PRICE $8.99 OCT.

23, 2017
 THE MONEY ISSUE
OCTOBER 23, 2017

9 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

35 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Evan Osnos on Trumps war threats;
putting greens; storming Bushwick; Xu Tan;
Adam Davidson on the Internet of Things.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Ronan Farrow 42 Abuses of Power
The Hollywood mogul accused of serial assault.
PERSONAL HISTORY
Jonathan Franzen 50 Under Construction
Getting by in New York City.
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON
Jane Mayer 54 The President Pence Delusion
Mike Pences pact with the corporate right.
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY
Sheelah Kolhatkar 70 Dark Factory
Can humans adapt to a robot workforce?
FICTION
Denis Johnson 82 Strangler Bob
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Jerome Groopman 88 The mysteries of sleep.
Nicholas Lemann 93 Herbert Hoovers forgotten talents.
97 Briefly Noted
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 98 The Meyerowitz Stories, Wonderstruck.

Continued on page 4
 POEMS
Marsha de la O 60 The Country That Doesnt Exist
Philip Schultz 76 Googling Ourselves
COVER
R. Kikuo Johnson Tech Support

DRAWINGS Tom Cheney, David Borchart, Amy Hwang, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Mike Twohy,
Edward Steed, John OBrien, Maddie Dai, Julia Suits, Kaamran Hafeez and Al Batt,
Farley Katz, Zachary Kanin, Liana Finck, Alice Cheng, Michael Maslin, Teresa Burns Parkhurst,
P. C. Vey, Avi Steinberg, Carolita Johnson SPOTS Christian Northeast

RelaxIm just here to take away the algebra they

shoved down your throat in high school.

4 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017

 CONTRIBUTORS
Sheelah Kolhatkar (Dark Factory, p. 70),
a sta writer, published her rst book,
Black Edge, this year.
Jonathan Franzen (Under Construc-
tion, p. 50), a frequent contributor to
The New Yorker, is the author of, most
recently, the novel Purity.
Jiayang Fan (The Talk of the Town,
p. 38) became a sta writer in 2016.
Her reporting on China, American
politics, and culture has appeared in
the magazine and on newyorker.com
since 2010.
Ronan Farrow (Abuses of Power, p. 42),
a television and print reporter, is the
author of the upcoming book War on
Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the
Decline of American Inuence.
Jane Mayer (The President Pence De-
lusion, p. 54) is a sta writer. Her lat-
est book is Dark Money.
Denis Johnson (Fiction, p. 82), who died
in May, is the author of several books, in-
cluding the story collection The Lar-
gesse of the Sea Maiden, which will be
published in January, 2018.

Nicholas Lemann (Books, p. 93), a sta R. Kikuo Johnson (Cover) teaches car-
writer, is a professor at Columbia Jour- tooning at the Rhode Island School of
nalism School. Design.

Jerome Groopman (Books, p. 88) is the
Recanati Professor of Medicine at
Harvard Medical School and chief of
experimental medicine at Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center.
Marsha de la O (Poem, p. 60) most re-
cently published the poetry collection
Antidote for Night.
Philip Schultz (Poem, p. 76) is the founder
and director of the Writers Studio. His
poetry collection Luxury is forthcom-
ing in January, 2018.
Evan Osnos (Comment, p. 35) is the au-
thor of Age of Ambition, which won
the 2014 National Book Award for
nonction.

NEWYORKER.COM
Everything in the magazine, and more.

PODCAST VIDEO
Jia Tolentino on the changing cultural Conversations with Chimamanda
climate and legal procedures around Ngozi Adichie and others from this
sexual assault. years New Yorker Festival.

SUBSCRIBERS: Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the
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6 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
 THE MAIL
THE MYTH OF ELLIS ISLAND
Janet Malcolms Prole of the political
television commentator Rachel Mad-
dow mentions that her surname was
faked . . . by a nineteenth-century Ellis
Island ocial who bestowed it on a fam-
ily of Russian Jewish immigrants named
Medvyedov (The Storyteller, Octo-
ber 9th). Genealogists dispute the com-
mon family lore that names were changed
by immigration inspectors at Ellis Is-
land. They did not create the records but
instead worked with passenger lists that
had been provided by shipping compa-
nies. Any mistakes, misspellings, or fab-
rications originated with the ticket-buyers
and ticket-sellers. Many immigrants
also Americanized their names at the
urging of family, friends, employers, and
immigration-aid workers.
Harvey Kabaker
Silver Spring, Md.
1 The level of control that the military
UNDERSTANDING MYANMAR
The violence and discrimination against
the Rohingya, one of Myanmars ethnic
minorities, is disturbing beyond com-
prehension (Fallen Idol, October 2nd).
While much of the blame can be placed
on the subject of Hannah Beechs ar-
ticle, Aung San Suu Kyithe head of
government and former human-rights
iconwe are all at fault for taking too
long to register that she was not who
we thought. I lived in Myanmar from
2013 to 2016, and I saw Suu Kyi inter-
viewed at the Irrawaddy Literary Fes-
tival in 2014. Locals, tourists, and ex-
pats stampeded the tiny hall where she
was speaking, desperate for a glimpse
of the saintlike gure. I remember feel-
ing confused and cheated by Suu Kyis
responses to the interviewers questions.
She coyly dodged most political dis-
cussion of the countrys ethnic strug-
gles, and seemed intent on talking about
gardening and cooking. It sounded very
much like what one would expect from
a gurehead such as the Queen of En-
glandnot from an icon of democracy.
And, sure enough, after her election
Suu Kyi became a smoke screen for
Buddhist extremism and oppressive
military rule.
Emily Hawkesworth
Brooklyn, N.Y.
To better understand the situation in
Myanmar, one has to bear in mind that
the whole political system was created,
in 2003, as part of a long-term plan
called the Road Map for Democracy.
The platform, which was written by the
military junta, dened the steps that
would turn the country into a so-called
disciplined democratic state. Those in-
cluded a new constitution and general
elections. It seems unimaginable that
the junta, which was more cunning than
it is generally given credit for, would
not have included a role for Suu Kyi.
By then, she had already established
herself as a stakeholder in the political
game, and it was clear that she would
have to be released from house arrest.
exerts over Suu Kyi may be a reection
of her upbringing, but it is also a prod-
uct of careful institutional structuring.
Thierry Falise
Bangkok, Thailand
Beech suggests that Myanmar became
one of the worlds poorest countries be-
cause of the regimes disastrous nation-
alization of the economy. But its eco-
nomic decline was also the result of
sanctions imposed by the U.S., which
blocked credit, investment, and access
to international markets. Beech says
that human rights were the reason for
these sanctions, but I think the gener-
als understood that to become a client
state of the U.S. would mean inltra-
tion by the C.I.A. and the looting of
its treasury by U.S. banks, N.G.O.s, and
multinational corporations.
C. J. Michiels
Los Angeles, Calif.
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.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 7
 OCTOBER 18 24, 2017

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

In the late nineteen-seventies, East Los Angeles swelled with decade-old soul records; Mexican-American
teens cruised to oldies in low-rider convoys, forging a youth subculture that was both nostalgic and new. The
Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis, who plays Bowery Ballroom on Oct. 20 and the Music Hall of Wil-
liamsburg on Oct. 21, revives the sound with magnetic, achy soul ballads free of pop glisten. I set the table for
two, maybe its cause Im a fool, she once riffed; for these gigs, she shouldnt have a problem filling seats.

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEDDA AFSARI


NIGHT LIFE
1
ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; its advisable to check
in advance to confirm engagements.
Baauer
A pipe dream for many electronic producers who
love hip-hop but dont make it is to, well, make it.
Harry Bauer Rodrigues veered somewhere close
in 2012. His track Harlem Shake, a case study
of the meme-as-song, spawned thousands of am-
ateur dance videos showing flash mobs flailing to
the monstrous drop of coiling synths, though the
dancing bore little resemblance to the decades-old
hip-hop shoulder shuffle from which the single
pulls its name. Since then, the Philadelphia d.j.
and producer has been releasing music thats at
once more ambitious and closer to his heart: One
Touch, from 2014, pays glowing homage to the
shiny hip-hop featured in mid-aughts blockbuster
dance films like Step Up and You Got Served, alettes.) But this fandom comes with a price; in
and Aa, his dbut album, released in March of
last year, lays rattling club bass under verses from
Future, Pusha T, M.I.A., and the grime upstart
Novelist. He co-headlines with the Australian
producer What So Not. (Terminal 5, at 610 W. 56th
St. 212-582-6600. Oct. 20.)
Benji B
Benji B, a radio presenter and d.j., has a covetable
status in the U.K., where he showcases the cut-
ting edge in emerging hip-hop and dance music
each week on BBC Radio 1. His three-hour late-
night sets are mandatory for a certain brand of
fanatic who pines over rising acts like Kelela,
Smerz, Mount Kimbie, BADBADNOTGOOD,
and Samiyam. Off the air, the d.j. has hosted a
beloved London club night, Deviation, for ten
years, known for surprise guests and playlists that
leap between genres. A product of the citys sto-
ried club culture, Benji launched the party to fos-
ter a new scene for an incumbent generation. I
saw it as my responsibility, he said in a recent in-
terview. (Good Room, 98 Meserole Ave., Brooklyn.
goodroombk.com. Oct. 20.)
Black Coffee
If youve heard anything by this celebrated South
African dance producer, it was probably his dewy,
deep-house remix of In Common, the comeback
single Alicia Keys fans knew she could make. Born
Nkosinathi Maphumulo, he grew up in Durban,
and was thoroughly musical before he found house,
studying jazz and working as a backup vocalist. By
the mid-aughts, he had broken out internation-
ally, rising with a swell of outsider interest in the
Afrobeat sound; in the past three years, hes racked
up several d.j. awards and honors worldwide for his
original releases and remixes. This March, Black
Coffee cemented what has felt like a long-overdue
cultural crossover, when he contributed music to
Drakes global-minded mixtape, More Life. (Out-
put, 74 Wythe Ave., Brooklyn. 212-555-1212. Oct. 21.)
Lana Del Rey
To be a music fan in 2017 is to pine over cowlicks,
dye jobs, sways of shoulders, outfit palettes, and
preferred fonts, as well as (or well before) any one
piece of music. Lana Del Rey, a thirty-two-year-
10 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
old singer-songwriter, specializes in a hard-to-pin-
down shade of chamber pop: no two songs are the
same, but she is always wistful, low-toned, and
airy, a dead-eyed heartbreaker her fans can love
unconditionally. Reys star shot skyward in 2012,
with a series of self-released YouTube singles and
well-timed endorsements of rappers, and she has
since grown into a cunning pop subversive; Lust
for Life, her July single with the Weeknd, saun-
ters as well as she does. (Terminal 5, at 610 W. 56th
St. 212-582-6600. Oct. 23-24.)
Insane Clown Posse
Detroit has produced three of the most prom-
inent white rap acts of all time: Eminem, Kid
Rock, and this cult-favorite duo, which started in
1989 and refers to itself as the most hated band
in the world. The groups violent lyrics and ex-
treme stage presence have inspired a legion of
mostly young, white, working-class men as super-
fans, who refer to themselves fraternally as Jugga-
los. (Their female counterparts are known as Jug-
Now in its third year, this proudly eclectic gath-
2011, the F.B.I. added the Juggalos to its national
gang-threat assessment list, and classified them
as a loosely organized hybrid gang. The band
and its fans havent taken this lightly. In 2014, In-
sane Clown Posse and the A.C.L.U. of Michigan
sued the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. And
last month a group of fans organized the Juggalo
March, a trek to Washington to protest the dis-
crimination, profiling, and harassment of Jugga-
los across the country. Regardless of your opinion
of the fans, the music, or the group itself, theres
something profoundly fascinatingand inargu-
ably Americanabout their story. (Villain, 307
Kent Ave., Brooklyn. 718-782-2222. Oct. 23.)
Queens of the Stone Age
This brainchild of the former Kyuss singer and gui-
tarist Josh Homme emerged at the tail end of the
nineties, with a beefy, hook-laden sound that en-
capsulated the best bits of punk, metal, and stoner
rock as well as the dying embers of that decades
defining sound, grunge. Huge singles from its
Songs for the Deaf record catapulted the band
into MTVs orbit by 2002, and the albums dingy
interstate-drive texture has proven ageless. Fifteen
years and three albums later, the Queens have re-
leased Villains, co-helmed by the accredited pro-
ducer Mark Ronson, doubling down on the carny
rock that helped the group first stick out. The
Way You Used to Do is far from a return to old
habits, but few would expect a step backward from
this merry band of outsiders. (Madison Square Gar-
den, Seventh Ave. at 33rd St. 800-745-3000. Oct. 24.)
T-Pain
This song man of the turn of last century (back
when phones had buttons and played polyphonic
pop hits when they received a call) has one of the
most engrossing Behind the Music specials ever
produced. Come for the chronicling of his unlikely
rise from an aspirant rapper in Tallahassee, Florida,
to the most sought-after Auto-Tuned voice of an
era, and stay for the gripping portrayal of his tur-
bulent family life, unconventional marriage, and
perseverance in the face of a changing industry
and mounting critical backlash. Then remember
Pains torrential downpour of hits and his collab-
orations with Justin Timberlake, Jamie Foxx, Lily
Allen, Kanye West, and countless more. T-Pain
plays an acoustic, unplugged concert, inspired by
his beloved NPR Tiny Desk performance. (Gram-
ercy Theatre, 127 E. 23rd St. 212-614-6932. Oct. 24.)
Yves Tumor
The work of Sean Bowie, who performs as Yves
Tumor, slithers from smeary ambient music to fu-
ture soul, psychedelic pop, and hip-hop. His excel-
lent long-player from last year, Serpent Music,
announced his commitment to eclecticism and ce-
mented his position as a major force in contem-
porary experimental and electronic circles. Last
month, he returned with a new self-released album,
Experiencing the Deposit of Faith. It sustains
a gorgeous melancholy throughout twelve atmo-
spheric, mostly instrumental tracks, but dont take
that as a suggestion to leave the earplugs at home
when he supports the studied electronic composer
1
Nicolas Jaar. (Brooklyn Steel, 319 Frost St., Brooklyn.
888-929-7849. Oct. 18.)
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
BRIC JazzFest 2017 Marathon
Too long in coming but welcome all the same,
Brooklyn has a jazz festival to call its very own.
ering remains unbounded by convention; look
for such artists as Maceo Parker, Vijay Iyer, GoGo
Penguin, Harriet Tubman, Rudresh Mahanthappa
Indo-Pak Coalition, Papo Vazquez, Dave Douglas
Meets the Westerlies, and Matana Roberts during
the three-day marathon. (BRIC Arts Media House,
647 Fulton St., Brooklyn. 718-855-7882. Oct. 19-21.)
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra
Songbook
It may be Wynton Marsaliss baby, but the Jazz at
Lincoln Center Orchestra has never been the star
trumpeters personal fiefdomhes always encour-
aged band members to contribute original compo-
sitions and arrangements. Work by such ensem-
ble stalwarts as Victor Goines, Ted Nash, Marcus
Printup, and Carlos Henriquez, along with offer-
ings from the boss, will be on display. (Rose The-
atre, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th St. 212-
721-6500. Oct. 20-21.)
Camille OSullivan
With a mesmerizing intensity that threatens to
shatter the stage on which shes performing, the
Irish vocalist OSullivan can transform a perfor-
mance into a veritable rite. She trains her laser
focus during this rare Stateside engagement on the
songs of the French singer-composer Jacques Brel.
(Irish Arts Center, 553 W. 51st St. 212-757-3318. Oct. 19.)
Scott Wendholt / Adam Kolker Quartet
This lean and feisty foursome combines the pow-
erful synergy of the trumpeter Wendholt and the
saxophonist Kolker, and has the joined-at-the-hip
rhythm team of Billy Drummond, on drums, and
Ugonna Okegwo, on bass. (Smalls, 183 W. 10th St.
212-252-5091. Oct. 20-21.)
Larry Willis and the Heavy Blue Band
A trusted journeyman who elevates his work to
the level of rare artistry, the pianist Larry Wil-
lis takes on the role of leader during this week-
end run, fronting a quintet that also includes the
trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and the drummer Victor
Lewis. How high the bands blues quotient will
be remains an agreeable mystery. (Smoke, 2751
Broadway, between 105th and 106th Sts. 212-864-
6662. Oct. 20-22.)

ART
1
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Metropolitan Museum
Rodin at the Met
A team of Met curators led by Denise Allen has in-
stalled about fifty bronzes, plasters, terra-cottas,
and carvings by Auguste Rodin, along with works
by related artists, in the grand foyer of the muse-
ums galleries of nineteenth-century painting. (One
room is filled with a chronological survey of his
drawings.) The show marks the hundredth anniver-
sary of the artists death, but no occasion is really
needed. Rodin is always with us, the greatest sculp-
tor of the nearly four centuries since Gian Lorenzo
Bernini perfected and exalted the baroque. Matter
made flesh and returned to matter, with clay cast
in bronze: Rodin. (There are carvings in the show,
too, but made by assistants whom he directed. He
couldnt feel stone.) You know hes great even when
youre not in a mood for him. Are The Thinker
and The Kiss kind of corny? Does the grandios-
ity of Monument to Balzac (for which there is a
small study in the show) overbear? Sure. Theres
a stubborn tinge of vulgarity about Rodin, insep-
arable from his strength. But roll your eyes as you
may, your gaze is going to stop, again, and widen
at the sight of one or another work of his. Heor
his hand, as his minds executivewrenched fig-
urative sculpture from millennia of tradition and
sent it tumbling into modernity. Through Jan. 15.
Museum of Modern Art
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait
Louise Bourgeois is best known for spiders.
The art of still-life is ancient; frescoes of fruit bowls graced homes in Pompeii. Holly Coulis refreshes the
form (in paintings likeOrange Row and Paper with Arc, above) at the Von Nichtssagend gallery.
12 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
Big ones, like the twenty-two-foot-tall steel
marvel from 1997, now installed in the muse-
ums atrium. It hovers protectively over a wire-
mesh enclosure housing a mysterious assem-
blage of bone, gold, wood, silver, rubber, and
glass; its draped with a large fragment of vin-
tage tapestry. (The last material is the most
telling: Bourgeois was born into a family of
tapestry restorers in Paris in 1911.) The Brob-
dingnagian spider is an ambassador for the re-
velatory exhibition on the third floor, focussed
on the artists prints and illustrated books.
Bourgeoiss prints, though underrecognized,
are the alpha and omega of her uvre, her
first mature mediumand her last. She made
about twelve hundred in her lifetime, most in
the nineties and the two-thousands. The show
is structured thematically and loosely chrono-
logically, beginning with delicate, Surrealist-
inflected, black-and-white engravings and
etchings from the mid-forties, which conflate
bodies and buildings, and culminating in an
almost overpoweringly visceral room of all
but abstract etchings, hand-colored in pinks
and reds, made in 2007, when the artist was
ninety-six and facing down death. (She died
in 2010, at the age of ninety-eight.) The last
series is titled lInfiniInto Infinity the center of it all, suspended from the ceiling,
and it rivals any fearless late work by Guston
or Goya. Through Jan. 28.
Guggenheim Museum
Art and China Since 1989: Theatre of the
World
In 1989, military tanks rolled into Beijings
Tiananmen Square and massacred hundreds,
if not thousands, of demonstrators. That vio-
lent year is the starting point for this stagger-
ing, illuminating, roughly two-decade survey
of some hundred and fifty works by seventy
Chinese artists and collectives. Its a bitter
irony, then, that protests by animal-rights ac-
tivists, which erupted last month, included
threats of explicit violence against the mu-
seum, which led it to consult with the N.Y.P.D.
and remove three contested pieces: two vid-
eos, of dogs in distress and pigs copulating, and
a sculpture housing live reptiles and insects.
The latter piece, Huang Yong Pings Theatre
of the World (1993), gives the show its title
and still appears at the start, a tortoise-shaped
enclosure under a cagelike bridge, both now
starkly empty. What follows is a thoughtfully
organized, if inevitably overwhelming, array
of paintings, drawings, videos, performance
documentation, sculptures, and installations,
as well as a series of coves in which visitors can
hang out and watch absorbing footage about
Chinas artist-run spaces. Familiar names in
the Westworks by the ubiquitous Ai Wei-
wei appear throughoutare outnumbered by
the lesser known, such as the Paris-based artist
Shen Yuan, one of the shows scarce female art-
ists, whose tender watercolors share the stories
of women who worked in Guangdongs Nan-
ling National Forest Park between 1957 (the
heyday of Communism) and 2005 (after China
emerged as a global superpower). Floating in
is Chen Zhens sixty-five-foot-long dragona
spectre of Chinas preindustrialized past, fash-
ioned from cast-o bicycles. Through Jan. 7.
Whitney Museum
Calder: Hypermobility
In the summer of 1922, Alexander Calder
was twenty-three and doing a stint as a mer-
chant marine. One morning made a cosmic
impression. As he later described it, Over
my coucha coil of ropeI saw the begin-
ning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the
moon looking like a silver coin on the other.
The story has the elements of a great Calder
sculpture: curving lines, strong colors, organic
shapes, harmonious balance, suspension in
space. Whats missing is a sense of motion
as essential to Calders work as metal or paint,
as we learn on the eighth floor of the museum.
Among other engines for joy made between
1930 and 1959 are eight rarely seen motorized
pieces. Theyre turned on, for brief intervals,
three times a day (and twice as often Friday
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KLAUS VON NICHTSSAGEND GALLERY
through Sunday), by art handlers who also ac-
tivate many non-mechanized sculptures, mak-
ing them flutter and spin, as the artist intended.
Watching the quivering of the five-foot-high
1941 stabile Aluminum Leaves, Red Post,
whose clawlike base recalls the gargantuan
Calders in public plazas from Seattle to Grand
Rapids, Michigan, is like seeing a new side of
an old friend youve been taking for granted.
Through Oct. 23.
New Museum
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon
The four nouns in the title of this large group
show go o like improvised explosive devices,
boding civil strife. Not to worry. The works,
by forty-two mostly L.G.B.T.Q.-identified
artists, who range in age from twenty-seven
to sixty-seven, artist teams, and collectives
tend to be elegant and ingratiating, temperate,

or even a little boringthough not unpleas-
antly so. (A little boredom may come as wel-
come relief to our lately adrenaline-overdosed
body politic.) One rare example of an aggressive
aront is a series of fantastically nasty small
works by the reliably dazzling Los Angeles-
born, Berlin-based, biracial, transgender artist
and performer Vaginal Davis: abstract reliefs
that suggest mangled faces, viscera, and gen-
italia, painted in a blood-red mixture of sub-
stances, including nail polish. (Black artists ac-
count for most of the works in the show that
pack punches.) The happiest surprise is a trend
in painting that takes inspiration from ideas of
indeterminate sexuality for revived formal in-
vention. Two painters who stand out are Tscha-
balala Self and Christina Quarles. Each rhymes
ambiguous imagery of gyrating bodies with dy-
namics of disparate pictorial techniques. Each
artist may call to mind early-nineteen-forties
Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, who
fractured Picassoesque figuration on the way
to physically engaging abstraction. Self and
Quarles play that process in reverse, adapting
abstract aesthetics to carnal representation.
Whether intentionally or not, they eectively
return to an old well that suddenly yields fresh
water. Through Jan. 21.
New-York Historical Society
Arthur Szyk: Soldier in Art
Born in Lodz, Poland, in 1894, and educated
in Paris, Szyk achieved tremendous success
as an illustrator during his lifetime by com-
bining a modern eye for composition with
the intricacy of illuminated medieval minia-
tures. In 1924, he travelled to Morocco for a
portrait commission from the Pasha of Mar-
rakesh; in 1931, he went to Geneva to deco-
rate the Covenant of the League of Nations;
and in 1940, with the backing of Great Brit-
ain and the Polish government, he arrived
in New York, where he illustrated covers for
Colliers and Time. His anti-Nazi cartoons, on
which this small show focusses, bristle with
anger and Biblical references: a 1943 ink-
and-graphite drawing titled De Profundis
shows Christ crowned with thorns on top of a
heap of murdered Polish Jews under the leg-
end Cain, where is Abel thy brother? But
even the gravest content is no bar to the vi-
sual delight of Szyks highbrow cartoon style.
Soldiers, swastikas, and musical notes, in one
1942 watercolor, pour out of a keyboard played
by the skeletal hands of Richard Wagner. In
a plate from his 1946 book, Ink and Blood,
Szyk shows himself at a drawing desk with
an angry little Hitler struggling to escape
his brush, while Mussolini and Ptain slump
in the wastepaper basket and an obese Her-
1
mann Goering awaits his turn on his hands
and knees. Through Jan. 21.
GALLERIESUPTOWN
John Chamberlain
The American sculptor, who died in 2011, was
famous for his heroically sized abstract con-
structions of automotive steel. But heres a sur-
prise: he also made masks, just twenty-five of
them, out of the same brightly colored mate-
rial. The fifteen on view range in style from
samurai to sci-fi to lucha libre, all with a touch
of the insect about them. A malevolent red-
ant king has enormous chrome lips, a spiny
ridge down its nose, and a jagged crown; near
14 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
ART
him hangs a motley clown with a streaked red-
white-and-blue face. But the best masks here
are the simplest, notably a yellow one with
three rusty holes for eyes and a nose, dents for
temples, and remnants of a cars grille for its
mouth. Through Oct. 28. (Gagosian, 980 Madi-
son Ave., at 76th St. 212-744-2313.)
Peter Doig
A lush seascape titled Two Trees com-
mands the first room of the Scottish-born,
Trinidad-based painters new show. Its mauve
sky and rippling aquamarine expanse collapse
the mythic and the quotidian, as fantastical
purple-trunked trees share the scene with
three ghostly figures, one of which trains a
video camera on the others. Also on view is a
salon-style installation of smaller works, many
on paper. A bather in red trunks is a recur-
ring motif, as are lions, which appear in lovely
charcoal studies and pastel drawings, and also
on canvases. Throughout, Doig eschews the-
matic coherence, throwing wild-card abstrac-
tions and figurative one-os into the mixa
dreamy world in which bright fragments carry
as much weight as cinematic vistas. Through
Nov. 18. (Werner, 4 E. 77th St. 212-988-1623.)
Jos Leonilson
As evidenced by this modest but thorough
roundup of works by the Brazilian artist, made
between the late eighties and 1993, when he
died, of complications from AIDS, at the age of
thirty-six, Leonilsons art was already charged
with intense emotion when he tested positive
for the H.I.V. virus, in 1991. In Leo Cant
Change the World, made in 1989, a disembod-
ied maroon heart floats above a hazy field of
gold on an unstretched canvas, which is painted
blood red. After his diagnosis, Leonilson began
incorporating embroidery and other embellish-
ments to create smaller works, in which the
vulnerability expressed in his paintings be-
comes intensified. In one such piece, O Ilha
(The Island One), a stick figure, stitched in
black thread with metal beads, sits above the
English words Handsome and Selfish; in ter Benjamin while posing for Sanders cam-
another, an irregular group of crystals hangs
from a narrow piece of fabric under the word
1
Traidor (Traitor). Through Feb. 3. (Ameri- harder to understand the longer you contem-
cas Society, Park Ave. at 68th St. 212-249-8950.)
GALLERIESCHELSEA
Ruth Asawa
The history of American art gets a rewrite in
a transporting selection of sculpturesdiaph-
anous wonders made of wire that appear to
be floating in spaceby Asawa, who died in
2013, at the age of eighty-seven. (The museum-
quality show was curated by Jonathan Laib.) In
her use of line as sculptural form, Asawa pro-
vides a crucial link between the mobile mod-
ernism of Alexander Calder and the gossamer
Minimalism of Fred Sandback, whose yarn
pieces similarly render distinctions between
interior and exterior moot. Asawas parents
were farmers, who emigrated to rural Califor-
nia from Japan; she began making art while in-
terned in camps as a teen-ager. (She went on to
study at Black Mountain College before settling
in San Francisco.) While it would be inaccurate
to suggest that Asawas work has languished in
obscurity until now, her addition to arts over-
whelmingly white-male hit parade comes at a
critical time in our country, as the policies of
the current Administration challenge the un-
deniable fact that the United States is a nation
of immigrants. Through Oct. 21. (Zwirner, 537
W. 20th St. 212-517-8677.)
Rosalyn Drexler
Stark, punchy paintings from the nineteen-
eighties merge film-noir and Surrealist im-
agery with the headlines of their day. Drexler
isnt one of Pop arts big names, but she should
be: her signature method of boldly overpaint-
ing mass-media collages, forged in the sixties,
lends her work an uncanny allure and critical
edge, anticipating subsequent approaches to ap-
propriation. (Sarah Charlesworths supersatu-
rated symbols of consumer lust and dread come
to mind.) In the sinister Glasnost (1988), a
masked, Joker-like Ronald Reagan appears on
a crumpled newspapers front page. In another
painting from the same year, a nod to Magritte,
a disguised man stands over a green apple, his
black suit disappearing into the background.
Violence comes to the surface in Rub Out
(1982), in which a yellow tablecloth is stained
with the bright blood of a slumped-over mob-
1
ster. Through Oct. 21. (Greenan, 545 W. 20th St.
212-929-1351.)
GALLERIESDOWNTOWN
Omer Fast
The Berlin-based video artists provocative,
ambiguous show begins with his convincing
transformation of the front of the gallery into
a waiting room for a Chinatown bus. (Con-
vincing, that is, unless you read Chinesethe
characters on the awning say art gallery.) In-
side, a screen plays the artists video Looking
Pretty for God (After G.W.), an absorbing
oral history of morticians in which child ac-
tors lip-synch some of the words. Beyond that,
the crisp 3-D short August reimagines the
German portrait photographer August Sander
at the end of his life, confronting his mem-
ory of a Nazi ocial who aably quotes Wal-
eraan embodiment of the kind of factlike
death, evil, or gentrificationthat only gets
plate it. Through Oct. 29. (Cohan, 291 Grand St.
212-714-9500.)
Tabboo!
A Greek-key-inspired frieze, improvised
in metallic paint, runs along the top of the
walls, setting the scene for this show of
buoyant paintings, both old and new. Self-
Portrait in Drag (1982) is an impressionistic
record of the multitalented East Village art-
ists personal history (hes also a well-known
performer). Heavily made up, with a pearl
choker and a bouant hairdo, Tabboo! pre-
sents himself pensively, with his chin on his
palm, perhaps regarding the stage. The artists
insouciance is a through-line, even as his mate-
rials have grown more refined; his most recent
pieces were painted on linen, and their back-
grounds feature elegant, post-painterly stains.
Most of these are still-lifes (of puppets, flow-
ers, and houseplants), but two cityscapes steal
the show. Snowstorm Out My Window (Big-
ger Flakes) (2017) is a moody, white-splattered
wonder; in Chrysler Building, the landmark
glitters against an Yves Klein-blue night.
Through Nov. 19. (Robichaux, 41 Union Square W.;
enter at 22 E. 17th St. 646-678-5532.)

