, Keltner goes on. There
are four years of touch exchanged between mother and baby. Among primates, the sense of reciprocal altruism
emerges from food sharing, and they are
always systemically touching each other
as they share food. Reciprocity is tactile.
Aggression is tactile. Sex is tactile. Its
the root moral precept of our sense of
common humanity. In the social realm,
our social awareness is profoundly tactile. Keltner was one of the co-authors
of a much talked of study that encoded
twelve distinct kinds of celebratory
touches among pro basketball players,
including st bumps, high-ves, chest
bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest
punches, head slaps, head grabs, low ves,
high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team
huddles. They discovered that teams
whose players touched one another a lot

did better than those whose players didnt.
Touch lowers stress, builds morale, and
produces triumphsa chest bump instructs us in coperation, a half-hug in
compassion.
Keltners approach to touch turns on
the deeper idea that consciousness itself
is exteriorizedthat we are alive in relation to others, not in relation to some
imagined inner self, the homunculus in
our heads. Our bodies are membranes
in the world, with sensation and meaning passing seamlessly through them.
Our experience of our bodiesthe things
they feel, the moves they make, and the
textures and the people they touchis
our primary experience of our minds.
The brain is just simply part of our bodies is how the philosopher Alva No
often puts it. The truer cartoon, in a sense,
would be Outside In, with the emotions produced by people bumping
against one another. A key to being embodied in this way is tactile experience
what we touch, whom we touch, how
many we touch, and why we nd them
touching. Grasping, hugging, striking,
playing, caressing, reaching, scratching
backs, and rubbing rears: these are not
primitive forms of communication. They
are the fabric of being conscious. The
work of the world is done by handling
it. We live by feel.
Later, in a caf near the square, Keltner has a cappuccino and, sitting at the
counter, watches the variety of human
touch as it reveals itself in that unending theatre: ngers ying on the keyboard, hands darting out to make a point,
heads turning to underline a joke, bodies slouching and primping and jostling
and soliciting attention. An intensity of
feeling combines, in our tactile lives,
with a plurality of kinds.
Perhaps the reason that touch has
no art form is that its supremacy makes
it hard to escape. We can shut our eyes
and cover our ears, but its our hands
that do it when we do. We cant shut
off our skins. It is the obscurity of the
other senses that makes us enliven them
with art: touch is too important to be
elaborated or distilled. It just is. What
we see we long for; what we hear we
interpret; what we touch we are. The
art we aspire to is a remote sensation,
always out of reach. Life is the itch we
are still trying to scratch.
UNINVENT THIS
LEE CHILD
telling tales
he other day I saw my father, who is ninety-two
JOON MO KANG
T years old, and in very poor health. Physically, hes a
wreck, and mentally hes not much better. At his peak,

he was a capable and intelligent man, by nature rational
to the point of coldness. But the other day he was full
of childlike fear of the darkness that lay ahead. Hes religious, in an austere way. So I knew what he meant.
Dont be afraid, I said. Youre a good man, and you
lived a good life. In fact, neither thing was true. But
what else could I say? Im sure he said the same to his
own father, for the same reasons, and with the same reservations. Dont we all?
Ten thousand fathers ago, we would have said nothing, because we didnt yet have language. We didnt yet
have much of anything. A passing U.F.O. would have
written us off as a certain dead end. Our contemporary
competitors, the Neanderthals, would have got the nod.
We were weak and slender, and often sickly, and shabby
toolmakers. Then we developed language, and everything
changed. We had grammar and syntax, which turned out
to be the best tools of all. Now we could plan, and discuss, and theorize, and speculate. We could cordinate
ahead of time, with a plan B and a plan C already in
place. A coperative pack of early humans was suddenly
the most powerful animal on Earth. So that if the U.F.O.
came back today it would have to admit that its rst impressions were wrong.
But along the way something extraordinary happened.

At rst, we prospered by planning and speculating based
on what we knew to be true, or could reasonably and responsibly infer to be true. In other words, we lived in a
nonction world. We still do, in every practical way. My
wife might tell me that her phone says its going to rain,
so I should take my umbrella, and every step of that
transaction would be meaningless without the fundamental assumption of truth. Most of life is like that. Its
a great strategy. Ten thousand generations ago, our bones
were piled high in hyenas dens. Now Voyager has left
the solar system. Or not, depending on how youreasonably and responsiblyinterpret the Oort Cloud. These
are the things we talk about, and this is how we talk
about them.
At some point, though, we invented a parallel option.
We invented ction. We started talking about things
that hadnt happened to people who didnt exist. Why?
Not for entertainment during our leisure time. We were
still deep in prehistory. We had no leisure time. Everything was a desperate struggle for survival. We did nothing unless it had a chance of keeping us alive until
morning. Fiction evolved for a purpose. Warnings and
cautionary tales could be sourced from the grim nonction world. A sabre-toothed tiger will kill you. O.K.,
got it. Fiction pushed the pendulum the other way. It
inspired, and empowered, and emboldened. It said, No,
actually, there was a guy, a friend of a friend, who came
face to face with a sabre-toothed tiger, a huge one, and
he turned and outran it, all the way back to the cave,
safe as can be. So dont panic. It doesnt always turn out
bad. Then, perhaps a hundred generations later, the story
evolved, and the friend of the friend killed the tiger. The
action hero was born. Strength and courage would save
us. And it worked. Fiction in its various forms proved
just as powerful to our survival as any other factor. Some
would say more powerful. Some would name us not
Homo sapiens but Pan narrans: the storytelling ape. Would
Voyager be leaving the solar system if we hadnt long
ago formalized and mythologized our inchoate desire
to wander?
But the bad things would not be happening, either.
Every bad thing depends on the same two components
as every good thing: people prepared to lie, and other
people prepared to believe them. The habit of credulity,
bred into us, albeit inspiring and empowering and emboldening, has led to some very bad outcomes throughout what we know of our history. From small things, like
a father believing a son, to much larger things, like a billion miserable and terried dead. All balanced against
the good things. Is it fty-fty? Or worse than that? And
what about babies and bathwater? Could we give up the
stunning joy that the good side of storytelling brings in
order to erase the appalling horrors of the bad side?
Where does the balance lie?
Its ironic, given my profession, but the more I learn
the more I would uninvent ction.
67
PROFILES
PLAY GROUND
How a Dutch landscape architect is reinventing the park.
BY ALEXANDRA LANGE
he landscape architect
Adriaan Geuze hopped onto
the grass, cupping his hands to
his ears. You can hear a million insects, he said, in his vowelly Dutch
accent. You think, Wow, you are in the
jungle. I heard crickets, birds, a passing jet. Purple and yellow wildowers
crowded the edges of the asphalt path
where I was standing, which was dramatically lined with snow-white concrete. Not quite a jungle, but it was
hard to believe that we were seven minutes from lower Manhattan, deposited
by ferry on Governors Island.
The island has shimmered with architectural possibility since being sold
back to the people of New York for a
dollar, in 2003. Now, because of Geuze,
when you pass from the islands historic district through a vaulted archway in Liggett Hall, a former Army
barracks designed by McKim, Mead &
White, you shift more than a century
in sensibility. On one side, there are
gracious officers homes with porches.
On the other, a curved, man-made landscape rolls out in front of you, like a
living map. Ten years ago, the view
would have looked very different: as
at as a pancake, and dotted with derelict Coast Guard buildings, including
a salty Burger King. A visitor in 2016
nds four paths outlined in thick white
concrete curbs that rise and fall from
ground level to seating height, like a
topographic doodle. Signs point to a
lawn, hammocks, and what you are really here to see: the Hills, New Yorks
newest peaks, crowning a forty-acre
park.
The curbs are brilliant in the sun,
as smooth as marble. An aqueous pattern has been lightly pressed into them,
suggesting the wash of tide, frozen in
place. They are irresistible in the manner of the yellow brick road, a red carpet, a lighted runway: your eye leaps
ahead, and your body has to follow.
68
Geuze pressed pause just at the point

where the surrounding cityscape of
New York disappears and the rise of
the park encloses a visitor. In holding
you here, between the city and the
peaks, Geuze delays the big reveal, focussing attention on the curtain, on the
way that the landscape architecture has
embroidered the ground beneath your
feet. Then he draws the curtain back
to show a star that needs no introduction: as a visitor strolls down the path,
the Hills part to reveal the Statue of
Liberty.
We wanted to manipulate the eye
to create suspense, Geuze said, of his
design team, so you have a craving to
see the statueand then you see her.
From the top of whats called Outlook
Hill, you can gaze across the harbor to
Liberty Island. We expect people will
take a sele there, Geuze said. Then,
after updating your Instagram, you can
turn for a three-hundred-and-sixtydegree view of Staten Island, the Verrazano Narrows, the Brooklyn Bridge,
lower Manhattan, Jersey City. It is like
the Bosporus, or the Table Mountain,
in Cape Town. The beach of Rio,
Geuze said of the view. All these currents, they come together, and theres
granite rocks, the great estuary. Every
civilization would like to leave footprints here. When I rst read about
Governors Island, I thought, This is
the coolest spot on the planet.
If the High Line provides an elevated perspective on the industrial cityscape, the new geography of Governors Island offers one for the bay. In
addition to Outlook Hill, there is Discovery Hill, to the south, which will
be more heavily wooded, the better to
cloak a new, site-specic sculpture by
the British artist Rachel Whiteread.
Kids will surely scramble up and down
Outlooks set of giant steps, made with
granite blocks recycled from the islands partly dismantled seawall, and
head toward Slide Hill, to the east,

whose forty-nine-foot slide terries
adults. Grassy Hill, to the north, has a
twenty-ve-foot roll that looks ordinary by comparisonthe greensward
is intended for picnics and playbut
it is still visionary, conjured from a combination of landll, demolished Coast
Guard buildings, and a carefully calibrated soil recipe. As of July 19th, this
landscape will be for everyone. Because
of the mild winter, and the tight cordination between the design and the
construction teams, the Hills will open
ten months ahead of schedule.
Governors Island has been popular
since it opened to seasonal visitors,
in 2008. Leslie Koch, the outgoing
president of the Trust for Governors
Island, has guided the islands development for the past ten years. (She announced last Friday that she was stepping down.) She likes to point out that
the island welcomed four hundred
and fty thousand people in the four
months that it was accessible last year
a number surpassed only by New Yorks
largest cultural institutions.
In 2007, Geuze and his landscapearchitecture and urban-design rm,
West 8, which is based in Rotterdam,
won a competition for the Governors
Island project. In Kochs recollection,
the conversation around parks in New
York at that time centered on resuscitating historic parks like Frederick Law
Olmsted and Calvert Vauxs Central
and Prospect Parks, and on private developers adding pocket-size open spaces
to midtown. (The High Line and
Brooklyn Bridge Park had yet to open.)
West 8s winning proposal would bring
a stylized, contemporary park to New
York City, on a site that many thought
would never be developed.
Landscape history is lled with
major earthworkshills and grottoes,
parterres and canalsbut their purpose was often to trick the eye into
SOURCE: FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: TIM CLAYTON/CORBIS/GETTY; KENA BETANCUR/GETTY; IMAGE

SOURCE/GETTY; PAUL SEHEULT/EYE UBIQUITOUS/UIG/GETTY; CAREL VAN HEES (PEOPLE)
When Adriaan Geuze rst learned of Governors Island, the site of his new design, he thought it the coolest spot on the planet.
ILLUSTRATION BY EDA AKALTUN
69
ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN
seeing double
familiar Victorian superstition claims that a mir-
A rors reection captures a portion of the soul; break-
ing a mirror, therefore, injures the spirit of the person

who broke it. For this reason, the use of a mirror entailed
a set of safety guidelines and instructions: if a relative
had recently died, mirrors in the home would be covered
to prevent his or her soul from becoming trapped, and
children under two years of age were to avoid them, as
their souls were still developing and could be stolen entire. These days, we no longer shield our souls from the
mirrors in our home, but the residue of old phobias lingers in the anxiety with which we approach our reection. We seek the mirrors approval, we fear what it has
to tell us. Living in a world full of reections has helped
us know ourselves better, in a skin-deep sense, but it has
also bred dissociation, obsession. By transforming our
faces into images for scrutiny, the mirror has made us
more careful about ourselves as objects, at the expense
of caring for ourselves as whole beings.
For much of mirrors long history, they were luxury
items, fragile and expensive to produce, owned mainly
by the aristocratic and the wealthy. Who could have
70
JOON MO KANG
UNINVENT THIS
imagined, then, that they would one day be so cheap and

so common that wed use them to wallpaper our bathrooms and dance oors, line our skyscrapers with their
smooth, shiny surfaces, and affix them to our cars? Like
most people, I wake up each morning and look for my
face in the bathroom mirrorbut if I wanted to avoid
this it would be nearly impossible to do. I open the doors
of the medicine cabinet, and in the mirrored backs I
see my face projected six or more times, from different
angles, reections of reections receding into the far
distance. In the elevator, I watch myself in the convex
security mirror, my head ballooning. When you seek
outor seek to avoidyour own reection, the modern
city becomes a hall of mirrors: car windows, reective
walls, and plate glass are everywhere, transmitting a
cacophony of different versions of youthis one too
short, that one too wide, another one with a sickly color
youve never seen before. Your own face runs rampant
through the world and, like a word repeated too many
times, begins to lose its reference.
In this way, whats whole becomes fractured: a series
of variants is generated, some better than you had imagined, others worse, all converging in an impulse to control what we see reected through a more effortful arrangement of the hair, body, and face. Rather than reveal
us to ourselves as we are, mirrors show the many different ways we might be, and press us to choose from among
them the image that we want to project to the world.
Does the fascination of glimpsing ourselves outweigh
the psychological strain of continually caching, processing, and relating these different likenesses? Are we better off for knowing that were having a bad hair day, or
that there are wrinkles on our faces where there never
used to be? Early mirrors lacked precision; made from
bronze or obsidian, they revealed the viewer to himself
hazily in their polished surfaces. Our crisp, shiny mirrors, which allow us to peer deeply into faults that we
hardly ever notice in others, complicate more than they
clarify.
In the modern imagination, the mirror has been
placed at the center of what denes us as a species, and
what denes us as individuals. While many other species can make tools or communicate in some form of
language, only a select fewgreat apes, dolphins, orcas,
elephants, and the Eurasian magpiehave demonstrated
the self-awareness to recognize their own reection in
a mirror. But before there was any such thing as a mirror, human beings were still self-aware, possessed of an
individualized sense of self; the only real difference, perhaps, was the degree to which we relied on others to
view us. Because we could not witness ourselves, except
with difficulty in pools of water, we needed others to
see us, to make us visible. It seems hard, but not impossible, to imagine ourselves back into that earlier, more
unencumbered state: knowing our bodies by how it feels
to dwell in them, instead of by how they shift incrementally over the course of a day, or a lifetime.
believing that the landscape had always been that way (the British tradition) or to overwhelm you with the intricacy of plantings, sculpture, and
fountains (the French tradition). In either case, until the nineteenth century
such gardens were strictly an upperclass diversion. As industrialized cities
grew in density, some leaders set aside
land, often at the edge of town, as pleasure grounds intended as a public-health
benet. When real-estate values around
those parcels rose, they became central
rather than peripheral.
In the past decade, the thinking
about the location of parks has changed.
A major occupation of landscape architecture is the reuse and remediation
of industrial and infrastructural sites.
Theres not much virgin territory left
in cities, so to create open space is to
begin again on the ruins of the past.
In 2004, Chicagos Millennium Park
converted acres of industrial lakefront
into a linear landscape with wildower
gardens, sculpture, and a Frank Gehry
concert pavilion. In Seattles Olympic
Sculpture Park, broad green concrete
bridges zigzag over the roads and rails
that once cut off the citys art museum
from the water. West 8s most ambitious completed landscape, Madrid Ro,
is a park covering a riverfront highway
that used to divide the city.
Landscape today often abandons
the fantasy of playing Mother Nature
to achieve spectacular designs that
aunt their manufactured underpinnings, enticing architects to cross over
from buildings to the spaces around
them. The half-mile-long Superkilen
park, in Copenhagen, designed by big
Architects, Topotek 1, and Superex,
places miniature rolling green hills, a
pink patchwork market square, and
star-shaped Moroccan-tile fountains
into one of the citys most diverse
neighborhoods. Singapores Gardens
by the Bay, designed by Grant Associates, Wilkinson Eyre, and Atelier
Ten, is landscape as entertainment,
with a grove of steel Supertrees, overgrown with plants, that provide shade
during the day and light up at night.
In the Cloud Forest, under a glass
dome that resembles Santiago Calatravas recently opened Oculus, in lower
Manhattan, a thirty-ve-metre waterfall crashes down the side of a cone-
shaped mountain. Parks have become

the new architecture stars, perfectly
suited for our green and communityseeking age.
euze, fifty-five, is slim and
G boyish, with scruffy hair and a
coat thats perpetually aap. (His last