The title of Nanni Morettis film Palombella Rossa (Red Wood Pigeon) combines the symbolic Communist color with a water-polo idiom.
Revolutions per Minute
Pop culture and political activism mesh
in the comedies of Nanni Moretti.
The Italian director and actor Nanni
Moretti, whos the subject of a mini-
retrospective at Metrograph Oct. 18-21,
delves deeper into political ideas and
practicalities by way of antic fantasy than
many more heralded political lmmakers
do with earnest realism. In his 1989 com-
edy, Palombella Rossa, Moretti plays
Michele Apicella, his alter ego in his mov-
ies since the nineteen-seventies. Michele
is an lite water-polo player and Com-
munist politician, who, after a minor car
accident, is left with amnesia. Michele
rediscovers his identity, bit by bit, when
the people in his life, unaware of his injury,
include him in his regular activities.
At rst, Moretti puckishly keeps the
two activities separate: Micheles team-
mates pull him onto a bus en route to a
match; then, when he reads an article that
he wrote before the accident, he rediscov-
ers his political allegiances. Characters
from Micheles past turn up by chance at
the arena where his team is competing,
16 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
MOVIES
unleashing ashbacks (including clips of
Moretti talking politics in his own earlier
lms) and fusing childhood memories,
electoral debates on television, his rela-
tionship with his teen-age daughter (Asia
Argento), and his athletic career. Soon,
Michele is yelling about the contradic-
tions of capitalism while being dunked
by the real-life water-polo star Imre Bu-
davari (who plays himself ), and the mov-
ies joke about the teams lefties and right-
ies turns serious when Michele, whos
taking a game-deciding penalty shot, is
forced to choose sides.
In his poolside encounters, Michele
mocks both the sentimentality of Cath-
olic intellectuals and the hectoring of
Communist ideologues, and derides jour-
nalists prefabricated language, expressing
his desire for a new language that brings
politics and emotions together in order
to build a Communism based on popu-
lar sentiment. Whats more, Moretti
builds that ideal in the lm with pop-
culture references that show what popu-
lar sentiment looks like, as in a scene that
may be the most devoted use of a Bruce
Springsteen song in any movie, when a
teammates boom box blasts Im on Fire
and brings the water-polo match to a halt.
In 1994, the far-right media tycoon
Silvio Berlusconi was elected Prime Min-
ister of Italy; Morettis autobiographical
1998 comedy, Aprile, which begins with
that election, is a tale of an artist being
driven mad by his countrys politics.
Moretti, playing himself, depicts his failed
eort to make an anti-Berlusconi docu-
mentary. Then, in the run-up to the 1996
elections, Moretti drops a long-planned
projecta musical, set in the nineteen-
fties, about a pastry chefin favor of
another political documentary. Mean-
while, Morettis (real-life) wife, Silvia
Nono, gives birth to their (real-life) son,
Pietro, and the lmmaker interweaves his
droll struggles with the basics of parenting
and his anger at the state of Italian society
(which leads him to interview a group of
COURTESY CINECITT STUDIOS
newly arrived refugees) and, for that mat-
ter, at the state of the cinema (in derisive
ris aimed at the Hollywood lms Heat
and Strange Days). Morettis blend of
passion, principle, and pleasure is a lofty
political project in itself.
Richard Brody
1 OPENING
MOVIES

BPM Reviewed in Now Playing. Opening Oct. 20.
(In limited release.) The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Colin Farrell stars in this drama, about a doc-
tor who is confronted by his foster son (Barry
Keoghan) about past misdeeds. Directed by Yor-
gos Lanthimos; co-starring Nicole Kidman and
Alicia Silverstone. Opening Oct. 20. (In limited
release.) Wonderstruck Reviewed this week in
Hampton Fancher as a screenwriter, this time
in collaboration with Michael Green. Harri-
son Ford, at his wryest, is also still in the frame,
though whether his character is an immortal an-
droid or just an old growling guy remains a mys-
tery. The new director is Denis Villeneuve, and
the new hero is KD6-3.7 (Ryan Gosling), a blade
runnera replicant cop who is assigned to shut
down any early-model replicants who remain.
One job leads him on a lengthy quest, involving
and Jean Cocteau to pop music and TV. The re-
sult is a disarming, disturbing, elusive, and pro-
found meditation on personal identity. Shock-
ingly, Harris hasnt yet made another film.R.B.
(BAM Cinmatek, Oct. 20, and streaming.)
The Dead Zone
Christopher Walken is fascinating as a tormented
psychic in David Cronenbergs 1983 adaptation
of Stephen Kings novel. Walkens character, a

1
The Current Cinema. Opening Oct. 20. (In lim-
ited release.)
NOW PLAYING
American Made
A limp title for Doug Limans suspiciously cheer-
ful new film. Tom Cruise plays Barry Seala real-
life figure, although most of his adventures reek
of the tall tale. Even the protagonists own voice-
overs sound incredulous. In the late nineteen-
seventies, we are told, Barry, a commercial air-
line pilot, is invited by a C.I.A. agent (Domhnall
Gleeson) to become involved in the broiling pol-
itics of Central America. At first, Barry merely
photographs troops on the ground, but then he
branches out into drug running for a Colom-
bian cartel and, for good measure, supplying
guns to Contra rebels and other needy souls. Any
firm distinction between friend and foe soon dis-
solves, along with Barrys patriotic conscience,
and Liman and his screenwriter, Gary Spinelli,
seem so enamored of the narrative chaos that the
movie scarcely bothers to take a moral view; in-
deed, the heros main concern, shared by his wife,
Lucy (Sarah Wright), is to find somewhere to
stash the crazy money that he earns. Liman recap-
tures some of the swagger that marked his early
films, like Swingers (1996) and Go (1999),
and, as for Cruise, seldom has his smile been so
forcefully tested.Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our
issue of 10/2/17.) (In wide release.)
Battle of the Sexes
Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who made
Little Miss Sunshine, turn to the tennis
court for this drama, set in the early nineteen-
seventies. Emma Stone stars as Billie Jean King,
a champion in her late twenties who has multiple
barriers to contend with. First, theres unequal
pay. The gods of tennis, headed by Jack Kramer
(Bill Pullman), still decree that women players
are less of a drawwhich, as King points out,
is untrueand therefore deserve lesser prizes.
Then, theres her husband, Larry (Austin Stow-
ell), who could surely make a fortune advertising
slacks; she loves him, but her heart belongs to
her hairdresser, Marilyn (Andrea Riseborough).
Last, theres Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), a fifty-
something former champion and full-time chau-
vinist, who, having beaten Kings rival Marga-
ret Court (Jessica McNamee), looks forward to
trouncing King herself. Some hope. Carell con-
vinces you that Riggs was more of a sad sack
than a showman; Stone, trailing clouds of wist-
fulness from La La Land, may seem ill-suited
to so combative a role, but, once the match starts,
at the Houston Astrodome, she comes into her
own, shuts off her smile, and leaves her opponent
gasping like a fish. With Sarah Silverman, Elisa-
beth Shue, and Alan Cumming, as the doyen of
tennis fashion.A.L. (9/25/17) (In wide release.)
Blade Runner 2049
A sequel to Ridley Scotts masterwork of 1982.
He returns as an executive producer, as does
such minor matters as his own origins and the
future of the humanand thus the inhuman
race. The resulting film is doom-struck, un-
rushed, and dangerously close, at times, to the
brink of the ponderous; the shock of the new,
delivered by the first movie, is all but impossi-
ble to repeat. Jared Leto underwhelms in the
role of the resident evil genius, but Dave Bau-
tista, in wire-rimmed spectacles, is a potent hulk,
and Ana de Armas is a dazzling virtual compan-
ion to K. There is pathos in that dazzle; it can
be turned off at the press of a button.A.L.
(10/16/17) (In wide release.)
BPM
This intermittently affecting but occasionally
simplistic drama, centered on the ACT UP move-
ment in France in the nineteen-nineties, alter-
nates between collective action and intimate
life. Its centered on one couple, Nathan (Ar-
naud Valois) and Sean (Nahuel Prez Biscayart),
who meet in the group. The twenty-six-year-old
Sean is H.I.V.-positive, having been infected at
the age of sixteen by one of his teachers; Na-
than, whos a little older, is uninfected, having
abstained from sex for years. But their discussion
of their conjoined medical and erotic histories is
more or less the only substance with which the
director, Robin Campillo (who wrote the script
with Philippe Mangeot), infuses their relation-
ship. (One powerful arc of the drama involves
characters frequent references to their dwin-
dling T-cell counts.) Scenes of the groups stra-
tegic debates strain for an analytical vitality and
a historical resonance that the film leaves mainly
unexplored; the vigorous depictions of ACT
UPs heroic confrontations with drug compa-
nies, insurance companies, and the French gov-
ernment are played more for spectacle than for
substance. (A scene of activists defiant intru-
sion into classrooms shows French social con-
flicts most clearly.) The dramatic focus of the
film, on Seans physical deterioration, is both
agonizing and methodical. In French.Richard
Brody (In limited release.)
Chameleon Street
The title of this 1989 independent film, which
was written and directed by Wendell B. Harris,
Jr., who also stars, refers to a real-life character,
William Douglas Street, who, in the nineteen-
seventies, pulled off an extraordinary series of
impersonations (for instance, pretending to be
a doctor, he performed, according to Harris,
thirty-six successful hysterectomies), for which
he was ultimately imprisoned. Harris plays the
part for comedy and for anger, portraying Street
as a sardonic victim of racism who, having grown
up conforming to the expectations of others, be-
comes adept at fitting into any role thats thrust
upon himor that he chooses. As a director,
Harris himself is something of a chameleon,
joining his incisive vision to disruptive narra-
tive techniques borrowed from Frank Tashlin,
the French New Wave, and television comedy.
He endows Streets character with his own vast
cultural range, stretching from Orson Welles
teacher named Johnny Smith, emerges from a
five-year coma as a paranormal superhero. He
has the power to see the future and to ferret out
the secrets of the past. Hes also a victim: his fi-
ance (Brooke Adams) married another man
during Johnnys unconscious half decade. And
hes a bit of a martyr, too: each time he has a vi-
sion, he loses physical strength. Walkens nor-
mal range of emotion has always been far out,
and here he seems to throw his consciousness to
the camera the way a ventriloquist throws his
voice to a dummy. In several frightening trance
scenes, his throbbing, spooky-eyed expressions
blend eerily well with Cronenbergs hyperbolic
visuals. Despite Jeffrey Boams primitive script,
Walken never lets up.Michael Sragow (Metro-
graph, Oct. 22, and streaming.)
Emergency Kisses
Philippe Garrels intensely romantic, self-
revealing drama, from 1989, begins with a harsh
flourish: a movie director, Mathieu (Garrel him-
self), is besieged by his wife, Jeanne (Brigitte
Sy, Garrels then wife), an actress who wants to
play the lead role in his upcoming filmwhich
is based on her, but in which he has cast another
actress (Anmone). When the confusion of art
and life undermines his marriage, the despair-
ing Mathieu is advised by his father (Maurice
Garrel, the directors father) to rely on the cou-
ples child, Louis (Louis Garrel, son of Gar-
rel and Sy), as an aid to reconciliation. In this
painfully personal and unsparing film, Garrel
matches his self-excoriating sincerity with ar-
tistic self-control, elegant style, and sure taste.
He has an aesthetes rawness, a cultivated an-
guish. The lusciously aphoristic dialogue and
high-contrast images (which make even day-
time landscapes feel nocturnal) add to the ex-
quisiteand quintessentially Frenchbeauty of
Garrels art, the triple sensation of experienc-
ing wild emotion, beholding it, and beholding
oneself in the act of doing so. In French.R.B.
(Metrograph, Oct. 20-21.)
Faces Places
Anecdote and history converge wondrously
and insightfully in this playful yet painstaking
collaboration between the octogenarian direc-
tor Agns Varda and the thirtysomething pho-
tographer and muralist JR. They visit a diverse
batch of small French towns in JRs van, a sort
of mobile photo booth equipped with a poster-
size printer, and they create a variety of large-
scale public art projects to match their various
encountersexalting the traditions of a for-
mer mining town, gathering stories from dock
workers wives, and celebrating a goat farmer
whose traditional methods rise to philosophy.
But the movies strongest inspirations arise
when it becomes personal. JRs blunt questions
spark Vardas frank confrontations with age,
health, and death, as she revisits the sites and
subjects of her art work from the nineteen-fifties
as well as her own cinematic pastin partic-
ular, her longtime connection with the direc-
tor Jean-Luc Godard, whos a virtual presence

18 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017


throughout the film. Varda and JR gleefully ren-
act a famous scene from one of his films, then
travel to Switzerland to visit him at his home.
She illuminates the resulting drama with ref-
erences to her own life story and the history of
cinema. In French.R.B. (In limited release.)
The Florida Project
Sean Bakers new film, his first feature since
Tangerine (2015), is set in Orlando, where a
confident six-year-old named Moonee (Brook-
lynn Prince) lives with her mother, Halley (Bria
Vinaite), at the Magic Castle Motel. Moonees
friendsoccasional partners in crime, and fel-
low hunters of ice creaminclude Jancey (Valeria
Cotto) and Scooty (Christopher Rivera), though
she is also on excellent terms with Bobby (Wil-
lem Dafoe), the manager of the motel. (Its rare,
and touching, to see the gentler side of Dafoe.)
The first half of the movie is almost plotless, and
pleasingly dotted with escapades and scrapes;
far from looking down on these kids, let alone
askance at them, Baker invites us to look with
them, granting us privileged access to their hope-
ful view of the world. It seems both natural and
sad that, as the plot quickens, and as Halley gets
herself into trouble for the sake of her daugh-
ter, that view should grow darker and more con-
fused. The result earns a place among the mem-
orable chronicles of childhood, all the more so
because of its punches of bright color, and the
heart-seizing image with which it ends.A.L.
(10/9/16) (In limited release.)
Lucky
The late Harry Dean Stanton, in one of his last
roles, infuses the slightest gesture and inflec-
tion with the weight of grave experience, but
this maudlin drama mainly renders his grit and
wisdom wholesome and cute. Stanton stars as
Lucky, a cantankerous ninetyish Second World
War veteran living in a small town on the edge
of a desert. Lucky whiles away his time in a
fixed routine that starts with yoga at home and
breakfast at a diner, moves on to crossword puz-
zles and TV shows, and ends in a bar among
life-worn regulars. (One of them, played by
David Lynch, is grieving over the loss of his
pet tortoise.) Its never clear what Lucky has
done with his life, but, with the first sign of
failing health, he grows reminiscent, dredg-
ing up old regrets in gruffly sentimental mono-
logues. His elbows-out rounds of friendly josh-
ing are filled with hardboiled argot, and they
only hint at his troubled past as an argumenta-
tive and insubordinate cuss. Stanton and the en-
tire cast (including James Darren, Beth Grant,
Barry Shabaka Henley, and Yvonne Huff) are de-
lightful to watch, but they dont stand a chance
against the stereotypes. Directed by John Carroll
Lynch.R.B. (In wide release.)
Marshall
Reginald Hudlin directs this historical drama,
set in 1941, with an apt blend of vigor and em-
pathy. It stars Chadwick Boseman as Thurgood
Marshall, a thirty-three-year-old N.A.A.C.P.
attorney who is dispatched to Bridgeport, Con-
necticut, to represent a black man, Joseph Spell
(Sterling K. Brown), who is accused of the rape
and attempted murder of a wealthy white woman
(Kate Hudson) for whom he worked as a chauf-
feur. As an out-of-state attorney, Marshall has to
be paired with a local lawyer; his reluctant part-
ner, Sam Friedman (Josh Gad), is an insurance
specialist with no defense experience. Mean-
while, the judge hearing the case high-handedly
20 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
MOVIES
bars Marshall from speaking in court, reducing
him to Friedmans silent counsel. Much of the ac-
tion is set in the courtroom, where Hudlin (work-
ing with a script by the Bridgeport attorney Mi-
chael Koskoff and his son, the screenwriter Jacob
Koskoff) lends physical energy to the language of
ideas. He ties the dialectical action to Marshalls
energetic and plainspoken brillianceand to the
behind-the-scenes insights of Marshalls wife,
Buster (Keesha Sharp), and a random woman he
meets in a bar. Meanwhile, the movie urgently
dramatizes the threat of racist violence that poi-
sons personal relationships and judicial proceed-
ings alike.R.B. (In wide release.)
Our Souls at Night
An unhurried coda to the partnership of Rob-
ert Redford and Jane Fonda, which began with
The Chase, in 1966. Here, they play a cou-
ple of widowed neighbors, Louis Waters and
Addie Moore, in a small Colorado town. Both
are lonely, though only Addie has the nerve to
confront the problem; she comes around one eve-
ning and asks Louis to sleep with heror, at any
rate, to go to sleep beside her. The directness of
the question gets the story going with a jolt, of
the kind in which Fonda has specialized, and its
a shame, some viewers will feel, that the rest of
the film, directed by Ritesh Batra, is dedicated to
softening the blow. The unorthodox behavior of
these senior citizens is at first condemned, then
mocked, and finally accepted by their peers, and
it even assists the younger generationAddies
unhappy son (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his no
less dispirited child (Iain Armitage), who, with
Louiss encouragement, even learns how to cast
aside his phone. Much of this is too hokey by
half, yet the two leading actors, their skills un-
faded, command your attention to the end. With
Bruce Dern at his grouchiest.A.L. (10/9/17) (In
limited release and on Netflix.)
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
The writer and director Angela Robinson illu-
minates an extraordinary corner of pop-culture
history with a bland and textureless drama. Its
based on the true story of a married couple
William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), a Har-
vard professor in the psychology department,
and Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall), a newly
minted Ph.D. in the field and a law-school grad-
uatewho become jointly enamored of their new
research assistant, Olive Byrne (Bella Heath-
cote), and set up a mnage trois. Booted from
the university, they struggle to make a living for
their growing family (William fathers children
with both women). But their visit to a Green-
wich Village S. & M. parlor inspires Williams
vision of a new kind of superhero, and he decides
to write a comic book embodying both his sex-
ual fantasies and what he calls his feminist ide-
als; it becomes the Wonder Woman series. The
drama is shown in flashbacks from a hostile in-
terrogation of William by a representative of a
conservative religious group; the movie is sym-
pathetic but simplistic, depicting an exceptional
story with little energy or sense of physical pres-
ence. (Halls high-relief line readings, though,
are memorable.)R.B. (In wide release.)
Ruthless
Edgar G. Ulmers 1948 melodrama centers
on a glutton for wealth, pleasure, and power:
H. Woodruff Vendig (Zachary Scott), a mighty
Wall Street raider who donates his fortune to
his political foundation and invites his victims
to the teeming ceremony. Facing them as if star-
ing into the mirror of his blank conscience, he
recalls his predatory rise. In flashbacks, Ven-
dig uses shameless cunning and sexual allure
to climb from a poor and embittered childhood
to Harvard, a job at a brokerage, and a dirty fi-
nancial coup. Along the way, he leaves a trail of
blood and heartbreak and loses his first and best
friend, Vic Lambdin (Louis Hayward), a guest
at the ceremony and the escort of a mysterious
woman (Diana Lynn) who stirs up old dreams
and new desires. Ulmers approach is monumen-
tal and detailed, baroquely gestural and coldly
violent. His fascination with the dialectical tur-
moil of finance and the electrical charge of lust
leads to terrifying tableaux of degradation
most notably that of an imperious rival (Syd-
ney Greenstreet). The result is a grim comeup-
pance that, by current standards, seems almost
Bolshevik.R.B. (MOMA, Oct. 21 and Oct. 26,
and streaming.)
Sylvio
In this exquisite yet uproarious fantasy, Sylvio
(Sylvio Bernardi) is a frustrated cubicle jockey
at a debt-collection agency. Sylvio happens to
be a gorilla; he cant speak, but he does every-
thing else that humans do, strolling and driv-
ing through his home town of Baltimore in his
trademark red sunglasses and red parka. (Ber-
nardi wears a gorilla costume throughout the
film.) The drama involves the conflict of artis-
tic dreams and commercial realities. Sylvio is
an aspiring puppeteer who, in his spare time,
makes a sweetly melancholy Web series show-
ing a balding and stiff-armed Every-white-man
doll on miniature sets. But when Sylvio goes to
a local TV studio to collect a debt he acciden-
tally ends up on the air; though hes an artist of
refined sensibility, he becomes famous for going
wild, and a crisis of conscience results. The direc-
tors, Kentucker Audley (who co-stars as a talk-
show host) and Albert Birney, embrace both sides
of Sylvios temperament, realizing his frenzied
outbursts (including a vehicular-chase scene) as
imaginatively and as delicately as his self-doubt.
Bernardi is an actor of genius; his Janus-faced
pantomime, as Sylvio struggles voicelessly for a
place among human chatterboxes, channels the
infinite grace of the great silent-film comedi-
ans.R.B. (Nitehawk Cinema.)
Victoria and Abdul
In 1887, a young Indian clerk named Abdul Karim
(Ali Fazal) is summoned to England to perform
a ceremonial duty. He makes the mistake of
looking at Queen Victoria (Judi Dench), rather
than averting his eyes, and she returns the look
with interest. Soon he finds himself hired as her
personal footman, and then as her munshi, or
teacher; his duties range from teaching her Urdu
to dancing with her, on a warm Florentine night,
and serving her tea on a windblown Scottish hill-
side. Such intimacy is an outrage, in the view
of the royal household, and determined efforts
are made to halt the unlikely romance. Stephen
Frearss new venture into period drama, stiff with
formal costumes and lightly trimmed in anec-
dotal charm, feels impossibly distant from the
mischief that he once made, and the emotional
devastation that he charted, in Dangerous Li-
aisons (1998). Dench, as expected, commands
the scene with monarchical ease, but, despite
the barbs in Lee Halls screenplay, the fusty co-
lonial attitudes of the period emerge unscathed.
With Michael Gambon, as the Prime Minister,
and Eddie Izzard, as the Prince of Wales.A.L.
(10/2/17) (In wide release.)

THE THEATRE
John Patrick Shanleys play is about a lawyer dealing with several women and his own high anxiety.
Serenity Now!
Jason Alexander returns to the stage in
The Portuguese Kid.
An actors life is full of chance. Jason
Alexander was twenty when he got
what he thought was his big break, a
role in Stephen Sondheim and George
Furths new Broadway musical Mer-
rily We Roll Along, directed by Hal
Prince. Born Jason Greenspan, Alex-
ander was already a veteran of Her-
sheys Kisses commercials and New
Jersey theatre, but now he was working
with Broadway royalty. As it turned
out, Merrily was a mess: the story
was muddled (though the score re-
mains beloved), audiences left in
droves, and the show closed in twelve
days. I still hold it true that it was the
greatest learning experience that I
could have had, Alexander said re-
cently, because I was watching people
with consummate ability struggle. It
taught me very early that even the
gods are human.
Nonetheless, Alexander had a busy
stage career in the years before George
Costanza. In 1984, he starred alongside
Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera in
the Kander and Ebb musical The
Rinkanother op. Its the only time
Ive been completely blindsided by
opening-night reviews, Alexander
said. He rebounded in Neil Simons
Broadway Bound, then shot a sitcom
called Everythings Relative, which
22 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
lasted only six episodes. When he was
oered an audition for Jerome Rob-
bins Broadway, a revue of the chore-
ographers greatest hits, he turned it
down three times: Im an actor who
dances, but Im not a dancer. I thought,
What the hell am I going to do? He
was cast anyway, which meant working
with the mercurial Robbins, who was
directing his own self-tribute. Every-
thing that made Jerry Robbins a chal-
lenging human being was on display
during our ve months of rehearsal and
tech, Alexander recalled. Butsur-
prise!the show was a hit. Alexander
won a Tony Award, the exposure led
to Pretty Woman and Seinfeld, and,
yada, yada, yada, the residual checks
are still rolling in.
Alexander is now back onstage in
The Portuguese Kid, a comedy writ-
ten and directed by John Patrick Shan-
ley, the author of Doubt. (The Man-
hattan Theatre Club production opens
Oct. 24, at City Center Stage I.) Alex-
ander plays a lawyer in Providence,
Rhode Island, dealing with an over-
bearing mother (Mary Testa), a sexy
Greek widow with a past (Sherie Rene
Scott), and his own high anxiety. A
starry cast, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
playwright: Alexander knows from
experience not to rest on pedigree. Its
the same as the rst time you get up,
he said. You cross your ngers, and
you pray to the gods that it will work.
Michael Schulman
1 OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
After the Blast
Zoe Kazans play, featuring Cristin Milioti, follows
a couple living underground in a postapocalyptic
world where fertility is regulated. Lila Neugebauer
directs, at LCT3. (Claire Tow, 150 W. 65th St. 212-
239-6200. In previews. Opens Oct. 23.)
The Bands Visit
David Yazbek and Itamar Mosess musical, about
an Egyptian police orchestra stranded in the Is-
raeli desert, moves to Broadway; Katrina Lenk
and Tony Shalhoub reprise their roles in David
Cromers production. (Ethel Barrymore, 243 W. 47th
St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)
Illyria
The Public Theatre tells its own story with this play
written and directed by Richard Nelson, about how
the young Joe Papp (John Magaro) founded the
New York Shakespeare Festival, in the nineteen-
fifties. (425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. Previews begin
Oct. 22.)
Jesus Hopped the A Train
In Stephen Adly Guirgiss dark comedy from 2000,
directed by Mark Brokaw, a former bike messen-
ger imprisoned at Rikers Island meets a born-again
serial killer. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480
W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. In previews. Opens Oct. 23.)
Junk
Doug Hughes directs a new play by Ayad Akhtar
(Disgraced), about a nineteen-eighties invest-
ment banker (Steven Pasquale) attempting a take-
over of a manufacturing company. (Vivian Beau-
mont, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)
The Last Match
Anna Zieglers play, directed by Gaye Taylor Up-
church for the Roundabout, centers on two ten-
nis champions facing off in a high-stakes match.
(Laura Pels, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300. In pre-
views. Opens Oct. 24.)
Latin History for Morons
John Leguizamos newest one-man show, in which
he recounts his search for a Latin hero for his sons
history project, moves to Broadway, directed by
Tony Taccone. (Studio 54, at 254 W. 54th St. 212-
239-6200. Previews begin Oct. 19.)
Lonely Planet
Keen Company revives Steven Dietzs 1994 play,
featuring Arnie Burton and Matt McGrath as gay
men who meet at a map store during the height of
the AIDS epidemic. (Clurman, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-
239-6200. In previews. Opens Oct. 19.)
M. Butterfly
Clive Owen and Jin Ha star in Julie Taymors
revival of David Henry Hwangs Tony Award-
winning drama, about the romance between a mar-
ried French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer.
ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN
(Cort, 138 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)
Oedipus el Rey
Luis Alfaro wrote this adaptation of the Sopho-
cles tragedy, reset in a South Central L.A. peni-
tentiary. Directed by Chay Yew, in collaboration
with the Sol Project. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-
967-7555. In previews. Opens Oct. 24.)
Office Hour
Julia Chos play, directed by Neel Keller, is about
a college professor facing an ethical crisis when

one of her students writes obscene work in class.
(Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. In previews.)
People, Places & Things
Denise Gough reprises her Olivier-winning role
in Duncan Macmillans play, as an actress trying
to get her life back together in rehab. (St. Anns
Warehouse, 45 Water St., Brooklyn. 718-254-8779. Pre-
views begin Oct. 19.)
Shadowlands
Fellowship for Performing Arts revives William
Nicholsons 1990 play, about C. S. Lewiss rela-
tionship with a young American writer who de-
veloped terminal cancer. (Acorn, 410 W. 42nd St.
212-239-6200. In previews.)
Strange Interlude
Transport Group presents this reimagined ver-
sion of Eugene ONeills nine-act drama, in which
David Greenspan performs all the characters him-
self. (Irondale Center, 85 S. Oxford St., Brooklyn. 866-
811-4111. In previews. Opens Oct. 21.)
Stuffed
The comedian Lisa Lampanelli wrote and acts in
this play, first produced last fall, which brings to-
gether four women dealing with different food is-
sues. Jackson Gay directs. (Westside, 407 W. 43rd St.
212-239-6200. In previews. Opens Oct. 19.)
Torch Song
Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl star in a new
version of Harvey Fiersteins Torch Song Trilogy,
directed by Moiss Kaufman and set in the New
York gay scene of the seventies and early eighties.
1
(Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422. In pre-
views. Opens Oct. 19.)
NOW PLAYING
The Home Place
Charlotte Moore directs the New York premire of
Brian Friels 2005 play, fashioning an insightful and
inspiring piece of theatre. In 1878 in County Done-
gal, the native population is becoming increasingly
rebellious toward the English gentry who are their
landlords, even to the point of murder. The cast
of eleven is led by John Windsor-Cunningham, as
Christopher Goreone of those landlords, though
a benevolent oneand Rachel Pickup, as Margaret
ODonnell, a local woman who, since the death of
Gores wife, has become the vigilant mistress of his
household. Windsor-Cunningham brings a Lear-
like range and intensity to his portrayal of a man
who finds himself on the wrong side of age, love,
and history. And Pickup, after a series of emotional
scenes, and with the help of exquisitely modulated
lighting and sound, takes the play to a dnouement
of surpassing beauty. (Irish Repertory, 132 W. 22nd
St. 212-727-2737.)
KPOP
At once skeptical and exuberant, this immersive
show from Ars Nova (in collaboration with the
Woodshed Collective and Ma-Yi Theatre Com-
pany) transforms the multi-floor space into a candy-
colored K-pop factory, equal parts Willy Wonka
and Blade Runner. The audience, were told, is
the focus group for JTM Entertainment, a Korean
label trying to cross over to America; spectators are
split up and introduced to its star acts. Theres the
girl group Special K, whose teen-age members un-
dergo a rinse cycle of voice lessons, media train-
ing, and plastic surgery; a boy band, F8, squab-
bling over whether to Westernize their sound; and
24 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
THE THEATRE
the pop diva MwE (Ashley Park), fighting off an
Eve Harrington-esque rival. Cleverly, the show
blasts away its own cynicism with a sonic boom, in
a ravelike finale that displays how, for K-pops ever-
expanding global audience, the product easily
out-glimmers the means of production. (A.R.T./
New York Theatres, 502 W. 53rd St. 866-811-4111.
Through Oct. 21.)
Mary Jane
Amy Herzogs beautiful new play, directed by Anne
Kauffman, is about family and illness, and how the
difficulties inherent in caring for the infirm can
strengthen familial bondsor erode them. Mary
Jane (Carrie Coon) is a single mother; her young
boy has cerebral palsy. We never meet him, but
from time to time we glimpse the dark wallpaper
and toys in his room. While the majority of the
play unfolds in Mary Janes apartment, the audi-
ence really lives within the parameters of her ma-
ternal concernand sometimes panicas it beats
against the walls of her heart. (The cast also in-
cludes, in multiple roles, the fantastic Liza Coln-
Zayas and the brilliant Brenda Wehle.) Herzog, in
her most satisfying work to date, has made theatre
that shines from her characters inner lives first.
And, for a hundred intermissionless minutes, they
become our imperfect family, too. (New York The-
atre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475.)
Measure for Measure
Shakespeares long problem play about truth
and justice, corruption and virtue, has its admir-
ers, but you may not be one of them after you see
Elevator Repair Services ridiculous stunt of an in-
terpretation. Directed by John Collins with an in-
creasingly forced point of view, the piece is remi-
niscent of the groups Fondly, Collette Richland
(2015), featuring some of the same actors and sim-
ilar nineteen-forties costumes. Why Collins has
decided (sort of) to set this current show in the
same period is one of its mysteries, along with so
much else, including why he sped the whole thing
up so that it clocks in at a little more than two
hours. Thats just one of the shows few mercies,
along with Scott Shepherds Duke and Greig Ser-
geants Claudio. But Collins ultimately demeans
Sergeants excellent characterization by using his
race as a joke. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555.)
{my lingerie play} 2017
Diana Ohs new piece is essentially a consciousness-
raising session in the guise of a play with music, or
maybe its a narrative concert. Oh alternates be-
tween playing original indie-rock songs (she leads
a four-piece band on guitar) and exploring the
evolution of her intersectional awareness, starting
with her shoplifting lingerie at age sixteen. The-
atregoers are invited to participateone night,
Oh shaved the head of a willing N.Y.U. freshman,
this shows natural audiencein a fuzzily support-
ive atmosphere. This isnt about making people
think, but about making them feel good about what
they already think. Occasionally, the piece has a
Riot Grrrl-like joyous primitivism, as when vol-
unteers who dont know how to play instruments
are invited to join the band onstage. Far from chal-
lenging assumptions, the show reaffirms them,
creating a warm theatrical bath of shared convic-
tions. (Rattlestick, 224 Waverly Pl. 212-627-2556.)
Syncing Ink
A celebration of freestyle that isnt especially free,
NSangou Njikams play takes its callow narrator,
Gordon, from tongue-tied innocence to battle-
hardened experience. A bildungsroman set to a
hip-hop beat, its an oddly conventional and over-
long tale, enlivened by some bouncy rap sequences
and inviting performances. Theres also gravitas
imported from the Yoruba pantheon, though this
allegorical dimension doesnt yet feel earned. In
the first act, Gordon (Njikam) is the odd kid out
in A.P. English, staggered by the mad flow of his
classmates. In the second act, hes at a historically
black college, still struggling to rap with confi-
dence. Njikam has a way with rhyme, but not with
character. Theres a broad reliance on stereotype
and an occasional streak of sexism. (The women
are only around to advance the heros journey.)
But, under Niegel Smiths direction, the lights
pulse, and the beat goes affectionately on. (Flea,
20 Thomas St. 866-811-4111.)
Time and the Conways
In J. B. Priestleys 1937 drama (directed by Rebecca
Taichman, in an uneven Roundabout revival), Eliz-
abeth McGovern plays Mrs. Conway, the widowed
but still vibrant matriarch of a large English coun-
try home. Its 1919, and the occasion is an extrava-
gant twenty-first birthday party for her daughter
Kay (Charlotte Parry) and the first reunion of the
six Conway children with their mother since the
end of the war. The second act skips ahead nine-
teen years, to Kays fortieth birthday: the Conways
have convened to discuss their straitened finances,
and we observe the tarnished states of a once hope-
ful cohort of dreamers, culminating in a touching
exchange between Kay and her brother Alan (Ga-
briel Ebert) on the mystical nature of time. The
third act returns to the original party, showing the
seeds of the trouble to come, but the point has al-
ready been made. The middle section would be a
lovely, complete play all on its own. (American Air-
lines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300.)
Too Heavy for Your Pocket
Bowzie Brandon (Brandon Gill), a young African-
American man in Nashville in the sixties, has a
scholarship to Fisk University. But he has decided
to leave the classroom and step onto a Freedom
Riders bus. As he tells his friend Sally-Mae (Nneka
Okafor), I got a chance to help grab us some true
justice. More than just a tiny piece of the dream.
I dont care if they call me an agitator. I dont care
if they kill me. I dont. In Jirh Breon Holders
lyrical drama, directed by Margot Bordelon for
Roundabout Underground, Bowzie and his wife,
Evelyn (Eboni Flowers), and Sally-Mae and her
husband, Tony (Hampton Fluker), reckon with
their varying appetites for freedom and responsi-
bility. If the structure wobbles and the metaphors
are overstressed, Holder has created a quartet of
fully realized, deeply felt characters, all in search
of what Bowzie calls basic human dignity. (Black
1
Box, Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre,
111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300.)
ALSO NOTABLE
Animal Wisdom The Bushwick Starr. As You
Like It Classic Stage Company. Through Oct.
22. Burning Doors Ellen Stewart. Through
Oct. 22. A Clockwork Orange New World
Stages. Come from Away Schoenfeld. Hello,
Dolly! Shubert. The Play That Goes Wrong Ly-
ceum. Prince of Broadway Samuel J. Fried-
man. The Show-Off Theatre at St. Clements.
Through Oct. 21. The Siege N.Y.U. Skirball.
Through Oct. 22. Springsteen on Broadway Wal-
ter Kerr. The Terms of My Surrender Belasco.
Through Oct. 22. Tiny Beautiful Things Pub-
lic. The Treasurer Playwrights Horizons. War
Paint Nederlander.
 CLASSICAL MUSIC
The JACK Quartet performs Ruth Crawford Seegers String Quartet 1931 at Miller Theatre.
Woman, Interrupted
Ruth Crawford Seegers music shines
brightly, decades after her early death.
The triumphant New York premire of
Kaija Saariahos LAmour de Loin, at
the Metropolitan Opera, in the fall of
2016, added a rush of urgency to discus-
sions about the challenges faced by
women composers throughout history,
and today. American critics and musicol-
ogists, searching for precedents, often
reach back to Amy Beach (1867-1944), a
superb professional who created a large
and sturdy catalogue of late-Romantic
music that compares well with that of her
contemporaries. But another fascinating
composer from the period tends to get
overlooked: Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-
1953), whose String Quartet 1931 will be
performed this week at Miller Theatre as
the capstone of Soundscape America,
in two concerts by the brilliant JACK
Quartet (Oct. 19 and Oct. 21).
Beach was a great musician, but Craw-
ford Seeger was a genius. String Quartet
1931 is arguably the nest American
quartet before those of Elliott Carter, a
composer she decisively inuenced. JACK
will also perform Carters String Quartet
No. 2 (1959) at Miller (along with works
by such luminaries as John Zorn, An-
thony Braxton, and Gloria Coates), and
most of his essential style elementsthe
26 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
full-spectrum dissonance, the ornery in-
dependence of the four instrumental
lines, the slow music that moves in surg-
ing planes of harmony, like clouds over a
landscapecould already be found in
Crawford Seegers piece, in a pithier and
more concentrated form.
The reasons for the neglect of Craw-
ford Seegers ever-challenging music have
little to do with her gender: like her fel-
low-ultra-moderns Ives, Varse, and
Ruggles, she has never been part of the
American classical hit parade. But the
reasons for her limited output have ev-
erything to do with her gender, and are
tragic. Having married her former teacher,
the radical musicologist Charles Seeger
who had a towering intellect but less cre-
ative talent than his wifeshe laid down
her pen as the demands of motherhood
and the absorbing attraction of Commu-
nist ideology, which she shared with her
husband, steadily grew during the
nineteen-thirties. Instead, she turned her
attention to collecting and publishing
extant folk songs. She eagerly returned to
composition in the late forties, but intes-
tinal cancer claimed her swiftly, at the age
ILLUSTRATION BY K. L. RICKS
of fty-two; as her stepson Pete Seeger
observed, She didnt go gently at all. In
classical musics annals of early death, it
was a loss less grand, perhaps, than that
of Gershwin, but even more poignant.
Russell Platt

11 OPERA
Metropolitan Opera
Bartlett Shers production of Offenbachs Les
Contes dHoffmann often feels disjointed in
performance. But in the current revival it co-
alesces around Vittorio Grigolos thrilling turn
in the title role, with each act emerging as a
fever dream of frustrated longing. The bass Lau-
rent Naouri is a wonderfully arch antagonist
as the Four Villains; other standouts include
Anita Hartigs sensitively sung Antonia and Erin
Morleys dazzling Olympia. Offenbach was pri-
marily a composer of operettas, and Johannes
Debus, appropriately, conducts with rhythms
that dance and melodies that gently waft into
the air. (Yosep Kang replaces Grigolo in the
first performance.) Oct. 18 and Oct. 24 at 7:30 and
Oct. 21 at noon. This years revival of Franco
Zeffirellis crowd-pleasing production of La
Bohme offers the house dbut of the soprano
Angel Blue, a former Miss Hollywood and an
Operalia finalist who has worked as a presenter
for the BBC Proms. Her castmates include Bri-
gitta Kele, Russell Thomas, and Michael Todd
Simpson; Alexander Soddy. Oct. 19 at 8 and Oct.
23 at 7:30. David McVicars new production of
Bellinis Norma is cautious and dark, but sup-
portive of the drama; its an excellent vehicle for
the Met stars Joseph Calleja (a sensitive Polli-
one) and Joyce DiDonato (a shining, steadfast
Adalgisa). In this performance, Marina Rebeka
takes the title role; Carlo Rizzi keeps the orches-
tral forces well in hand. Oct. 20 at 8. Zeffirellis
over-the-top style defined the Met in the eight-
ies and nineties, but now the famed Italian direc-
tor has only one other production (besides La
Bohme) left in the companys repertory, a tra-
ditionalist pageant of glittering chinoiserie that
he devised for Puccinis Turandot thirty years
ago. Oksana Dyka, Aleksandrs Antonenko, and
Maria Agresta star in the revival; Rizzi. Oct. 21
at 8. (Metropolitan Opera House. 212-362-6000.)
CLASSICAL MUSIC
ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES
New York Philharmonic
Andrs Schiff, an artist of uncommon refinement,
comes to the Philharmonic to collaborate as both
piano soloist and conductor. His program opens with
the compelling drama of Haydns Symphony No. 80
in D Minor and continues with Bartks buoyant Di-
vertimento and Bachs elegant Concerto in A Major
(BWV 1055), culminating in Schumanns passionate
Piano Concerto in A Minor. Oct. 19 at 7:30 and Oct.
20-21 at 8. (David Geffen Hall. 212-875-5656.)
White Light Festival: Dancing Voices
Asked by the remarkable Young Peoples Chorus
of New York City to fashion a program around the
choral version of Three Heavens and Hells, which
the ensemble had commissioned in 2007 but never
performed in full, Meredith Monka singular com-
poser, vocalist, and choreographerarrived at an
ingenious solution. Using pieces from her existing
canon, she fashioned a seventy-five-minute tapestry
that moves from youthful curiosity, discovery, and
bonding to metaphysical deliberation and, ultimately,
budding enlightenment. The result is a keen met-
aphor for Monks ongoing process of transmitting
her art to new generations of interpreters. Oct. 20 at
7:30 and Oct. 21 at 3 and 7:30. (Gerald W. Lynch The-
atre, John Jay College, 524 W. 69th St. lincolncenter.org.)
Orchestra dellAccademia Nazionale
di Santa Cecilia
Its strange that Antonio Pappano, an Anglo-Italian
conductor with American roots who is the long-
time music director of the Royal Opera Covent
Garden, has such a low profile in Gotham. That
might change this week when he brings his sto-
ried Roman orchestra to Carnegie Hall. The leg-
endary pianist Martha Argerich is the guest in the
first concert, performing Prokofievs Third Piano
Concerto as part of an otherwise all-Italian pro-
gram that includes the Sinfonia from Verdis Aida
and Respighis Fountains of Rome and Pines of
Rome. The dazzling soprano Barbara Hannigan is
the guest for the second evening, singing in the New
York premire of Salvatore Sciarrinos La Nuova
Euridice Secondo Rilke, a prelude to Mahlers
Sixth Symphony. Oct. 20-21 at 8. (212-247-7800.)
Early Music New York: BarokOrkest
The grand finale of this years New York Early
Music Celebration is offered by Frederick Renzs
chamber orchestra, a bulwark of the citys period-
performance community. The concert, an afternoon
of concertos by Dutch and Flemish masters of the
High Baroque, features the talents of not only such
home-town players as the violinist Daniel Lee and
the harpsichordist Dongsok Shin but also a special
guest, the renowned Barthold Kuijken, on trans-
verse flute. Oct. 22 at 5. (First Church of Christ, Sci-
entist, Central Park W. at 68th St. earlymusicny.org.)
1
RECITALS
Brooklyn Rider: Spontaneous Symbols
This intensely musical ensemble is adept at both
standard repertory and superstar collaborations,
but in this concert, at the cutting-edge space Rou-
lette, it devotes itself strictly to music of our

New York City Opera: Dolores Claiborne

When the composer Tobias Picker first unveiled
his adaptation of Stephen Kings psychological
thriller, at San Francisco Opera, in 2013, it had
all the grand-opera trappings one would expect
of a high-profile commission at a major Ameri-
can company. For the works New York premire,
though, Picker has scaled back the orchestral
forces with a chamber arrangement that prom-
ises to highlight the harrowingly intimate nature
of a story about sexual abuse, domestic violence,
and murder. Pacien Mazzagatti conducts, and
Michael Capasso directs. Oct. 22 at 3 and Oct. 24
at 7. (59E59 Theatres, 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.
Through Oct. 29.)

White Light Festival:

The Operas of Monteverdi
The festivals stated mission is to illuminate our
inner and spiritual lives through music; Clau-
dio Monteverdi, one of the founding masters
of the operatic form and a prolific creator of sa-
cred music, did much to advance that cause. To
mark the composers four-hundred-and-fiftieth
birthday, the festival presents an epic cycle of
his three extant operasOrfeo, The Return of
Ulysses, and The Coronation of Poppeaover
the course of four days. John Eliot Gardiner con-
ducts his esteemed ensembles, the Monteverdi
Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, as well
as a group of accomplished Baroque singers.
Oct. 18, Oct. 19, and Oct. 21 at 7. (Alice Tully Hall.
lincolncenter.org.)

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 27

 CLASSICAL MUSIC
time. The program features forward-looking works
for string quartet by Tyondai Braxton, Evan Zi-
poryn, Paula Matthusen, Kyle Sanna (Sequence
for Minor White), and one of the groups magnetic
violinists, Colin Jacobsen. Oct. 19 at 8. (509 Atlan-
tic Ave., Brooklyn. roulette.org.)
Borromeo String Quartet
The great quartet of Boston, renowned for its Old
World elegance and interpretive depth, comes to
Carnegies Weill Recital Hall with a piquantly var-
ied program: a selection of arrangements (by Nich-
olas Kitchen) from Bachs Well-Tempered Cla-
vier, Book I; world premires of two short works
by Sebastian Currier; and two songful, canonical
quartets, Mendelssohns in A Minor, Op. 13, and
Schumanns in A Major, Op. 41, No. 3. Oct. 20 at
7:30. (212-247-7800.)
Moving Sounds Festival:
Music by liane Radigue
Radigue, a pioneering creator of mystically con-
templative electronic music, has since 2004 devoted
her attention chiefly to acoustic works, including
Occam Ocean, a ceaseless tide of meditative solo
and chamber pieces that can be combined like tribu-
taries flowing into an endless sea. Here, three close
colleaguesthe harpist Rhodri Davies, the clarinet-
tist Carol Robinson, and the electronic composer
Laetitia Sonamipresent works from both parts of
Radigues uvre, including a premire, in a concert
thats a highlight of the Austrian Cultural Forums
Moving Sounds festival. Oct. 20 at 8. (Issue Project
Room, 22 Boerum Pl., Brooklyn. issueprojectroom.org.)
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center:
Bohemia in Bloom
A group of the Societys superb young instrumen-
talists (including the pianist Michael Brown and
the violinist and violist Yura Lee) offers a program
of Czech classics, including works by Suk, Dvok
(the rarely heard early Piano Quintet in A Major,
Op. 5), and Smetana (the deeply expressive, and
highly original, Piano Trio in G Minor). Oct. 22 at
5. (Alice Tully Hall. 212-875-5788.)
Borodin Quartet
The most distinguished of Russian string quartets
doesnt devote itself exclusively to music from its
homeland, but its native spirit pervades all of its
work. Schuberts brief Quartettsatz in C Minor
opens the Borodins concert at the 92nd Street Y, an
evening that continues with music by Tchaikovsky
and Shostakovich (two of his finest, if less often
heard, quartets, No. 6 in G Major and No. 13 in
B-Flat Minor). Oct. 22 at 7:30. (Lexington Ave. at
92nd St. 212-415-5500.)
Rene Fleming
The paramount sopranos recital for Carnegie Hall
is a careful encapsulation of elements of her legacy,
including a generous serving of German Romanti-
cism and a reminder of her devotion to American
works, with premires by Andr Previn and the Pu-
litzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw. Fleming closes
her program with arias from Richard Strausss sump-
tuous Ariadne auf Naxos, a work she has never per-
formed in New York; Inon Barnatan, a formidable
pianist, accompanies her. Oct. 23 at 8. (212-247-7800.)
Emerson String Quartet: Nearing the End
Americas preminent quartet, a favored guest at
Lincoln Center, returns to Alice Tully Hall to ex-
plore late-period works by two titans, in a concert
without intermission: Beethovens Quartet in E-Flat
Major, Op. 127, and Shostakovichs Quartet No. 15
in E-Flat Minor. Oct. 24 at 7:30. (212-721-6500.)
28 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
DANCE
American Ballet Theatre stemming from four years of work with Bard Col-
The companys two-week season at the Koch The- lege students. It was typically cryptic, with verbal
atre features a variety of shorter works. Much of codes, remote-controlled cars, high-tech sound
the repertory here is new or of recent vintage, with equipment, roller skates, and strong suggestions
the exception of Jerome Robbinss Other Dances of sadism. October2017/\, now dbuting at the
(which will be danced by David Hallberg and Hee Kitchen, picks up where that piece left off. (512
Seo on Oct. 19 and Oct. 22) and Frederick Ash- W. 19th St. 212-255-5793. Oct. 18-21.)
tons Symphonic Variations. The novelties in-
clude a new ballet by Alexei Ratmansky, Songs JSun Howard / Brother(hood) Dance!
of Bukovinaset to a folk-infused piano suite by For his part of a shared evening focussed on queer
the Ukrainian composer Leonid Desyatnikovand men of color, Howard, a Chicago-based cho-
I Feel the Earth Move, by the L.A.-based chore- reographer, searches for spiritual joy through
ographer Benjamin Millepied, who has also con- male intimacy in Working on Better Versions
tributed a site-specific performance piece for the of Prayers: Volume I. Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr.,
theatres public spaces, to be performed at inter- and Ricarrdo Valentine, known as Brother(hood)
mission on some nights. Not to be missed is Rat- Dance!, return to Danspace Project with How to
manskys Serenade After Platos Symposium, a Survive a Plague, a ritualistic look at the some-
meditation on love and friendship inspired by So- times overlooked victims of AIDS, which the duo
cratic dialogue, from last year. Oct. 18 at 6:30: presented in a different form in last years Plat-
The Gift, Songs of Bukovina, and Thirteen form 2016: Lost and Found. (St. Marks Church
Diversions. Oct. 19 at 7:30: Her Notes, Sym- In-the-Bowery, Second Ave. at 10th St. 866-811-
phonic Variations, Other Dances, and Serenade 4111. Oct. 19-21.)
After Platos Symposium. Oct. 20 at 7:30: Songs
of Bukovina, Her Notes, and Thirteen Diver- Simone Dinnerstein and Pam Tanowitz
sions. Oct. 21 at 2: Songs of Bukovina, Sym- Dance
phonic Variations, Other Dances, and Serenade As the brilliant choreographer Pam Tanowitz is
After Platos Symposium. Oct. 21 at 8: Serenade well aware, her New Work for Goldberg Vari-
After Platos Symposium, Songs of Bukovina, ations is far from the first choreographic at-
and Thirteen Diversions. Oct. 22 at 2: Her tempt to scale the mountain of the Bach score.
Notes, Symphonic Variations, Other Dances, But she has a special guide in the pianist Simone
and Thirteen Diversions. Oct. 24 at 7:30: Her Dinnerstein, who earned attention in 2007 with
Notes, Symphonic Variations, Elegy pas de a freely expressive recording of the piece. With
deux, and Thirteen Diversions. (David H. Koch, luck, Dinnersteins elastic interpretation will give
Lincoln Center. 212-721-6500. Through Oct. 29.) breath and space to Tanowitzs witty inventions.
For this Peak Performances show, the seven
Marc Bamuthi Joseph / Peh-LO-tah dancers swirling around the pianist include the
Joseph, who recently collaborated on the opera We Tanowitz stalwarts Melissa Toogood and Mag-
Shall Not Be Moved (about the 1985 MOVE bomb- gie Cloud and the Mark Morris alumna Maile
ing), turns his attention to the beautiful game, Okamura. (Alexander Kasser Theatre, 1 Normal
i.e., soccer. (Pelota means ball in Spanish.) Through Ave., Montclair, N.J. 973-655-5112. Oct. 19-22.)
song, poetry, dance, and film, Peh-LO-tah explores
not only his love of the game but also the ambiva- Walter Dundervill
lence he feels about how it is exploited by govern- In Dundervills installations, dancers are at the
ments and economic forces. (BAM Harvey Theatre, service of the sets and costumes more than the
651 Fulton St., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. Oct. 18-21.) other way around. The works often imagine his-
tory through fabric. The aesthetic of Skybox
Manual Cinema / Mementos Mori (presented by New York Live Arts) is inspired
Using shadow puppets, projectors, and a profu- by ancient Roman frescoes and Mannerist paint-
sion of camera angles, the Chicago-based outfit ings, but its forward-looking, too. In the vast
creates live movies out of bits of paper and light. brick building of Pioneer Works, in Red Hook,
The results are haunting and lovely. Mementos twelve performers, elaborately outfitted, move
Mori, Manual Cinemas feature from 2015, tells among sculptures by Diana Puntar that include a
a trio of intertwined stories, all of which touch on spacecraft that dispenses Mylar. (159 Pioneer St.,
the subject of death. (BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 718-596-3000. Oct. 20-22.)
Brooklyn. 718-636-4100. Oct. 18-21.)
Works & Process / Ryan McNamara and
Tero Saarinen Company / Morphed John Zorn
Masculinity and the rugged beauty of masculine At the Guggenheim Museum last year, the icon-
movement are the themes of this hour-long work oclastic composer John Zorn dbuted a stimulat-
by the Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen, last ingly varied suite of chamber pieces inspired by
seen here in 2013. In Morphed, set to excerpts the characters of commedia dellarte. Now that
of various works by his fellow-Finn Esa-Pekka music is reprised as the score for a performance
Salonen, seven men take on Saarinens grounded, piece by Ryan McNamara, who isnt a trained
sweaty, even combative movement style, within a dancer or choreographer but who often uses danc-
landscape of hanging ropes and shifting light de- ers in his performance art. Just squeezing eight
signed by Mikki Kunttu. (Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth dancers (including the quietly compelling Dylan
Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. Oct. 18-21.) Crossman) and twenty musicians (including the
scintillating drummer Tyshawn Sorey) into the
Sarah Michelson Guggenheims small and oddly shaped theatre
At Bard College last month, the polarizing cho- is a staging challenge. (Fifth Ave. at 89th St. 212-
reographer presented September2017/\, a piece 423-3575. Oct. 22-23.)
 ABOVE & BEYOND
Diwali on the Hudson
In the early aughts, a snaking loop of syncopated
handclaps and kick drums from Jamaican dance-
hall swept into mainstream radio through the
back door. Tropical hits like Sean Pauls Get
Busy and Rihannas Pon di Replay were an-
chored by a drum sample affectionately referred
to as the Diwali riddim, for its Indian-dance-
music influence. Diwali, the ancient Hindu
autumn holiday also known as the festival of
lights, is celebrated in India, Sri Lanka, Trini-
dad and Tobago, New Zealand, and, now for the
fourth year, New York Citys waterfront. Karsh
Kale and DJ Suhel will provide the soundtrack
for an evening of food, drinks, performance,
and fireworks, featuring a pop-up shop in col-
laboration with the Mumbai designer label
Payal Singhal. Proceeds from the event will
go to the Desai Foundation, a public organiza-
30 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
tion that serves Indian-American families and
communities. (Hudson Terrace, 621 W. 46th St.
thedesaifoundation.org. Oct. 18.)
1 in which merchants ward off the midday heat
AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES with paper fans. (104 E. 25th St. 212-254-4710.)
One of the magical aspects of the art of photog-
raphy is that it can give us the illusion of see-
ing moments from the past, as if they were fro-
zen in time. The sale of photographs at Swann
on Oct. 19 contains several prime examples,
first among them an album by the nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century photographer John
Thomson, a Scot who was one of the first West-
ern photographers to document his travels in the
Far East. It includes several dozen of his images
of Hong Kong, Canton, Singapore, and Borneo
from the eighteen-sixties, before mass tourism,
Mao, or globalization; they depict sleepy scenes
of street venders in wide-brimmed hats plying
their trade along Hong Kongs harbor, villages
of stone houses clinging to hillsides, and shops
1
READINGS AND TALKS
Temple Emanu-El
The inimitable Mel Brooks commented re-
cently, We have become stupidly politically
correct, which is the death of comedy. . . . Com-
edy is the lecherous little elf whispering into
the kings ear. At ninety-one years old, Brooks
can certainly track how far the envelopes been
pushed, and pulled back. He came of age in
Williamsburg, the son of German and Rus-
sian Jews, and was drawn to performance after
the Second World War, rising from Catskills
night clubs to the back rooms of Hollywood
and eventually directing such canonical com-
edies as Blazing Saddles, Young Franken-
stein, and The Producers. Springtime for
Hitler has identifiable offspring in the hilari-
ously offensive musical numbers found in sat-
ires like Family Guy and South Park, but
it remains to be seen what Brooks will be able
to get away with at this one-night performance
of standup, accompanied by film clips and per-
sonal anecdotes from his extensive legacy.
(1 E. 65th St. 212-507-9580. Oct. 19 at 7.)
92nd Street Y
The decentralization of the retail industry has
shaken out two opposite extremes: ubiquitous
services like Amazon, Seamless, and Spotify,
which engulf entire categories of goods and
are brandless in their omnipresence, and cult
brands, which are little known to the mass mar-
ket but attract ravenous tribes who follow them
loyally, expressing an identity through con-
sumption. Marketers and investors have come
to covet the latter, sacrificing quick returns
for an obsessive, engaged audience. (The skate
company turned fashion favorite Supreme, for
example, confirmed this month that it had sold
a stake to the private equity outfit the Carlyle
Group, the first deal of its kind between a top-
tier firm and a streetwear line.) The cult brand
ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO
is something of a modern phenomenon, and its
relationship to the new American economy is
still being sussed out; at Double-Edged Sword:
How Reaching Cult Brand Status Can Help
(and Hurt) a Business, a panel of executives,
including Nicolas Jammet, of the fast-casual
restaurant Sweetgreen, and Emily Weiss, of the
cosmetics startup Glossier, will talk through its
contours. (1395 Lexington Ave. 212-415-5500. Oct.
24 at 10:30 A.M.)