name is pronounced Huh-zaa, with
a guttural H.) He is restless when
seated, reaching for tabletop bric-abrac to model a scene in 3-D. Hed
prefer to cycle, to walk up and down
and around the contours and elevation
changes that his profession inscribes
upon the earth, because thats when
his conversation and inspiration ow.
Those curbs, the landscape features
that you can stroll beside, sit on, lie on,
or walk on, are a built manifestation
of his own looping energies. When
Geuze won the commission to design
Torontos Central Waterfront, in 2006,
one of his rst requests was to be taken
to a Canadian lake and taught how to
canoe. At a rustic camp on Lake Algonquin, he got his wish, and, in return, taught his host how to sh. On
Dutch TV last summer, he was shown
making birdcalls from a cell in a
twenty-foot-tall concrete honeycomb
wall that West 8 designedand then,
like a naughty schoolboy, walking along
the top.
After leading me to the peak of the
Hills, Geuze sat in the more formal
part of the Governors Island composition, amid low hedges planted in a
leaf-shaped pattern. This is where you
have a coffee before setting off on your
island adventure. In my childhood, I
had such a strong experience hanging
around in the landscape, he told me.
I was a bird-watcher, but I also hunted
and collected bird eggs. I had a cousin,
he was rougher than I and even more
of a daredevil. We could jump over canals with a stick, literally cross the landscape. We caught pike in an illegal
waymade lines in the evening and
picked them up in the morningand
sold them to the restaurants. I had a
radius of twenty miles when I was ten
or eleven years old.
Growing up in Dordrecht, a Renaissance city in the western Netherlands, Geuze lived on the green edge
between town and country. This being
the Netherlands, there was no mistak-
ing the division: on one side, a canal

bordered by tightly wedged row houses;
on the other, a path and perhaps a house
on top of a high grassy dike, a thin line
of blue water, a at farm eld or a rough
stand of trees. Each plot was a rectangle, or as close to a rectangle as engineers like Geuzes father and grandfather could build. Ecology in Holland
is in grids, Geuze said. Every frog in
Holland is in a line, because all the
water is linear.
But that geometry didnt bring boredom or conformity. The smell of the
tide near Dordrecht, it intoxicated my
brains,Geuze said. All the boys were
into soccer, but I could not play soccer. Waiting out the school day, he
would think, he said, I have a tree hut.
I have secret places you dont even know
where they are. When Geuze was a
teen-ager, his father took him along to
international industry and agricultural
shows. We went to the German Hanover machinery expos, where there
would be not ve machines but ve
thousand machines. He took me on
very big boats, at least in my imaginationocean steamersand even an
oil platform. Even into the engine
rooms, where the violent noise was
there. When I am romantic, I am thinking about these things.
The project that rst brought West 8
international fame is a prime example of Geuzes romance with nature
and machinery. Schouwburgplein, or
Theatre Square, is a plaza built atop
a parking garage, in central Rotterdam, that by the nineteen-eighties had
become a needle park. A methadone
clinic in a nearby church attracted
thousands of drug addicts from across
northern Europe, and, eventually, the
neighbors rebelled against the crime
and the crowds. Geuze lived not far
away, in Lijnbaan, a modernist postwar development that put housing and
a then revolutionary pedestrian shopping mall in the bombed-out central
city. I had broken car windows. My
car radio and bicycle were stolen more
than once, Geuze said. Politicians
had made crazy plans for the plaza
that were very expensive, but the outcome was zero.
In 1994, West 8 was asked to propose a redesign of the park. Clean it,
take the terraces out, give the garage a
71
72
stroyed by German bombs during the

Second World War. The citys lack of
historic context is obviously freeing,
and has generated a tremendous quantity of late-twentieth-century architecture that plays off the scale, simplicity,
and material of the modernist box and
the dockland cranes. Picture-perfect
Amsterdam, by contrast, is a city in a
circle, Geuze said, drawing his arms
in close. For me, it is like Dantes
HellI feel Ill never escape.
The Netherlands is a country his-
Beaufort scale, so the alarm sounds at

Beaufort force 8. On the radio, Geuze
said, Literally every month you will
hear once, Tomorrow the wind will be
West 8.
Geuze has a tendency to reach for
natural metaphors. My profession is
like surngyou have to wait for the
wave, he told me. He describes landscape architecture as being as much
about operations as it is about design. I wait, I watch, he said. As such,
Geuze has long been involved with
Rotterdams Schouwburgplein, or Theatre Square, won West 8 international fame.

torically at odds with the sea, a natural enemy that it has pushed back with
dikes and canals to create farmland and
new towns. God created the world,
but the Dutch created the Netherlands
the saying goes. In the Netherlands,
the desire to make nature orderly and
calculable is ever-present, but there is
also a wariness, a recognition that the
Dutch live in a fragile landscape of extreme contrasts. The name of Geuzes
rm, West 8, refers to extremity. When
he set it up, in 1987, he and his partner at the time wanted a name that
was short, worked internationally, and
was not one of their surnames. In the
Netherlands, the big storms usually
come from the Atlantic Ocean, from
the west. In the old days, when the
winds reached a certain speed, the national water board would place people
on the dikes to watch for breaches. A
heavy storm is a nine or a ten on the
Dutch politics regarding land use, arguing that municipal governments are
letting too many buildings encroach
on the green edge that he once traversed by bike and by pole. He admires
gures like New Yorks former Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and Madrids former Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardn,
who provided political shortcuts for
the extended and often tedious process of making landscape.
Since the founding of West 8, the
office has hopscotched around the Rotterdam docklands in search of wideopen spaces for its sixty-ve employees. (There are twenty more in New
York.) One early office had room for
football matches and roller-skatingThat brought a lightness and
freedom to the work, Geuze said. The
current one is housed in a nineteen-sixties steel-framed building raised on
stilts, which used to contain a customs
GEOGRAPHY PHOTOS/UIG/GETTY
face-lift, Geuze recalls being told.

Give us a festival plaza that can
be easily cleaned, with benches and
lamps. The brief was for a defensible space, with no place to hide, and
no complicated elements that would
be hard to maintain or easy to damage. But a lamppost, in that grim setting, didnt need to be straight from
Narnia. We thought, O.K., they asked
us to do a lamp in the city of Rotterdam, Geuze said. Of course, that
lamp will refer to the docklandsit
will be hydraulic.
Geuze and West 8 designed four
tall, hinged, gantry-like lampposts
painted the signature red of the citys
Willemsbrug Bridge, and set them
along one side of the plaza. They loom
over it like dinosaurs. Six-year-old
boys, they are craving to go to the plaza,
push the button, and set the lamp in
motion, Geuze said. Children of
Geuzes button-pushing temperament
can indeed create a mechanical ballet,
but for less playful adults just moving
across the plazas different types of
deckingwood, perforated metal, and
rubbermakes you aware of your steps
and the ground beneath your feet. In
the original design, a section of the
oor was patterned with silver maple
leaves.
It is not an in-between, everyoneis-happy design, Geuze said. It is a
surprising design, a place that you have
never been before, so you are able to
say, What is it? Some people didnt
get it, but younger people like it and
say, Wow, this is our plaza. In summer, Schouwburgplein now functions
as a communal space for soccer games
and skateboarders and music festivals.
Videos on the Internet show ash-mob
performances of Gangnam Style, as
well as more organized events, with
sofas scattered across the expanse and
spotlighted by the gantries. It has very
strong imagery if it is raining and it is
at night, Geuze said. The steel reects
a million lamps, the glare of the city.
You can move one of the dinosaur lamps
and illuminate your lover if you want,
which is seductive.
Schouwburgplein, for Geuze, is also
self-reexive, turning Rotterdams
notorious charmlessness into a jumping-off point for design. Rotterdam is
an industrial city that was all but de-
office. The top oor is the usual openplan array of desks and pinup boards,
but, instead of an architects racks of
carpet or countertop samples, there are
chunks of stone, in every shade of gray,
lined up by the long windows.
The employees are a multinational
group, with English as a common language. In the office one day, Geuze
stopped to discuss a design for a boulevard in Moscow with a small team
of designers, sketching the proper spacing of trees on the plans. He was then
feet up, he told me. The children and

I lled the hexagons with rocks, like a
drystone wall. The exercise convinced
him that the hexagons needed curves
If you do miles and miles of hexagons,
it starts to look like infrastructure
and that the pergola could become a
way of getting the local community
more involved with the building of the
park. Children could plant container
gardens in the cells, and neighbors could
prune climbing vines. Attempts to attract bats and owls and insects could
JEROEN MUSCH
Building the pergola, in Utrechts Mximapark, involved the local community.

waylaid by a set of serious, black-clad
young people with renderings of a
tongue-shaped fountain for a private
client. He pointed out, gently, that a
few options looked a little X-rated for
a family home. One oor below, Geuze
picked up a model of the walled enclosure at Mximapark, in nearby
Utrechtits called the pergola
which he was taking me to see that afternoon. The pergola, rendered in wood
and tted into a little carrying case,
looked like a classic hexagonal honeycombmuch less interesting than the
soft, stretched cells that the project had
morphed into.
Geuze used this model to build a
prototype in the back yard of his vacation house, in Spain, where he goes
with his wife, Jacqueline Blom, who is
a well-known actress, and their three
children. I made the hexagons for the
rst time there, a fty-foot wall, twelve
also be made. Only then would adults

and children feel as if the landscape
were theirs.
The pergola helped solve a design
problem at Mximapark: Geuze and
West 8 knew that the neighbors in
the residential areas around the park
wouldnt countenance a wall, but they
felt that the park had to have an edge.
The pergola prototype from Spain became a three-and-a-half-kilometre
cast-concrete white cellular structure,
on legs, that stalks across the landscape
like an aqueduct. It also provides the
armature for growing vines and feathering nests, as Geuze intended. It is
beautiful, if very strange, seen as ashes
of white as we drove around the sprawling suburban park. Children pretend
they live there, Geuze said. This is
the inhabiting-and-sensibility part.
The wet feet, the smell of tides, the
logic that you can inhabit the tree.
Mximapark is a great example of

the landscape architect as a political
operator, not just a designer. After
West 8 won the competition for the
park, in 1997, the rm decided to concentrate on the design of fty central
hectares of open green space, called
the Binnenhof, or courtyard, which
would hold classic park elements, like
playgrounds, canals, and gardens. The
remaining land was allocated for other
uses. In the twenty years sincethis
was a project with many political moments, many wavesa western section has become an archeological museum, housed in a wooden reconstruction
of a Roman castellum. A hundred hectares were dedicated to local sports organizations, which built playing elds
and practice facilities.
More hectares were donated back
to the city, to be sold to housing developers, following the rationale that
the park would be safer with a constituency of surrounding homes. But
West 8 didnt cede all control: it designated key building sites Berlage
parcels, named for Hollands pioneering modernist architect H. P. Berlage. In a tidy turnabout, architects
of houses on those sites have to submit their designs for West 8s review.
Home builders are encouraged to
make landmarks that cyclists can navigate by as they cruise the parks
eight-kilometre bike path. One house
has a roof that ends in two exaggerated white points; another has a tall
brick tower, high above the tree line.
The bike path has its own design
touch, a centerline marked by white
daisies rendered in reective paint.
When the project was named for
Hollands glamorous, Argentine-born
Queen Mxima, in 2013, she obviously got it, showing up for the dedication on a bike, in a dress the colors of a varied bouquet of owers.
The heroic pergola at Mximapark
gives that at site a shape and identity suggestive of a fairy-tale world of
ora and fauna that lies just beyond
the rows of dark, gable-roofed houses.
Alice followed a rabbit, but the architecture does the luring here. Passing
through the pergola parallels the journey that you take to get to the Hills
at Governors Island: peering through
the arch at Liggett Hall. At each of
73
these thresholds, theres no telling what

you might nd on the other side. Governors Island is an island, and you can
get to an island only through a journey, Geuze said. The island has a notion of being reborn. The island has
the philosophical quality of being on
the other side.
eacting to the scale and the set-
R ting of Governors Island, West 8
has made a simpler set of design decisions than those in the European parks
I saw. The Hills are the big gesture,
and everything elsefrom the curbs
drawing you across the ground toward
the grove of trees that will one day
stand between Liggett Hall and the
Statue of Liberty, to the subtle, cutout
steel signs, designed by Pentagram
serves that gesture and the superlative
views beyond. Olmsted manipulated
the perspective in a way that Americans have the illusion of the wilderness, Geuze said.Park history is related to illusions, and is not far from
the realm of poetry and painting. We
work from a certain narrative anecdote or feeling. There are other componentsfunctionality, durability, a
timeless componentbut illusion is
where it starts.
One of West 8s rst recommendations after winning the competition
was that the southern part of the island be raised at least fteen feet. Terms
like sea-level rise and resilience, now

familiar to all American coastal cities,
were not even in the brief that dened
the competition; there was only a reference to sustainability. With us in
Holland, Chapter 1 is How did you
deal with the water? We have been
dealing with brackish water for a thousand years, Geuze said. West 8 convinced Leslie Koch that spending a
quarter of the budget to lift the park
was necessary.
In 2012, when Sandy hit, the new
park was under construction, so the
Trust of Governors Island moved its
construction equipment to the new,
higher ground. The islands historic
district lost only eight mature trees.
(Prospect Park lost more than three
hundred.) West 8 and the New Yorkbased landscape architects Mathews
Nielsen, which was hired to develop
the planting design, decided to spend
that budget on hundreds of spindly
young trees, using more than fty
species that were native or adapted
to the New York region, rather than
on fewer large-specimen trees. They
believed that trees that grew up in
the islands salt air and wind would
be hardier and longer-lived. They also
made sure that the new trees would
not grow to obscure the views they
had so carefully planned. Governors
Islands existing trees reach only eighty
per cent of their species potential
Our marriage has been renewed for another season.
height, so the new trees crowns should

top out, twenty years hence, just under
the eye line between the top of Outlook Hill and the span of the Brooklyn Bridge.
That particular eye line was one
that Koch guarded closely. Most New
Yorkers dont get to experience that
view of the changing skyline, she said,
because access to the tops of most skyscrapers is available only for a fee. In
renderings before the project was built,
West 8 had shown the island as the
center of an asterisk, with lines leading to all the major visual landmarks
that surround it. But Geuze had never
actually seen that view: the Coast
Guards eleven-story dormitory, which
provided access to the vista, was demolished before he had a chance to
visit the top. Every inch of an articial hill costs tens of thousands of dollars, so two years ago Koch and Geuze
went up in a cherry picker to determine how high the tallest hill needed
to be. Strapped in and terriedboth
are afraid of heightsthey inched up
in the cherry picker, until, at exactly
seventy feet, they glimpsed the full
three-hundred-and-sixty-degree reveal over the trees and the roof of Liggett Hall.
The projects rst engineering rm
approached the building of the Hills
as if we were building a building, Jamie
Maslyn Larson, West 8s principal-incharge for North America, said. The
rm suggested that such height would
require piles sunken into the soft landll, as if the designers were, in fact,
building a skyscraper. This was both
outside the budget and not what West 8
had in mind. A second set of engineers, from the Seattle-based rm
Hart Crowser, had experience with
landll, water, and seismic activity
from the Olympic Sculpture Park, and,
after more than a year of back-andforth, they helped to create hills that
would stand tall, resist erosion, and
not be so heavy that they would push
the edge of the islandsplatout into
the harbor.
Twenty-ve per cent of the bulk of
the Hills is material recovered from
the demolition of the Coast Guard
structures and parking lots, including
that eleven-story building, whose 2013
implosion can be viewed on YouTube.
(It took twenty seconds.) This landll forms the Hills core, the workhorse base beneath the showstopper
elements. To lighten the load on the
man-made island, West 8 also called
for parts of the tallest hill to be made
from pumice, a pale-gray, porous volcanic rock that looks like the surface
of a Hollywood moon, drains well,
and weighs half as much as regular
ll. The ll was covered with horticultural soil, made from ve different
recipes, engineered to support specic
types of turf, plants, and trees. To create steeper inclines, some of the ll
was wrapped in geotechnical matting,
creating rounded edges that resemble
a giant stack of pancakes of diminishing diameter. The steepest, almost
vertical slopes were made with wire
baskets, stuffed with horticultural soil.
Jute mesh, coir logs, and forty-two
thousand shrubs help to keep the horticultural soil in placethe belt and
suspenders of the operation, according to Ellen Cavanagh, the director
of planning for the trust.
The nal design of the Hills creates a sort of mental push-pull for the
visitor: their extreme slopes say unnatural, while their soft curves, stone
scrambles, and brushy forests tell the
body to approach, climb, explore. They
dont look fake, like the Astroturf-covered slopes one sees at new playgrounds, but like an exaggerated version of reality. Geuze built very long
slides on Slide Hill, though he was
careful to make them blend with the
rest of the park, so as not to become
a segregated place for families. There
is also the Stone Scramble, an assortment of giant blocks that act as a shortcut for the many children who will be
too impatient to climb Outlook Hill
on the path.
Hidden around the back side of Discovery Hill is a surprise for the adults:
the sculpture by Rachel Whiteread. I
was thinking about Walden Pond and
that cabin therea cabin just the right
size for one person, Whiteread said.
The sculpture is a concrete cast of the
interior of a wooden shack, a modernday hermitage around which the artist has placed bronze casts of actual
trash found on the island, which she
made in her studio, in London. After
Whiteread was done with the trash
which was considered an archeological nd, because it was unearthed

in the islands historic districtshe
shipped it back, bubble-wrapped, to
Governors Island. Eighteenth-century
British landscapes often had such buildings dotted about their slopes, styled
as temples, grottoes, and Merlinesque
cottages. Like Whitereads shack, they
were designed both to ornament the landscape and
to provide a lookout point.
I had the idea of being
holed up there and looking over to the Statue of
Liberty and the site of the
former World Trade Center, Whiteread told me.
It is a very loaded place.
I didnt want to spell it
out, but I wanted you to
have a sense of reverie while standing there and looking out. Koch says
that she had not thought about the
relationship between the shack and
the skyscrapers until the day the shack
was being installed: Rachel was there
in a hard hat, and the sculpture was
suspended from a crane as they were
putting it into position. Koch suddenly saw the concrete against the
backdrop of lower Manhattan, its
rough edges clashing with the crystalline towers. I said to Rachel it had
never occurred to me how it would
look against the skyline. She said, It
occurred to me.
adrid Ro, whose nal section
M will be completed later this year,
is like Bostons Big Dig, New Yorks