TABLES FOR TWO
The Aviary
80 Columbus Circle (aviarynyc.com)
Grant Achatz, the renowned chef of
Alinea, in Chicago, is breeding a friendly
army of food super-nerds, and hes
brought some of them to New York with
the opening of this elaborate cocktail
bar, a branch of the original in the
Windy City. Consummate bartenders,
managers, and servers, dazzling with
their knowledge of arcane liquors and
scientic processesalong with a spec-
PHOTOGRAPH BY ZACHARY ZAVISLAK FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
tacular view of Central Park from a
rather staid hotel-lounge perch, on the
thirty-fth oor of the Mandarin Ori-
entalcan almost make you forget your
troubles. And if they cant there are many
drinks that can, served with a wink, a
nod, and, often, a show.
The menu reads as code: on a list of
fteen coyly named cocktails (Bring An-
other Smurf!, How Does Snoop Dogg
Use Lemongrass?), little birds have
mapped a path away from each drink
the farther the bird, the more adventure-
some the cocktail. The Science A.F. takes
the ingredients of a classic Penicillin
honey, lemon, ginger, Scotchto their
boiling and smoking alchemical extreme,
with the help of a towering ask-and-re
contraption, ostensibly to infuse the drink
with blueberries. For the In the Rocks
(NYE Celebration), a hollow sphere of
ice is lled with a Szechuan-accented
FD & DRINK
Scotch-and-bourbon numberin a cruel
show of desperation, the drinker must
crack the ice to get to the liquor; in a nod
to either celebration or lack of good judg-
ment, champagne is served on the side.
Theres a large selection of food, in
portions that are laughably small. (The
proprietors do not lack a sense of humor.)
These include excellent octopus cro-
quettes, a couple luscious little slices of
Wagyu beef, and Not Ramen, which
actually is ramen. (See? Funny.) The
Black True Explosion, a dish that made
Achatz famous early on, at Trio in Evan-
ston, Illinois, is here a single raviolo, en-
closing a deeply trued liquid. Delivery
came with a jovial warning: I need you
to take one bite and keep your mouth
sealedyesterday we had an incident.
The explosion did not disappoint; the
only problem was that it was cold.
In early August, while the Aviary space
was still a construction zone, a visit to the
Oce, Achatzs quiet speakeasy next door,
delighted even a clutch of jaded New
Yorkers. A parade of Dusty Bottle cock-
tails featured recovered decades-old li-
quors, and retro dishes like crudits (sci-
entically turbo-boosted, of course) came
in antique serving pieces, as charming as
the bars central concept: tell us a spirit
and a mood and our bartender will devise
a cocktail. As at the Aviary, the results
were erudite and preciseand also liber-
ating. (Dishes $11-$29; cocktails $18-$38.)
Shauna Lyon
1 BAR TAB
The Edge Harlem
101 Edgecombe Ave., at 139th St. (212-939-9688)
Langston Hughes, wistful, black tie around his
neck, stares from a portrait behind the bar at this
uptown watering hole and eatery. I guess I like
him like that, one of the courteous servers
mused. You never get to see him in that way:
young. Crowded with twentysomething Har-
lemites on the quietest of evenings, the Edge
serves wine and sweet punch to a reggae and jazz
soundtrack. A hibiscus mimosa is a Hudson River
sunset in a glass. On any given night, everyone
is invariably deep in conversation, perhaps be-
cause theres no WiFi: a sign tells guests to con-
nect with each other. The other night, a young
Brit wearing a T-shirt that read FCUK MOI?
complained to his date about the weather (Its
like Florida here!), while, nearby, a professorial
type held forth on an issue of Byzantine com-
plexity, the topic unclear. Theres also fine Ca-
ribbean cookinga board lists Rice an pese.
Steem fish. Fish tea, but the kitchen serves much
more, plus coffee and pastries in the morning.
Wednesdays are devoted to live music: blues and
rock and world rhythms. Real eclectic, as the
server put it. The Edge feels like a place the
young Langston would like, full of verse and
the murmur of hours well spent. The English
writer Christopher Logues poem exhorting read-
ers to Come to the Edge is chalked on a wall
at the back of the room. The indecision that af-
flicts one of the poems interlocutors (We might
fall, Its too high!) shouldnt bother potential
patrons, but guests might feel as transcendent as
Logues characters, who eventually decide to
make a trip to the edge. And they came, he
writes. And they flew. Nicolas Niarchos
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 31
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
FIGHTING WORDS
ong before Donald Trump was
L mocking Little Rocket Man in
North Korea, or taunting fools in the
Republican foreign-policy establishment,
he expressed special contempt for one
international agreement: the Joint Com-
prehensive Plan of Action, which blocked
Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
After the Obama Administration signed
the agreement, in 2015, then candidate
Trump called it the worst deal ever, and
vowed to renegotiate it once he was in
oce. In fact, the landmark agreement
capitalized on a rare consensus. After
years of hesitating, China and Russia
joined the other permanent members of
the United Nations Security Council,
along with Germany and the European
Union, in supporting American pressure
on Iran to change course. At a negoti-
ating session in Vienna, the coalition was
so large that, for appearances sake, Iran
stocked its side of the table with addi-
tional staers. Jake Sullivan, one of the
U.S. negotiators, recalled, It was the
whole world versus Iran.
The deal did not change all of Irans
bad behavior: Tehran continued to test
conventional ballistic missiles, to foment
violence in Iraq and Syria, and to un-
justly detain Americans. But the eect
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
on its nuclear program was unquestion-
able. In return for the removal of sanc-
tions imposed by the United States and
other nations, which had crippled its
economy, Iran agreed to shut down fa-
cilities and to give broad access to in-
spectors from the International Atomic
Energy Agency. Even erce critics of
Tehran, including U.S. Defense Secre-
tary James Mattis and Ehud Barak, the
former Israeli Prime Minister, have held
the agreement to be vital to international
security. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Irans
foreign minister, and Federica Mogher-
ini, the European Unions foreign-aairs
chief, were widely mentioned as con-
tenders for this years Nobel Peace Prize.
When President Trump discovered that
not only Mattis but also Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson and other national-security
ocials wanted to preserve the agreement,
he threw a t, a source told the Wash- court the prospect of a two-front war
ington Post last week. By early October,
the White House had devised a plan to
assuage his anger. The President would re-
fuse to certify that the deal is in Ameri-
cas national interest, an action that would
not undo the agreement outright but punt
the decision to Congress, for lawmakers
to decide whether to renew sanctions.
It is a risky move, nonetheless. If hawks
in Congress push through a law demand-
ing further concessions, it could provoke
Iran to abandon the deal, eject the in-
spectors, and accelerate its nuclear pro-
gram. That might result in calls for Irans
facilities to be destroyed before they can
produce enough weapons-grade mate-
rial for a bomb. Such a chain of events
could lead to a particularly perilous con-
sequence: returning to the possibility of
military conict with Iran, at a time when
the United States is already facing a nu-
clear stando with North Korea, would
an act of self-sabotage more immedi-
ately damaging to American security
than reviving the xenophobic slogan
America First, withdrawing from the
Paris climate accord, or antagonizing our
allies (Mexico, Australia, South Korea,
and counting).
Gutting a deal that Americans con-
ceived, brokered, and secured would un-
dercut decades of U.S. leadership on
non-proliferation. Thomas Graham, Jr.,
a retired ambassador who worked in a
senior capacity on every major Ameri-
can arms-control and disarmament ne-
gotiation over a period of twenty-ve
years, said of Trumps comments about
the Iran deal, Ive never seen anything
remotely like this. There isnt any reason
in my opinion to decertify it, except for
narrow political advantage, or if you re-
ally want to have a war. Historically, there
was certainly opposition to some arms-
control agreement, but this just seems
like were reading Kafka.
Indeed, in the past two weeks there
have been a number of indicators of
the Presidents growing political insta-
bility. On October 7th, Trump, having
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 35
ridiculed Tillerson for seeking a nego-
tiated solution with North Korea, all but
threatened an attack, tweeting, Sorry,
but only one thing will work! Last week,
NBC reported that, during a Pentagon
brieng, Trump called for a nearly ten-
fold increase in the nuclear arsenal. Na-
tional-security aides were unnerved
any such increase would violate a raft of
disarmament treaties and set o a global
arms race. (It was after this meeting that
Tillerson reportedly called Trump a
fucking moron.) The President and his
aides denied the account, and he tweeted
that it might be time to challenge NBCs
broadcast licenses.
Trumps reexive pursuit of manufac-
tured conict is becoming unbearable
even to some of his most loyal erstwhile
allies. Bob Corker, the chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
told the Times, We could be heading
towards World War III with the kinds
of comments that hes making. Tom
MIDLIFE CRISIS DEPT.
FORE!
oe Ferrari-Adler looks young enough
Jcouncil,
to be the president of the student
but hes actually an executive ed-
itor at Simon & Schuster. When he
turned forty, he decided that the only
birthday present he wanted was an arti-
cial putting green in the back yard of his
familys house, which is across the street
from Prospect Park, in Brooklyn.
Ive wanted one since I was ten, he
said the other day. His yearning was not
foreseeable at his birth: his father was a
hippie and his mother was an ex-nun,
and they had met while counselling draft
resisters during the Vietnam War. Their
home was a farm in southwestern Penn-
sylvania; the marriage broke up when
Joe was four, in part because his mother
didnt like the fact that the marijuana
was growing higher than the corn. Joe
discovered golf as a child, when his
mother began dropping him o at a local
public course early on summer morn-
ings and picking him up late in the af-
ternoon, hoping to give him something
36 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
Barrack, one of Trumps closest friends,
told the Washington Post that he was
shocked and stunned by the Presi- economic communities, Michael Mad-
dents rhetoric and tweets.
Decertifying the Iran agreement would
fracture the United States credibility
among its original partners in the deal.
It would open a rift with China just as
it is weighing whether to join the United
States again, this time in negotiating with
North Korea. Global Times, a state-backed
Chinese newspaper, has asked, If Amer-
ica would overturn a pact it made to the
rest of the world, solely because of a tran-
sition in government, how can it retain
the reputation of a great power?
The harm to Americas full faith and
credit would be particularly acute in
Pyongyang. A decision to undermine the
signature foreign-policy deal of a previ-
ous Administration would tilt the bal-
ance away from North Korean ocials
who argue for compromise. The more
hawkish cohorts will feel emboldened
inexpensive to do that would last all day.
It was great for her, because she was a
single mom, and it was great for me, be-
cause youre kind of growing up on a golf
course, he said. Youre hanging out with
old men and learning about girls and
playing cards and drinking beer and
things like that.
To build his birthday present, he hired
Michael Lehrer, whose company, Home
Green Advantage, has installed hundreds
of synthetic greens in the metropolitan
areaincluding two in Lehrers own
back yard, in Armonk. He is tall and d-
gety, and hes so abundantly supplied
with hyperkinetic professional enthusi-
asm that his e-mails often arrive in after-
thought-laden barrages. Quite a few of
his clients are well known. I did Jimmy
Buetts course, in Sag Harbor, he said,
while taking a water break on a small
deck o Ferrari-Adlers kitchen, over-
looking the back yard. Hes a really good
guyhe looks like Larry David. I did
Kenneth Cole. I did the oating green
at GlenArbor Golf Club, in Bedford. I
did two soccer elds at Greenwich Coun-
try Day School. Ive done most of the
big real-estate people in the city: Rat-
ner, Silverstein, Milstein. Give me some
other namesI probably did stu for
them, too.
You-know-who?
during internal deliberations against peo-
ple in the diplomatic, intelligence, and
den, of Johns Hopkins Universitys 38
North Web site, said.
A nations credibility is the type of
asset that is easy to overlook, until an
emergency makes it precious. During the
Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, President
John F. Kennedy dispatched former Sec-
retary of State Dean Acheson to Paris to
inform President Charles de Gaulle that
the Administration had decided to stage
a naval blockade of Cuba. Acheson oered
to show surveillance photographs of the
islands missile sites, but de Gaulle waved
them away, saying, The word of the Pres-
ident of the United States is enough for
me. History suggests that President
Trumps disdain for even the achieve-
ments of his predecessor is most damag-
ing not in the eyes of Americas enemies
but in the eyes of its friends.
Evan Osnos
I did a big golf thing on the roof of
Trump Tower at City Center, in White
Plains. And he paid me.
Ferrari-Adlers yard is tightly bordered
by a tall privet hedge, a fence, and a gate
that opens onto an alley, and its nowhere
near as spacious as a Trump roof.
This green is about eighteen or twenty
by twelve, Lehrer said. So maybe two
hundred square feet, two-twenty-ve.
Ferrari-Adler laughed. He may be
exaggerating a little bit.
We use the term rounded feet.
Joe Ferrari-Adler
 This is the smallest one youve ever
done, right?
Oh, no.
Youve built smaller greens than this?
I nd that hard to believe.
Well, basement greens. Oce greens,
Lehrer said. I usually do those on a
wooden decka little four-inch plat-
formso that I can cut holes in it.
To prepare Ferrari-Adlers yard for
its covering of plastic grass, Lehrer had
to maneuver his truck down a side street
and into the alley. You know, a golf green
is not like a lawn, he said. If the ball
starts turning an eighth of an inch two
years from now, its because something
down below decomposed. So you have
to take out all the organic material and
replace it with crushed rock.
Lehrer hollered instructions from
above, and two helpers arranged fringe
pieces around the perimeter of the put-
ting surface, which was slightly kidney-
shaped. The fringe pieces looked like
green shag bathroom rugs.
This project is great, and I love this
guy, but its just tough to get to Brook-
lyn, Lehrer said. The hardest thing
about these projects is logistics. When
you do Manhattan, youre, like, Am I
going to have to get a crane or a heli-
copter to get shit up here? Still, he said,
he was pleased with the result. Its like
1
seeing a cake come together, isnt it?
David Owen
THE PICTURES
CAN IT HAPPEN HERE?
hen the action thriller Bushwick
W premired, at Sundance, during
the same week as Donald Trumps In-
auguration, its plot seemed like a fanci-
ful nightmare, in a Red Dawn kind of
way: an army of militiamen from South-
ern states, hoping to secede from the
Union, invades the transitional Brook-
lyn neighborhood, bringing black heli-
copters and automatic weapons. Its a
Fort Sumter moment for a second Amer-
ican civil war.
We thought it would be a caution-
ary tale for maybe ten years in the fu-
turenot now, Jon Milott, one of the
movies directors, said the other day. But
just before Bushwick opened, in Au-
gust, Confederate ags were ying in
Charlottesville, and a new civil war sud-
denly seemed a little less hypothetical.
A Brooklyn radio host asked me if I
would punch a Nazi in the face, Cary
Murnion, Milotts co-director, said.
The lmmakers were standing out-
side the Jeerson Street subway sta-
tion, their rst return to Bushwick since
they shot on location there in 2015. Re-
tracing the route of their movie cam-
eras, they pointed out sites of mayhem
in the lm, sounding like the worlds
worst Realtors.
There was a sniper in the window
up there, Murnion said, on Willoughby
Street. And we had a burning car on
this corner. He had a scraggly beard and
wore a NASA T-shirt and had bicycled
over from Clinton Hill.
This is where we had to wait for the
grati tour, Milott, in a black T-shirt
and sunglasses, said. Were in the mid-
dle of a shot, theres guns and explosions
and smoke, and a grati tour goes by.
In the lm, Bushwicks hipsters, Latino
shopkeepers, Hasids, and gang members
surprise the invaders by ghting back.
The lms militiamen thought the neigh-
borhoods ethnic diversity would weaken
the resistance, Murnion said. They had
faulty intel.
Murnion remarked on how the area
was changing. Skirting new construc-
tion on Wycko Avenue, he nodded to-
ward an orange Jaguar parked outside a
natural-food store. When I moved to
Bushwick, it was sold to me as East Wil-
liamsburg, he said. If I got into a cab
in Manhattan and said, Bushwick, they
would say no.
The two men entered a bodega and
searched for the spot on the oor where,
in the lm, the shopkeeper lies bleeding,
having been stabbed by looters.
This is like a Whole Foods now,
Murnion said.
Maybe he used the ten grand we
gave him to let us shoot here, Milott
said.
The directors were classmates at Par-
sons, and before Bushwick they made
comedies. Their breakthrough was
Boob, a short horror parody, screened
at South by Southwest in 2009, about a
breast that goes on a rampage after a
botched augmentation. In horror lms
everything comes to life, Murnion said.
But we had never seen a boob come to
life. (They learned only later about the
disembodied-breast sequence in Woody
Allens Everything You Always Wanted
to Know About Sex*. We decided to
tell people what a great inuence Woody
was, he added.)
They dreamed up Bushwick in 2009,
when Rick Perry, the governor of Texas,
joked that his state could secede. Mur-
nion and Milott started what-ing mil-
itary scenarios and pitched a movie.
When Brittany Snow (Pitch Perfect)
and Dave Bautista (Guardians of the
Galaxy) signed on to co-star, XYZ Films
raised the $3.3 million needed for the
lm. Being pacist comedy geeks, Mur-
nion and Milott boned up on combat
tactics by studying Generation Kill, a
miniseries about the 2003 Iraq invasion.
From that, Murnion said, they learned
that you go to a soft spot, take it, and
attack from there. Bushwick works be-
cause it isnt very populated. And theres
a waterway a few blocks from here, so
you could bring in boats if you need to.
Its just the beginning of invading
Manhattan, Milott said.
Murnion recalled how hed taken a
map of Bushwick and plotted a serpen-
tine escape route for the movies heroes.
A lot of this came from our experience
with 9/11, he said. Nobody knew what
was going on that day.
In the opening sequence, Snow scram-
bles past a burning ice-cream truck (We
looked into getting the rights to the Mis-
ter Softee music, Murnion said), and
sprints by the Owl Juice Bar and Do or
Die Tattoo, on Wycko. But a block
and a half later there was a busted-up
car in an alleyway that was perfect, Mur-
nion said.
As they crossed Cypress Avenue, they
pointed to an alley. This is where the
Hasids ght back, Murnion said. We
gave them old-school ries rather than
big M16s because we thought they were
more traditional.
The tour ended, as the movie does,
at Grover Cleveland Playground. The
nal scene is a night skirmish amid the
swings and jungle gyms. At 3 A.M., we
had live mortars going o, Murnion
said. We thought wed be hearing from
the neighbors. There was not one com-
plaint. Those are true New Yorkers.
On the grass nearby, a sunbather was
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 37
splayed face down, motionless. Thats
very bizarre, Murnion said, somewhat
alarmed. Thats the exact location of the
nal death in the movie. He and Mi-
lott waited and watched until the sun-
1
bather wiggled a foot.
Don Steinberg
ARTS SAKE
BRIGHT AND SHINY
he Chinese artist Xu Tan inspected
T the freshly unpacked pieces of his
art workscrupulously labelled and cor-
doned o with yellow barrier tapeand,
hands on hips, exclaimed, Well, this sort
of looks like a crime scene, doesnt it?
Xu, who is sixty, wore a Palm Springs
Bridge Winner of the Year T-shirt (the
real winner was his brother-in-law, who
lives in Orange County) and clunky
brown shoes. Hed arrived in New York
two days earlier, from Shenzhen, to take
part in the exhibition Art and China
After 1989: Theatre of the World, on
view at the Guggenheim until January.
Nearly a hundred and fty works
were being set up throughout the mu-
seum. Xu was contributing an installa-
tion called Made in China, which hed
rst shown two decades earlier: a re-
creation of an apartment belonging
to upwardly striving, middle-class city
dwellers during the boom years of the
late nineties. I lived in Guangzhou then,
Xu said. The Pearl River Delta was re-
Take a lookthats us in ninety years.
ally starting to make a name for itself as
the worlds low-tech factory.
Made in China is Xus attempt to
document how Chinas budding con-
sumerist revolution transformed the
countrys domestic sphere. The apart-
ments furnituresofa, bathtub, chairs,
desk, bedhad been purchased locally
and delivered the day before from a New
York warehouse. I still remember when
sofasthe Chinese word, sha-fa, de-
rives from the Englishentered China,
and what a luxury commodity it was.
He pointed to the sofa and chuckled.
Anyone who could aord one put it
front and center in their living room, just
to show that they had one.
On the oor lay an array of plastic
dollar-store knick-knacks, symbolizing
the manufactured goods fuelling Chi-
nas newfound wealth. There was a Bat-
man gurine, a Rubiks Cube, slippers,
a pink hairbrush, Donald Duck, Mickey
Mouse, a plastic rhinoceros, a toy am-
bulance, and a Japanese manga-themed
water gun. A ve-hundred-piece Mona
Lisa jigsaw puzzle would be left out for
visitors to play with. Can you guess
why I named the piece Made in China?
Xu said.
The knickknacks dated to the instal-
lations inaugural showing, in 1998, but
Xu had stopped by a Chinatown gro-
cery that morning to pick up bottled
condiments (soy sauce, oyster sauce),
which he added to the mix. A dash of
local avor, he said. Its a weird thing
that China started mass-producing cheap
frivolities for the worldclothes, toys
when so recently we were too poor to
even adequately care for our bodies. He
patted his belly. For a long time, we
Chinese didnt think we had a right to
our bodies. They belonged to the Peo-
ple, the Party, the collective. We sacriced
the body as an instrument of war, for a
larger cause. He shook his head. Like
suicide bombers.
The apartment required one nal
touch. Xu would be wrapping each piece
of furniture in Mylar, to convey the oc-
cupants zeal for ash. Gold and silver
spell opulence to the Chinese, he said.
In Guangdong, its also, especially, good
luck. He picked up a swath of gold sheet-
ing that was so shiny he could see his
face in it, and began wrapping the sofa,
Christo style. (We call it the space blan-
ket, an assistant curator, who had pro-
cured the material from the garment dis-
trict, whispered.) Xu stepped back. Of
course, it comes o looking completely
fake, but I guess thats the point, he said.
During that transitional moment in the
economy, everything was designed to
look ostentatious.
The silver sheeting turned out to be
too narrow to cover the double bed. Two
art handlers with walkie-talkies arrived
to troubleshoot; it was decided that the
Mylar would be cut and re-sewn, to the
right dimensions. A tattooed assistant
named Sonia grabbed a pair of scissors
and began snipping. As she worked, a
Guggenheim employee moved the knick-
knacks to the desk, protecting them with
a sign that read Caution: Art.
Because God forbid someone injure
my ninety-nine-cent plastic Mickey
Mouse, Xu said.
When the bed was sheathed in sil-
ver, he took a deep breath and lifted one
end of the bathtub, to strategize its wrap-
ping. I havent done physical labor for
a living in a long time, but, at heart, I
suspect Im still a member of the labor-
ing class, he said. I remember starting
out, in 1992, and asking myself, What
the hell is an artist, and am I really qual-
ied to be one, ever? He set the tub
down with a groan. How strange that,
thirty years later, I still sometimes feel
the same way.
Straightening up, Xu gazed at the
tub. Im just jet-lagged enough to think
about jumping in there right now, he
said. He didnt have a tub at home, in
China, he said. That would be crimi-
nally indulgent.
Jiayang Fan
THE FINANCIAL PAGE
CLEANING UP made little or no prot. In the early days,
he Smoot-Hawley Tari Act of 1930
T is perhaps the single most frequently
mocked act of Congress in history. It
sparked a trade war in the early days of
the Great Depression, and has become
shorthand for self-destructive protec-
tionism. So its surprising that, while the
laws taris have been largely eliminated,
some of its absurd provisions still hold.
The other week, the American appliance-
maker Whirlpool successfully employed
a 1974 amendment to the act to persuade
the United States government to impose
as yet unidentied protections against
its top Korean competitors, LG and Sam-
sung. Whirlpools ocial argument was
that these rms have been bolstering
their market share by oering fancy ap-
pliances at low prices. In other words,
Whirlpool is getting beat and wants the
government to help it win.
This decision is more than a throw-
back. It shows that Whirlpool and its
supporters in government have failed to
understand the shift occurring in the
business world as a result of the so-called
Internet of Thingsappliances that send
and receive data. Its easy to miss the
magnitude of the change, since many of
these Things seem like mere gimmicks.
Have you ever wanted to change the
water temperature in the middle of a
wash cycle when youre not at home, or
get second-by-second reports on pre-
cisely how much energy your dryer is
consuming? Probably not, but now you
can. And its not just washing machines.
There are at least two smart toasters
and any number of Wi-Fi-connected
coeemakers, refrigerators, ovens, dish-
washers, and garbage cans, not to men-
tion light bulbs, sex toys, toilets, pet feed-
ers, and a childrens thermos.
But this is just the early, land-rush
phase of the Internet of Things, com-
parable to the rst Internet land rush, in
the late nineties. That era gave us noto-
rious failurescue obligatory mention
of pets.combut it also gave us Ama-
zon, the company that, more than any
other, suggests how things will play out.
40 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
For most of its existence, Amazon has
it was often ridiculed for this, but the
companys managers and investors quickly
realized that its most valuable asset was
not individual sales but dataits knowl-
edge about its loyal, habit-driven cus-
tomer base. Amazon doesnt evaluate
customers by the last purchase they made;
instead, customers have a lifetime value,
a prediction of how much money each
one will spend in the years to come. Am-
azon can calculate this with increasing
accuracy. Already, it likely knows which
books you read, which movies you watch,
what data you store, and what food you
eat. And since the introduction of Alexa,
the voice-operated device, Amazon has
been learning when some customers wake
up, go to work, listen to the news, play
with their kids, and go to sleep.
This is the radical implication of the
Internet of Thingsa fundamental shift
in the relationship between customers
and companies. In the old days, you
might buy a washing machine or a re-
frigerator once a decade or so. Appliance-
makers are built to prot from that one,
rare purchase, focussing their market-
ing, customer research, and internal
nancial analysis on brief, sporadic, high-
stakes interactions. The fact that you
bought a particular companys stove ve
years ago has no value today. But, when
an appliance is sending a constant stream
of data back to its maker, that company
has continuous relationships with the
owners of its products, and can nd all
sorts of ways to make money from those
relationships. If a company knows, years
after you bought its stove, exactly how
often you cook, what you cook, when
you shop, and what you watch (on a
stove-top screen) while you cook, it can
continuously monetize your relation-
ship: selling you recipe subscriptions,
maybe, or getting a cut of your food or-
ders. Appliances now order their own
supplies when they are about to run out.
My printer orders its own ink; I assume
my next fridge will order milk when Im
running low.
Whirlpool makes smart appliances,
just like Samsung and LG. The president
of Whirlpool North America, Joseph Li-
otine, e-mailed me to say that the rm
has led the way in developing cut-
ting-edge innovations and solutions. He
pointed out that its appliances connect
to various services, such as Amazon Dash,
which can automatically order laundry
detergent, and Yummly, a recipe app that
Whirlpool owns. But having the right
products isnt the same as having the right
strategy. Unlike its Korean competitors,
Whirlpool hasnt embraced the Amazon
lesson: that the way to win in a data-driven
business is to push prices as low as pos-
sible in order to build your customer base,
enhance data ow, and cash in in the
long-term. Douglas Irwin, an economist
at Dartmouth and the author of Ped-
dling Protectionism, a book about
Smoot-Hawley, told me, Whirlpool is
putting their resources into stopping com-
petition. Maybe they should put their re-
sources into serving their consumers bet-
ter. This may just delay the reckoning.
Irwin points out that Whirlpools
trade complaint was rst led under the
Obama Administration, which had im-
posed taris on LG and Samsung in
two related cases. But most of the taris
were small and easy for the companies
to get around. President Trump, of
course, views free trade more skepti-
cally, and may well impose huge taris
on all laundry-machine imports. Irwin
suspects that this will produce a ood
of trade-protection complaints from
other American rms. That would be
bad for anyone who wants to buy a laun-
GOLDEN COSMOS
dry machine, but, in the long run, it will
be even worse for American business.
Adam Davidson
 Weinstein and his associates used non-
A REPORTER AT LARGE disclosure agreements, payos, and legal
threats to suppress their accounts. Asia

ABUSES OF POWER
Argento, an Italian lm actress and di-
rector, said that she did not speak out
until nowWeinstein, she told me, forc-
Stories from the women harmed by Hollywoods most influential producer. ibly performed oral sex on herbecause
she feared that Weinstein would crush
BY RONAN FARROW her. I know he has crushed a lot of peo-
ple before, Argento said. Thats why
this storyin my case, its twenty years
old, some of them are olderhas never
come out.
On October 5th, the New York Times,
in a powerful report by Jodi Kantor and
Megan Twohey, revealed multiple alle-
gations of sexual harassment against
Weinstein, an article that led to the res-
ignation of four members of the Wein-
stein Companys all-male board, and to
Weinsteins ring.
The story, however, is complex, and
there is more to know and to understand.
In the course of a ten-month investiga-
tion, I was told by thirteen women that,
between the nineteen-nineties and 2015,
Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted
them. Their allegations corroborate and
overlap with the Timess revelations, and
also include far more serious claims.
Three of the womenamong them
Argento and a former aspiring actress
named Lucia Evanstold me that Wein-
stein had raped them, forcibly perform-
ing or receiving oral sex or forcing vag-
inal sex. Four women said that they had
experienced unwanted touching that
could be classied as an assault. In an

Sfewince the establishment of the rst stu-

dios, a century ago, there have been
movie executives as dominant, or as
domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. He
co-founded the production-and-distri-
bution companies Miramax and the
Weinstein Company, helping to reinvent
the model for independent lms with
business, inspiring both fear and grati-
tude. His movies have earned more than
three hundred Oscar nominations, and,
at the annual awards ceremonies, he has
been thanked more than almost anyone
else in movie history, ranking just after
Steven Spielberg and right before God.
For more than twenty years, Wein-
audio recording captured during a New
York Police Department sting operation
in 2015, Weinstein admits to groping a
Filipina-Italian model named Ambra
Battilana Gutierrez, describing it as be-
havior he is used to. Four of the women
I interviewed cited encounters in which
Weinstein exposed himself or mastur-
PHOTOGRAPH: RAYMOND HALL/GC IMAGES/GETTY (MAN)

movies including Sex, Lies, and Video- stein, who is now sixty-ve, has also bated in front of them.
tape, The Crying Game, Pulp Fic- been trailed by rumors of sexual harass- Sixteen former and current executives
tion, The English Patient, Shake- ment and assault. His behavior has been and assistants at Weinsteins companies
speare in Love, and The Kings Speech. an open secret to many in Hollywood told me that they witnessed or had knowl-
Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his and beyond, but previous attempts by edge of unwanted sexual advances and
inuence as a prolic fund-raiser for many publications, including The New touching at events associated with Wein-
Democratic Party candidates, including Yorker, to investigate and publish the steins lms and in the workplace. They
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. story over the years fell short of the de- and others described a pattern of pro-
Weinstein combined a keen eye for prom- mands of journalistic evidence. Too few fessional meetings that were little more
ising scripts, directors, and actors with a people were willing to speak, much less than thin pretexts for sexual advances on
bullying, even threatening, style of doing allow a reporter to use their names, and young actresses and models. All sixteen
said that the behavior was widely known
Harvey Weinstein allegedly used his position, for decades, to harass and assault. within both Miramax and the Weinstein
42 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY
Company. Messages sent by Irwin Rei-
ter, a senior company executive, to Emily
Nestor, one of the women who alleged
that she was harassed, described the mis-
treatment of women as a serial problem
that the Weinstein Company had been
struggling with in recent years. Other
employees described what was, in es-
sence, a culture of complicity at Wein-
steins places of business, with numerous
people throughout his companies fully
aware of his behavior but either abetting
it or looking the other way. Some em-
ployees said that they were enlisted in a
subterfuge to make the victims feel safe.
A female executive with the company
described how Weinsteins assistants and
others served as a honeypotthey
would initially join a meeting along with
a woman Weinstein was interested in,
but then Weinstein would dismiss them,
leaving him alone with the woman. (On
October 10th, the Weinstein Companys
board issued a statement, writing that
these allegations come as an utter sur-
prise to the Board. Any suggestion that
the Board had knowledge of this con-
duct is false.)
Virtually all of the people I spoke with
told me that they were frightened of re-
taliation. If Harvey were to discover my
identity, Im worried that he could ruin
my life, one former employee told me.
Many said that they had seen Weinsteins
associates confront and intimidate those
who crossed him, and feared that they
would be similarly targeted. Four ac-
tresses, including Mira Sorvino and
Rosanna Arquette, told me they suspected
that, after they rejected Weinsteins ad-
vances or complained about them to com-
pany representatives, Weinstein had them
removed from projects or dissuaded peo-
ple from hiring them. Multiple sources
said that Weinstein frequently bragged
about planting items in media outlets
about those who spoke against him; these
sources feared similar retribution. Sev-
eral pointed to Gutierrezs case: after she
went to the police, negative items dis-
cussing her sexual history and impugn-
ing her credibility began rapidly appear-
ing in New York gossip pages. (In the
taped conversation, part of which The
New Yorker posted online, Weinstein asks
Gutierrez to join him for ve minutes,
and warns, Dont ruin your friendship
with me for ve minutes.)
Several former employees told me
that they were speaking about Wein-
steins alleged behavior now because they
hoped to protect women in the future.
This wasnt a one-o. This wasnt a pe-
riod of time, an executive who worked
for Weinstein for many years told me.
This was ongoing predatory behavior
toward womenwhether they consented
or not.
Its likely that the women who spoke
to me have recently felt increasingly em-
boldened to talk about their experiences
because of the way the world has changed
regarding issues of sex and power. Their
disclosures follow in the wake of stories
alleging sexual misconduct by public
gures, including Donald Trump, Bill
OReilly, Roger Ailes, and Bill Cosby. In
October, 2016, a month before the elec-
tion, a tape emerged of Trump telling a
celebrity-news reporter, And when youre
a star, they let you do it. You can do any-
thing. . . . Grab em by the pussy. You can
do anything. This past April, OReilly,
a host at Fox News, was forced to resign
after Fox was discovered to have paid
ve women millions of dollars in ex-
change for silence about their accusa-
tions of sexual harassment. Ailes, the for-
mer head of Fox News, resigned in July,
2016, after he was accused of sexual ha-
rassment. Cosby went on trial this sum-
mer, charged with drugging and sexu-
ally assaulting a woman. The trial ended
with a hung jury.
In the Times piece, Weinstein made
an initial eort at damage control by
partly acknowledging what he had done,
saying, I appreciate the way Ive behaved
with colleagues in the past has caused a
lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for
it. In an interview with the New York
Post, he said, Ive got to deal with my
personality, Ive got to work on my tem-
per, I have got to dig deep. I know a lot
of people would like me to go into a fa-
cility, and I may well just do thatI will
go anywhere I can learn more about my-
self. He went on, In the past I used to
compliment people, and some took it as
me being sexual, I wont do that again.
In his written statement to the Times,
Weinstein claimed that he would chan-
nel that anger into a ght against the
leadership of the National Rie Associ-
ation. He also said that it was not co-
incidental that he was organizing a foun-
dation for women directors at the
University of Southern California. It
will be named after my mom and I wont
disappoint her. (U.S.C. has since re-
jected his funding pledge.)
Sallie Hofmeister, a spokesperson
for Weinstein, issued a new statement in
response to the allegations detailed
here. It reads in full: Any allegations of
non-consensual sex are unequivocally de-
nied by Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein
has further conrmed that there were
never any acts of retaliation against any
women for refusing his advances. Mr.
Weinstein obviously cant speak to anon-
ymous allegations, but with respect to
any women who have made allegations
on the record, Mr. Weinstein believes
that all of these relationships were con-
sensual. Mr. Weinstein has begun coun-
seling, has listened to the community and
is pursuing a better path. Mr. Weinstein
is hoping that, if he makes enough prog-
ress, he will be given a second chance.
While Weinstein and his representa-
tives have said that the incidents were
consensual, and were not widespread or
severe, the women I spoke to tell a very
dierent story.
ucia Stoller, now Lucia Evans, was
L approached by Weinstein at Cipri-
ani Upstairs, a club in New York, in 2004,
the summer before her senior year at
Middlebury College. Evans, who is now
a marketing consultant, wanted to be an
actress, and although she had heard ru-
mors about Weinstein she let him have
her number. Weinstein began calling her
late at night, or having an assistant call
her, asking to meet. She declined, but
said that she would do readings during
the day for a casting executive. Before
long, an assistant called to set up a day-
time meeting at the Miramax oce in
Tribeca, rst with Weinstein and then
with a casting executive, who was a
woman. I was, like, Oh, a woman, great,
I feel safe, Evans said.
When Evans arrived for the meeting,
the building was full of people. She was
led to an oce with exercise equipment
in it, and takeout boxes on the oor.
Weinstein was there, alone. Evans said
that she found him frightening. The
type of control he exertedit was very
real, she told me. Even just his pres-
ence was intimidating.
In the meeting, Evans recalled, he
immediately was simultaneously atter-
ing me and demeaning me and making
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 43
me feel bad about myself. Weinstein
told her that shed be great in Project
Runway the show, which Weinstein
helped produce, premired later that
yearbut only if she lost weight. He also
told her about two scripts, a horror movie
and a teen love story, and said one of his
associates would discuss them with her.
At that point, after that, is when he
assaulted me, Evans said. He forced
me to perform oral sex on him. As she
objected, Weinstein took his penis out
of his pants and pulled her head down
onto it. I said, over and over, I dont
want to do this, stop, dont, she recalled.
I tried to get away, but maybe I didnt
try hard enough. I didnt want to kick
him or ght him. In the end, she said,
hes a big guy. He overpowered me. She
added, I just sort of gave up. Thats the
most horrible part of it, and thats why
hes been able to do this for so long to
so many women: people give up, and
then they feel like its their fault.
Weinstein appeared to nd the en-
counter unremarkable. It was like it was
just another day for him, Evans said. It
was no emotion. Afterward, he acted as
if nothing had happened. She wondered
how Weinsteins sta could not know
what was going on.
Following the encounter, she met
with the female casting executive, who
sent her the scripts, and also came to
one of her acting-class readings a few
You sold our cow for magical beanbags?
weeks later. (Evans does not believe
that the executive was aware of Wein-
steins behavior.) Weinstein, Evans said,
began calling her again late at night.
She told me that the entire sequence
of events had a routine quality. It feels
like a very streamlined process, she
said. Female casting director, Harvey
wants to meet. Everything was de-
signed to make me feel comfortable
before it happened. And then the shame
in what happened was also designed
to keep me quiet.
Evans said that, after the incident, I
just put it in a part of my brain and closed
the door. She continued to blame her-
self for not ghting harder. It was al-
ways my fault for not stopping him, she
said. I had an eating problem for years.
I was disgusted with myself. Its funny,
all these unrelated things I did to hurt
myself because of this one thing. Evans
told friends some of what had happened,
but felt largely unable to talk about it. I
ruined several really good relationships
because of this. My schoolwork denitely
suered, and my roommates told me to
go to a therapist because they thought I
was going to kill myself.
In the years that followed, Evans en-
countered Weinstein occasionally. Once,
while she was walking her dog in Green-
wich Village, she saw him getting into
a car. I very clearly saw him. I made eye
contact, she said. I remember getting
chills down my spine just looking at him.
I was so horried. I have nightmares
about him to this day.
sia Argento, who was born in Rome,
A played the role of a glamorous thief
named Beatrice in the crime drama
B. Monkey, which was released in the
U.S. in 1999. The distributor was Mira-
max. In a series of long and often emo-
tional interviews, Argento told me that
Weinstein assaulted her while they were
working together.
At the time, Argento was twenty-one
and had twice won the Italian equiva-
lent of the Oscar. Argento said that, in
1997, one of Weinsteins producers in-
vited her to what she understood to be
a party thrown by Miramax at the Htel
du Cap-Eden-Roc, on the French Riv-
iera. Argento felt professionally obliged
to attend. When the producer led her
upstairs that evening, she said, there was
no party, only a hotel room, empty but
for Weinstein: Im, like, Where is the
fucking party? She recalled the pro-
ducer telling her, Oh, we got here too
early, before he left her alone with Wein-
stein. (The producer denies bringing Ar-
gento to the room that night.) At rst,
Weinstein was solicitous, praising her
work. Then he left the room. When he
returned, he was wearing a bathrobe and
holding a bottle of lotion. He asks me
to give a massage. I was, like, Look, man,
I am no fucking fool, Argento told me.
But, looking back, I am a fucking fool.
And I am still trying to come to grips
with what happened.
Argento said that, after she reluctantly
agreed to give Weinstein a massage, he
pulled her skirt up, forced her legs apart,
and performed oral sex on her as she re-
peatedly told him to stop. Weinstein ter-
ried me, and he was so big, she said.
It wouldnt stop. It was a nightmare.
At some point, she stopped saying no
and feigned enjoyment, because she
thought it was the only way the assault
would end. I was not willing, she told
me. I said, No, no, no. . . . Its twisted.
A big fat man wanting to eat you. Its a
scary fairy tale. Argento, who insisted
that she wanted to tell her story in all
its complexity, said that she didnt phys-
ically ght him o, something that has
prompted years of guilt.
The thing with being a victim is I
felt responsible, she said. Because, if I
were a strong woman, I would have kicked
him in the balls and run away. But I
didnt. And so I felt responsible. She de-
scribed the incident as a horrible trauma.
Decades later, she said, oral sex is still
ruined for her. Ive been damaged, she
told me. Just talking to you about it, my
whole body is shaking.
Argento recalled sitting on the bed
after the incident, her clothes in sham-
bles, her makeup smeared. She said that
she told Weinstein, I am not a whore,
and that he began laughing. He said he
would put the phrase on a T-shirt. After-
ward, Argento said, He kept contacting
me. For a few months, Weinstein seemed
obsessed, oering her expensive gifts.
What complicates the story, Argento
readily allowed, is that she eventually
yielded to Weinsteins further advances
and even grew close to him. Weinstein
dined with her, and introduced her to
his mother. Argento told me, He made
it sound like he was my friend and he
really appreciated me. She said that
she had consensual sexual relations with
him multiple times over the course of
the next ve years, though she described
the encounters as one-sided and onan-
istic.The rst occasion, several months
after the alleged assault, came before
the release of B. Monkey. I felt I had
to, she said. Because I had the movie
coming out and I didnt want to anger
him. She believed that Weinstein
would ruin her career if she didnt com-
ply. Years later, when she was a single
mother dealing with childcare, Wein-
stein oered to pay for a nanny. She
said that she felt obliged to submit to
his sexual advances.
Argento told me that she knew this
contact would be used to attack the cred-
ibility of her allegation. In part, she said,
the initial assault made her feel overpow-
ered each time she encountered Wein-
stein, even years later. Just his body, his
presence, his face, bring me back to the
little girl that I was when I was twenty-
one, she told me. When I see him, it
makes me feel little and stupid and weak.
She broke down as she struggled to ex-
plain. After the rape, he won, she said.
In 2000, Argento released Scarlet
Diva, a movie that she wrote and di-
rected. In the lm, a heavyset producer
corners Anna, the character played by Ar-
gento, in a hotel room, asks her for a mas-
sage, and tries to assault her. After the
movie came out, women began approach-
ing Argento, saying that they recognized
Weinsteins behavior in the portrayal. Peo- ders, which made me very uncomfort-
ple would ask me about him because of
the scene in the movie, she said. Some
recounted similar details to her: meetings
and professional events moved to hotel
rooms, bathrobes and massage requests,
and, in one other case, forced oral sex.
Weinstein, according to Argento, saw
the lm after it was released in the U.S.,
and apparently recognized himself. Ha,
ha, very funny, Argento remembered him
saying to her. But he also said that he was
sorry for whatever happened. The mov-
ies most signicant departure from the
real-life incident, Argento told me, was
how the hotel-room scene ended. In the
movie I wrote, she said, I ran away.
Other women were too afraid to allow
me to use their names, but their stories
are uncannily similar to these allegations.
One, a woman who worked with Wein-
stein, explained her reluctance to be iden-
tied. He drags your name through the
mud, and hell come after you hard with
his legal team.
Like others I spoke to, this woman
said that Weinstein brought her to a
hotel room under a professional pretext,
changed into a bathrobe, and, she said,
forced himself on me sexually. She told years with whether to come forward with
him no, repeatedly and clearly. After-
ward, she experienced horror, disbelief,
and shame, and considered going to the
police. I thought it would be a he said,
she said, and I thought about how im-
pressive his legal team is, and I thought
about how much I would lose, and I de-
cided to just move forward, she said.
The woman continued to have profes-
sional contact with Weinstein after the
alleged rape, and acknowledged that sub-
sequent communications between them
might suggest a normal working rela-
tionship. I was in a vulnerable position
and I needed my job, she told me. It
just increases the shame and the guilt.
ira Sorvino, who starred in several
M of Weinsteins lms, told me that
he sexually harassed her and tried to
pressure her into a physical relationship
while they were working together. She
said that, at the Toronto International
Film Festival in September, 1995, she
found herself in a hotel room with Wein-
stein, who produced the movie she was
there to promote, Mighty Aphrodite,
for which she later won an Academy
Award. He started massaging my shoul-
able, and then tried to get more physi-
cal, sort of chasing me around, she
recalled. She scrambled for ways to ward
him o, telling him that it was against
her religion to date married men. (At
the time, Weinstein was married to Eve
Chilton, a former assistant.) Then she
left the room.
A few weeks later, in New York City,
her phone rang after midnight. It was
Weinstein, saying that he had new mar-
keting ideas for the lm and asking to
get together. Sorvino oered to meet
him at an all-night diner, but he said he
was coming over to her apartment and
hung up. I freaked out, she told me.
She called a friend and asked him to
come over and pose as her boyfriend. The
friend hadnt arrived by the time Wein-
stein rang her doorbell. Harvey had man-
aged to bypass my doorman, she said. I
opened the door terried, brandishing
my twenty-pound Chihuahua mix in
front of me, as though that would do any
good. When she told Weinstein that her
new boyfriend was on his way, he became
dejected and left.
Sorvino said that she struggled for
her story, partly because she was aware
that it was mild compared with the ex-
periences of other women, including So-
phie Dix, an actress she spoke to at the
time. (Dix told me that she had locked
herself in a hotel bathroom to escape
Weinstein, and that he had masturbated
in front of her. She said it was a classic
case of someone not understanding the
word no.. . . I must have said no a thou-
sand times.) The fact that Weinstein
was so instrumental in Sorvinos success
also made her hesitate: I have great re-
spect for Harvey as an artist, and owe
him and his brother a debt of gratitude
for the early success in my career, includ-
ing the Oscar. She had professional con-
tact with Weinstein for years after the
incident, and remains a close friend of
his brother and business partner, Bob
Weinstein. (She never told Bob about
his brothers behavior.)
Sorvino said that she felt afraid and
intimidated, and that the incidents had
a signicant impact on her. When she
told a female employee at Miramax about
the harassment, the womans reaction
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 45
was shock and horror that I had men-
tioned it. Sorvino appeared in a few
more of Weinsteins lms afterward, but
felt that saying no to Weinstein and re-
porting the harassment had ultimately
hurt her career. She said, There may
have been other factors, but I denitely
felt iced out and that my rejection of
Harvey had something to do with it.
IMissnrez,March, 2015, Ambra Battilana Gutier-
who was once a nalist in the
Italy contest, met Harvey Wein-
stein at a reception for New York Spring
Spectacular, a show that he was pro-
ducing at Radio City Music Hall. Wein-
stein introduced himself to Gutierrez,
who was twenty-two, remarking repeat-
edly that she looked like the actress
Mila Kunis.
Following the event, Gutierrezs mod-
elling agency e-mailed her to say that
Weinstein wanted to set up a business
meeting as soon as possible. Gutierrez
arrived at Weinsteins oce in Tribeca
early the next evening with her model-
ling portfolio. In the oce, she sat with
Weinstein on a couch to review the port-
folio, and he began staring at her breasts,
asking if they were real. Gutierrez later
told ocers of the New York Police De-
partments Special Victims Division that
Weinstein then lunged at her, groping
her breasts and attempting to put a hand
up her skirt while she protested. He nally
backed o and told her that his assistant
would give her tickets to Finding Nev-
erland, a Broadway musical that he was
producing. He said he would meet her
at the show that evening.
Instead of going to the show, Gutier-
rez went to the nearest police station and
reported the assault. Weinstein tele-
phoned her later that evening, annoyed
that she had failed to appear at the show.
She picked up the call while sitting with
investigators from the Special Victims
Division, who listened in and devised a
plan: Gutierrez would agree to see the
show the following day and then meet
with Weinstein. She would wear a wire
and attempt to extract a confession or
an incriminating statement.
The next day, Gutierrez met Wein-
stein at the bar of the Tribeca Grand
Hotel. A team of undercover ocers
helped guide her through the interac-
tion. On the recording, which I have
heard in full, Weinstein lists actresses
46 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
whose careers he has helped and oers
Gutierrez the services of a dialect coach.
Then he presses her to join him in his
hotel room while he showers. Gutierrez
says no repeatedly; Weinstein persists,
and after a while she accedes to his de-
mand to go upstairs. But, standing in the
hallway outside his room, she refuses to
go farther. In an increasingly tense ex-
change, he presses her to enter. Gutier-
rez says, I dont want to, I want to
leave, and I want to go downstairs.
She asks him directly why he groped her
breasts the day before.
Oh, please, Im sorry, just come on
in, Weinstein says. Im used to that.
Come on. Please.
Youre used to that? Gutierrez asks,
sounding incredulous.
Yes,Weinstein says. He adds, I wont
do it again.
After almost two minutes of back-
and-forth in the hallway, Weinstein
nally agrees to let her leave.
According to a law-enforcement
source, Weinstein, if charged, would
most likely have faced a count of sex-
ual abuse in the third degree, a misde-
meanor punishable by a maximum of
three months in jail. But, as the police
investigation proceeded and the allega-
tion was widely reported, details about
Gutierrezs past began to appear in the
tabloids. In 2010, as a young contestant
in the Miss Italy beauty pageant, Gutier-
rez had attended one of Prime Minis-
ter Silvio Berlusconis infamous Bunga
Bunga parties. She claimed that she
had been unaware of the nature of the
party before arriving, and she eventu-
ally became a witness in a bribery case
against Berlusconi, which is still ongo-
ing. Gossip outlets also reported that
Gutierrez, as a teen-ager, had made an
allegation of sexual assault against an
older Italian businessman but later de-
clined to coperate with prosecutors.
Two sources close to the police in-
vestigation of Weinstein said that they
had no reason to doubt Gutierrezs ac-
count of the incident. One of them, a
police source, said that the department
had collected more than enough evi-
dence to prosecute Weinstein. But the
other said that Gutierrezs statements
about her past complicated the case
for the oce of the Manhattan Dis-
trict Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr. After
two weeks of investigation, the D.A.s
oce decided not to le charges. The
oce declined to comment on this
story but pointed me to its statement
at the time: This case was taken se-
riously from the outset, with a thor-
ough investigation conducted by our
Sex Crimes Unit. After analyzing the
available evidence, including multiple
interviews with both parties, a crimi-
nal charge is not supported.
We had the evidence, the police
source involved in the operation told me.
Its a case that made me angrier than I
thought possible, and I have been on the
force a long time.
Gutierrez, when contacted for this
story, said that she was unable to discuss
the incident. Someone close to the mat-
ter told me that, after the D.A.s oce
decided not to press charges, Gutierrez,
facing Weinsteins legal team, and in re-
turn for a payment, signed a highly re-
strictive nondisclosure agreement with
Weinstein, including an adavit stating
that the acts he admits to in the record-
ing never happened.
Weinsteins use of such settlements
was reported by the Times and conrmed
to me by numerous people. A former
employee with rsthand knowledge
of two settlement negotiations that
took place in London in the nineteen-
nineties recalled, It felt like David ver-
sus Goliath . . . the guy with all the money
and the power exing his muscle and
quashing the allegations and getting rid
of them.
he Times story disclosed a com-
T plaint to the Weinstein Compa-
nys oce of human resources, led on
behalf of a temporary front-desk assis-
tant named Emily Nestor in Decem-
ber, 2014. Her own account of Wein-
steins conduct is being made public here
for the rst time. Nestor was twenty-
ve when she started the job and, after
nishing law school and starting busi-
ness school, was considering a career
in the movie industry. On her rst day
in the position, Nestor said, two em-
ployees told her that she was Wein-
steins type physically. When Wein-
stein arrived at the oce, he made com-
ments about her appearance, referring
to her as the pretty girl. He asked how
old she was, and then sent all of his as-
sistants out of the room and made her
write down her telephone number.
 Weinstein told her to meet him for
drinks that night. Nestor invented an
excuse. When he insisted, she suggested
an early-morning coee the next day,
assuming that he wouldnt accept. He
did, and told her to meet him at the
Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills, where
he was staying. Nestor said that she
had talked with friends in the enter-
tainment industry and employees in
the company who had warned her about
Weinsteins reputation. I dressed very
frumpy, she said.
Nestor told me that the meeting was
the most excruciating and uncomfort-
able hour of my life. After Weinstein
oered her career help, she said, he began
to boast about his sexual liaisons with
other women, including famous actresses.
He said, You know, we could have a lot
of fun, Nestor recalled. I could put
you in my London oce, and you could
work there and you could be my girl-
friend. She declined. He asked to hold
her hand; she said no. In Nestors ac-
count of the exchange, Weinstein said,
Oh, the girls always say no. You know,
No, no. And then they have a beer or
two and then theyre throwing them-
selves at me. In a tone that Nestor de-
scribed as very weirdly proud, Wein-
stein added that hed never had to do
anything like Bill Cosby. She assumed
that he meant hed never drugged a
woman. Its just a bizarre thing to be so
proud of, she said. That youve never
had to resort to doing that. It was just
so far removed from reality and normal
rules of consent.
Textbook sexual harassment was
how Nestor described Weinsteins be-
havior to me. Its a pretty clear case of
sexual harassment when your superior,
the C.E.O., asks one of their inferiors,
a temp, to have sex with them, essen-
tially in exchange for mentorship. She
recalled refusing his advances at least a
dozen times. No did not mean no to utterly ineective; one female executive
him, she said. I was very aware of how
inappropriate it was. But I felt trapped.
Throughout the breakfast, she said,
Weinstein interrupted their conversa-
tion to yell into his cell phone, enraged
over a spat that Amy Adams, a star in
the Weinstein movie Big Eyes, was
having in the press. Afterward, Wein-
stein told Nestor to keep an eye on the
news cycle, which he promised would
be spun in his favor. Later in the day,
When youre President, then you can watch six hours of television a day.
there were indeed negative news items
about his opponents, and Weinstein
stopped by Nestors desk to be sure that
shed seen them.
By that point, Nestor recalled, I was
very afraid of him. And I knew how well
connected he was. And how if I pissed
him o then I could never have a career
in that industry. Still, she told a friend
about the incident, and he alerted the
companys oce of human resources, perience as part of Weinsteins serial mis-
which contacted her. (The friend did not
respond to a request for comment.)
Nestor had a conversation with company
ocials about the matter but didnt pur-
sue it further: the ocials said that Wein-
stein would be informed of anything
she told them, a practice not uncom-
mon in businesses the size of the Wein-
stein Company. Several former Wein-
stein employees told me that the com-
panys human-resources department was
ter had made diligent eorts to raise
described it as a place where you went
to when you didnt want anything to get
done.That was common knowledge across
the board. Because everything funnelled
back to Harvey. She described the de-
partments typical response to allegations
of misconduct as This is his company.
If you dont like it, you can leave.
Nestor told me that some people at
the company did seem concerned. Irwin
Reiter, a senior executive who had worked
for Weinstein for almost three decades,
sent her a series of messages via LinkedIn.
We view this very seriously and I per-
sonally am very sorry your rst day was
like this, Reiter wrote. Also if there are
further unwanted advances, please let us
know. Last year, just before the Presi-
dential election, he reached out again,
writing, All this Trump stu made me
think of you. He described Nestors ex-
conduct. Ive fought him about mis-
treatment of women 3 weeks before the
incident with you. I even wrote him an
email that got me labelled by him as sex
police, he wrote. The ght I had with
him about you was epic. I told him if
you were my daughter he would have
not made out so well. (Reiter declined
to comment for this article, but his law-
yer, Debra Katz, conrmed the authen-
ticity of the messages and said that Rei-
these issues, to no avail. Katz also noted
that Reiter is eager to coperate fully
with any outside investigation.)
Though no assault occurred, and
Nestor left after completing her tempo-
rary placement, she was profoundly
aected by the experience. I was de-
nitely traumatized for a while, in terms
of feeling so harassed and frightened,
she said. It made me feel incredibly dis-
couraged that this could be something
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 47
that happens on a regular basis. I actu
ally decided not to go into entertainment
because of this incident.
mma de Caunes, a French actress,
E met Weinstein in 2010, at a party at
the Cannes Film Festival. A few months
later, he asked her to a lunch meeting at
the Htel Ritz, in Paris. In the meeting,
Weinstein told de Caunes that he was
going to be producing a movie with a
prominent director, that he planned to
shoot it in France, and that it had a strong
female role. It was an adaptation of a
book, he said, but he claimed he couldnt
remember the title. But Ill give it
to you, Weinstein said, according to
de Caunes. I have it in my room.
De Caunes replied that she had to
leave, since she was already running late
for a TV show she was hostingEmi
nem was appearing on the show that after
noon, and she hadnt written her ques
tions yet. Weinstein pleaded with her to
retrieve the book with him, and nally
she agreed. As they got to his room, she
received a telephone call from one of her
colleagues, and Weinstein disappeared
into a bathroom, leaving the door open. She
assumed that he was washing his hands.
When I hung up the phone, I heard
the shower go on in the bathroom, she
said. I was, like, What the fuck, is he
taking a shower? Weinstein came out,
naked and with an erection. What are
you doing? she asked. Weinstein de
manded that she lie on the bed and told
her that many other women had done
so before her.
I was very petried, de Caunes said.
But I didnt want to show him that I
was petried, because I could feel that
the more I was freaking out, the more
he was excited. She added, It was like
a hunter with a wild animal. The fear
turns him on. De Caunes told Wein
stein that she was leaving, and he pan
icked. We havent done anything! she
remembered him saying. Its like being
in a Walt Disney movie!
De Caunes told me, I looked at him
and I saidit took all my courage, but
I said, Ive always hated Walt Disney
movies. And then I left. I slammed the
door. She was shaking on the stairs go
ing down to the lobby. A director she
was working with on the TV show
conrmed that she arrived at the studio
distraught and that she recounted what
had happened. Weinstein called relent
lessly over the next few hours, oering
de Caunes gifts and repeating his asser
tion that nothing had happened.
De Caunes, who was in her early
thirties at the time, was already an es
tablished actress, but she wondered
what would happen to younger and
more vulnerable women in the same
situation. Over the years, she said, shes
heard similar accounts from friends. I
know that everybodyI mean every-
bodyin Hollywood knows that its
happening, de Caunes said. Hes not
even really hiding. I mean, the way he
does it, so many people are involved
and see whats happening. But every
ones too scared to say anything.
ne evening in the early nineties, the
O actress Rosanna Arquette was sup
posed to meet Weinstein for dinner at
the Beverly Hills Hotel to pick up the
script for a new lm. At the hotel, Ar
quette was told to meet Weinstein up
stairs, in his room.
Arquette recalled that, when she ar
rived at the room, Weinstein opened the
door wearing a white bathrobe. He said
that his neck was sore and that he needed
a massage. She told him that she could
recommend a good masseuse. Then he
grabbed my hand, she said. He put it on
his neck. When she yanked her hand away,
Weinstein grabbed it again and pulled it
toward his penis, which was visible and
erect. My heart was really racing. I was
in a ghtoright moment, she said. She
told Weinstein, I will never do that.
Weinstein told her that she was mak
ing a huge mistake by rejecting him, and
named an actress and a model who he
claimed had given in to his sexual over
tures and whose careers he said he had
advanced as a result. Arquette said she re
sponded, Ill never be that girl, and left.
Arquette said that after she rejected
Weinstein her career suered. In one
case, she believes, she lost a role because
of it. He made things very dicult for
me for years, she told me. She did ap
pear in one subsequent Weinstein lm
Pulp Fiction. Arquette believes that
she only got that role because of its small
size and Weinsteins deference to the
lmmaker, Quentin Tarantino. (Disputes
later arose over her entitlement to pay
ment out of the lms proceeds.) Ar
quette said that her silence was the re
sult of Weinsteins power and reputation
for vindictiveness. Hes going to be work
ing very hard to track people down and
silence people, she explained. To hurt
people. Thats what he does.
There are other examples of Weinsteins
using the same modus operandi. Jessica
Barth, an actress who met him at a Golden
Globes party in January, 2011, told me that
he invited her to a business meeting at the
Peninsula. When she arrived, he asked her
over the phone to go up to his room. Wein
stein assured her it was no big dealbe
cause of his high prole, he simply wanted
privacy to talk career stu. In the room,
she found that Weinstein had ordered
champagne and sushi.
Barth said that, in the conversation
that followed, Weinstein alternated be-
tween oering to cast her in a lm and
demanding a naked massage in bed. So,
what would happen if, say, were having
some champagne and I take my clothes
o and you give me a massage? she re-
called him asking. And Im, like, Thats mer employee said, he turned to her and
not going to happen.
When she moved toward the door to
leave, Weinstein lashed out, saying that
she needed to lose weight to compete
with Mila Kunis, and then, apparently
in an eort to mollify her, promising a
meeting with one of his female execu-
tives. He gave me her number, and I
walked out and I started bawling, Barth
told me. (Immediately after the incident,
she spoke with two people; they conrmed
to me that she had described her expe-
rience to them at the time.) Barth said
that the promised meeting at Weinsteins
oce seemed to be purely a formality. I
just knew it was bullshit, she said. (The
executive she met with did not respond
to requests for comment.)
einsteins behavior deeply aected
W the day-to-day operations of his
companies. Current and former employ-
ees described a pattern of meetings and
strained complicity that closely matches
the accounts of the many women I inter-
viewed. The employees spoke on condi-
tion of anonymity because, they said, they
feared for their careers in Hollywood and
because of provisos in their work contracts.
There was a large volume of these
types of meetings that Harvey would have
with aspiring actresses and models, one
female executive told me. He would have
them late at night, usually at hotel bars
or in hotel rooms. And, in order to make
these women feel more comfortable, he
would ask a female executive or assistant
to start those meetings with him. She
was repeatedly asked to join such meet-
ings, she said, but she refused.
The executive said that she was espe-
cially disturbed by the involvement of
other employees. It almost felt like the
executive or assistant was made to be
a honeypot to lure these women in, to
make them feel safe, she said. Then he
would dismiss the executive or the assis-
tant, and then these women were alone
with him. And that did not feel like it was
appropriate behavior or safe behavior.
One former employee told me that
she was frequently asked to join for the
beginning of meetings that, she said, had
in many cases already been moved from
day to night and from hotel lobbies to
hotel rooms. She said that Weinsteins
conduct in the meetings was brazen.
During a meeting with a model, the for-
demanded, Tell her how good of a boy-
friend I am. She said that when she re-
fused to join one such meeting, Wein-
stein became enraged. Often, she was
asked to keep track of the women, who,
in keeping with a practice established by
Weinsteins assistants, were all led under
the same label in her phone: F.O.H.,
which stood for Friend of Harvey. She
added that the pattern of meetings was
nearly uninterrupted in her years of work-
ing for Weinstein. I have to say, the be-
havior did stop for a little bit after the
groping thing, she told me, referring to
Gutierrezs allegation to the police. But
he couldnt help himself. A few months
later, he was back at it.
Two staers who facilitated these
meetings said that they felt morally com-
promised by them. One male former
staer noted that many of the women
seemed not aware of the nature of those
meetings and were denitely scared.
He told me that most of the encounters
that he saw seemed consensual, but oth-
ers gave him pause. He was especially
troubled by his memory of one young
woman: You just feel terrible because
you could tell this girl, very young, not
from our country, was now in a room
waiting for him to come up there in the
middle of the day, and we were not to
bother them. He said that he was never
asked to facilitate these meetings for men.
None of the former executives or as-
sistants I spoke to quit because of the
misconduct, but many expressed guilt
and regret over not having said or done
more. They talked about what they be-
lieved to be a culture of silence about
sexual assault inside Miramax and the
Weinstein Company and across the en-
tertainment industry more broadly.
einstein and his legal and public-
W relations teams have conducted
a decades-long campaign to suppress
these stories. In recent months, that
campaign escalated. Weinstein and his
associates began calling many of the
women in this article. Weinstein asked
Argento to meet with a private inves-
tigator and give testimony on his be-
half. One actress who initially spoke
to me on the record later asked that
her allegation be removed from this
piece. Im so sorry, she wrote. The
legal angle is coming at me and I have
no recourse. Weinstein and his legal
team have threatened to sue multi-
ple media outlets, including the New
York Times.
Several of the former executives and
assistants in this story said that they
had received calls from Weinstein in
which he attempted to determine if
they had talked to me or warned them
not to. These employees continued to
participate in the article partly because
they felt that there was a growing cul-
ture of accountability, embodied in the
relatively recent disclosures about high-
prole men such as Cosby and Ailes.
I think a lot of us had thoughtand
hopedover the years that it would
come out sooner, the former execu-
tive who was aware of the two legal
settlements in London told me. But
I think now is the right time, in this
current climate, for the truth.
The female executive who declined
inappropriate meetings told me that
her lawyer advised her that she could
be liable for hundreds of thousands of
dollars in damages for violating the
nondisclosure agreement attached to
her employment contract. I believe
this is more important than keeping a
condentiality agreement, she said.
The more of us that can conrm or
validate for these women if this did
happen, I think its really important for
their justice to do that. She continued,
I wish I could have done more. I wish
I could have stopped it. And this is my
way of doing that now.
Hes been systematically doing this
for a very long time, the former em-
ployee who had been made to act as a
honeypot told me. She said that she
often thinks of something Weinstein
whisperedto himself, as far as she
could tellafter one of his many
shouting sprees at the oce. It so un-
nerved her that she pulled out her
phone and tapped it into a memo, word
for word: There are things Ive done
that nobody knows.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 49