Hudson River Park, and the future
plans for the Los Angeles River rolled
into one six-billion-euro public project. To build it, West 8 and three Spanish architectural officesBurgos &
Garrido, Porras La Casta, and Rubio
& A-Salajointly won a competition
to design the area on top of the M-30
highway, already in the process of being
submerged and capped. To see it properly, you have to get on a bike, and so,
on a mild day in December, Geuze,
Blom, and I rented bicycles at the Matadero, an early-twentieth-century slaughterhouse thats being transformed into
a caf, theatre, and galleries. As I looked
at the stylish interventionssteelframed windows, sans-serif signs made
out of lightbulbs, buffed concrete

oorsit was hard not to dream of
proposals for similar makeovers for the
historic buildings on Governors Island.
We had coffee in a large space outtted with reclaimed, jewel-colored theatre seats and a vintage bar. A book fair
was being held in another space, an art
exhibit in a third. I could have stayed
all day, and we hadnt even
left the rst courtyard.
We set out with Geuze
in the lead, cycling upright
and one-handed, coat apping, point-and-shoot camera outstretched, snapping
away. It was easy to ride up
and down the gentle sloping paths, but you had to
pay attention. Kids were everywhere: on a low rise, a
pod of tiny children in pastel skates
were getting an inline-skating lesson,
their legs pumping on their teachers
command; on a stone-covered hill that
was a miniature version of one on
Governors Island, a boy shot off the
end of a slide into the sand, laughing,
while a mother behind him looked
nervous as she picked up speed.
Geuze and Blom got off their bikes
at one of the parks twenty bridges: a
long, at concrete curve whose underside has been painted with giant red
dots. They mounted adjoining onerope swings attached to the infrastructure, leaning back into the sweep for
momentum. It wasnt clear if the swings
were meant to be for adults or for children, but it didnt really matter. The
whole place was a playground, depending on your idea of fun. On the south
bank, joggers and Lycra-clad bikers
zipped past us, down the Saln de
Pinos, which was lined with eight
thousand gnarled and windblown
character pines. (Nurseries across
Europe had been depleted.) We biked
more slowly past a skate park designed
by an architect and skater in West 8s
Rotterdam office, and past a series of
oval fountains, vortices, and splash
pads that in summer become the playa
that Madrid never had.
Its not one design but seven different parks, with seven different design
logics, Geuze said. The rst was the
boulevard of dancing pines, then one
section after another, with a different
75
narrative and identity. Madrid Ro

has been described as a linear park
that knits together a number of neighborhood parks, and that is exactly right.
Lacking Geuzes excellent balance, I
had to keep getting off my bike to
take a picture of the next beautiful
thing, not a feeling Ive ever had in a
park of similar shape, like the Hudson River Park. Some parts of Madrid Ro look sedate, some wild, but
the controlled palette of gray granite,
green trees, and tan paths already feels
settled into the grand design of the
city. The space is quiet, despite the
brash ambition of both its design and
its client. The parts that in photographs looked rather madthat boulevard paved with marble blossoms,
bridges lined with mosaic portraits of
Madrileos, the brilliantly planted
parterresprovide opportunities to
pause and delight in a sprawling composition. Geuze says that experience
brings the wisdom to do less: When
I was younger, I would never have
been able to keep my hands off.
The Ro is majestic in a way that
Governors Island will never be, an
Old World version of new landscape
ideas, but in New York you can see the
same ideas at work: the mixing and
sometimes overlapping movement
streams of skaters and runners and
pedestrians and bikers, the range of
activities from hot to chill, the fussy
hedges and the love of a soft curb. Our
Slide Hill is bigger, they have fancier
bridges. Our coffee is weaker, they have
streets paved in owers. The Statue of
Liberty is still the trump card. Madrid
Ro is largely an internal experience,
travelling through and looking at the
landscape that the design team created;
Governors Island doesnt need to do
as much, because the site came with so
much more, gratisits location in New
York Harbor.
The park wouldnt hold peoples interest if it were only for seles with
the Statue of Liberty. There is the
promenade around the islands rim,
which can be walked or cycled; the
hide and reveal approach to the same
horizon from within the park, as you
follow the curving paths and the corridors that line up your view, in the
Baroque manner, with landmarks such
as the Brooklyn Bridge or Ellis Island.
76
We designed different ways to see the

world, and together they are perfect,
Geuze said.
overnors Islands regular ferry
G was in drydock for its biennial
tune-up ahead of the sites opening, on

Memorial Day, so the vessel that picked
up a dozen families for a test run at
the Hills was a party boat: a blue-glass,
L.E.D.-lit dance oor, and a top deck
with caf chairs and tables. It seemed
right for a day off, with babysitters, parents, and offspring sprung from their
desks and playdates. One set of kids
pressed their noses to the window,
pointing out the steady stream of helicopters rising from the downtownManhattan heliport, while others went
to the top deck to take in the view.
When the boat reached the island, the
pack took off on the long walk from
the pier, in strollers, on scooters, on
bikes. Wheres your helmet? one
mother asked, glancing at her spouse.
The group swept around the west
side of the island, passing between one
end of Liggett Hall and a school. Beyond those buildings, the island opened
up, with no structures except for a restroom trailer. Before us was the Statue
of Liberty, same as she ever was, and
something new: a tall, tan hill, terraced
like a ziggurat, with a rockfall zagging
down the north side. Jonas, we are going
to have to climb a mountain today, my
eight-year-old remarked to his best
friend. As we walked closer, the fall resolved itself into large, Minecraft-like
chunks, a frozen river of patinated granite recycled from the islands seawall,
tough and gray against the hills surface.
Can anyone tell me what this hill is
made of? Koch asked. No one answered.
A building that blew up! The kids
were not impressedas daughters and
sons of architects, some of them had
been witnesses to the implosion. Yes,
we blew up a building that was right
here, Koch said. The rocks you are
going to climb on were in the ocean for
a hundred years. Its up to you to tell us
if they are tough enough for New York.
With that, the children were off, the
rst time that feet under a size 7 had
touched the rocks of the Stone Scramble, sorting themselves by size order as
they jumped, hopped, and bounced up
the hill. In the olden days, one might
have reached for a mountain-goat metaphor; today, these kids had probably
all taken a class in parkour. Before most
of the adults had reached the foot of
the hill, the big kids were up top, standing on the rocks that mark the hardwon height of seventy feet, looking
across the harbor at Lady Libertys face.
They could barely be persuaded to pose
for a photo before they were down, up,
down again. An older child ran up,
panting: Vera found a wobbly rock!
The adults were more inclined to
linger up top, looking not just west but
north and east and south, mentally
checking off all the landmarks: the panoramic sweep takes in One World Trade
Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Verrazano; closer in are the slides, the picnic grounds with gatherings of more
rock seats, and the Whiteread concrete
cabin. No one wanted to call the kids
attention to Slide Hill, which was
off-limits until the matting required
for a soft landing was installed, but the
slides did look fun, stainless-steel beds
angling across the lower slope, interspersed with Jenga-like constructions
of climbable wooden logs.
When the toddlers started digging
in the dirt of what will soon be a grassy
apron in front of the Hills high spot,
it was time to leave. We walked down
the hill with regret, back to the ats.
Koch noted with satisfaction the kids
running along the curbs. She wished
that she could nd the woman who
had come up to her after one of the
rst planning workshops, in 2008, and
whispered, Dont tell anyone, but I let
my kids run free here.
It isnt just children who need opportunities to run free. New York Harbor
offered Geuze a grand borrowed landscape, and a ferry ride that sets this park
off from all the others in the city. Theres
no doubt that mass culture has a hundred-per-cent success in making the
world programmed, he told me. Everything is branded, everything has a
name, has a function that you have paid
for. That makes a very relevant question
for our generation of designers. If we
are interfering in public space, should
we be part of that, or should we offer a
sort of antidote? His answer, in this
spot, is clear: Maybe we should make
an environment where everyone can
enjoy the lightness, and you can play.
UNINVENT THIS
TED CHIANG
bad character
ts not personal. I never learned anything in the
JOON MO KANG
I Saturday-morning Chinese school I was forced to at-
tend as a child, but thats not what motivates my choice

here. There were plenty of reasons for my poor performance in those classesmy resentment at having to miss
the Super Friends cartoon being just one of themso
I dont blame Chinese characters for my failure.
No, my objection is a practical one: Im a fan of literacy, and Chinese characters have been an obstacle to literacy for millennia. With a phonetic writing system like
an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen
symbols and you can read most everything printed in a
newspaper. With Chinese characters, you have to learn
three thousand. And writing is even more difficult than
reading; when you cant use pronunciation as an aid to
spelling, you have to rely on pure memorization. The cognitive demands are so great that even highly educated Chinese speakers regularly forget how to write characters they
havent used recently.
The huge number of characters poses other obstacles
as well. Ive ipped through a Chinese dictionary, Ive seen
photographs of a Chinese typewriter, Ive read about Chinese telegraphy, and despite their ingenuity they are all
cumbersome inventions, wheelbarrows for the millstone
around Chinese cultures neck. Computers and smartphones are impossible to use if youre restricted to Chinese
characters; its only with phonetic systems of writing, like
Bopomofo and Pinyin, that text entry becomes practical.
In the past century, there have been multiple proposals to
replace Chinese characters with an alphabet, all unsuccess-
ful; the only reform ever implemented was to invent simplied versions of the more complex characters, which
solved none of the problems Ive mentioned and created
new ones besides.
So lets imagine a world in which Chinese characters
were never invented in the rst place. Given such a void,
the alphabet might have spread east from India in a way
that it couldnt in our history, but, to keep this from being
an Indo-Eurocentric thought experiment, lets suppose
that the ancient Chinese invented their own phonetic
system of writing, something like the modern Bopomofo, some thirty-two hundred years ago. What might
the consequences be? Increased literacy is the most obvious one, and easier adoption of modern technologies
is another. But allow me to speculate about one other
possible effect.
One of the virtues claimed for Chinese characters is
that they make it easy to read works written thousands of
years ago. The ease of reading classical Chinese has been
signicantly overstated, but, to the extent that ancient texts
remain understandable, I suspect its due to the fact that
Chinese characters arent phonetic. Pronunciation changes
over the centuries, and when you write with an alphabet
spellings eventually adapt to follow suit. (Consider the
differences between Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales,
and Hamlet.) Classical Chinese remains readable precisely because the characters are immune to the vagaries
of sound. So if ancient Chinese manuscripts had been
written with phonetic symbols, theyd become harder to
decipher over time.
Chinese culture is notorious for the value it places on
tradition. It would be reductive to claim that this is entirely a result of the readability of classical Chinese, but I
think its reasonable to propose that there is some inuence.
Imagine a world in which written English had changed
so little that works of Beowulf s era remained continuously readable for the past twelve hundred years. I could
easily believe that, in such a world, contemporary English
culture would retain more Anglo-Saxon values than it does
now. So it seems plausible that in this counterfactual history Im positing, a world in which the intelligibility of
Chinese texts erodes under the currents of phonological
change, Chinese culture might not be so rooted in the past.
Perhaps China would have evolved more throughout the
millennia and exhibited less resistance to new ideas. Perhaps it would have been better equipped to deal with modernity in ways completely unrelated to an improved ability to use telegraphy or computers.
I have no idea if I would personally be better off in such
a world, assuming that its even meaningful to talk about
my existing there at all. But there is one thing Im certain
of: in a world where Chinese was written with phonetic
symbols, I would never have to read or hear any more popular misconceptions about Chinese charactersthat theyre
like little pictures, that they represent ideas directly, that the
Chinese word for crisis is danger plus opportunity.That,
at least, would be a relief.
77
FICTION
78
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY PENELOPE UMBRICO
he side door of the police van

slid open, rattling, and he was
shoved inside. There were seven
or eight men already sitting on the oor
in the dark, their wrists handcuffed behind them. Nobody said anything. The
van started with a jerk, then picked up
speed. His legs were stretched out in
front of him, and he tried to use his
cuffed hands to balance himself, but
the plastic cuffs tightened, and he and
the other men went rolling across the
oor like loose bottles.
This was the rst time that Gautama had been arrested. Before calling the prostitute, he had Googled the
number in the ad to make sure that it
wasnt being used by the police. In the
van, he remembered how, as he was
being hurried down the stairs of his
building, one of the apartment doors
was slightly ajar, a man in an undershirt staring at him as he was led past.
Gautama was twenty-four, tall, slender, with large brown eyes and longish
hair that framed his face. He was a Ph.D.
student in chemistry at New York University. He had arrived in America a
year earlier, and, like many foreign students in America who are living away
from home for the rst time, he had
immediately begun loitering on Craigslist and Backpage.
The arrested men stood in a cell on
one side of a brightly lit room. It was a
little after midnight. A short, stocky policewoman was taking mug shots. When
she was done, she came over and, looking bored, her hands on her hips, said,
You know, when you have sex with a
prostitute you might as well be having
sex with every guy shes slept with.
A bearded Hasidic man sidled up
to the front of the cell. I was just e-mailing the girl, he said. I only offered
money to help. He had a high cracking voice, and his eyes were very wide.
He spoke so sincerely that he seemed
to believe himself. A Latino guy in a
blue mechanics uniform was crouched
in a corner of the cell, speaking tenderly through the bars to an underage
prostitute who was seated on a folding
chair, her slender wrist handcuffed to
a bar. Until he began talking to the girl,
the Latino had said only one thing,
while being shoved into the van: Shit,
its my birthday.
Around two in the morning, the
men, all chained together, were led

shuffling down the precinct steps. Gautama was near the end of the chain.
The cold night air felt alien. He saw
cars go by, their wheels hissing, and
wanted to hide his face in his shoulder.
The men ahead of him began climbing into the back of a white van. Gautama waited his turn, and as he did he
felt that he and the other men had entered some strange enclosed world
there was a world that was spacious and
normal, where people drove home at
night, and, next to it, off to the side,
was another world, a world so constricted that living in it was like walking a narrow passage between two walls.
In Central Booking, the men were
led one by one into separate cells. The
cells had bunk beds and steel toilets. In
Gautamas cell, the wall beside the toilet bore long ngerlike streaks of shit.
He lay down on the lower bunk. He
was wearing a gray sweatshirt. He hugged himself and pulled his knees to his
stomach.
autama was from Gwalior, a
G small city in Madhya Pradesh, one
of those wretched places where the

streets are narrow and crowded and
where shopkeepers in the central market sell illegal postcards of satis sitting
on bonres. When a merchant sold one
to you, hed touch the card to his forehead as if he wanted a last blessing before letting the goddess leave.
Gautama was an ordinary middle-class boy. He knew he would have
to get married one day, and he hoped
to have as much sex as possible before
then, but he also believed that any Indian girl who had sex before marriage
had something wrong with her, was in
some way depraved and foul and also
unintelligent. He wished he could have
sex with Sunny Leone.
Gautama rolled over to face the cinder-block wall. From down the hall came
the voice of a young man who had been
in the holding cell with him. The young
man had tried to start up conversations
by asking the other men about their jobs.
I have cigarettes, he now called to
whoever might be listening. You O.K.,
someone answered in fake solidarity.
Gautamas favorite thing about hiring prostitutes was negotiating the price.
This was because actually having sex
with a prostitute seemed so immoral

that it was hard to enjoy it. As soon as
hed called a prostitute and left a message with a made-up name, hed start
to feel scared of what hed set in motion, and a part of him would not want
the woman to call back. If she did, hed
get excited. His mouth would go dry.
Hed ask whether the hundred and fty
roses that she asked for in her ad could
be reduced. Often the woman hung up.
Periodically, he and the prostitute would
reach an agreement and set a time for
her to come over. Most often then, in
a panic, he would hurry out of the apartment. He lived in the Bronx, next to a
bodega near the Grand Concourse. He
would rush to put some distance between him and his building and then
walk for hours, his heart racing. Whenever people glanced at him, hed feel as
if they might grab him and beat him.
Occasionally, Gautama stayed in his
apartment and waited for the woman
to arrive. His building was a walkup,
and he lived on the fourth oor, in a
studio with a single large window, which
was divided by metal brackets into many
small panes. When the prostitute got
to his apartment, shed be out of breath
and look irritated at having had to climb
the stairs. He would invite her in and
then tell her that she didnt look like
the photos shed texted and ask her to
reduce her price again. As he did this,
he was hoping that the woman would
just demand cab fare and leave. Usually, she shouted at him. Sometimes, cursing him, she reduced the price by ten
or fteen dollars. The actual sex after
all this was almost always wretched:
Gautama wearing double condoms, and
the woman beneath him looking angry,
telling him, Dont touch the breasts.
As he lay on his side in the cell, a
thought came to him: he should just get
married. Most of his cousins who were
his age were married already. He felt
that if he were married he wouldnt hire
prostitutes, he wouldnt be ridiculous, he
wouldnt do things like call a hooker and
ask if the afternoon delight rate still
applied, even though it was evening.
At eleven the next morning, Gautama was released.
For two days, he went to a park and
picked up litter while wearing an orange
vest. Kids went whizzing by him on bicycles, calling, What you did, punk?
79
When he didnt respond, one of them,

emboldened, stopped a few feet from
him and shouted, Ill make you my
bitch! It seemed to him that this was
the world that his actions had brought
him into. He picked up garbage and
imagined being married, being a father,
having a son. He imagined working hard
and earning money to take care of his
family. Imagining this, he felt comforted,
as if he were already living that life.
irmala was a little over ve feet
N tall. She had a round face and a
round body and shiny black hair. She

liked to gossip and laugh, especially
about politicians. She, too, was from a
small city, from a family of doctors. She
had not been able to get into medical
school, so she was getting a Ph.D. in
biology. Nirmala was popular among
the foreign graduate students. Partly
this was because she was cheerful. Partly,
also, it was because she was kind. She
always remembered peoples birthdays
and tried to organize a cake or a dinner or at least a card. When somebody
was sick, she visited and brought food.
Gautama had spoken to Nirmala only
a few times. Since other people respected
her, he assumed she was admirable.

Nirmala worked at the circulation
desk in the big atrium at Bobst Library.
Gautama began drifting among the
shelves of reference books to look at
her. Normally, she took her lunch break
at twelve-thirty. One day, he walked
up to the circulation desk. He felt selfconscious about his face, about his long
body, about the fact that his breath
might smell of coffee. Do you want
to have lunch? he asked and giggled.
With you?
Yes.
The graduate students from India,
even when they didnt know one another
well, treated one another with the politeness of neighbors living in the same lane.
Gautama and Nirmala went to a seminar room to eat. There was a conference table, a whiteboard, a projector
on a rolling table. They had brought
their lunches in plastic grocery-store
bags and, when they sat down, she asked
what kind of water his city had. Hard
water, he said, and she told him that
she still found it amazing that in America one could drink from the tap.
They removed the aluminum foil
their rotis were rolled up in. The crin-
Can you please stop arguing in your TED Talk voice!
kling of the foil sounded loud to Gautama. At rst, they ate in silence, like
people travelling together on a bus. Gautama had been imagining what kind
of marriage he wanted, and he felt he
needed to be as honest as possible in
order to have the sort of relationship he
was envisioning. He told Nirmala the
thing that felt most precious to him.
My sister has epilepsy.
Gautamas parents had not told his
sister, his only sibling, what condition
she had. They had told him, instead,
because he was a boy. His sister was
four years older than he was, and his
relationship with her had always involved his feeling that hed had good
luck while shed had bad. He was haunted by the image of his sister swallowing pills whose purpose she didnt understand, standing beside the kitchen
sink, taking one pill from their mothers outstretched palm and then a second and then opening her mouth to
show their mother that it was empty.
In India, public knowledge of his sisters epilepsy would have marked the
whole family as defective. Telling someone about her for the rst time, Gautama
felt careless, immature, selsh. When we
began looking for a boy for her, my parents had to tell whoever was considering her about the epilepsy, he said. Several of the families his parents negotiated
with declined to pursue a marriage. One
nally agreed to it after his parents promised a house in the city, a farm, and a
foreign car. After the dowry had been
agreed upon, the grooms grandfather,
feeling that he had not been adequately
consulted, forbade the marriage.
Gautama was seventeen then. He
went with his father to the electronics
shop that the grooms family owned.
They stood in the parking lot outside
the shop, surrounded by scooters. The
sun was hot, and the diesel in the air
hurt Gautamas eyes and throat.
His father pleaded with the grandfather, who was wearing a white kurta
pajama. What is the matter? his father said, touching the old mans elbow.
She is a good girl. We have ordered
the food for the engagement.
You tried to be smart, didnt you?
the old man scolded. Trying to hide
your shame with such a large dowry.
Because of her epilepsy, his sister,
who had a bachelors degree, was now
married to a laborer who had not nished

high school. The man lived in Saudi Arabia doing construction work, and his parents treated Gautamas sister as a servant.
As Nirmala listened, she looked concerned. After hed nished speaking,
she was silent for a while. Softly, she
said, When your sisters children are
ready for education, you can pay for it.
She said this because she knew that
sometimes the only relief possible is
the thought that one day well be able
to help in some small way. But Gautama had so much adrenaline in him
that he had a hard time understanding what she was saying. She seemed
to be talking about something other
than what he had just told her.
Several hours later, sitting in an office
chair, looking at a computer screen, in
a very cold lab, he began to feel an unclenching. Having told somebody about
his sister made the world feel bigger,
as if there were more space around him.
Simultaneously, the way fresh air can
cause a cut to sting, arrived a new sense
of horror at the image of his mother
standing by his sister, making her swallow pills whose mysteriousness frightened her, and then saying, Open, until
his sister opened her empty mouth.
irmala and Gautama began hav-
N ing lunch together every day. After
a few days, Gautama stopped being

nervous about asking her to join him.
They ate in seminar rooms that had
glass walls and whiteboards. When they
nished eating, theyd wipe down the
table with wet paper towels. Then theyd
take the plastic bags theyd brought their
lunches in into the hallway and put them
in the trash cans there, so that the odor
would disperse. They did this because
they felt self-conscious about the stereotype of how Indians smell.
Nirmala was attered by Gautamas
attention. She saw herself as fat, lumbering. Once, a friend, a white girl who
also worked at the circulation desk, gestured with her head toward Gautama
as he walked over to them. Your shadow
has arrived, she said. Nirmala knew
that her friend was teasing, but having
a shadow pleased her. She thought more
often about Gautama, and as she thought
more often about him he began to gain
in importance for her.
After his arrest, Gautama had stopped
going onto Backpage. Once he started

having lunch with Nirmala, he also stopped looking at pornography. He did this
because he wanted there to be no shame
in his relationship with her.
As the days went by and they continued having lunch, he told her stories
and found himself relieved of old anxieties. His family ran a nuts-and-driedfruit business, and he told her how, when
he was thirteen or fourteen, he had conspired with a family employee to steal
money from one of the shops that his
family owned. The man had then blackmailed him. After he told Nirmala this,
the guilt of having stolen from his family, the sense of self-disgust for being so
weak that he could be blackmailed, dissipated almost immediately. It vanished
so quickly that it was like waking from
a nightmare and within minutes not
being able to recall what had happened
in the dream.
One night, a month after they started
having lunch, they went out to dinner.
An Indian restaurant had opened on
crowded Macdougal Street, and Gautama had read in a magazine that the
restaurant, for its opening weeks, while
it worked out its menu, was allowing
guests to pay whatever they thought was
fair. Gautamas plan was to pay nothing.
It didnt occur to him that Nirmala would
mind this.
The restaurant was in a basement.
They went down some steps and entered a room with a dozen or so tables
with white tablecloths. Only a few of
the tables were occupied. Eight young
Indians, probably undergraduates, were
seated around the largest table, in the
middle of the room, and the manager,
an Indian man with a mustache, went
over to them frequently to see how
they were liking the meal. He didnt
go as often to the tables with white customers. Gautama understood that the
manager was suspicious that the Indians would try to get away with paying
nothing. He saw this and felt in his
stomach that he, too, would not have
entered a restaurant with no intention
of paying if it were owned by white
people.
The manager came over to Gautama
and Nirmala. He explained the pricing:
What would food like this cost in another restaurant? That is one way to think
of it. He spoke in the stretched vowels
of an Indian trying to sound American.

He left them to look at the menu.
Nirmala watched him go. Are you
planning not to pay? she asked.
Ill pay something, Gautama murmured. He stared down at the menu,
which was a single page with a list of
items on the left side and nothing on
the right.
Shrimp is expensive, Nirmala said.
Fish is expensive. We cant steal from
these people.
The fact that she wanted to pay
when she didnt have to surprised him.
A part of him couldnt believe it. He
felt that she was showing off.
I didnt bring my purse. You should
have told me to bring my wallet, she said.
Hearing her frustration, he had the
sense that he did not know her, that
he had been revealing himself to someone who might have been thinking bad
things about him.
The manager came back with a
waiter. He explained again that they
should bear in mind what the food might
cost in another restaurant.
Nirmala ordered without looking
up. She asked for the lentils, which
would probably have been the cheapest item on the menu. Ill have the
turmeric sh, Gautama said, and the
seafood biryani. He ordered two entres because, despite the fear of embarrassment, he couldnt pass up something free.
It is a lot of food, the manager
said. At his American-sounding accent, Gautama felt even more judged.
He kept looking down. The manager
stood there for a moment and then left.
Gautama and Nirmala sat in silence.
The food came. They began eating.
This isnt very good, Gautama said.
I dont want to talk.
He continued eating. He wondered
what he should pay.
The meal ended. The manager came
to their table and asked how they had
enjoyed the food.
It was very good, Nirmala said.
Well come back.
He put down a printout of all the
items they had ordered. Gautama placed
seventy dollars on top of it. This was
all the money he had.
Outside, it was a cold February night.
There were people waiting in lines to
get into restaurants. Some of them were
81
arm in arm. One couple walked in circles, laughing at how cold it was. As
Gautama and Nirmala walked down the
crowded sidewalk, Nirmala bumped into
him. Sorry, Gautama said, not looking at her. After a few steps, she bumped
into him again. He glanced at her.
Its over, she said and laughed.
Gautama felt relieved that he
had not embarrassed himself before
Nirmala.
s he got to know her better, Nir-
A mala began to seem more compli-
cated to him. She told him that her fathers younger brother had bothered
her. She didnt say what he had done to
bother her, but she said that, when her
uncle was living with her family, she had
begun pulling out her hair. I get white
hair where I used to pull it out, she said.
The fact that this had happened to
her made Gautama see her as being like
any other person, someone with her own
past, someone who needed love, who was
scared and embarrassed, who had pulled
out her own hair and was convinced that
it turned white because of this.
The two started going on walks in
the evening in the West Village, near
Nirmalas dorm. One day, they held
hands for the rst time. It was midMarch. The air was cold and heavy with
moisture. They were walking past a
pizza parlor, and Nirmala put her hand
in his. The rst thing Gautama noticed
was the calluses on her palms. But, as
soon as he had closed his hand around
hers, he had the feeling that he would
never need anything else. All the other
things he worried abouthis research,
what job he would get, what might happen to his family in Indianone of this
mattered, because this thing was O.K.
He looked on YouTube for guidance on kissing. He watched a video
in which an old white-haired couple
kissed and then told each other what
they had liked about the kiss.
French kissing seemed disrespectful.
Kissing with closed lips had the bravery of
kissinga declaration of not caring what
society thoughtbut was also not vulgar.
Every new thing that he and Nirmala
did, such as standing on a street corner,
each with a hand in the others back
pocket, gave him a sense of freedom.
They began lying together on her bed
in her dorm room, kissing until he stop82
ped being able to think. He would move

her hand to his crotch, and she would
move it away.
Gautama began looking at pornography again. He felt that if he did not ejaculate he would go mad. The rst time he
did this, sitting at his small wooden desk
in his apartment, his laptop open before
him, he immediately wondered why he
had worried so much about doing it.
He began to nd Nirmala incredibly beautiful. Her ears, small with little diamond studs, appeared both modest and intelligent. When she spoke, her
soft insistent voice resounded as if it
were inside his own chest.
In early June, they decided to have
sex. They removed their clothes and
stood in Nirmalas dorm room.
Dont look at me, she said, holding her hands over her stomach.
He knelt down and kissed her belly.
Does it smell bad? she asked.
No. Why?
I dont know.
In the days afterward, in the happiness of someone having chosen to have
sex with him, he felt that he was growing more real, more substantial. Before,
he had been only thoughts and emotions, and now he was becoming solid.
He found himself constantly thinking about Nirmala, how he teased her
about her nervousness about her weight:
You are so small that you get lost in
the bed. He pictured some of the things
they had done, him, half sitting, with
her on top of him, telling her that she

was not heavy, that she was like a little girl. To be able to be kind to someone you loved seemed a fortunate thing.
Until then, they had kept their involvement a secret. Once, at a Holi party,
a large, dark-skinned woman from Hyderabad had begun praising Nirmala
in front of Gautama, as if inviting him
to join in. Gautama had immediately
become suspicious that the woman
might be a gossip, that if he were to
say what he felt the woman would then

tell others and the information might
somehow make its way to India, where
it could be used to embarrass Nirmalas family.
But now Nirmala began introducing him to people as her boyfriend. This
felt dangerous to Gautama, as if they
were taking on a problem they could
have avoided. He wondered whether
Nirmala was doing this so that he could
not back out. He decided that he did
not want to think such a thing about
her, that she was simply declaring her
love to the world.
He and Nirmala began to be treated
as a couple. People would ask him what
hours she was working. Once, a woman
came to him and wanted to know if Nirmalas aunt in New Jersey was going to
be visiting India soon, because she wanted
to send a blood-pressure cuff to a relative. There was a strain to being known
as a couple. One man advised him to
propose in the morning; that way he and
Nirmala would have the whole day to
enjoy being engaged. At a party, he talked
to a woman who was a new Ph.D. student, and one of Nirmalas friends stood
nearby glaring angrily at him.
Because Nirmalas parents were
bound to learn about him, it seemed
important to tell his parents rst, so
that they might reach out to hers and
keep them from feeling shame.
Gautama sat cross-legged on his futon
bed and Skyped with his mother. She
started crying. She wiped her eyes with
a fold of her sari while his fathers legs
paced behind her. They were contemplating the dowry they could have negotiated, Gautama assumed, the elation
there would have been in nding a match
for a son who was educated in America. I
blame you, not her, his mother said, and
from this he understood that all was not
lost. His father shouted, I blame her, too!
Afterward, Gautama went to the refrigerator and stood by it drinking milk
to ease his stomach.
In the next few days, he got calls from
his sister, from his favorite cousin, from
an uncle whom everybody in the family
was scared of because he was a smalltime politician and gangster. The tension
of this was constant, and Gautama felt
that he could not talk about it with Nirmala, because he had had sex with her,
and so she had tied her fate to his.
Weeks went by, and then months.

He periodically told his mother that
she should talk to Nirmala, that Nirmala was a good girl. When I have to
drink that poison, I will, she said.
ome things about Nirmala began
S to irritate him.If they went to a movie,
she would take the tickets from his hand

after he had purchased them. When
they went to buy groceries, she would
check that all the items on their list were
in the cart, even though he had already
crossed them out on the scrap of paper
they were written on. To Gautama, this
behavior seemed to come from Nirmalas belief that if she were not in charge
things would go wrong. Sometimes he
wondered what he had started.
What bothered him most about Nirmala was that, if he was incorrect about
something, she would point it out immediately. If he did the same to her,
she became sullen. Once, he told her
that the argument she was making about
genetics was probably not correct. When
he explained why hed said this, she became angry and asked why he was in
such a bad mood.
September came, and the university
became busy again. The weather was still
warm, and every afternoon two young
women on Rollerblades performed in
Washington Square Park. They wore
white shorts and skated around the arch
while playing trumpets. Gautama liked
looking at these women so much that
he would try always to be in Washington Square when they were there.
One evening, almost a year after
he was arrested, he sat at his desk and
opened his laptop and went to Backpage. The screen lled with ads: lines
of text, some words in bold, others capitalized, phone numbers written out as
words. He felt as if he were oating, as
if it were someone elses nger clicking on an ad. A new screen opened:
more text with images below, a Hispanic girl in a bikini, her face hidden
by a ash, the picture taken in the bathroom mirror. Gautama recognized the
photo from other ads hed seen, and
he suddenly became exhausted at the
memory of calling prostitutes and then
running away from his apartment. He
shut down the computer.
A few days later, he came home and
opened his laptop before hed nished
The people in my new novel have started rejecting

print media. Thats a bad omen.
undressing. He sat on the edge of his

futon and browsed through Backpage.
He had his jeans at his ankles, and he
remained that way for an hour.
The prostitute who walked into his
apartment later that night was nineteen
or twenty and black. She had white plastic beads in her hair. It was dark outside,
and his studios wide window, divided
into panes, was like a bank of TV screens
in which the girl hung bright and tilted.
The girl stood at the center of the
room, and Gautamas heart pounded. Before she arrived, he had planned to tell
her that she did not look like her photo
and give her cab fare home. But she was
much more beautiful than her photo, and
he thought that the luck of getting someone so lovely might not occur again, and,
since he would eventually end up having sex with a prostitute anyway, it was
best not to waste this opportunity.
The girl was wearing a gray dress with
thin blue horizontal stripes. Gautama
handed her the money. He stepped away
from her and again was amazed by her
beauty.
Youre pretty, he said.

Thank you.
Could you take off all your clothes?
She pulled her dress over her head.
She was slender with big breasts. She
looked as if she had been Photoshopped. Folding the dress, she put it
on his desk, which stood near the head
of the bed. She came back to the center of the room.
May I hold your breasts while you
jump?
The girl laughed. Sure.
She was smiling as he put his hands
on her breasts. She started jumping. Her
hair ew up, and the beads clicked. Her
feet made soft thuds when she landed.
His hands on her breasts, Gautama
became happier and happier. He knew
that tomorrow he would feel guilt and
shame, but he did not care. The girl
jumped, and he had the sense that nobody else anywhere could be leading
a life of such adventure and delight.
NEWYORKER.COM
Sharma on the complicating forces of shame.