PERSONAL HISTORY
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Manhattan, 1981.
BY JONATHAN FRANZEN
y girlfriend, V, and I were nish-
M ing college, with a summer to
burn before the next thing, and New
York beckoned. V went to the city and
signed a three-month lease on the
apartment of a Columbia student,
Bobby Atkins, who may have been the
son of the creator of the Atkins Diet,
or maybe we just enjoyed imagining
that he was. His place, on the south-
west corner of 110th Street and Am-
sterdam, had two small bedrooms and
was irremediably lthy. We arrived in
June with a fth of Tanqueray, a car-
ton of Marlboro Lights, and Marcella
Hazans Italian cookbook. Someone
had left behind a spineless black plush-
The author and his brother on the roof of the Cable Building in New York City.
50 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
toy panther, manufactured in Korea,
which we liberated and made ours.
We were living on a margin. In 1981,
before full-scale gentrication, before
mass incarceration, the city seemed
starkly drawn in black and white. When
a young Harlem humorist on the up-
town 3 train performed the magic act
of making every white passenger dis-
appear at Ninety-sixth Street, I felt
tried and found guilty of whiteness.
Our friend Jon Justice, who that sum-
mer had Thomas Pynchons V. stued come east with a Chicago friend of
into the back pocket of his corduroys,
was mugged at Grants Tomb, where
he shouldnt have been. I was aesthet-
ically attracted to cities but morbidly
afraid of being shot. In New York, Am-
sterdam Avenue was a sharp dividing
line, and I stood on the east side of it
only once, when I made the mistake
of riding a C train to 110th and walk-
ing home from there. It was late af-
ternoon and nobody paid attention to
me, but I was light-headed with fear.
Deepening my impression of menace
were the heavy, light-blocking secu-
rity gates on our windows and the po-
lice lock in our entry hall, its steel rod
anchored to the oor and angling up
to a slot on the front door. I associated
it with our next-door neighbor, an el-
derly white man with raging senile de-
mentia. He would pound on our door
or stand on the landing, wearing only
pajama bottoms, and asseverate, over
and over, using a vile epithet, that his
wife was having relations with black
men. I was afraid of him, too, and I
hated him for naming a racial division
we liberal kids accepted in silence.
In theory, V and I were trying to
write ction, but I was oppressed by
the summer heat and by the peniten-
tiary gloom of the Atkins place, the
cockroaches, the wandering neighbor.
V and I fought, wept, made up, and
played with our black panther. We
practiced cooking and semiotic crit-
icism and ventured outalways going
westto the Thalia, and Hunan Bal-
cony, and Papyrus Books, where I
bought the latest issue of Semiotext(e)
and dense volumes of theory by Der-
rida and Kenneth Burke. I dont re-
member how I had any money at all.
Conceivably my parents, despite their
disapproval of New York and of my
cohabitation with V, had given me
some hundreds of dollars. I do re-
member sending letters to various
magazines, inquiring about paid in-
ternships, and being told that I needed
to have applied six months earlier.
Luckily, my brother Tom was in
New York that summer, doing a loft
conversion for the hot-shot young
photographer Gregory Heisler. Tom,
who was then based in Chicago, had
COURTESY GREGORY HEISLER
Heislers who wanted to start a ren-
ovation business and hoped to pick
up some skills from my brother and
split the prots. But Heisler could see
that Tom had all the know-how. Be-
fore long, the friend was sent back to
 Chicago, leaving Tom without a la-
borer. This became my job.
Heisler was a portraitist, eventually
best known for his double-exposed
image of George H. W. Bush on the
cover of Time. His loft was at the cor-
ner of Broadway and Houston, on the
top oor of the Cable Building, then
a den of sweatshops, later the home
of the Angelika Theatre. The build-
ing was zoned for commercial use,
and Tom and Heisler hadnt bothered
with city permits, and so for me, at
least, there was a frisson of illegality
to the hidden apartment that Tom
was building behind the photo stu-
dios south wall. Heisler wanted every
surface in the apartment covered with
a trendy gray plastic laminate whose
little raised dots made edging it with
a router a nightmare. I spent long af-
ternoons in a cloud of acetone fumes,
cleaning rubber cement o the lam-
inate, while Tom, in another room,
cursed the raised dots.
My main job was to fetch things.
Every morning, Tom gave me a shop-
ping list of construction staples and
exotica, and I made the rounds of sup-
ply stores on the Bowery and Canal
Street. East of the Bowery were the
dangerous alphabet streets and the
projects, a zone of no-go on my men-
tal map of the island. But in the rest
of lower Manhattan I found the aes-
thetic experience Id been looking for.
SoHos transformation was still lar-
val, its streets quiet, its iron pillars peel-
ing. Lower Broadway was peopled
with garment workers, and the city
below Canal seemed hung over from
the seventies, as if the buildings were
surprised to nd themselves still stand-
ing. On the Fourth of July weekend,
V and Jon Justice and I got up onto
the old West Side Elevated Highway
(closed but not yet demolished) and
went walking past the new World
Trade Center towers (brutalist but not
yet tragic) and didnt see another per-
son in any direction. Romantically de-
serted vistas were what I wanted in a
city when I was twenty-one.
n the evening of the Fourth, when
O Morningside Heights began to
sound like wartime Beirut, V and I
went over to East End Avenue to
watch the ocial reworks from our
52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
friend Lisa Alberts familys apart-
ment. I was astonished when her
buildings elevator opened directly
into the apartments front hall. Her
familys cook asked me if Id like a
sandwich, and I said yes, please. It
had never occurred to me that my
background and Alberts werent
more or less the same. I hadnt imag-
ined that an apartment like hers ex-
isted, or that a person only ve years
older than I was, Greg Heisler, could
have hired vans and a team of assis-
tants at his disposal. He also had a
willowy and dumbstrikingly beauti-
ful wife, Pru, who came from Aus-
tralia and wore airy white summer
dresses that made me think of Daisy
Buchanan.
The citys dividing line of wealth
was not unrelated to the other divid-
ing line, but it was less distinctly geo-
graphical and easier for me to cross.
Under the spell of my lite college
education, I envisioned overthrowing
the capitalist political economy in the
near future, through the application
of literary theory, but in the mean-
time my education enabled me to feel
at ease on the wealth side of the line.
At the formal midtown restaurant
where Vs visiting grandmother took
the two of us to lunch one day, I was
given a blue blazer to wear with my
black jeans, and this was all it took
for me to pass.
I was too idealistic to want more
money than I needed to subsist, too
arrogant to envy Heisler, and so to me
the rich were mainly a curiosity, inter-
esting for the conspicuousness of both
their consumption and their thrift.
When V and I visited her other grand-
parents, at their country estate outside
the city, they showed me the little paint-
ings by Renoir and Czanne in their
living room and served us stale store-
bought cookies. At Tavern on the
Green, where we were taken to dinner
by my brother Bobs in-laws, a pair of
psychoanalysts who had an apartment
not a lot smaller than Lisa Alberts, I
was appalled to learn that if you wanted
a vegetable with your steak you had to
pay extra for it. The money seemed of
no consequence to Bobs father-in-law,
but we noticed that one of the moth-
er-in-laws shoes was held together
with electrical tape. Heisler, too, was
given to grand gestures, like ying Toms outlets. Id gotten smarter about most was my failure to imagine that
soon-to-be wife out from Chicago for money, and I was able to jump on the black New Yorkers I was afraid
a weekend. But he paid Tom twelve a cheap space in Harlem because I of might be even more afraid than
thousand ve hundred dollars for the wasnt scared of the city anymore. I I was.
loft conversion, approximately one- had a personal connection with the On my last full day in Manhat-
eighth of what it would have cost with Harlemites in my building, and after tan that summer, I got a check from
a New York contractor. work I could go downtown and Greg Heisler for my last four weeks
It was people like Tom and me who safely walk with my friends on the of work. To cash it, I had to go to
didnt recognize the value of what they alphabet streets, which were being the European American Bank, a
had in hand. Tom realized too late colonized by young white people. strange little hexagonal building that
that he could easily have charged In time, on the strength of the sales sat on a bite of dismal parkland taken
Heisler two or three times as much, of the book Id written in Harlem, out of SoHos southeast ank. I dont
and I left Manhattan, in mid-August, I bought my own Upper East Side remember how many hundred-dol-
owing two hundred and twenty-ve co-op and became a person who lar bills I was given theremaybe
dollars to St. Lukes Hospital. To cel- took younger friends and relatives it was six, maybe ninebut it seemed
ebrate the end of the summer and also, to dinner at places they couldnt have to me a dangerous amount of cash
I think, our engagement to be mar- aorded. to carry in my wallet. Before I left
ried, V and I had gone to dinner at a The citys dividing line had be- the bank, I discreetly slipped the
Cuban restaurant on Columbus Av- come more permeable, at least in one bills into one of my socks. Outside,
enue, Victors, which her former boy- direction. White power had reas- it was one of those bright August
friend, a Cuban, had frequented. I serted itself through the pressure of mornings when a cold front ushes
started with black-bean soup and was real-estate prices and police action. the badness from the citys sky. I
a few spoonfuls into it when the beans In hindsight, the era of white fear headed straight to the nearest sub-
seemed to come alive on my tongue, seems most remarkable for having way, anxious about my wealth, hop-
churning with a kind of malevolent lasted as long as it did. Of all my ing I could pass as poor to someone
aggression. I reached into my mouth mistakes as a twenty-one-year-old who wanted the money in my sock
and pulled out a narrow shard of glass. in the city, the one I now regret the more than I did.
V agged down our server and com-
plained to him. The server summoned
the manager, who apologized, exam-
ined the piece of glass, disappeared
with it, and then came back to hustle
us out of the restaurant. I was press-
ing a napkin to my tongue to stanch
the bleeding. At the door, I asked if it
was O.K. for me to keep the napkin.
Yes, yes, the manager said. V and I
hailed our only cab of the summer and
went to St. Lukes, our neighborhood
hospital. Eventually, a doctor told me
that my cut would heal quickly and
did not require stitches, but I had to
wait a couple of hours to receive this
information and a tetanus shot. Di-
rectly across from me, in one of the
corridors where I waited, a young Af-
rican-American woman was lying on
a gurney with a gunshot wound in her
bared abdomen. The wound was leak-
ing pinkish uid but was evidently not
life-threatening. I can still see it viv-
idly, a .22-calibre-size hole, the thing
Id walked in fear of.

ifteen years later, after being mar-

F ried and divorced, I built a work
studio in a loft on 125th Street, fol-
lowing Toms example and hanging
my own drywall, wiring my own
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 53

THE PRESIDENT PENCE DELUSION
Trumps critics yearn for his exit. But Mike Pence, the corporate rights inside man, poses his own dangers.
n September 14th, the right-
O wing pundit Ann Coulter, who
last year published a book ti-
tled In Trump We Trust, expressed
what a growing number of Americans,
including conservatives, have been feel-
ing since the 2016 election. The previ-
ous day, President Trump had dined
with Democratic leaders at the White
House, and had impetuously agreed to
a major policy reversal, granting pro-
visional residency to undocumented
immigrants who came to America as
children. Republican legislators were
blindsided. Within hours, Trump dis-
avowed the deal, then rearmed it.
Coulter tweeted, At this point, who
doesnt want Trump impeached? She
soon added, If were not getting a wall,
Id prefer President Pence.
Trumps swerve did the unthink-
ableuniting Coulter and liberal com-
mentators. After Trump threatened
to totally destroy North Korea, Gail
Collins, the Times columnist, praised
Vice-President Mike Pence as some-
one who at least seems less likely to
get the planet blown up. This sum-
mer, an opinion column by Dana Mil-
bank, of the Washington Post, ap-
peared under the headline President
Pence is Sounding Better and
Better.
Pence, who has dutifully stood by the
President, mustering a devotional gaze
rarely seen since the days of Nancy Rea-
gan, serves as a daily reminder that the
Constitution oers an alternative to
Trump. The worse the President looks,
the more desirable his understudy seems.
The more Trump is mired in scandal,
the more likely Pences elevation to the
Oval Oce becomes, unless he ends up
legally entangled as well.
Pences odds of becoming President
are long but not prohibitive. Of his forty-
seven predecessors, nine eventually as-
sumed the Presidency, because of a death
or a resignation. After Lyndon Johnson
54 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON
BY JANE MAYER
decided to join the ticket with John F.
Kennedy, he calculated his odds of as-
cension to be approximately one in four,
and is said to have told Clare Boothe
Luce, Im a gambling man, darling, and
this is the only chance Ive got.
If the job is a gamble for Pence, he
himself is something of a gamble for
the country. During the tumultuous
2016 Presidential campaign, relatively
little attention was paid to how Pence
was chosen, or to his political record.
And, with all the inghting in the new
Administration, few have focussed on
Pences power within the White House.
Newt Gingrich told me recently that
the three people with the most policy
inuence in the Administration are
Trump, Chief of Sta John Kelly, and
Pence. Gingrich went on, Others have
some inuence, such as Jared Kush-
ner and Gary Cohn. But look at the
schedule. Pence has lunches with the
President. Hes in the national-security
briengs. Moreover, and crucially,
Pence is the only ocial in the White
House who cant be red.
Pence, who declined requests for an
interview, is also one of the few with
whom Trump hasnt overtly feuded.
The President considers him one of
his best decisions, Tony Fabrizio, a
pollster for Trump, told me. Even so,
they are almost comically mismatched.
You end up with an odd pair of throw-
backs from fties casting, the former
White House strategist Stephen Ban-
non joked, comparing them to Dean
Martin, the bad boy of the Rat Pack,
and the dad on Leave It to Beaver.
Trump and Pence are misaligned po-
litically, too. Trump campaigned as an
unorthodox outsider, but Pence is a doc-
trinaire ideologue. Kellyanne Conway,
the White House counsellor, who be-
came a pollster for Pence in 2009, de-
scribes him as a full-spectrum conser-
vative on social, moral, economic, and
defense issues. Pence leans so far to the
right that he has occasionally echoed
A.C.L.U. arguments against govern-
ment overreach; he has, for instance,
supported a federal shield law that would
protect journalists from having to iden-
tify whistle-blowers. According to Ban-
non, Pence is the outreach guy, the
connective tissue between the Trump
Administration and the most conser-
vative wing of the Republican establish-
ment. Trumps got the populist nation-
alists, Bannon said. But Pence is the
base. Without Pence, you dont win.
Pence has taken care to appear ex-
traordinarily loyal to Trump, so much
so that Joel K. Goldstein, a historian
and an expert on Vice-Presidents who
teaches law at St. Louis University, re-
fers to him as the Sycophant-in-Chief.
But Pence has the political experience,
the connections, the discipline, and the
ideological mooring that Trump lacks.
He also has a close relationship with
the conservative billionaire donors who
have captured the Republican Partys
agenda in recent years.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump
characterized the Republican Partys
big spenders as highly sophisticated
killers whose donations allowed them
to control politicians. When he de-
clared his candidacy, he claimed that,
because of his real-estate fortune, he
did not need support from rich do-
nors, and he denounced super pacs,
their depositories of unlimited cam-
paign contributions, as corrupt. Pences
political career, though, has been spon-
sored at almost every turn by the do-
nors whom Trump has assailed. Pence
is the inside man of the conservative
money machine.
On Election Night, the dissonance
between Trumps populist supporters and
Pences billionaire sponsors was quietly
evident. When Trump gave his accep-
tance speech, in the ballroom of the Hil-
ton Hotel in midtown Manhattan, he
vowed to serve the forgotten men and
Stephen Bannon, the former White House strategist, worries that Pence would be a President that the Kochs would own.
ILLUSTRATION
BY TODD ST. JOHN THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 55