83
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
THE MAN WHO MADE THE NOVEL

Loving and loathing Samuel Richardson.
ts hard to imagine a more unlikely
I novelist than Samuel Richardson.The
son of a carpenter, he attended school

only intermittently until he was seventeen, when his formal education ended
and he was apprenticed to a printer. He
didnt publish his rst novel until after
he turned fty. The undertaking was almost accidental. He had become the
proprietor of a printing press when, in
1739, two London booksellers asked
him to put together a letter-writer,an etiquette manual consisting of letters that
country readers might use as models
for their own correspondence.
Richardson quickly expanded the
projects scope. A diligent worker who
had risen from tradesman to middleclass property owner, he longed to impart what he had learned. He wanted,
he wrote in the books introduction, to
teach readers not only how to write elegant letters but how to think and act
justly and prudently in the common
concerns of life. Recollecting a true
story hed heard years earlier, he composed several letters to and from a pious
servant girl whose boss was making lewd
advances, in order to warn young women
of snares that might be laid against
their virtue.
In the fall of 1739, Richardson began
to absent himself from his wife in the
evenings, after work at the printing press.
Instead of proceeding as planned on the
letter-writer, he was quietly adding to
the stock of letters by the servant girl,
bringing her story to a happy conclusion. It took him just two months to
produce Pamela, a book many consider the rst modern English novel.
Not that Richardson made this claim.
He associated novels with improbable
84
romances, or mere entertainments; Pamela was intended to be instructive.

But a novel it was. More than the adventure stories of Daniel Defoe or Jonathan Swift, Pamela was concerned
with the representation of interior life. It
is also organized around a single, unied plot, which distinguished it from
Defoes more episodic Moll Flanders
(1722), a pseudo-memoir that recounts
its protagonists varied and largely illicit
pursuits, from her inauspicious beginnings through her late years in the colonies. Flanderss story is told from the
complacent perspective of a woman
who has achieved wealth and security,
and generally adopts the matter-of-fact
tone of a case history. Pamelas letters,
in contrast, are lively and conversational,
their language a reection of both her
native cleverness and her inexperience.
Richardson was fond of saying that his
characters letters are written to the moment; that is, as the characters experience the events they describe. This
lends Pamela a palpable sense of immediacy. In its rst letter, our fteenyear-old heroine describes to her parents the attention she has begun to
receive from her young, unmarried employerwho gave me with his own
hand four golden guineas, and some silver. Her parents urge Pamela to keep
her distance. We had rather see you all
covered with rags, and even follow you
to the churchyard, than have it said, a
child of ours preferred any worldly conveniences to her virtue, they writeto
which Pamela responds, I will die a
thousand deaths, rather than be dishonest in any way.
This can sound like the exaggerated
language of farce. It isnt. To read Rich-
ardson is to enter a moral universe in

which the terms virtue and honesty
are used, unironically, as synonyms for
virginity. Richardsons puritanism was
extreme even for his period. (Flanders,
for example, spoke playfully about her
virginity as a trie . . . to be had easily.)
But the sanctimonious tone didnt deter
many readers. The novel was so popular that Pamela-inspired merchandise,
from teacups to fans, quickly sprang up,
as did spurious sequels, a theatrical version, and even a comic opera. The book
also drew praise for its edifying story
line. (Virtue Rewarded is its apt subtitle.) Alexander Pope gave it a jolt of
publicity when he said that it would do
more good than many volumes of sermons, a quote that may have been solicited by Richardsons brother-in-law,
a bookseller.
Not everyone was won over by the
self-taught moralist. A number of Pamela parodies also appeared, including
two by a not yet famous Henry Fielding, then a thirty-four-year-old failed
playwright studying to be a lawyer.
Fielding, whose Tom Jones would
gain renown for his cheerful sexual exploits, found Richardsons platitudinous
Sunday-school morality unbearable. He
launched his own novel-writing career
with the spoofs Shamela, in which the
virginal young maid is recast as a slatternly schemer who manipulates Squire
Booby into marrying her, and Joseph
Andrews, which purported to be about
Pamelas brother. Strapping young Josephs impassioned speeches about his
virtue, though nearly identical in substance to Pamelas, read rather more
comically coming from a mans mouth.
Fielding articulated a squeamishness
ABOVE: GUIDO SCARABOTTOLO
BY ADELLE WALDMAN
Richardson was an accidental novelist, and an accidentally great one; his powers of empathy clashed with his pinched piety.
ILLUSTRATION BY LEIGH GULDIG
85
about Richardson that outlasted either

mans lifetime. Though Richardson went
on to write two more novelsincluding the masterly Clarissahe has long
inspired an unusually intense mix of appreciation and irritation. So oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious,
concupiscent, Samuel Coleridge described him in his notebooks. It pained
Coleridge to admit that he nonetheless
admired the man very greatly. A selfsatised bourgeois, with a scolds horror of impropriety, Richardson certainly
confounds the image of the writer as
tortured artist. The bigger problem is
that these qualities bleed into his work.
His self-serious moralizing and the ostentatiousness of his characters rectitude make Richardson difficult to embrace. Yet, unlike the more urbane and
congenial Fielding, Richardson has a
knack for psychological realism and an
ability to craft characters whose clamorous inner lives continue, almost three
centuries later, to feel real to us. He possesses a sometimes dizzying rhetorical
intelligencehis characters argue with
the agility of top litigatorsand seemingly boundless imaginative sympathy:
the gures who populate the most winning of eighteenth-century picaresques
are cardboard cutouts compared with
Richardsons principals.
Even Pamela, prudish and didactic as it is, feels far less limited or quaint
than we might expect. The story is robust enough that readers neednt accept
Pamelas belief that shell be ruined if
she has sex (consensual or otherwise)
in order to sympathize with her situation; its enough that she doesnt want
sex on the terms offered. It helps, too,
that her narration is engaging and tartly
comic. If Mr. B, her employer, had his
way, she writes to her parents, he would
keep me till I was undone, and till his
mind changed; for even wicked men, I
have read, soon grow weary of wickedness with the same person. Meanwhile,
Mr. Bthe nest young gentleman in
ve countiesassumed that what he
wanted from Pamela would not be so
very unwelcome, especially since, like
any decent gentleman of pleasure, he
was prepared to reward her for her favors. He is baffled by her reaction to his
overturessomewhat understandably,
given that Pamela says things like How
happy am I, to be turned out of door,
with that sweet companion my innocence! (In spite of being on Pamelas
side, we cant help feeling some sympathy with Mr. B when he calls her a romantic idiot.) Even as his actions become increasingly desperate, he has a
coherent rationale for his behavior. He
thinks Pamela is overreacting. I am sure
you . . . frightened me, by your hideous
squalling, as much as I could frighten
you, he says after he tries to kiss her.
Richardsons wit and ability to conceive characters who feel naturalas

he rather immodestly put it in the books
original introductionenable the novel
to outpace his own didactic intentions,
to become something far more lifelike
and original than a morality tale. But
Pamela is, at bottom, a Cinderella story,
and so Mr. B eventually proposes marriage to his former maid. Pamela is
transported with joy that he is willing
to stoop so low, but whats good for
the character is less good for the reader.
With a story to tell, Richardson the writer
of instructional material was distracted,
but when the conict is resolved, about
halfway through, we enter a narrative
dead zone in which the authors more
irksome qualities come to the fore.
Mr. B becomes a mouthpiece through
which Richardson delivers life lessons
(for example, that a woman ought not
grow careless in her dress after marriage). Lest we forget that Pamelas happiness is due to her exemplary virtue,
we watch as she is embraced, one after
another, by all the neighboring gentry
as an ornament to our sex, a worthy
pattern for all the young ladies in the
county, the ower of their neighborhood, etc.a tedious procession of
praise that starts to undermine the good
will we felt for Pamela when her circumstances were less prosperous. The
novel closes with a last word from our
zealous author, who briey tears off his
epistolary robes to list the various moral
teachings the book contains, in case we
somehow missed them.
Richardson and the Art
S amuel
of Letter Writing (Cambridge), a
Nice worklets take a quick social-media break.
new book by Louise Curran, who teaches

at Oxford, looks for fresh insight into
this perplexing author and his milieu
by scouring his correspondence. The
premise is an intriguing one. As the English canons best-known writer of epistolary novels, Richardson would seem
likely to be a noteworthy letter writer
in private life.
It turns out he isnt. An 1804 piece
in the Edinburgh Review that assessed
the rst published edition of Richardsons letters had it that they consist
almost entirely of compliments and
minute criticisms on his novels, a detail of his ailments and domestic concerns the whole so loaded with gross
and reciprocal attery, as to be ridiculous at the outset, and disgusting in the

repetition. Little unearthed in Currans
sober, academic study contradicts this
characterization. Skeptics of literary biography have long held that everything
worth knowing about a novelist is evident in the work itself. Richardsons correspondence constitutes strong supporting evidence for this proposition.
If, for example, Richardsons aim in
Pamela, with the surfeit of overblown
compliments bestowed on her, was to
guarantee that readers knew exactly what
they were supposed to think of his heroine, he also sought by the same method
to insure that readers thought highly of
the work itself. For the second edition
of Pamela, as Curran notes, he took
the unusual step of including as an introduction twenty-four pages of fawning letters he received about the book.
There was never Sublimity so lastingly
felt, as in PAMELA, reads one, by Richardsons friend Aaron Hill (one of ve
from Hill that were included). Not surprisingly, these greasy compliments,
as one clergyman described them, didnt
go over well with everyone. Fielding
took a potshot by beginning Shamela
with several made-up letters composed
in much the same style: How happy
would it be for Mankind, if all other
Books were burnt, that we might do
nothing but read thee all Day, and dream
of thee all Night.
Richardsons life might be divided
into two phases: before Pamela and
after. About the former period, relatively little is knownhe appears to
have destroyed most of his letters from
these days. We know he married the
daughter of his former employer in
1721, the same year he set up his own
printing shop. All six of their children
died in infancy or early childhood; his
wife died young as well. He was remarried the next year, once again to a
woman from a family with whom he
had long-standing business ties. Both
were sound alliances in a worldly sense,
but Richardson appears to have been
relatively happy in each of his marriages, although the rst was characterized primarily by grief over the loss
of so many children. To friends and
business associates, including struggling writers, he was frequently generous, more generous than unalloyed
prudence or the burgher work ethic

that he embodied might lead us to expect. His strict middle-class morality
may seem uninspired, but, as his biographers T. C. Duncan Eaves and
Ben D. Kimpel have pointed out, he
doesnt appear to have been petty or
hypocritical.
After Pamela, the once obscure businessman became conscious of himself
as a public gure. He cultivated epistolary relationships with a coterie of admirers, many of whom were women
several, he bragged to a friend, were
women of Conditionand he began
to preserve his correspondence with an
eye to future publication. Over the years,
this deferential circle of correspondents
became his most important sounding
board. (After his death, Samuel Johnson
quipped that Richardson died merely
for want of change among his atterers.) When Aaron Hill, the author of
those glowing letters about Pamela,
delicately suggested ways to shorten Clarissa, Richardson responded rst defensively and then with what appears to
have been aggrieved silence; his favored
correspondents presumably learned over
time not to repeat Hills error. Richardsons letters, like his heavily internal novels, rarely engaged with events in the
outside world or even with books aside
from his own. He claimed not to have
read Tom Jones, although in deriding
its bad Tendency to members of his set
he demonstrated a suspiciously detailed
knowledge of its contents.
Its surprising enough that this touchy,
straitlaced, and rather narrow man wrote
a novel like Pamela, in which he deftly
inhabited the turbulent emotional life
of a teen-age girl. Even more surprising is the fact that he went on to write
Clarissa. Pamela is, for the rst half,
a crisp, shrewd delight of a romantic
comedy. But Clarissa is of a different
order. Johnson called it the rst book
in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart. Even Fielding admired it.
ichardson has a habit of putting
R his heroines in harrowing binds, and
Clarissa is no exception. At the novels outset, eighteen-year-old Clarissa

Harlowes family is pressuring her to
marry for money. The Harlowes believe
that, if she doesnt marry the wealthy
but unappealing Solmes, she will run

off with the too-agreeable rake Lovelace. Clarissa insists that she will give
up Lovelace if her parents will let her
remain single. Its a testament to Lovelaces perceived desirability that absolutely no one seems to feel she will hold
up her end of this bargain. A standoff
ensues, in which, to prevent her from
eloping with the whoremonger, her
family keeps a close watch over her. Her
only outlet is writing long letters to her
friend Anna Howe. Their ongoing correspondence is one major portion of
Clarissa. Another consists of letters
between Lovelace and his condant,
Belford.
What separates the novels setup from
the gothic melodrama that emerged
later is how well its constructed. Each
of the Harlowes has his or her own reasons for wanting Clarissa to marry
Solmes; their distinct personalities operate on Clarissa and on one another in
a way thats both operatic and in keeping with how families work. Then, there
is Clarissa herself. So much wit, so much
beauty, such a lively manner, and such
exceeding quickness and penetration!
Lovelace writes. A more sophisticated
model of virtue than Pamela, Clarissa
is philosophical in an old-fashioned
sense, teasing out maxims about human
nature from everyday observation. For
her, morality begins with the attempt
to remove the taint of self-interest from
her judgments. She wouldnt, she writes
to Anna, be pleased with herself if I
should judge of the merits of others as
they were kind to me. . . . For is not this
to suppose myself ever in the right; and
all who do not act as I would have them
act, perpetually in the wrong? If shes
a bit of a Goody Two-Shoes, most of
us are, like Lovelace, inclined to forgive
her. Shes too fair-minded, too impressive in her repartee, too rigorously selfcritical (Is not vanity, or secret love of
praise, a principal motive with me at the
bottom?), and too uniformly kind for
us to hold her over-earnestness too much
against her.
One of Richardsons avowed purposes in Clarissa was to caution young
women against preferring a Man of
Pleasure to a Man of Probity. This
aim would have been achieved had he
written Lovelace as a simple villain. But,
libertine though he is, Lovelace is also
87
intelligent, full of feeling, and a terric

talker, who amuses even in his offhand
remarks, as when he sneeringly describes Belfordwho goes in for prostitutes, fallen women, and other easy
preyas determined . . . to gluttonize on the garbage of other foul feeders. He is the only character who is
Clarissas match in wit and the only
one, aside from Anna, to fully comprehend her merit. Plus, hes the bestlooking man Clarissa has ever seen, a
man whose bountiful temper and gay
heart attach every one to him. Whether
Clarissa is, as her family believes, in
love with him is a question that has
spurred debate ever since the novel was
published. She denies it, but, from Johnson on, the critical consensus has mostly
held that she is lying to herself. There
is always something which she prefers
to the truth, Johnson said. I confess I
tend to part ways with Johnson et al.
on this point. My instinct is to believe
Clarissa when she says that she likes
Lovelace better perhaps than I ought
to like him, given all his preponderating faults, but that she would happily, and without a throb, as she puts
it to Anna, give him up in order to be
reconciled with her parents and her
uncles. Still, she winds up doing exactly what the Harlowes most dread.
Afraid that they will force her to marry
Solmes and manipulated by a less than
wholly truthful Lovelace, she panics
and runs off with her dashing admirer.
Here the novel takes a turn. Clarissa
and Lovelace seem at rst to be, like
Pamela and Mr. B, a familiar if wellrendered example of a virtuous woman
and a marriage-resistant playboy, but
their fully elaborated inner worlds begin
to transform them into beings far more
ambiguous. Clarissa vacillates between
attraction to and moral revulsion toward Lovelace, who is as slippery a character as ction has produced. At one
moment, he laments that he and Clarissa ght so often: we fall out so often,
without falling in once; and a second
quarrel so generally happens before a
rst is made up. He is so endearing
that we almost forget that the cause of
their arguments is his endless duplicity,
the dogs tricks he almost cant help
but engage in. Of his designs, Clarissa
knows less than the readerwho has
access to his letters to Belfordbut she
88
picks up on things all the same. She

writes to Anna:
He says too many fine things of me, and
to me. True respect, true value, I think lies not
in words. . . . The silent awe, the humble, the
doubting eye, and even the hesitating voice,
better shew it. . . . The man indeed at times is
all upon the ecstatic; one of his phrases. But,
to my shame and confusion, I must say, that I
know too well to what to attribute his transports. In one word, it is to his triumph.
Clarissa is in a mortifyingly dependent position. She needs Lovelace to
marry her for the sake of her reputation. I behold him with fear now, as
conscious of the power my indiscretion
has given him over me, she confesses
to Anna. If she knew as much as the
reader, shed be even more afraid. Clarissa is one of ctions most terrifying
he said, she said dramas because the
facts are seldom whats at issue: the characters private thoughts are. Clarissa
would be both furious and humiliated
if she knew to what extent Lovelace is
torn between his real tenderness for her
and his baser impulses.
Heaven give me the heart to be honest to my Clarissa! he writes, and means
itat that moment. But even in a position of dependence Clarissa is too
truthful, or proud, to cater to Lovelaces
ego or to cease regretting that she left
home with him: he is not, she tells him,
a man . . . who improved upon acquaintance. Whether because his vanity is
wounded by this treatment (she is like
a haughty and imperious sovereign, he
complains) or simply because its his nature, once Clarissa is in his power he
cant help but pursue the ultimate coup
making this young woman of unusually
high repute into his mistress. He now
cunningly sidesteps the issue of marriage, concealing his ambivalence in a
sea of lip-deep promises. He isnt entirely sure he wont behave honorably
by hereventually. I resolve not any
way, he says. I will see how her will
works; and how my will leads me on.
Meanwhile, he prides himself on at least

being honest with his chosen confessor.
Never was there . . . a man so ready to
accuse himself, he says to Belford.
When depicting his main characters inner turmoil, Richardson moves
well beyond his hortatory preoccupations. From one page to the next, its
never clear which motives will hold
sway over Lovelace (This cursed aversion to wedlock, how it has entangled
me!) or how Clarissa, with her delicate pride and shifting perceptions, will
respond to him. Clarissas and Lovelaces letters to their respective condants are as probing as any therapy session, and as riddled with defensiveness
and self-deception. The epistolary form,
it becomes evident, plays to Richardsons strengths and minimizes his weaknesses: writing from the perspectives
of his best-realized and most complex
characters, and especially writing to
the moment, lters his didactic intentions, preventing him from sermonizing in his own voice.
Relentlessly analytical and unabashedly prolixJohnson once said, If
you were to read Richardson for the
story, your impatience would be so
much fretted that you would hang
yourself Clarissa is as unlike most
of the novels to have come after it as it
is from anything written before. No random twists of fate, no plots set in motion by jealous rivals keep the lovers
apart; even the disapproving parents
have been sidelined. The only obstacles
to their happiness are the ones they create themselves. Its hard to think of a
work of ction so exclusively internal
until Dostoyevskys The Idiot, and
harder still to think of a romance. The
nest novel in the English language,
Harold Bloom has said. The only novel
that can rival even Proust. If most readers arent prepared to go quite that far,
this dark, strange romantic dance certainly marks the owering of Richardsons talent for morally and emotionally
sophisticated psychological realism.
ne cant talk about Clarissa
O without acknowledging its most
notorious feature: its length. By far the

longest novel in the English canon,
Clarissa runs to some nine hundred
and seventy thousand words. For reference, War and Peace clocks in at
ve hundred and sixty thousand words,

and Innite Jest a slender four hundred and eighty-four thousand. My
Penguin Classics editionat 1,499
pagesdwarfs the other paperbacks
on my shelf, more like a phone book
than like a novel.
Even its most ardent admirers tend
to concede that some sections are overlong. Richardson anticipated such criticism and included a rebuttal in its postscript: The letters and conversations,
where the story makes the slowest progress are presumed to be characteristic.
They give occasion . . . to suggest many
interesting personalities, in which a
good deal of the instruction essential
to a work of this nature is conveyed.
His pedantic, slightly hectoring tone is
telling. One wonders if he was arguing
with himselfsearching for a justication for not having had the wherewithal
to take a scalpel to his own work.
But this is less of a problem for Clarissa than it would be for his third and
last book, Sir Charles Grandison.
Richardsons three novels bear an interesting relationship to one another.
He had always been uncomfortable
with the happy ending he had given
Pamela, and the resulting implicationremote from his actual view
that a reformed rake makes the best
husband. (Pamelas marriage to Mr. B
had ostensibly been imposed on him
by the true story he remembered and
sought to re-create.) Clarissa had been
intended as something of a correction.
With Lovelace, Richardson aimed to
introduce a rake so chilling as to set
women straight about these kinds of
men. Perhaps he should have paid more
attention to readers response to Miltons Satan. To his dismay, many readers blamed Clarissas coldness for what
goes wrong between them. O that I
could not say, that I have met with more
admirers of Lovelace than of Clarissa,
he wrote to a friend.
With Grandison, he sought to correct the correction, writing about the
sort of virtuous man women ought
to prefer to a Lovelace. Grandison is
handsome, brave, and kind to women
and the poor. Unfortunately, he is also
an insufferable prig. He is apt to pronounce that there are innocent delights
enough to ll with joy every vacant hour
in order to persuade a friend to give up
womanizingwhich the friend does.

The bulk of the book consists of Grandison delivering life lessons to, and being
praised by, his many admirers; what little plot it has concerns a love triangle
in which our hero, though blameless
according to his own protestations
winds up entangled with two women,
both desperately in love with him. Sadly,
only one can marry him. So inconsolable is the one who cant that our hero
has to talk her out of becoming a nun.
With more expansiveness than Pamela and less moral and psychological
complexity than Clarissa, Richardsons third novel offers a comprehensive distillation of the generally sound
and humane worldly wisdom that its
author valued. It also contains occasional germs of the subtle drawing-room
comedy that in the nineteenth century
constituted such a crucial development
for the novel. But its sermon-to-action
ratio is so high, and its adulation of its
self-satised hero so breathless, that it
often reads as if it were written by one
of Richardsons parodists.
What is surprising is that Grandison was, of Richardsons novels, a particular touchstone for Jane Austen, who
(her nephew recounted) could describe
with exactitude all that was ever said
or done by each of its many characters.
This partiality, difficult to account for
on aesthetic grounds, is likely attributable to a certain overlap in sensibility
between the authors, an unembarrassed
belief in prudence and scrupulosity over
unchecked feeling. Richardsons crusade
against rakish men was one of several
themes that Austen would take up in
her own ction, oftentimes more convincingly (as in Sense and Sensibility).
Working in the early years of domestic
realism, she seems to have felt a kinship
with its originator, someone who assembled his massive narrativeswhat
he recognized as a new species of writingwithout models or maps. A little more than half a century after Richardson, she brought to the realist novel
a discipline and a concision and an irony
that enabled her to transform her own
didactic impulses into the basis of art.
Richardson, on the other hand, often
succeeded despite himself. It was when
his instructional aims were crowded out
by the tortuous inner lives of his characters that he achieved greatness.
89
BOOKS
SHOW THEM THE MONEY

Is the sports business a bubble?
BY LOUIS MENAND
Is Your Brain on Sports

T his
(Crown Archetype), by L. Jon
Wertheim and Sam Sommers, is a
reader-friendly look at what the authors
refer to as all the batshit craziness that
courses through the sports ecosystema
phrase that captures nicely the jocular
and good-natured spirit of their undertaking. Some twenty sports-related topics are taken up, from why people be-
brain acting as it does in other contexts.

The authors nail their points down
with the mighty hammer of cognitive
science. As outlandish as sports conduct
might seem, they explain, it is rooted
in basic human psychology, neuroscience,
and cognitive tendency. Their procedure is therefore to nd for the various
sports-related attitudes and behaviors
they discuss (Wertheim is an editor at
have studied the effects of physiological

arousal on thought and behavior report
that we seem to have two personalities:
one for cool conditions and one for when
we are gripped by hot passion.
It is good to know that these assertions have been proved in a laboratory,
because they have been part of the folklore of common sense for pretty much
ever. This Is Your Brain on Sports is a
book for people who think that if, instead of saying that people are happy
when their team wins, you say Activity
increased in a region called the ventral
striatum, or, instead of talking about
stress, you talk about a surge of cortisol, then you are on to something.
What youre on to is physicalism,
which (leaving the metaphysics aside) is
simply a method of redescription. Were
This Is Your Brain on Sports explores what studies tell us, and dont tell us, about the way we behave around sports.
lieve that quarterbacks are good-looking
(theyre not, apparently, or not especially)
to why international sporting events like
the Olympics and the World Cup dont
make Earth a more peaceful planet. (On
the contrary, they often seem to iname
tensions.)
Wertheim and Sommerss basic conceit is that although people seem to
behave irrationally when it comes to
sports, theyre acting no differently from
the way they do in the rest of their
lives. If cheering on the underdog, loving perennial losers, and risking life
and limb to snag a cheesy T-shirt red
out of a cannon are, objectively, absurd
things to do, then its natural to be irrational. Your brain on sports, they
conclude, is really just your regular
90
Sports Illustrated ) scientic ndings

(Sommers is a psychologist at Tufts) that
ground them in biology.
The result is a large number of as
studies show constructions. As in: Studies from across the behavioral sciences
have identied a veritable bias blind spot,
a failure to recognize in ourselves the
prejudices and ethical violations we so
easily spot in others. And: Research
tells us that we are not helplessly at the
mercy of a hypocritical brainunder the
right circumstances we can be equally
sensitive to our own and to others moral
transgressions. And: Studies of the brain
suggest that the difference between sexual and competitive arousal may not be
that large at all. (Really? Try doing both
at the same time.) And: Those who
conscious of our thoughts and feelings;

what were not conscious of is their physical correlates, the chemical states in our
bodies that constitute them and without
which nothing could be felt or thought.
The experience of rooting for your favorite team can actually be captured at
a neural level, Wertheim and Sommers
say. This is true, because so can the experience of everything.
The fallacy to watch out for is the assumption that brain states tell us something about what an experience means
to the person having it. Brain states of
the kind that Wertheim and Sommers
describethat is, things like hormonal
increases and changes in the ventral striatumare indifferent to meaning. On
that level, the brain of someone whose
ILLUSTRATION BY NISHANT CHOKSI
team has just lost the Super Bowl is indistinguishable from the brain of someone who is grieving for the death of a
loved one. No one would say that those
experiences are equivalent.
Anxiety is a classic case. I can be made
equally anxious by the thought of missing my bus and the thought of being
struck by a meteor. The rst is (usually)
rational and the second irrational. But
the brute chemistry is the same. This is
why its not that hard to nd non-sports
situations in which the brain seems to
act like a brain on sports. The more interesting question has to be whether we
really treat the two situations as the same,
or have a sports mode that we switch
on and off. And, if we do, what that mode
cognitively is. What do we think were
doing when were on sports?
To their credit, Wertheim and Sommers are on to this. They are enthusiasts,
but they are not fanatics, and they frequently concede that, whatever the suitability of a given behavioral pattern with
regard to sports, it is often inappropriate,
and hence overridden, in lifes other arenas. They frequently pull the rug out from
under their own arguments. In sports, for
example, we like to root for the underdogthe team or the player who, by denition, is more likely to losepartly because the marginal psychic payoff for being
right is so much greater than the potential pain on the downside. But were playing with house money. When its our own
money, we tend to back the favorite.
Similarly with fan-centric hypocrisy.
If you are a Boston sports fan, you are
condent that Tom Brady never ordered
anyone to deate his footballs, and you
are equally certain that Peyton Manning
is a big fat liar. Would you be surprised
if someone pointed out that you might
be suffering from a bias blind spot? I
dont think you would. The whole basis
for being a sports fan is that there are no
consequences for hypocrisy. In fact, if
you are not a hypocrite in this sense, if
you cannot favor one side for no decent
reason over the other, then you cannot
enjoy sports at all.
There is another fallacy lurking here.
That is the assumption that the baser
impulsein this case, the impulse to
prefer your cheater to their cheateris
more hard-wired than the nobler impulse, which would be to put favoritism
aside, ignore the fact that one quarterback
is married to a Brazilian supermodel

while the other does Papa Johns pizza
commercials, difficult as that may be, and
weigh the cases impartially.
We dont think we need to do this,
because sports is one of those consequence-free zones in life in which a double standard is acceptable. Armchair political debate is another. Hillary Clinton
voted for the Iraq War? An honest mistake, made by many. Bernie Sanders voted
against gun regulation? Disqualied to
be President! But, once consequences for
us or for people we care about come into
the picture, we strive to assess candidates
objectively. We may bewe undoubtedly arestill limited by blind spots, but
we are not agrantly prejudiced. To be a
fan is to make a point of being unreasonable. Sports is a vacation from prudence.
Is hating on Peyton more rooted in
basic human psychology than appreciating his case with judicious disinterest? People toggle effortlessly between
these behaviors every day, because people are astute readers of context. We
know the difference between sitting in
a bar and sitting in a jury box. We condemn bias when it matters just as instinctively as we root for the home team
when it doesnt.
ne purpose of explaining behav-
O ior by reference to basic human
psychology is to naturalize it. Its true

that, as far as we know, some people have
always enjoyed athletic contests, hoping,
no doubt, to pump up activity in their ventral striata.
An athletic competition is
described in detail in the
Odyssey, which is set in
the twelfth century B.C.E.
Does this have evolutionary
signicance? I think its one
of those species characteristics, like singing or writing poems, about which you
could argue either way. Its either a performance to attract mates or a by-product of adaptive characteristics that have
been selected for other reasons. We have
evolved to chase animals and kill them
with stones and sticks. Why not stage
some foot races and discus throws when
were not in the mood to hunt?
What does change, of course, is the
social role that games play. In ancient
Greece, they were performed at funer-
92
als or as demonstrations of regional pride.

In ancient Rome, the site of gladiatorial excesses, they were used to promote
military virtues. In eighteenth-century
England, sports were an excuse for gambling. Organized spectator sports, of the
kind we have today, with leagues and
championships and codied rules, virtually all date from the nineteenth century. One of the earliest attempts to
codify soccer was at the University of
Cambridge, in the eighteen-forties,
around the same time that the rst rules
of rugby were set down, at the Rugby
School. Ice hockey was made a sport at
McGill in 1877, the same year that Wimbledon began. In the United States, organized baseball began in the eighteen-seventies, football and basketball
in the eighteen-nineties. The rst modern Olympic Games were held in 1896,
the rst Tour de France in 1903. The
N.C.A.A. was formed (under a different name) in 1906, the P.G.A. in 1916.
Still, even though football games, tennis matches, and golf tournaments today
take virtually the same form they did a
hundred years ago, there has been one
big change in the ecology of modern
sports. That change is, in a word, money.
In 1971, Roger Staubach, who was a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, the Super
Bowl Most Valuable Player, and one of
the most popular athletes in the United
States, had a salary of fty thousand dollars. During the off-season, he worked
in real estate. Today, the teams starting
quarterback, Tony Romo,
who has never won a championship, plays on a sixyear contract worth a hundred and eight million dollars. Matthew Futtermans
Players: The Story of
Sports and Money, and the
Visionaries Who Fought
to Create a Revolution
(Simon & Schuster), from
which this example is taken, is a book
about how that happened.
As his subtitle suggests, Futterman
has cast the story in a heroic modeas
a series of actions in the tradition of the
storming of the Bastille, the Boston Tea
Party, and the ninety-ve theses nailed
to the door. A few individuals with
guts and vision risk all to challenge a
reactionary status quo and bring modern sports into an era of (relatively)
enlightened liberality, in which business

is booming and everyone is better off.
Futtermans story begins in 1960, and
his revolutionaries include Mark McCormack, the founder of the sports and
fashion agency IMG (originally International Management Group); Nick Bollettieri, the tennis coach who created the
rst full-time tennis boarding school
(which was eventually bought by IMG);
Marvin Miller, the union organizer who
established free agency in major-league
baseball; and John Paul (Sonny) Vaccaro,
a businessman who persuaded Nike to
put all its advertising money into one
star, Michael Jordan. There are also terric stories about the great hurdler Edwin
Moses and the tennis star Stan Smith,
about Arnold Palmer (McCormacks rst
client) and Catsh Hunter (from whose
contract dispute Miller fashioned his
breakthrough).
Although the dramatic effect of the
stories is ne, the premise is false. For
everyone knows what the social role of
sports is today. It is, via commercials and
endorsements, to sell stuff. And everyone knows what makes that possible:
television. It did not require a revolutionary genius to gure this out. How
the various interested parties managed
to get access to that giant teat did require some legal and nancial savvy.
But if it had not been managed in one
way it would surely have been managed
in another.
utterman knows this perfectly
F well, too, and when, in his nal
chapters, he gets to the part played by

television in modern sports, he makes
his most provocative observations. For
he thinks that the enormous nancial
sports empire built up since 1960 may
be teetering on collapse.
Two things especially concern him.
One is what might be called the Michael
Jordan effect. As Futterman is not the
rst person to note, the model for contemporary sports marketing was set in
Hollywood in the nineteen-fties, and
the key gure was Lew Wasserman, who
ran the talent agency M.C.A. What Wasserman and the studios gured out was
that stars sell a picture. If you promote
the actors, rather than the story, you will
sell more tickets.
This meant paying the stars a lot more,
and sometimes giving them a piece of
the actionpointsas Wasserman

did, starting in 1950, with his client Jimmy
Stewart. The result is what we might
call, if the analogy were not a little grotesque, entertainment-industry income
inequality. Stars make astronomically
more than the rest of the talent. For Star
Wars: The Force Awakens, Harrison
Ford is reported to have been paid between twenty and thirty million dollars;
Daisy Ridley, one of the leads, got between one and three hundred thousand.
Futterman argues that in team sports
like basketball this has a damaging effect.
The organization has a big nancial stake
in the performance of one or, at most,
two players. The more people tune in to
watch Kobe Bryant, the more points Kobe
Bryant has to score, and the more points
Kobe Bryant scores, the more money he
is paid. The game itself is reshaped, or
deformed, to get the ball to Kobe. His
salary this year was twenty-ve million
dollars, and his team, the Lakers, lost sixtyve of the eighty-two games it played.
(By the way, Staubach, underpaid as he
might have been by the Cowboys, did
turn his moonlighting job to some advantage. He made a fortune in real estate
and, in 2008, sold his company for more
than seven hundred million dollars.)
Futtermans other concern is more
alarming, at least to the oligarchs of professional sports. He thinks that the industry has expanded beyond the scale of
its actual audience. One of the great illusions of the sports industry is mass fascination, he says. Its true that hundreds
of millions of people watch special events
like the World Cup and the Olympics,
but the day-to-day audience for sports
is tiny. In the United States, it amounts
to about four per cent of households.
Fewer than three per cent on average
watch their local N.B.A. games; fewer
than two per cent watch their hometown N.H.L. teams.
The exception proves the rule. The one
major sport that continues to attract viewers and high Nielsen ratings is football,
and that, Futterman argues, is because it
is the only sport that broadcasts all of its
games on network television. Its income
is an accurate reection of the size of its
audience. All the other leagues and teams
have deals with cable companies, like
ESPN. Some, like the Yankees, own a
stake in their own cable companies.
Cable works by bundling: your monthly
93
cable bill is split up among the channels

your carrier provides, whether you watch
those channels or not. Futterman says
this means that about twenty per cent of
the average cable bill goes to sports channels, which pay the teams or the leagues
for the right to show their games. Which
means that sports are currently enjoying
a very large subsidy from a public that
doesnt watch them. Cable looks to be
on the way to disaggregation, and, when
that happens, sports will be worth what
the actual audience is willing to pay for
them. We may be looking at a bubble.
A statistic related to the shrinking
market is the rising age of fans in some
sports. According to Futterman, in 2009
the average age of a postseason baseball
viewer was forty-nine; in 2014, it was
fty-ve. The average age of someone
who watched a regular-season baseball
game that season was fty-eight. Men
over fty-eight is not a demographic advertisers are dying to reach, unless theyre
selling erectile-dysfunction or bladdercontrol medicationswhich is why you
see so many commercials for those products on local sports broadcasts. When
ask your doctor commercials start showing up, you know the end is near. Sports
cultural relevance, as Futterman puts
it, may be in decline.
In fact, if any industry looks primed
for disruption, its sports. The North
American sports business is valued at
half a trillion dollars. Annual revenue
from ticket sales, broadcast rights, merchandise, and other sources is about
sixty-one billion dollars. But the major
sports leagues are operated as cartels.
They are, in the terms of the Sherman
Act, combinations in restraint of trade.
The teams (the Green Bay Packers are
the only American exception) are privately owned, and the leagues, which
is to say, the owners, have rules to restrict the ability of players to sell their
services in the open market. These include the college draft (imagine that,
in your line of work, the right to employ you was owned by one company)
and the salary cap.
he entire industry rests on the
Tlabor of athletes.The number of ath-
letes is actually quite small, but, as a class,

they are not getting that much of the
money. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, only 13,700 people make their
94
living playing spectator sports in the

United States (compared with, for example, sixty-nine thousand people who
are actors). The median annual wage for
athletes is $44,680.
If that number sounds low, its because were accustomed to reading
about players signing multi-year contracts for sums north of a hundred million dollars. There are not many such
players, and theres a reason that their
contracts are so heavily publicized by
the industry: they mask actual labor
conditions. In the National Football
League, for example, where annual revenue is close to thirteen billion dollars, the median player salary is $839,000
and the average career lasts three and
a half years.
In Major League Baseball, where revenue is $9.5 billion, the average player
salary is $4.25 million, but that gure
reects the fact that a couple of dozen
players are making more than twenty
million dollars a year. The median salary
in baseball is $1.5 million, and the average career lasts a little more than ve and
a half years. Player compensation in baseball accounts for less than forty per cent
of total revenue, down from fty-six per
cent in 2002.
We may thinkwe are more or less
conditioned to thinkBut theyre getting paid just to play a game! We read
about the number of dollars a star athlete makes per goal or per at-bat and
feel that social priorities are out of whack.
But that one person is watched by millions of peopleon the truly big stage,
like the Super Bowl, by more than a
hundred million people. Star athletes
deliver the biggest audiences in the world
to advertisers. They are making many
people besides themselves rich.
For the stars, signing bonuses and
endorsements provide additional income. Which can be a lot: in 2015,
LeBron James made sixty-ve million
dollars, forty-four million from endorsements. On the other hand, according to Forbes, Daniel Gilbert, the
man who owns Jamess team, is worth
$5.4 billion. At sixty-ve million dollars a year, it will take James eighty
years to catch up. Tony Romos base
salary last year was eighteen million dollars, but the National Football Leagues
commissioner, who is employed by
the owners, made $34.1 million. No
one pays to watch the commissioner.

Once you get below the major leagues,
player compensation shrinks dramatically. In the minor leagues in baseball,
players can make as little as fty-ve
hundred dollars a season. In basketball,
the highest minor-league (the D-League)
pay is twenty-ve thousand dollars; in
hockey, the minimum is forty-two thousand. Practice-squad players in the N.F.L.
can make as little as six thousand dollars a week, and only during the season.
Women athletes make far less than men
who play the same sports. This is in part
because not a single womens sport is
scheduled for prime-time viewing, apart
from events like Grand Slam tennis
matches, the Womens World Cup, and
the Olympics. And, nally, four hundred
and sixty thousand college students play
organized sports. In 2014, the organization that governs those sports, the
N.C.A.A., had an income of $989 million. Some college athletes receive support from the N.C.A.A. for tuition and
other expenses, but none receive a salary
or are allowed to accept income for endorsements or other activities related to
their work as athletes.
The irony, if that is the right word, is
that sports is essentially aestheticized
labor. It is the spectacle of men and
women exerting all their mental and
physical powers to produce . . . nothing.
Kant dened art as purposiveness without purpose. I think (gulp) Kant was
wrong about artartists have purposes,
and people who watch, listen to, or read
works of art try to grasp what those purposes are. But he would have been right
about sports.
Sports, Maxim Gorky wrote, makes
people even more stupid than they are.
Fran Lebowitz, not always known for
agreeing with Soviet writers, agreed.
What is truly chilling is that there are a
lot of smart people interested in sports,
she said. That just gives you no hope at
all for the human race. Still, leaving aside
all the trash talk and chest thumping
(maybe you cant), there is something
beautiful and touching about watching
fellow-members of what is fundamentally a klutzy, badly engineered, and underpowered species perform difficult physical acts. A squirrel watching a gymnastics
routine would just laugh. On the other
hand, squirrels cant endorse pizza. Were
way ahead of them in that department.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Guapa, by Saleem Haddad (Other Press). Rasa, the narrator of
this vibrant, wrenching dbut novel, is a young gay man living in an unnamed Arab city. During the Arab Spring, he
joined protests, but now an autocratic regime rules while zealots seethe in the slums. Worse, Rasas ercely traditional
grandmother has just seen him with his lover, and his lover
is growing distant. In the course of a day, as Rasa hunts for
a missing friend, who has likely been hauled in by the vice
squad, his city and his memories roil, sensuous and caustic,
full of smoke and blood. A lavish political wedding that forms
the books nal set piece brings revelations and epiphanies,
but they dont feel forced.
Hard Red Spring, by Kelly Kerney (Viking). This century-span-
ning novel examines the violent relationship between Guatemala and the United States through the connected stories of
four American women. In 1902, the young daughter of cochineal farmers witnesses the violent disintegration of her family;
in 1954, the wife of an ambassador has an affair with her husbands best friend; in 1983, a missionary experiences misgivings;
and, in 1999, an adoptive mother takes her Mayan daughter on
a trip to explore her roots. The books ambitious scope entails
some creaky coincidences, but Kerneys insights are rewarding.
Of happiness, one character concludes, How unexpected, how
encompassing, how close to disappointment it felt.
Landscapes of Communism, by Owen Hatherley (New Press).
Part history, part travelogue, this survey of Soviet architecture

explores how a societys values, real or professed, inform physical space. Hatherley takes us down Moscows deep, grandiose metro stations, which doubled as bomb shelters, and
through gentrifying prefab workers districts. We encounter a
shamelessly phallic television tower in Prague and a showpiece of Stalinoid angry-yet-maternal womanhood in Warsaw. Triumphalist monuments to revolutionmuscles, beards,
gunsabound. Hatherley also addresses the dilemma of what
is to be done with structures freighted with a bygone ideology, and quotes Deng Xiaoping on Maos Mausoleum: It was
inappropriate to build it and it would also be inappropriate
to demolish it.
Charlotte Bront, by Claire Harman (Knopf ). In this masterly
biography, Harman captures the contradictions that dened

the life and work of the author of Jane Eyre. Together with
her sisters Emily and Anne, Bront led a life that was tedious
when it was not tragic: spent largely in rural isolation, and
punctuated by the untimely deaths of loved ones and stints
teaching and governessing. To explain how genius ourished
in such circumstances Harman leads readers on a precipitous
journey through the writers interior landscape. The Bronts
were odd, antisocial, enmeshed, obsessive, and violent; on one
occasion, an adult Emily terrorized her siblings by punching
the family dog in the eyes till it was half-blind. Harmans
psychologically astute portrait deftly bridges Charlottes world
and her work.
POP MUSIC
THE SELF-CONFLICT ZONE

Drakes perpetual sadness.
BY HUA HSU
he Toronto rapper and singer
T Drake got his big break in 2009,
back when describing someone as both

a rapper and a singer still seemed like a
way to undermine his credibility. That
year, he released So Far Gone, a mixtape that showcased him as a oneman distillation of modern hip-hop and
R. & B. In the past, the impassive outlaw rapper and the gushing doe-eyed
singer crossed paths only as a way of
combining their genres respective charms
for a hit single. Drake cracked the code:
he collapsed the distance between these
archetypes, seeming equally comfortable
rhyming about dodging bullets and bar-
ing his insecurities in a come-hither

hook.
There had been artists before him,
like Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott,
who toggled between rapping and singing. But what distinguished Drake was
a sense of shameless guile, a condence
in his complex persona that was due
partly to his background as an actor.
(Under his birth name, Aubrey Graham, he played a basketball star on
Degrassi: The Next Generation.) As
with his predecessor Kanye West, there
was something novel about a male rapper who appeared to be so sensitive.
Since the success of So Far Gone,
On Views, the rapper bleeds onto the page and then admires the pattern.
96
Drake has become one of pop musics

most polarizing gures as well as one
of its most inuential. He is like an algorithm cycling through a set of durable themes: Nobody believed in me;
always be loyal; my enemies are out to
get me; we should be together; Ive
tried to be faithful, but I just cant. And,
above all: nobodys perfect.
This last motif has dened Drakes
growth as an artist. Starting with the ornate melancholia of Take Care, from
2011, Drake elevated the unfurling of
ones imperfections into an art form. It
wasnt just his interest in scrutinizing his
own contradictions, by now a trope for
any thoughtful rapper. It was the harshness of his raps and the unabashed softness of his singing, the way his music
itted between styles and rhythms, expressing a restless desire to become someone or something better. The music
sounded intimate and precise, owing
largely to a close-knit circle of producers, led by his friend Noah (40) Shebib,
who swaddled his voice within their digital purrs and tolling bells.
The thing about introspection,
though, is that it allows us to think of
ourselves always as works in progress.
While this is a healthy realization with
which to greet every day, it doesnt make
for the most compelling narrative. In
recent years, Drake has grown perhaps
too comfortable in this perpetual state
of self-examination and light sadness
he bleeds onto the page and then admires the pattern he leaves behind. He
mines his past, not as a reason to change
but as rationalization for his worst behavior. Late last month, Drake released
his fourth album, Views. On the cover,
he poses high up on Torontos CN
Toweran apt, if melodramatic, image
of loneliness at the top. All of my lets
just be friends are friends I dont have
anymore, he croons on Keep the Family Close, one of the many songs on
the album which function as autopsies
for relationships past. Maybe there was
something there? Probably not, he concludes, comparing a certain woman to
a Chrysler designed to fool passersby
into thinking its a Bentley.
A lot of the songs on Views nd
Drake running through his relationship
woes, recounting arguments at the
Cheesecake Factory or dead-end discussions about trust, wondering if he
ILLUSTRATION BY STANLEY CHOW
was so good that it was inevitable that

he would be taken for granted. Views,
like much of Drakes music, is relatable
because of its vagueness, balancing tales
of betrayal and self-loathing with winning celebrations of loyalty and friendship. Weston Road Flows is a reminiscence of more carefree days; the title
track, built on a swelling gospel sample, follows the pressures of fame
The paranoia can start to turn into arrogance / Thoughts too deep to go work
em out with a therapist.
For Drake, redemption lies in his city
and in his past, as well as in his brotherhood-above-everything approach to
the good life. On the delightful With
You, he and the singer PartyNextDoor
take turns playfully begging their lovers
to come back, though it seems as if they
would rather hang out with each other.
For the listener, redemption comes from
Drakes knack for producing motivational anthems. Its humbling to think
how many birthdays, graduations, and
promotions have had his music as their
soundtrack.
Drake understands how people live
with music, how it helps us get through
life, whether its a breakup, a court date,
or an unusually long jog. One of his most
endearing habits has always been the
way he weaves other peoples music into
his own. I think Id lie for you / I think
Id die for you / Jodeci Cry for You, he
sings, over deconstructed dancehall
chirps, on Controlla. Elsewhere, he
samples the vocals of a Mary J. Blige
song from the nineties and a Ray J track
from the aughts, as if the album were an
index of the music that accompanies lifes
heartbreaks.
You send the Are you here? text
without an invite, he sings, on the satiny U with Me? Thats that shit that
I dont like. Here he is paraphrasing
the Chicago rapper Chief Keef s 2012
hit I Dont Like. Drake turns the
originals sociopathic stomp into something sweet and breezy, before retreating to more cocksure footing. Hows
that for real? he raps, nishing the
song with a gruff surliness. If you were
to cook Drakes music down to its essencethe intimacy, the effortlessness
of its craft, the absurdityyou would
probably get this song: a narrative about
texting with an ex-lover, veering back
and forth between vulnerability and
passive-aggressive nagging, and managing to make that moment when three

dots appear in the text window seem
epic.
ast July, Drake found himself in
L a tiff with the pugnacious Philadel-
phia rapper Meek Mill. Though Drake

had appeared on Meeks album, he
seemed uninterested in helping him promote it. What started as a minor snub
metastasized into a referendum on the
current state of hip-hop, as Meek accused Drake of hiring a lesser-known
rapper named Quentin Miller to write
his rhymes, a charge that might once
have been a career-ender. Drake quickly
responded with a pair of withering dis
tracks, as well as Hotline Bling, a single that did little to resolve questions
about Drakes originality. Hotline Bling
bore a close resemblance to Cha Cha,
a minor hit by the Virginia rapper
D.R.A.M., sparking an additional discussion of whether Drake was just a stylish fraud.
But old, meritocratic notions of authenticity have never vexed Drake. After
all, he is a former child actor from Canada whose grittiest raps seem to portray a life that was never his, and who
has been largely responsible for rebranding his home town, Toronto, as the 6,
a reference to the citys area codes as
well as to its six original boroughs. Instead, he has succeeded by pursuing
ubiquity, particularly when it comes to
understanding and embracing the unpredictable rhythms of the Internet. I
do my own propaganda, he raps on
Hype, something thats evident whenever you see him gesticulating courtside at a Toronto Raptors basketball
game, or gooly dancing to an up-andcoming artist he may want to claim as
a protg, or releasing videos, like the
one for the color-washed Hotline
Bling, and album art, like the cover of
Views, that seem tailor-made for recirculation as memes and GIFs. Even
his lyrics seem engineered to be tweeted
or used as hashtags.
There is no reason to feel sorry for
the version of Drake who oats through
this album, gazing forlornly out windows, scrolling through his phone for
someone to text, heartlessly boning his
way out of his malaise. And yet as I listened to Views I felt a sense of ex-
haustion that wasnt necessarily Drakes

fault. In early April, he announced the
albums release datea rarity in this era
of the surprise drop, when artists seem
intent on ambushing their fansand
teased us with One Dance, a wondrous, global dance party of a single,
featuring the British singer Kyla and
the Nigerian singer Wizkid. But between his announcement and the albums release, at the end of April, Beyonc put out her provocative new
visual album, Lemonade, and Prince
died. Its not just that these events upstaged himthey were a reminder, from
the distant past and a possible future,
of how outdated our traditional notion
of albums has become.
At a time when Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar have produced messy, ambitious albums full of statements on art
and accountability, Drakes goals seem
modest and quaint. Its the difference
between trying to do something important and trying to stay relevant.
Make no mistake: Drakes songs will
be unavoidable come summer, as the
soundtrack for sports highlights, inspiring some to grind a little harder,
helping others to mend a broken heart.
But its hard to stay in the world of
Views for too long. My eld of vision kept shrinking until I felt that I
was looking at a narrow band of light.
Theres something universal about
Drakes inwardness, certainly, but it begins to feel tedious to linger too long
in the self-conict zone when so much
other music aspires to take in the world
all at once. He continues to make music
that sounds magnicent but leaves you
feeling a bit unfullled. I imagine that
this is what it would feel like to be the
antagonist in one of Drakes songs, one
of the featureless exes whose only purpose is to support him, to hold a mirror up to him, stuck in a relationship
where sweet nothings are tossed off for
the sake of a clever phrasing, where
you are little more than furniture in
someone elses movie.
1
Pyrrhic Victory Department
From the Londonderry (N.H.) Times.
12:22 p.m. Report of angry squirrel in house

on King Henry Drive. Squirrel left the house.
6:19 p.m. Squirrel is back in house under
couch on King Henry Drive. Animal removed
from house.
97
SERIOUSLY FUNNY
A Nicole Eisenman retrospective.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
Political and personal: Eisenmans The Triumph of Poverty (2009).

succinct Nicole Eisenman ret-
A rospective of twenty-two paint-
ings and three sculptures, at the New

Museum, is accidentally well timed
to the recent news that the MacArthur Foundation has awarded a
genius grant to the spectacularly
talented, darkly hilarious New York
artist. Thats good. Any attention drawn
to Eisenman benets conversation
about contemporary art. At fty-one
tall and stovepipe slim, with a strikingly long face beneath close-cropped
black hairEisenman has mellowed
only slightly from the raucous wunderkind who burst onto the scene in
the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Since then,
she has led a kind of one-woman insurgency, bidding to reshape the eld,
with gurative works that collapse the
political into the personal and the personal into an erudite devotion to painting. She paints narrative fantasies that
look bumptiously jokey at rst, but
reveal worlds of nuanced thought and
98
feeling. They must be judged in person; in reproduction they lose the masterly touch that is Eisenmans signature. The MacArthur Foundation cited
her for restoring to the representation of the human form a cultural
signicance that had waned during
the ascendancy of abstraction in the
20th century. Id like it to be true.
Eisenmans resourceful Expressionism hints at the power of narrative
painting to re-situate the art world in
the world at large.
Eisenman is an artist of overlapping sincerities. One of them suggests
that of a bohemian community organizer. In Biergarten at Night (2007),
dozens of characterssome realist, including a self-portrait; others fanciful,
such as an androgynous gure passionately kissing a deaths-headhoist
brews in velvety shadow and glimmering light. Each face is painted a bit
differently, in a range from lmy to
impastoed, and each feels individually
known: liked, not liked, loved, perhaps

feared. The longer you look the more
meaningful the picture becomes. It
does indeed recast bohemia in a convincingly up-to-date guisein Brooklyn, of course, where thousands of the
art worlds threadbare strivers reside.
Similarly compelling are two big, populous paintings that signal Eisenmans
response to the Great Recession. In
Coping (2008), poignant citizens of
a strange village meander waist-deep
in a caramel-colored ood. In The
Triumph of Poverty (2009), a crowd
treks past a beat-up car in a rural scene;
one of them is a dishevelled rich man
whose dropped pants reveal that he is
ass-backward.
Another theme that has come naturally to Eisenman since the beginning of her career, and which she has
furthered almost to the extent of a
civic duty, is sexuality. A detail of It
Is So (2014), reproduced on the cover
of the shows catalogue, depicts lesbian cunnilingus. You see, in sculptural forms, the tops of the womens
heads and their linked hands, bracketed by the recipients spread legs.
Eisenman quipped to an interviewer
in 2014, I feel totally inhabited in
my role as a possessed-like lesbian
authority. Somebodys got to step up
and do it. But when the shows cocurator Massimiliano Gioni, interviewing her for the catalogue, hazarded that she is the voice of a queer
community, she said, No. God, no.
She explained, I couldnt draw a line
around a group of people and claim
to have a voice for anyone other than
myself. The apparent contradiction
goes to the heart of her singularity, as
an artist delighted to nd herself in
common cause with others, but only
by way of visions and opinions that
feel authentic to her. You neednt sign
on with any constituency to enjoy her
audacity.
Eisenman was born in Verdun,
France, in 1965. Her father was a U.S.
Army psychiatrist, and her mother is
an urban planner. When I spoke with
Eisenman recently, she told me that
her fathers Freudian orthodoxy both
tormented and inspired her as a child.
They were at odds for years, but have
reconciled. She paid homage to his
analytical bent and his interpretations
COURTESY THE ARTIST/LEO KOENIG INC.
THE ART WORLD
of dreams in a 2014 retrospective of

her work that appeared in museums
in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and San
Diego. Titled Dear Nemesis, it was
dedicated To my Dad, who has taught
me to see things that are not there
and to see through things that are.
Also important to Eisenman was her
maternal great-grandmother Esther
Hammerman, who died in 1984. Born
in Poland, Hammerman was an unschooled painter of cityscapes and
scenes of Jewish life who emigrated
from Vienna in 1937. Eisenman remains close, she told me, to the Eisenman clan, including two brothers and
a centenarian great-aunt who is the
subject of her painting Death and
the Maiden (2009), as a blowsy nude
tippling wine at a table with a patient
and even tenderly companionable death
gure.
In 1970, the family settled in Scarsdale, where Eisenman embraced her
vocation as an artist while still in high
school. She received a degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of
Design and spent a year in Rome, enraptured by Renaissance painters. Returning to New York in 1987, she lived,
by turns, on the Lower East Side, in
Chinatown, at the Chelsea Hotel, and,
for a few months, in the gallery of her
dealer, Jack Tilton. She worked for a
bed company in Jersey City and for
an outdoor-mural rm in Manhattan.
In the meantime, she experimented
with installations, sculpture, and video.
But she mainly drew, crowding the
walls of the Tilton Gallery with tackedup cartoons and sketches for a memorable solo show, in 1994. Her sensational contribution to the 1995 Whitney Biennial was a thirty-foot-long
mural of the museum blasted to ruins;
victims lie on the ground, and only
one wall remains, at which she sits on
a scaffold and paints. Her early paintings could be nasty. The Norman
Rockwellish pastiche of Dysfunctional Family (2000) features a father
smoking a bong, a mother exposing
her crotch, and a baby boy who has
taken a hammer to his private parts.
But even her darkest visions exude
ebullient panache.
Guessing Eisenmans historical precedents has been something of a sport
among her critics. Her favorite Old
Master, she told me, dating to her days

in Rome, is Andrea Mantegnathe
brother-in-law of Giovanni Bellini, who
is as astringently inty as Bellini is meltingly honeyed. She helpfully provides
references with the spines of books
stacked in It Is So and another painting of sexual intimacy, Night Studio
(2009): Bruegel, Goya, Vuillard, Munch,
Nolde, Kirchner, and Ernst, among
other forebears, and her gure-painting contemporaries Nicola Tyson and
Peter Doig. The inuence of Philip
Guston is plain in Sele (2014): the
stubbly, boulder-shaped head of a man
in bed holding his phone so close that
its camera picks up only half of his cyclopean eye. Eisenman likes rhyming
contemporary subjects with motifs from
the past, including, as she told Gioni
of a number of pictures, a timeless gesture of shoulders curled in and our eyes
reverently looking down; its a pose familiar from classic paintings of religious
piety, renacted whenever we check our
phones.
Eisenman is an enthusiast for fellowartists and, especially, for poets. Under
the Table 2 (2014) memorializes a
happily dissipated day with a crew of
the latter, she says. Jumbled heads share
a bottle, which a single hand lifts and
pours out, under a table that is topped
with a stuffed olive, a cigarette emitting an arabesque of smoke, and a huge
salami, its sliced end textured with
psychedelic dots of color. The image
is both lovely and gauchegaucherie
being Eisenmans when-in-doubt reex.
The New Museum show is titled
Al-ugh-ories, a phrasing that Eisenman coined when Gioni proposed
Allegories. That ugh, in response
to what seems a reasonable characterization of her stylelike the God,
no with which she rejected being categorized as a political activistexpresses an important distinction. Like
her sexual self-assertion, Eisenmans
stylistic genres are means to the end
of sustaining her condence as an artist. They are about being specic. She
is a pragmatist in service to creativity
that remembers the past, glories in
the present, and eagerly addresses the
future. She has said, Id love to jump
ahead thirty years and look back at
this moment in art. What will jump
out? She will, I bet.
99
THE CURRENT CINEMA
TRANSFORMERS
The Lobster and Captain America: Civil War.
BY ANTHONY LANE
Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz play forbidden lovers in Yorgos Lanthimoss film.
imorous, paunchy, and pale, with
T a sad mustache and a pair of rim-
less glasses, David (Colin Farrell) checks

into a rural hotel. He expects to remain
for forty-ve days, and, like the other
guestsall of whom, male and female,
are unattachedhe must use the time
to procure a suitable mate. Anyone who
unks that task will suffer an unusual
penalty. As the hotel manager (Olivia
Colman) says to David, The fact that
youll turn into an animal if you fail to
fall in love with someone during your
stay here is not something that should
upset you or get you down. Just think,
as an animal youll have a second chance
to nd a companion. She advises him
that, if transgured, he should limit his
choice of sweetheart to the same species. A wolf and a penguin could never
live together, nor could a camel and a
hippopotamus, she says. After a moment, she adds, That would be absurd. As if everything else she has mentioned is utterly normal.
Only a lm with a tenacious grasp
of absurdity would allow such talk,
and The Lobster, the rst Englishlanguage feature by the Greek direc100
tor Yorgos Lanthimos, ts the bill. Tranquil in manner yet brisk in momentum,
it lays out the foreground of the story
without pausing to ll in the backdrop;
clue by clue, we have to work it out for
ourselves. The underlying tenet of society, we come to understand, is that
people are forbidden to be single. Parts
of the lm are set in a city, where we
see that principle in action. A woman
on her own in a mall is stopped by security guards, who demand, politely
but rmly, to know the whereabouts
of her husband; she explains that he is
away on a business trip. Another solo
shopper is asked to produce his certicate, in order to prove that he has a
spouse.
David is a wretched case. (The casting of Farrell, who played Alexander
the Great for Oliver Stone, is a subtle
joke in itself.) His wife has recently left
him, and so he is sent to the hotel; no
one must be alone for long. With him
he takes a Border colliea loyal pal,
and no wonder, for it is in fact his
brother, who presumably tried and failed
to nd a partner of his own. (Most such
failures, according to the manager, elect
to become dogs. That is why the world

is full of dogs, she says.) One pleasure
of The Lobster, all the more striking
for going unremarked, is the array of
passing creatures: a amingo stalks by,
providing a splash of pink amid the
earth tones of the landscape; and an
Irish guest with long blond hair appears outside the hotel, after an unsuccessful stay, as a Shetland pony.
So strong is the conceit behind The
Lobster that only gradually do you realize how much plot is being packed
in. Things begin to stir as David and
the other residents, armed with tranquillizer guns, are forced to go hunting. The prey is not beasts but loners:
single folk who have gone rogue in the
woods and need to be culled. (The chase
is shot in slow motion, to extraordinary effect.) Loners willingly follow
their own code of conduct, which is every bit as severe as that which prevails
at the hotel. They may fraternize, or
dance without touching, but that is all:
two of them wear surgical dressings on
their lips, having been caught in an
embrace and punished with something
called the red kiss. David now absconds to join the loners, and falls in
love with one of them (Rachel Weisz).
The irony could not be more acrid: our
hero, unable to lose his heart at the
hotel, then loses it in the one place
where the loss is considered a crime.
Only in the city, where David and the
woman evade suspicion by pretending
to be a couple, do we see them share a
writhing smooch, and even then they
are told not to overdo it. Wherever you
go, Lanthimos implies, the laws entrap you.
That is a serious charge, and, for all
the pranks that he plays on our assumptions, Lanthimos is full of grave
intent. No art, for a lmmaker as for a
novelist, is ner or harder than that of
keeping a straight face as you hold the
world up to scorn. Swift managed it,
and so did Buuel, but few current directors, apart from Lanthimos and Todd
Solondz, make the effort. What is more,
theres nothing paltry or cheap about
the targets that Lanthimos picks.
Dogtooth (2009), his breakout movie,
sought to dismantle the family unit;
Alps (2011) took on death, no less,
and the culture of grief, with characters being hired to impersonate the
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKKEL SOMMER
deceased for the sake of the mourners;

and now we have The Lobster, which
snaps at love.
You could easily claim that the lm
connes its ridicule to the Tinderized
to those who are offered such elaborate assistance in the speed and the precision of their wooing that they are left
with no excuse for being alone. The
script, by Lanthimos and Efthymis
Filippou, certainly sports with the notion of the perfect match. At the hotel,
everyone owns up to a dening aw.
Robert ( John C. Reilly) has a lisp,
for example, and John (Ben Whishaw)
has a limp. So desperate is John to
stay human that, having met a woman
who gets nosebleeds, he keeps banging his own schnozzle to draw blood,
and thus to dupe her into accepting
him as her equal. As for David, he is
moved to discover that the woman in
the woods, like him, is nearsighted. Why
should they not peer into the future
together?
All this is neatly done, and Whishaw,
in particular, is frighteningly dry, yet
The Lobster is more than a satire on
the dating game. It digs deeper, needling at the status of our most tender
emotions. Even when David and his
fellow-myopic are revealed to be kindred spirits, that kinship affords them
little joy. Not once do they seem happy,
and I fear that Lanthimos regards
romantic bliss, like domestic harmony,
as yet another illusion to be pricked.
Hence the stern voice-over supplied
by Weisz, sounding like a school principal. Hence, too, the soundtrack
mostly jagged snatches of string
music by Beethoven, Shostakovich,
Schnitt ke, and others, scraping away

any patches of contentment. One image,
of four loners walking down a country
road, clad in suits, recalls the similar
strollers who crop up in Buuels Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972),
yet Lanthimos lacks the masters blithe
awareness that, in the matter of tone,
the savage can cohabit with the suave.
Although few lms this year will make
the kind of impression that The Lobster does, it remains grim fare, spiky
and unconsoling, and, where there are
laughs, they die at the back of the throat.
To anyone planning to see this movie
on a date: good luck.
ow do you dene the Avengers?
H Two phrases from Captain Amer-
ica: Civil War offer alternative answers.

One is a lot of superpeople. The other
is a group of U.S.-based enhanced individuals, which for one heavenly moment suggests that, since we last met
Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) and his
merry mates, they have put on weight.
Imagine a wobbly Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and a lumbering Falcon (Anthony Mackie), with Captain
America (Chris Evans), the incredible
chunk, bringing up the rear.
Alas, the whole gang is in good
shape, although they are having issues
with their bonding. The big news, delivered by the Secretary of State (William Hurt), is that Avenging, hitherto a privately run concern, will now
be controlled by the U.N. under the
Sokovia Accords, named for the location of a previous adventure. (Why do
made-up countries always sound like
somewhere ruled by Groucho Marx?)
Iron Man likes the idea, whereas Captain America hates it. You could parse
their clash as a grownup debate on
the politics of governance, but its really not. Its an excuse for the two of
them to duke it out on a German
aireld, each with a bunch of friends
at his behest. Even Spider-Man (Tom
Holland) and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd)
get roped in, with mixed results. Both
are nicely played, and they leaven the
mood (a tiny Rudd gets to hop inside
Downeys metal costume, like a ea),
yet their very presence smacks of desperation. The motto of the directors,
Anthony and Joe Russo, appears to be:
If you can make it happen, do it. Dont
hold back.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes
had a word for this method: exorbitancy. Three hundred and sixty-six years
ago, in an uncanny trailer for Marvel,
he wrote, There are some that are not
pleased with ction, unless it be bold,
not onely to exceed the work, but also
the possibility of nature: they would have
impenetrable Armors, Inchanted Castles, invulnerable bodies, Iron Men,
ying Horses, and a thousand other such
things, which are easily feigned by them
that dare. As the feigning wears off,
and Captain America: Civil War crawls
to a close, you sense that the possibilities of nature have been not just exceeded but exhausted. Even the dialogue
seems like a special effect: Youre being
uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal,
Black Widow remarks to Iron Man.
Translation: Say something.
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT 2016 COND NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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101
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 weeks cartoon, by Harry Bliss, must be received by
Sunday, May 15th. The finalists in the May 2nd contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists
in this weeks contest, in the May 30th issue. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Any resident of the
United States, Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or
over can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.
THIS WEEKS CONTEST
..........................................................................................................................
THE FINALISTS
THE WINNING CAPTION
Would you feel more comfortable on the oor?

Karen Banniettis, New York City
I am required to report those bruises.
Peter Winslow, Washington, D.C.
Its normal to feel empty after a split.
Michelle Deschenes, Fort Collins, Colo.
His parents never picked him up.

Simon Hale, Boston, U.K.
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MAY 16, 2016

THE INNOVATORS ISSUE

11 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

A Whole New Ball Game

To the Class of 2050

A Life of Adventure and Delight

Samuel Richardson invents the modern novel.

The irrationality of sports fans.

A Nicole Eisenman retrospective.

Anthony Lane 100 The Lobster, Captain America: Civil War.

Letter to the Editor

recently published The Art of Memoir and Now Go Out There.

Lizzie Widdicombe (Happy Together,

D. T. Max (A Whole New Ball Game,

p. 40), a staff writer, is the author of

Charlie Brooker (Dance,Off, p. 52), a

former columnist for the Guardian,

Kevin Young (Poem, p. 58) was inducted

Carrie Brownstein (Call Me Crazy,

Alexandra Lange (Play Ground, p. 68),

an architecture and design critic, is the

Elisabeth Zerofsky (The Talk of the Town,

Rebecca Hazelton (Poem, p. 43) has pub-

Jen Spyra (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 47), a

Lee Child (Telling Tales, p. 67) is the

former senior writer for the Onion, is

lished two books of poetry, Fair Copy

Alexandra Kleeman (Seeing Double,

p. 70) will publish Imitations, a shortstory collection, in September.

Christoph Niemann (Cover) will pub-

lish Words, a visual dictionary for

Ted Chiang (Bad Character, p. 77) is a

Adelle Waldman (A Critic at Large,

p. 84) writes for the Page-Turner column on newyorker.com. The Love

Explore Christoph Niemanns animated cityscape by downloading

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016

THIS WEEKS COVER: ON THE GO

Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his article on

Nicholas Lemanns article rightly notes

ported centralized government and

I agree with Amy Davidsons views

Letters should be sent with the writers name,

MAY 11 17, 2016

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Marionette Maker, a diorama installed in a

Museum of Modern Art

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016

COURTESY THE ARTIST/METRO PICTURES

theatrical, are oddly touchingCollier doesnt

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016

(May 14-17), an older troupe with an aesthetic

American Ballet Theatre

Mark Morris Dance Group

Keely Garfield and Mariangela Lopez

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016

of Being Earnest and The Picture

ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016

Dear Evan Hansen

Long Days Journey Into Night

American Psycho Schoenfeld. Bianco St.

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016