Well, theres never going to be a perfect time to start a family.
women of our country, and promised to
rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels,
airports, schools, and hospitals. Upstairs,
in a room reserved for Party lites, sev-
eral of the richest and most conservative
donors, all of whom support drastic re-
ductions in government spending, were
celebrating. Doug Deason, a Texas busi-
nessman and a political donor, recalled
to me, It was amazing. In the V.I.P. re-
ception area, there was an even more
V.I.P. room, and I counted at least eight
or nine billionaires.
Deasons father, Darwin, founded a
data-processing company, Aliated
Computer Services, and in 2010 he sold
it to Xerox for $6.4 billion. A.C.S. was
notorious for outsourcing U.S. oce
work to cheaper foreign-labor markets.
Trump campaigned against outsourc-
ing, but the Deasons became Trump
backers nonetheless, donating a mil-
lion dollars to his campaign. Doug Dea-
son was enlisted, in part, by Pence,
whom he had known and supported
for years. Mike and I are pretty good
friends, Deason said, adding, Hes re-
ally the contact to the big donors. Since
the election, Deason has attended two
dinners for wealthy backers at the
Vice-Presidential residence.
Among the billionaires who gath-
ered in the room at the Hilton, Dea-
56 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
son recalled, were the nancier Wil-
bur Ross, whom Trump later appointed
his Secretary of Commerce; the cor-
porate investor Carl Icahn, who be-
came a top adviser to Trump but re-
signed eight months later, when allega-
tions of nancial impropriety were pub-
lished by The New Yorker; Harold
Hamm, the founder and chairman of
Continental Resources, an Oklahoma-
based oil-and-gas company that has
made billions of dollars through frack-
ing; and David Koch, the richest resi-
dent of New York City.
Kochs presence was especially unex-
pected. He and his brother Charles are
libertarians who object to most govern-
ment spending, including investments
in infrastructure. They co-own virtually
all of Koch Industries, the second-larg-
est private company in the United States,
and have long tapped their combined
fortunecurrently ninety billion dol-
larsto nance candidates, think tanks,
pressure groups, and political operatives
who support an anti-tax and anti-regu-
latory agenda, which dovetails with their
nancial interests.
During the campaign, Trump said
that Republican rivals who attended se-
cretive donor summits sponsored by the
Kochs were puppets. The Kochs, along
with several hundred allied donors, had
amassed nearly nine hundred million
dollars to spend on the Presidential elec-
tion, but declined to support Trumps
candidacy. At one point, Charles Koch
described the choice between Trump
and Hillary Clinton as one between
cancer or heart attack.
Marc Short, the head of legislative
aairs in the Trump White House,
credits Pence for the Kochs rapproche-
ment with Trump. The Kochs were
very excited about the Vice-Presiden-
tial pick, Short told me. There are
areas where they dier from the Ad-
ministration, but now there are many
areas theyre partnering with us on.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Dem-
ocrat from Rhode Island, who has ac-
cused the Kochs of buying undue in-
uence, particularly on environmental
policyKoch Industries has a long
history of pollutionis less enthusi-
astic about their alliance with Pence.
If Pence were to become President for
any reason, the government would be
run by the Koch brothersperiod. Hes
been their tool for years, he said. Ban-
non is equally alarmed at the prospect
of a Pence Presidency. He told me, Im
concerned hed be a President that the
Kochs would own.
his summer, I visited Pences home
T town of Columbus, Indiana. Harry
McCawley, a retired editor at the Re-
public, the local newspaper, told me,
Mike Pence wanted to be President
practically since he popped out of the
womb. Pence exudes a low-key hu-
mility, but, McCawley told me, hes
very ambitious, even calculating, about
the steps hell take toward that goal.
McCawley, who died, of cancer, in
September, knew the Pence family well,
in part because the Vice-Presidents
mother, Nancy Pence Fritsch, wrote a
chatty column for the newspaper for
several years (memories blossom
with arrival of spring). Eighty-
four and energetic, Fritsch met me for
coee this summer, along with her
eldest son, Gregory, who is in the
antiques business in the Columbus
area. Like the Vice-President, they are
good-looking, with chiselled features,
and have an unpretentious, amiable
manner. They ribbed each other as they
reminisced about the years when the
Pences six children lived with their
parents in a series of modest houses.
There was so little to do in the way of
entertainment, Gregory Pence recalled,
that we sometimes got in the car with
our parents on Friday nights and fol-
lowed after the re truck. All the boys
had nicknames. My name was Gen-
eral Harassment, Gregory said. Mi-
chaels was Bubbles, because he was
chubby and funny.
Michaels hilarious, his mother
agreed. I attribute it to the Irish. Were
faith-lled, and have a good sense of
humor. The family identies as Cath-
olic, and Mike was an altar boy. Reli-
gion is the most important thing in
our lives, she said. But we dont take
it seriously. I dont proselytize.
Pences maternal grandfather was
from Ireland, but his paternal grandfa-
ther, Edward Joseph Pence, Sr., came
from a German family. Brief mentions
of Edward in the press have described
him as having worked in the Chicago
stockyards, leaving the impression that
he was poor. But Gregory told me that
Edward was well o, with a seat on the
Chicago Stock Exchange. Grandfa-
ther Pence was a very hard man, Greg-
ory said. Edward refused to provide
nancial support when Gregory and
Mikes father, Edward, Jr., went to col-
lege; an aunt loaned him the tuition,
but he had to leave law school when
he ran out of money. Grampa Pence
was a gambler! Fritsch chimed in. He
played cards and went to Las Vegas.
Fritsch went to secretarial school.
With a laugh, she recalled that she met
her rst husband in a clubin other
words, a tavern. A Korean War vet-
eran, Edward Pence, Jr., was in uni-
form that night. (He had won a Bronze
Star, which the Vice-President keeps
in his oce.) In 1959, after leaving law
school, he moved with Fritsch from
Chicago to Columbus, where he sold
fuel to gas stations, farms, and conve-
nience stores. Shortly after their ar-
rival, Michael Pence, the couples third
child, was born.
Fritsch said of life in Indiana, I hated
it. I always looked forward to going back
to Chicago. But the family stayed, grad-
ually moving into the upper middle
classEdward became part owner of
an oil distributorshipand switching
from the Democratic to the Republi-
can Party. Fritsch had worshipped the
Kennedys, but, she said, I guess I be-
came a Republican because my husband
was one. I was a Stepford wife.
She was like the Scarecrow in The
Wizard of Oz, Gregory said at one
point.
You see what I have to put up with?
she shot back. Growing more serious,
she explained that, until she went back
to school, at sixty-ve, to get a college
degree in psychology, she didnt have lumba Catholic School through eighth
much self-esteem.
Thats when she got her brain,
Gregory said.
Edward, Jr., like his father, was a
tough disciplinarian. Gregory recalled,
If you lied to him, youd be taken up- his turn, his voice just boomed out over
stairs, have a conversation, and then
hed whack you with a belt. He ex-
pected his children to stand up when-
ever an adult entered the room. Hed
grab you if you didnt, Gregory said.
At dinner, the kids were forbidden to
speak.
While Gregory was in college, he
was sleeping late on a visit home when
his father pulled the covers o him and
told him to get up for church. I said
he couldnt tell me what to do anymore,
because he was only paying half my
college tuition, Gregory said. His fa-
ther stopped paying his tuition alto-
gether. He was black and white, Greg-
ory said. You were never confused
where you stood. My brothers a lot
like him.
Columbus, which has a population
of forty-ve thousand, was dominated
by a major engine manufacturer, Cum-
mins, and escaped the economic woes
that aicted many other parts of the
region. But McCawley, the newspaper
editor, told me that, while Pence was
growing up, Columbus, like many
Indiana communities, still had vestiges
of the Ku Klux Klan. The group had
ruled the states government in the
twenties, and then gone underground.
In Columbus, landlords refused to rent
or sell homes to African-Americans
until Cumminss owners demanded
that they do so. Gregory Pence insisted
that the town was not racist, but con-
tended that there had been anti-Cath-
olic prejudice. Protestant kids had
thrown stones at him, he recalled. We
were discriminated against, Pences
mother added.
The Pence children attended St. Co-
grade. Mike discovered a talent for
public speaking that made him a fa-
vorite with the nuns. In fifth grade, he
won a local oratory contest, defeating
kids several years older. When it came
the audience, his mother told the news-
paper. He just blew everybody away.
In high school, Pence won third place
in a national contest. When his mother
recalled Mike as a good student, Greg-
ory said, Not a fabulous one. I dont
think he stood out. He was class pres-
ident, but that wasnt cool. Nonethe-
less, by senior year, Mike was talking
to classmates about becoming Presi-
dent of the United States.
Mike Pence attended Hanover Col-
lege, a liberal-arts school in southeast
Indiana. On a visit home, he told his
father that he was thinking of either
joining the priesthood or attending law
school. His father suggested he start
with law; he could always join the
priesthood later. Shortly thereafter, to
his familys surprise, Pence became an
evangelical Christian. His mother said
that college gave him a dierent view-
point. The story Pence tells is that he
was in a fraternity, and when he ad-
mired another members gold cross he
was told, You have to wear it in your
heart before you wear it around your
neck. Soon afterward, Pence has said,
he attended a Christian music festival
in Kentucky and gave my life to Jesus.
His conversion was part of a larger
movement. In 1979, during Pences ju-
nior year in college, Jerry Falwell
founded the Moral Majority, to mo-
bilize Christian voters as a political
force. Pence voted for Jimmy Carter
in 1980, but he soon joined the march
of many Christians toward the Re-
publican Party. The Moral Majoritys
co-founder, Paul Weyrich, a Mid-
western Catholic, established numer-
ous institutions of the conservative
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 57
movement, including the Heritage
Foundation and the Republican Study
Committee, a caucus of far-right con-
gressional members, which Pence even-
tually led. Weyrich condemned ho-
mosexuality, feminism, abortion, and
government-imposed racial integra-
tion, and he partnered with some con-
troversial gures, including Laszlo
Pasztor, a former member of a pro-
Nazi party in Hungary. When Wey-
rich died, in 2008, Pence praised him
as a friend and mentor and a found-
ing father of the modern conserva-
tive movement, from whom he had
benetted immeasurably.
While in law school, at Indiana Uni-
versity, Pence met and married Karen
Batten, a schoolteacher whom he had
noticed playing guitar in a church ser-
vice. A friend at the time, Dan Le-
Clerc, told me, He was head over
heels. Pence took her ice-skating; she
made him taco salad for dinner. Soon,
anticipating a proposal, she began car-
rying in her purse a gold cross with the
inscription Yes. Eight months after
they began dating, he asked her to marry
him, having buried a ring box in a loaf
of bread that hed brought on a walk,
ostensibly to feed ducks. They shel-
lacked the loaf. Pences friends have
called Karen his prayer warrior.
The couple became almost insepa-
rable. One Christmas, she gave him
an antique red phone, connected to a
hotline whose number only she knew.
As the Washington Post reported, he
kept it on his oce desk long after the
advent of cell phones. At home, they
worked out on twin treadmills. And,
as Rolling Stone reported in January,
he referred to her in front of guests as
Mother. Pences oce has disputed because of immaturity, but he really was
the account, but a former Indiana Dem-
ocratic Party ocial told me, Ive heard
him call her Mother myself. Pence
also began observing whats known as
the Billy Graham rule, meaning that
he never dined alone with another
woman, or attended an event in mixed
company where alcohol was served un-
less his wife was present. Critics have
argued that this approach reduces
women to sexual temptresses and pre-
cludes men from working with women
on an equal basis. A Trump campaign
ocial said that he found the Pences
dynamic a little creepy. But Kelly-
58 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
anne Conway defended him vigorously,
telling me, Ive been a female top ad-
viser of his for years, and never felt ex-
cluded or dismissed. She went on,
Most wives would appreciate a loyal
husband who puts them rst. People
are trying to bloody and muddy him,
but talk about narrow-mindedto
judge his marriage!
In 1987, a year after Pence graduated
from law school, LeClerc, his old friend,
was asked by a mutual acquaintance,
Guess whos running for Congress? He leagues. An Indiana attorney recalled,
drew a blank. Pences decision, at the age
of twenty-nine, to challenge a popular
incumbent Democratic congressman sur-
prised many people, including his father,
Edward, who thought that it was silly,
given that Mike was a young newlywed
with no steady job. But after Mike en-
tered the race Edward became his big-
gest booster, helping him raise money
and put up lawn signs. Then, just a few
weeks before the Republican primary,
Edward, who was fty-eight, had a heart
attack and died. Mike won the primary,
but the Democratic incumbent, Phil
Sharp, was relected.
In 1990, Pence tried and failed again
to unseat Sharp, waging a campaign that
is remembered as especially nasty. One
ad featured an actor dressed in Middle
Eastern garb and sunglasses, who ac-
cused Sharp, falsely, of being a tool of
Arab oil interests. But Pences campaign
foundered after the press revealed that
he had used donations toward personal
expenses, such as his mortgage and gro-
ceries. It wasnt technically illegal, but it
violated the trust of his supporters and
sullied his pious image. Mike burned a
lot of bridges, Gregory recalled. He
upset a lot of his backers. It was partly
kind of full of shit.
The following year, Mike Pence wrote
an essay, carried by local newspapers, ti-
tled Confessions of a Negative Cam-
paigner, in which he said, A campaign
ought to demonstrate the basic human
decency of the candidate. He admitted
to reporters that he had violated this
standard, and said that he had no in-
terest in running for elected oce in the
foreseeable future, but added that if he
ever did he would not wage a negative
campaign. I think he realized hed be-
smirched himself, Sharp told me. He
comes across as Midwestern nice, but it
was mean and shallow. Sharp, who after
two more terms joined the faculty at
Harvards John F. Kennedy School of
Government, and is now semi-retired,
remains unimpressed by Pence. This is
not a person, in my limited exposure,
about whom Id ever say, Wow, he should
be President!
Pence took a job at a law rm in In-
dianapolis, where he handled mainly
small-claims and family cases, and
started each day by praying with col-
He was a big, jocular, friendly guy who
would put his arm around you at the
local pub. He probably weighed a hun-
dred pounds more than today. There
was a clear hierarchy in the Indianap-
olis legal world, and Pence was far from
its top rungs, relying on referrals for
work. There were dozens of guys like
that, the lawyer said. But the great
American story is that a guy like Mike
Pence is now Vice-President.
Gregory said of his brother, Law
wasnt really his thing, adding, Hes
completely unmotivated by money. I
dont think he would think for one sec-
ond about it, if it werent for Karen.
Service is his motivation, Pences
mother said.
And, of course, popularity, his
brother added. He had ambitions.
ence was thrown a lifeline in 1991,
P when he was oered a job as pres-
ident of the Indiana Policy Review
Foundation, a tiny new think tank that
promoted free-market policies. Pence
joked that some people called the foun-
dation an old-folks home for unsuc-
cessful candidates, but it gave him a
steady paycheck and valuable exposure
to the burgeoning universe of busi-
ness-funded conservative nonprot
groups. The foundation was part of
the State Policy Network, a national
web of organizations that had been
launched at Ronald Reagans sugges-
tion. It was designed to replicate at a
more local level the Heritage Founda-
tions successful promotion of conser-
vative policies. One of the State Pol-
icy Networks founders, Thomas Roe,
a construction magnate with strong
anti-union views, was said to have told
a Heritage board member, You cap-
ture the Soviet UnionIm going to
capture the states.
 In a 2008 speech, Pence described Pences true gift was not as a thinker vative connections and established a
himself as part of what we called the but as a talker. In 1992, he became a national network of wealthy funders.
seed corn Heritage Foundation was host on conservative talk radio, which In 2000, when a Republican congress-
spreading around the country in the had been booming since the F.C.C., man in northern Indiana vacated his
state think-tank movement. It isnt in 1987, repealed the Fairness Doctrine seat, Pence ran as the Party favorite,
fully clear whose money was behind and stopped requiring broadcasters to on a platform that included a promise
the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, provide all sides of controversial issues. to oppose any eort to recognize ho-
because think tanks, as nonprots, dont At a time when bombastic, angry voices mosexuals as a discrete and insular mi-
have to disclose their donors. But the proliferated, Pence was dierent. Like nority entitled to the protection of
early funders of the Heritage Founda- Reagan, who had become his political anti-discrimination laws. He won, by
tion included some Fortune 500 com- hero, he could present even extreme a twelve-point margin.
panies, in elds such as oil, chemicals, positions in genial, nonthreatening
and tobacco, that opposed health, safety, terms. Im a conservative, but Im not nce Pence got to Washington,
and environmental regulations.
Cecil Bohanon, one of two adjunct
mad about it, he liked to say. He wel-
comed guests of all political stripes,
O Conway said, his background in
the think-tank-slash-media axis really
scholars at Pences think tank, had a and called himself Rush Limbaugh equipped him to defend and explain an
history of nancial ties to tobacco-com- on decaf. argument in a full-throated way. Pence
pany front groups, and in 2000 Pence His radio career gave him great was in demand on the conservative
echoed industry talking points in an statewide name recognition, Je Smu- speaking circuit, and frequently ap-
essay that argued, Smoking doesnt lyan, the C.E.O. of Emmis Communi- peared on Sunday talk shows. He was
kill. In fact, two out of every three smok- cations, on whose radio stations Pences invited to Heritage, gun owners groups,
ers doesnt die from a smoking-related program aired, said. Hes likable, and property-rights groups, pro-life groups,
illness. A greater scourge than ciga- a great self-promoter. Smulyan, a and pro-Israel groups, Conway re-
rettes, he argued, was big government Democrat, added, Im not sure how called. People started to see an authen-
disguised as do-gooder, healthcare rhet- hed fare in a detailed policy debate, tic, aable conservative who was not in
oric. Bohanon, who still writes for the but Mike knows what Mike believes. a bad mood about it. Michael Lep-
think tanks publication, also has ties In 1994, Pence was on eighteen Emmis pert, a Democratic lobbyist in Indiana,
to the Kochs. Last year, John Hardin, stations, ve days a week. By then, hed saw Pence dierently. His politics were
the head of university relations for the lost weight and had three children; hed always way outside the mainstream,
Charles Koch Foundation, told an In- also amassed a Rolodex full of conser- Leppert said. He just does it with a
diana newspaper that the Kochs had
been funding Bohanons work as a pro-
fessor of free-market economics at Ball
State University for years.
Even as Pence argued for less gov-
ernment interference in business, he
pushed for policies that intruded on
peoples private lives. In the early nine-
ties, he joined the board of the Indi-
ana Family Institute, a far-right group
that supported the criminalization of
abortion and campaigned against equal
rights for homosexuals. And, while
Pence ran the Indiana Policy Review
Foundation, it published an essay ar-
guing that unmarried women should
be denied access to birth control. What
these people are really after is contra-
ceptives, Vi Simpson, the former Dem-
ocratic minority leader of the Indiana
State Senate, told me. In 2012, after
serving twenty-eight years in the leg-
islature, she ran for lieutenant gover-
nor on a ticket with the gubernatorial
candidate John R. Gregg, who lost the
election to Pence. Simpson believes
that Pence wants to reverse womens
economic and political advances. Hes
on a mission, she said.
smile on his face instead of a snarl.
Pence served twelve years in Con-
gress, but never authored a single suc-
cessful bill. His sights, according to
Leppert, were always on the national
ticket. He gained attention by chal-
lenging his own partys leaders, both
in Congress and in the George W. Bush
Administration, from the right. He
broke with the vast majority of his Re-
publican peers by opposing Bushs ex-
pansion of Medicaid coverage for pre-
scription drugs, along with the No
Child Left Behind initiative and the
Troubled Asset Relief Program, the
governments emergency bailout of
banks. Conway calls him a rebel with
a cause. In 2004, the Houses most
conservative members elected him to
head their caucus, the Republican Study
Committee. Pence joked that the group
was so alien to the Partys mainstream
that running it was like leading a Star
Trek convention. He was as far right
as you could go without falling o the
earth, Mike Lofgren, a former Repub-
lican congressional sta member, who
has become a Trump critic, told me.
But he never really put a foot wrong
politically. Beneath the Bible-thumping
earnestness was a calculating and am-
bitious pol.
In 2006, Pence boldly challenged
the House Minority Leader at the time,
John Boehner, a more centrist Repub-
lican from Ohio, for his post. Pence
got wiped out, but in 2008 Boehner
perhaps trying to contain Pences am-
bitionasked him to serve as the Re-
publican Conference chair, the Partys
third-highest-ranking post in the
House. The chair presides over weekly
meetings in which Republican House
members discuss policy and legislative
goals. Pence used the platform to set
the Partys message on a rightward
course, raise money, and raise his prole.
After Barack Obama was elected
President, Pence became an early voice
of the Tea Party movement, which op-
posed taxes and government spending
with an angry edge. Pences tone grew
more militant, too. In 2011, he made
the evening news by threatening to
shut down the federal government un-
less it defunded Planned Parenthood.
Some Hoosiers were unnerved to see
footage of Pence standing amid rowdy
protesters at a Tea Party rally and yell-
60 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
THE COUNTRY THAT DOESNT EXIST
I still hear the sound of women at night
crossing the cobblestones, filmy kerchiefs
over their hair, the mic-mac of their clogs
this in a country that doesnt exist. But
dont tell that to the storks who flap in from
Africa and build stick houses on battlements.
And consider the swans: laying their warm
breasts down on banks that mark no border.
The Moors passed through this impossible
country once and left behind their longings,
and what can anybody do about that? Or the
oblique solitude of the river sweeping down-
stream forever filling the emptiness of its bed
with more emptiness . . . light spills onto its
flecked back, coriander light, clove light, sesame,
the flower inside my eye opening to receive
those hungry flowersif a particle is a prison,
a wave is a ripple inside the wake of a pair
of swans. Whoopers. No, I will not marry again.
Marsha de la O
ing, Shut it down! His radicalism, servative students, Young Americas
however, only boosted his national Foundation, and spent several years as
prole. Pence became best known for a Republican Senate aide before join-
ercely opposing abortion. He backed ing Pences sta. His wife, as it hap-
personhood legislation that would pened, worked for the Charles Koch
ban it under all circumstances, includ- Foundation, and he admired the broth-
ing rape and incest, unless a womans ers anti-government ideology. A for-
life was at stake. He sponsored an un- mer White House colleague described
successful amendment to the Aord- Short to me as a pod person who re-
able Care Act that would have made ally delivered Pence to the Kochs.
it legal for government-funded hospi- In June, 2009, Short brokered Pences
tals to turn away a dying woman who rst invitation to address a Koch sem-
needed an abortion. (Later, as gover- inar, as the brothers call their secretive
nor of Indiana, he signed a bill barring semi-annual fund-raising sessions for
women from aborting a physically ab- top conservative donors. The theme of
normal fetus; the bill also required fetal the gathering, in Aspen, Colorado, was
burial or cremation, including after a Understanding and Addressing Threats
miscarriage. A federal judge recently to American Free Enterprise and Pros-
found the law unconstitutional.) perity. Pences speech was a hit. Short
Pences close relationship with doz- told me, Ive never seen someone who
ens of conservative groups, including can take a complex subject and distill
Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs it in a heartbeat like he can. Hed also
top political organization, was crucial never seen anyone who is as dedicated
to his rise. A key link to these groups a public servant, and lives their faith as
was provided by Marc Short, the cur- Mike does. Short, who is a devout
rent White House ocial, who in 2008 Christian, said, People often profess
became Pences chief of sta at the Re- faith thats not lived out, but with him
publican Conference. Short had grown its lived out each and every day. It guides
up in moneyed conservative circles in him. Its his core.
Virginia, where his father had helped The Kochs, who are not religious,
nance the growth of the Republican may have been focussed more on pock-
Party, and he had run a group for con- etbook issues than on Pences faith.
According to Scott Peterson, the ex-
ecutive director of the Checks & Bal-
ances Project, a watchdog group that
monitors attempts to inuence envi-
ronmental policy, Pence was invited to
the Koch seminar only after he did the
brothers a major political favor. By the
spring of 2009, Koch Industries, like
other fossil-fuel companies, felt threat-
ened by growing support in Congress
for curbing carbon emissions, the pri-
mary cause of climate change. Amer-
icans for Prosperity devised a No Cli-
mate Tax pledge for candidates to sign,
promising not to spend any govern-
ment funds on limiting carbon pollu-
tion. At rst, the campaign languished,
attracting only fourteen signatures. The
House, meanwhile, was moving toward
passage of a cap and trade bill, which
would charge companies for carbon
pollution. If the bill were enacted, the
costs could be catastrophic to Koch In-
dustries, which releases some twenty-
four million tons of carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere a year, and owns mil-
lions of acres of untapped oil reserves
in Canada, plus coal-red power plants
and oil reneries.
Pence, who had called global warm-
ing a myth created by environmen-
talists in their latest Chicken Little
attempt to raise taxes, took up the
Kochs cause. He not only signed their
pledge but urged others to do so as
well. He gave speeches denouncing the
cap-and-trade billwhich passed the
House but got held up in the Senate
as a declaration of war on the Mid-
west. His language echoed that of the
Koch groups. Americans for Prosper-
ity called the bill the largest excise tax
in history, and Pence called it the
largest tax increase in American his-
tory. (Neither statement was true.) He
used a map created by the Heritage
Foundation, which the Kochs sup-
ported, to make his case, and he urged
House Republicans to hold energy
summits opposing the legislation in
their districts, sending them home over
the summer recess with kits to bolster
their presentations.
According to the Investigative Re-
porting Workshop at American Uni-
versity, after Pence began promoting
the Kochs pledge the number of sig-
natories in the House soared, reaching
a hundred and fty-six. James Valvo,
the policy director for Americans for
Prosperity, who spearheaded the pledge,
told the Reporting Workshop that sup-
port from Pence and other Republi-
cans helped a scrappy outlier become
the established position. The cap-
and-trade bill died in the Senate.
Short said that he didnt recall the
Kochs ever asking for help on the issue,
adding, The Republican Conference
believed it was a winning issue because
of the impact that the bill would have
had on jobs. In any event, the pledge
marked a pivotal turn in the climate-
change debate, cementing Republican
opposition to addressing the environ-
mental crisis.
Peterson said that the Checks & Bal-
ances Project hadnt detected much
money going from the Kochs to Pence
before he promoted the No Climate
Tax pledge. Afterward, he was the
Kochs guy, and theyve been showering
him with money ever since. Peterson
went on, He could see a pathway to
the Presidency with them behind him.
Indeed, by 2011 Pence had report-
edly become Charles Kochs favorite
potential candidate for President in
2012. Andrew Downs, a political scien-
tist who directs the nonpartisan Mike
Downs Center for Indiana Politics, in
Fort Wayne, said, People thought Pence
was gearing up for a Presidential run.
Downs pointed out that when Pence
was in Congress he probably had a
shot at becoming Speaker of the House.
Downs continued, Instead, he spoke
at a lot of engagements with a national
focus, and visited places like Iowa and
New Hampshire. Running for Presi-
dent isnt an idea that just occurred to
Mike Pence when he joined the ticket
in 2016. It goes back a long way.
But the House of Representatives is
a tough platform from which to get
elected President. And so, in 2012, after
mulling over his national prospects,
Pence ran instead for governor of Indi-
ana. The conventional wisdom is that
he ran for governor so he could check
that box, get some executive experience,
and then run for President, Downs
said. Pence won the governors race, but
with only forty-nine per cent of the
vote. He was scary to the center, Bill
Oesterle, a co-founder of Angies List,
an Indiana company that collates user
reviews of local contractors, said. Oes-
terle, a Republican, contributed a hun-
dred and fty thousand dollars to Pences
campaign. David Koch contributed two
hundred thousand dollars.
Pences commitment to the Kochs
was now ironclad. Short, his former
chief of sta, had become a top oper-
ative for the Kochs, earning upward of
a million dollars a year as president of
the Freedom Partners Chamber of
Commerce, the brothers Virginia-based
membership group for big conserva-
tive donors. It served as a dark-money
bank, enabling donors to stay anony-
mous while distributing funds to fa-
vored campaigns and political organi-
zations. (During the past decade, the
group has pooled an estimated billion
and a half dollars in contributions.)
The Kochs national political network,
which had oces in nearly every state,
became the most powerful and best-
nanced private political machine in
the country. At least four other former
Pence staers followed Shorts lead and
joined the Koch network, including
Emily Seidel, who joined Freedom
Partners, and Matt Lloyd, who became
a Koch Industries spokesman. In 2014,
a Republican strategist told Politico
that the whole Koch operation had
become the shadow headquarters of
Pence for President.
ences tenure as governor nearly de-
P stroyed his political career. He had
promised Oesterle and other members
of the states Republican business estab-
lishment that he would continue in the
path of his predecessor, Mitch Daniels,
a well-liked scal conservative who had
called for a truce on divisive social is-
sues. Pence was very accommodating,
Oesterle said. But after he was elected
he began taking controversial far-right
stands that, critics believed, were geared
more toward building his national prole
than toward serving Indiana voters.
At rst, Pence highlighted scal
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 61
conservatism. In 2013, he proposed cut-
ting the state income tax. An internal
report by Americans for Prosperity de-
scribed the proposal as an example of
the Kochs model states program in veered from conservative orthodoxy. In
action. Indiana Republicans, who had
majorities in both legislative chambers,
initially balked at the tax cut, deeming
it irresponsible. But Americans for
Prosperity acted as a force multiplier
for Pence, much as it is now promis-
ing to do for Trumps proposed federal
tax cuts. The group mounted an ex-
pensive campaign that included fty
rallies, two six-gure television-ad
blitzes, and phone-bank calls and door-
to-door advocacy in fty-three of In-
dianas ninety-two counties. Eventu-
ally, the legislature went along with
what Pence often describes as the larg-
est income-tax cut in the states his-
tory, even though Indiana already had
one of the lowest income taxes in the
country, and had cut it only once be-
fore. Trump has recently described
Pences record as a template for the
White Houses tax plan, saying, Indi-
ana is a tremendous example of the
prosperity that is unleashed when we
cut taxes. But, in the view of Andrew
Downs, the Indiana political scientist,
the tax cuts were fairly meaningless.
Residents earning fty thousand dol-
lars a year received a tax cut of about
$3.50 per month. Pence claimed that
the cut stimulated the economy, but
John Zody, the chairman of the states
Democratic Party, told me, Our
per-capita income is thirty-eighth in
the nation, and not climbing.The state
No, Barry, I want you to want to help bury the evidence.
recently had to increase its gas tax by
ten cents per gallon, to repair its crum-
bling infrastructure.
In a few surprising instances, Pence
spread criticism, Pence reapplied for
2014, he broke with many other Re-
publican governors and agreed to ex-
pand Medicaid in Indiana. He declared
that his proposal was the kind of
health-care reform that puts working
Hoosiers in the drivers seat. He was
no fan of Obamacare: when it passed,
he likened the blow to 9/11. Neverthe-
less, Pence negotiated with the Obama
Administration and established waiv-
ers that made the expansion acceptable
to him. Among other things, all Indi-
ana residents were required to demon-
strate personal responsibility by pay-
ing something toward the cost of their
medical services. Critics argued that
such measures were needlessly puni-
tive toward poor residents. Americans
for Prosperity, which objects to any
form of government health care, gently
reproached Pence for meeting Wash-
ingtons demands. But the Medicaid- a bill called the Religious Freedom Res-
expansion plan was, and remains, pop-
ular in the state.
After this apostasy, Pence tilted
back toward the right. At the last min-
ute, he killed an application for an
eighty-million-dollar federal grant to
start a statewide preschool program.
Education ocials in Pences own ad-
ministration favored the grant, but con-
servative opponents of secular public
education had complained. When re-
porters asked Pence about his decision,
he said only that the federal govern-
ment had attached too many strings.
But, as Matthew Tully, a columnist at
the Indianapolis Star, wrote, he could
not name one. Eventually, after wide-
the grant. Tully concluded that Pence
had a fatal awhe was too polit-
ical and ideological to be a good gov-
ernor. His focus was on the next step
up, not the job at hand, Tully wrote.
Political handicappers noticed that
Pence was spending a lot of time taking
trips to states with important Presiden-
tial primaries and mingling with big out-
of-state donors. In the summer of 2014,
Pence spoke at an Americans for Pros-
perity summit in Dallas. At the event,
he stood by Shorts side and declared
himself grateful to have enjoyed
David Kochs support. That fall, Pence
reached out to Nick Ayers, a young,
sharp-elbowed political consultant, to
see if he would help him in a 2016 Pres-
idential run. Nothing came of it, but
Pence clearly had White House ambitions.
In the spring of 2015, Pence signed
toration Act, which he presented as in-
nocuous. He said it protected religious
freedom, and whos against that? Oes-
terle recalled. But then a photograph
of the closed signing session surfaced.
It showed Pence surrounded by monks
and nuns, along with three of the most
virulently anti-gay activists in the state.
The image went viral. Indiana residents
began examining the law more closely,
and discovered that it essentially legal-
ized discrimination against homosex-
uals by businesses in the state.
The No. 1 challenge we face in In-
diana is the ability to attract and re-
tain talented people, Oesterle said. If
the state is seen as bigoted to certain
members of the community, it makes
the job monumentally harder.The Re-
ligious Freedom Restoration Act, Oes-
terle said, was not an issue of Pences
creationit had gurgled out of the
far-right fringe of the Indiana legisla-
ture. But, he added, there was a lack
of leadership. In his view, Pence should
have prevented it and other extreme
bills from moving forward. You can
see it happening in Washington now,
Oesterle said. Hes not that eective
a leader, or administrator. Extremists
grabbed the initiative.
The outcry over the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act was enormous. Gay-
rights groups condemned the bill and
urged boycotts of the state. Pete But-
tigieg, the young gay mayor of South
Bend, who is a rising gure in the Dem-
ocratic Party, told me that he tried to
talk to Pence about the legislation,
which he felt would cause major eco-
nomic damage to Indiana. But he got
this look in his eye, Buttigieg recalled.
He just inhabits a dierent reality. Its
very dicult for him to lay aside the
social agenda. Hes a zealot.
In an eort to quell criticism, Pence
consented, against the advice of his
sta, to be interviewed by George
Stephanopoulos on his Sunday-morn-
ing show on ABC. Stephanopoulos
asked him ve times if it was now legal
in Indiana for businesses to discrimi-
nate against homosexuals, and each
time Pence was evasive. Pence also side-
stepped when Stephanopoulos asked
him if he personally supported discrim-
ination against gays. What killed him
was his unwillingness to take a clear
position, Oesterle said. You saw the
conict between his ideology and his
ambition. If hed just said, Look, I think
people should have the right to re gay
people, he would have been labelled a
rigid ideologue, but he wouldnt have
been mocked.
Smulyan, the broadcasting execu-
tive, began getting calls from acquain-
tances all over the country, asking what
was wrong with Indiana. The hashtag
#BoycottIndiana appeared on Twitters
list of trending topics, and remained
there for days. Alarmed business exec-
utives from many of the states most
prominent companies, including Cum-
mins, Eli Lilly, Salesforce, and Anthem,
joined civic leaders in expressing dis-
approval. Companies began cancelling
conventions, and threatening to reverse
plans to expand in the state. The In-
diana business community foresaw mil-
lions of dollars in losses. When the
N.C.A.A., which is based in Indianap-
olis, declared its opposition to the leg-
islation, the pressure became intolera-
ble. Even the Republican establishment
turned on Pence. A headline in the
Star, published the Tuesday after the
Stephanopoulos interview, demanded,
fix this now.
Within days, the legislature had
pushed through a less discriminatory
version of the bill, and Pence signed
it, before hastily leaving town for the
weekend. But he clearly had not an-
ticipated the outrage hed triggered,
and then he had tried to save his ca-
reer at the expense of his professed
principles. Steve Deace, an inuential
conservative radio host, told me that
Pences reversal was almost the worst
conservative betrayal Ive witnessed in
my career. He added, He had no year, the state health commissioner
chance at national oce after that,
other than getting on the Trump ticket.
Similarly, Michael Maurer, the owner
of the Indianapolis Business Journal,
who is a Republican but not a hard-
line social conservative, said, It just
exploded in his face. His polls were
terrible. I bet hed never get elected
again in Indiana. But he went from
being a likely loser as an incumbent
governor to Vice-President of the
United States. Were still reeling!
Pence loyalists rushed in to help.
Matt Lloyd, Pences former congres-
sional staer, left his communications
job with Koch Industries to work with
him in Indiana. Ayers, the political op-
erative whom Pence had consulted in
2011 about a Presidential run, became
an outside adviser. The state also signed
a seven-hundred-and-fty-thousand-
dollar contract with a public-relations
rm, Porter Novelli, which proposed
running ads featuring gay and lesbian
couples posing in front of Indiana land-
marks. But Pences mistake could not
be airbrushed away. Lawn signs saying
Fire Pence! began appearing across
the state.
His tenure in Indiana was charac-
terized by a lot of missteps, Buttigieg
said. He was always decent to me, but
over all there was a sense that every
few months something got bungled.
Hes denitely not the mastermind
behind the curtain that some people
suspect.
n 2015, Ed Clere, a Republican state
ICommittee
legislator who chaired the House
on Public Health, became
aware of a spike in the number of
H.I.V. cases in southern Indiana. The
problem appeared to be caused by the
sharing of needles among opioid abus-
ers in Scott County, which sits across
the Ohio River from Louisville, Ken-
tucky. In a place like Scott County,
Clere said, typically youd have no
cases, or maybe one a year. Now they
were getting up to twenty a week.
The area was poor, and woefully un-
prepared for a health crisis. (Pences
campaign against Planned Parent-
hood had contributed to the closure
of ve clinics in the region; none had
performed abortions, but all had
oered H.I.V. testing.) That same
called Indianas H.I.V. outbreak a
public-health emergency.
Clere came of age during the AIDS
crisis, and had read Randy Shiltss
best-selling account, And the Band
Played On. He tried to get the leg-
islature to study the possibility of le-
galizing a syringe exchange, which he
felt was a matter of life and death,
and could save lives quickly and
inexpensively.
But conservatives blocked the idea,
and Pence threatened to veto any such
legislation. With Pence, you need to
look at the framework, which is ab-
stinence, Clere said. Its the same as
with giving teen-agers condoms. Con-
servatives think it promotes the be-
havior, even though its a scientically
proven harm-reduction strategy. In
March, 2015, Clere staged a huge pub-
lic hearing, in which dozens of experts
and suerers testied about the cri-
sis. Caught at-footed, Pence sched-
uled his own event, where he an-
nounced that he would pray about the
syringe-exchange issue. The next day,
he said that he supported allowing an
exchange program as an emergency
measure, but only on a temporary basis
and only in Scott County, with no
state funding. Clere told me that he
spent every last dime of my political
capital to get the bill through. After
Scott County implemented the sy-
ringe exchange, the number of new
H.I.V. cases fell. But Republican lead-
ers later stripped Clere of his com-
mittee chairmanship, a highly unusual
event. I commend Representative
Clere for the eorts to help the state
deal with this, Kevin Burke, the health
ocer in neighboring Clark County,
told me. But he paid a price for it.
Clere remains bitter about Pence. It
was all part of his pattern of political
expediency, he said. He was stridently
against it until it became politically
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 63
expedient to support it. Clere, a Chris-
tian who opposes abortion, told me
that he now nds Pences piety hypo-
critical. He says hes pro-life, Clere nine years in prison for an armed rob-
said. But people were dying. When
Clere was asked whom he would rather
have as PresidentTrump or Pence
he replied, Id take Trump every day
of the week, and twice on Sunday.
ence likes to say of himself, I am
P a Christian, a conservative, and a
Republican, in that order. But Clere
is not alone in questioning Pences po-
litical purity. After the November, 2015,
terrorist attacks in Paris, Pence, like
several other U.S. governors, issued a
controversial executive order barring
the resettlement of Syrian refugees in
the state. The Archdiocese of Indiana
had long been deeply involved in re-
settling refugees, including Syrians,
and was about to welcome a new Syr-
ian family. In the hope of reversing
Pences ban, Joseph Tobin, the bishop
of Indianapolis, requested a meeting.
Tobin, who has since been elevated
to cardinal and become the archbishop
of Newark, New Jersey, told me that
he emphasized to Pence that the Syr-
ian family was eeing violence and
terror, and had been vetted for nearly
two years while living in a Jordanian
refugee camp. He also explained that
the family had relatives in the area.
Tobin brought along a former refugee
who now had a good job
at an Indiana hotel, as an
example of how success-
ful the resettlement pro-
cess was. Tobin is revered
in the Catholic commu-
nity of Indiana in which
Pence grew up. I really
think he thought it over,
Tobin said. There was
some anguish. But in the
end Pence told him, I
need to protect the people of the state.
I respect that, Tobin replied. But
this isnt a threat. Pence didnt change
his mind. Later that week, the Syr-
ian family was sent to Connecticut.
Eventually, federal courts struck down
Pences executive order as discrimi-
natory. I asked Cardinal Tobin if there
was a Christian argument in support
of turning the refugees away. After a
pause, he quietly said, No.
64 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
Pence has also been criticized for his
treatment of Keith Cooper, a former res-
ident of Elkhart, Indiana, who spent
bery that he didnt commit. He was re-
leased in 2006, but on the condition that
he admit guilt, which made it impossi-
ble for him to get a decent job. The pros-
ecutor and the Indiana Parole Board,
citing DNA evidence and victim recan-
tations, urged Governor Pence to par-
don him immediately. But Pence dragged
out the process for years. He didnt do
a thing to help me, Cooper told me.
Pence nally left the decision to his suc-
cessor, Governor Eric Holcomb, who is
also a Republican. Holcomb granted
Cooper a pardon within weeks of tak-
ing oce. It was the rst time in Indi-
ana that a pardon was granted on the
basis of innocence, rather than clemency.
It was all about Pences political
career, Cooper said. As a Christian,
hes a hypocrite. He wouldnt see me
or speak with me. God doesnt turn
his back on the truth, but Pence just
walked away from the truth. I couldnt
move forward in life. I was stuck in a
dead-end job. Cooper, who was op-
erating a forklift at the time, now cares
for his grandchildren. He has become
friendly with the robbery victims who
mistakenly identied him in a police
lineup; they supported his bid for a
pardon. I forgive them, he said.
They stood up for me. He went on,
I forgive the prosecutor.
He wrote a letter. And the
parole board? They saw
that justice happened. But
I dont forgive Mike Pence,
and never will. He talks
all this God stu, but
hes biased. He hates Mus-
lims, he hates gay people,
and he hates minorities.
He didnt want to be the
rst white man in Indiana
to pardon an innocent black man.
A spokesman for Pence, who declined
to be quoted, said Pence believed that
Cooper needed to go back to court and
face a retrial, instead of seeking a pardon.
ence, seeing his poll numbers plum-
P met, gave up on running for Pres-
ident, and decided to seek a second
term as governor. Victory was far from
assured. Once again, he faced John
Gregg, a folksy Democratic lawyer. In
the spring of 2016, polls showed the
two in a dead heat.
The national election, meanwhile,
was confounding expectations. As Trump
picked up momentum in the Republi-
can primaries, the Koch network be-
came unexpectedly paralyzed. Marc
Short pressed the brothers to dedicate
their resources to stopping Trump and
promoting his rivals. But executives at
Koch Industries considered the strategy
risky, and the brothers stayed out of the
Presidential race. Frustrated, Short quit
his job at Freedom Partners and signed
on to Marco Rubios campaign.
The Indiana primary was on May 3rd.
The previous month, Ted Cruz had
trounced Trump in Wisconsin, but if
Trump could win decisively in Indiana
he was virtually certain to secure the
nomination. The brain trust behind
Trumps Indiana campaign included
people whose public images were very
dierent from Pences. Among them
were Roderick Ratcli, the C.E.O. of
Centaur Gaming, the states largest gam-
ing-and-racetrack business, and Steve
Hilbert, a amboyant entrepreneur who
had been a business partner of Trumps.
Hilbert had built an insurance empire,
Conseco, which had been valued at fty-
two billion dollars before collapsing into
bankruptcy. He is currently married to
his sixth wife, and has denied reports
that they met when she popped out of
a cake, topless, at his stepsons bachelor
party. In 1998, Hilbert loaned Trump
money to buy the General Motors
Building, and they had remained friends.
In 2013, when Hilbert needed cash,
Trump bought Hilberts Caribbean es-
tate, and Hilbert and Melania Trump
made a deal to sell skin-care products.
Despite Pences straitlaced reputa-
tion, he had closer ties with these gures
than most people knew. As governor,
he proclaimed his opposition to any
expansion of the gaming industry, but,
though the state had banned political
contributions from casino operators,
cash had owed generously to him
from such sources, through indirect
paths. The states gaming companies,
including Centaur, routed donations
to soft money groups like the Repub-
lican Governors Association, which
then transferred the money to Pence and
other candidates. Pence, meanwhile,
used executive orders to quietly grant
several of the gambling industrys
wishes, such as allowing riverboat ca-
sinos to expand onshore.
In 2016, the largest donor to Pences
gubernatorial campaign was the Re-
publican Governors Association, and
some of its major donors were casino
companies. An L.L.C. connected to
Centaur contributed two hundred thou-
sand dollars to the R.G.A. that year.
The casino operator Sheldon Adelson
contributed a million dollars. But the
single largest donor to the R.G.A. in
2016 was Koch Industries, which con-
tributed more than two million dollars.
Nearly all this cash, and much more,
was divided between just two guberna-
torial races that year, one of which was
Indianas. That spring, David Koch also
invited Pence to be a featured guest at
a fund-raiser at his Palm Beach man-
sion, attended by about seventy of the
Republican Partys biggest donors.
Trump handily won the Indiana
primary. Pence, who had tepidly endorsed
Ted Cruz, switched to Trump. Pences
history with Trump, however, was
strained. In 2011, Pence had gone to
Trump Tower in Manhattan, seeking a
campaign donation. Trump brought up
some gossipthe wife of Mitch Dan-
iels, the outgoing governor of Indiana,
had reportedly left him for another man,
then reunited with her husband. Accord-
ing to the Times, Trump announced that
hed never take back a wife who had been
unfaithful. Pence reacted stiy, and their
conservation grew awkward. Trump gave
Pence a small contribution, but the coarse
New York billionaire and the prim In-
diana evangelical appeared to be on dier-
ent wavelengths.
Nevertheless, in 2016, political insid-
ers in Indiana began hearing that Pence
would welcome a spot on the Trump ticket.
There was no doubt hed say yes, Tony ceptible to attery, he told the media
Samuel, the vice-chair of the Trump cam-
paign in the state, who was a lobbyist for
Centaur and other companies, told me.
Paul Manafort, who was Trumps cam-
paign chairman at that point, arranged
for Trump to meet Pence, and urged
Trump to pick him. Pence was seen as a
bridge to Christian conservatives, an asset
in the Midwest, and a connection to the
powerful Koch network. Kellyanne Con-
way, who had done polling work for the
Kochs, pushed for Pence, too, as did Ste-
You were overheard saying youd kill for a good tomato.
phen Bannon, although private e-mails
recently obtained by BuzzFeed indicate
that he considered the choice a Faustian
bargainan unfortunate necessity.
Still, Trump remained wary. Accord-
ing to a former campaign aide, he was
disapproving when he learned how lit-
tle money Pence had. In 2004, the oil
rm that Pences father had partly
owned had led for bankruptcy. Mike
Pences shares of the companys stock,
which he had valued at up to a quar-
ter of a million dollars, became worth-
less. In 2016, according to a campaign-
nance disclosure form, Pence had one
bank account, which held less than
fteen thousand dollars.
But in July Pence found a way to
please Trump when he played golf with
him at Trumps club in Bedminster, New
Jersey. Recognizing that Trump was sus-
had responded, In a heartbeat.
that Trump beat me like a drum.
Yet, in a phone conversation that I
had with Trump during this period, he
told me that he was torn about the
choice. He noted repeatedly that Chris
Christie, the governor of New Jersey,
had been loyal to him. When I asked
Trump if he shared Pences deeply con-
servative social views, he became un-
characteristically silent.
Trump came closer to picking Chris-
tie than is generally known. On July
11th, Christie appeared at a campaign
event with Trump. Afterward, the Trump
campaign informed him that the choice
was down to him or Pence, so he needed
to get ready. The next day, Trump ew
to Indiana to do a campaign event with
Pence. A tire on Trumps plane devel-
oped a at, so he and his son Eric, who
had accompanied him, decided to stay
the night. They joined the Pences for
dinner at an Indianapolis restaurant.
The foursome emerged looking happy.
(Samuel, who was at the restaurant, told
me that Trump tipped the chef a cou-
ple hundred dollars.)
At dawn on July 13th, Ivanka and Don,
Jr., ew to Indianapolis to join their fa-
ther for breakfast with the Pences at the
governors mansion. The Times soon re-
ported that Trump had asked Pence if
he would accept the job, and that Pence
But the next night, according to
someone familiar with the details,
Trump called Christie and said, Ive
got a question for you. Are you ready?
Ready for what? Christie responded.
Ready to do this with me,Trump said.
Are you oering? Christie said.
Im asking youbut youve got
to make sure youre ready, Trump said.
Im as tough as they come, Chris-
tie said.
O.K., Trump said. Im making
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 65
the decision tomorrow. Stay by your
phone.
But Christie was left hanging for
the next three days. He suspected that
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner had
intervened and turned Trump against
him, because years earlier, as a U.S.
Attorney, he had prosecuted Kush-
ners father for tax fraud and other
crimes. Conway told me that this the-
ory was wrong, but acknowledged,
It truly was a tiealmost a jump
ball.
Hoping to break the tie, Christies
detractors made the case that he was
politically toxic because of the Bridge-
gate scandal, in which ocials had
caused trac jams on the George
Washington Bridge in an act of re-
prisal against the mayor of Fort Lee,
New Jersey. Trump began leaning to-
ward Pence. I wouldnt say Trump
was pushed into it, a top Trump cam-
paign aide told me. He was led into
it. Pence was made the most palat-
able choice by those around him.
Before Pences trip to Bedminster,
he had asked his brother Gregory to
meet him at a Burger King. He said,
Donald Trump wants to talk to me,
Gregory recalled. They both knew
what it was about. I told him, You
have to go, you have no choice,
Gregory said. As he saw it, his brother
also had no choice about saying yes,
if picked: When your partys nom-
Plan B is firing whoever came up with Plan A.
inee asks you to be the running mate,
you have to do it. But it was a gam-
ble. As Gregory put it to me, If he
lost, he had no money, and he had
three kids in college. He took out
student loans for the kids. Hes got
a retirement account, but I was afraid
hed run out of money in just a cou-
ple of weeks. Hed have to get a job.
He was rolling the dice. Some pol-
iticians in Indiana were surprised
that Trump wanted to pick Pence,
who was ailing as governor, and
that Pence wanted to run with Trump.
The one thing you could count on
with Pence was interpersonal de-
cency, which made it strange that he
joined the Trump ticket, the most
indecent ticket any partys ever put
together, Pete Buttigieg said. But,
really, he had nowhere else to go. His
chances of getting relected were
fty-fty at best. Trump to pray. When Trump and
By July 14th, Trumps aides had
leaked that he was about to pick Pence,
who had own to New York for the
announcement. But that night, as
CNN reported, Trump called his aides
to see if he could back out of his de-
cision. The next morning, Trump
called Christie and said, Theyre
telling me I have to pick him. Its
central casting. He looks like a Vice-
President. A few hours later, Trump
announced Pence as his running mate.
Several days later, at the Republi-
can National Convention, Newt Gin-
grich, who had also been passed over
for the Vice-Presidency, found him-
self backstage next to Trump while
Pence was giving his acceptance
speech. Isnt he just perfect? Trump
asked Gingrich. Straight from cen-
tral casting.
he awkwardness between Pence
T and Trump didnt entirely dissi-
pate. When the Access Hollywood
tape surfaced, revealing Trumps boast
about grabbing women by the pussy,
Karen Pence was horried. Accord-
ing to a former campaign aide, Pence
refused to take Trumps calls and sent
him a letter saying that he and Karen,
as Christians, were deeply oended
by his actions and needed to make
an assessment about whether to re-
main with the campaign. They urged
Pence nally did talk, Pence told him
that his wife still had huge prob-
lems with his behavior. But in pub-
lic Pence was forgiving, saying, I am
grateful that he has expressed remorse
and apologized to the American peo-
ple. (A Pence spokesman has denied
that there was any friction over the
incident.)
Pence exceeded expectations in the
Vice-Presidential debate, and tra-
versed the Midwest tirelessly. He did
an amazing job, Bannon said. Lots
of conservative groups had questions
about Trump. He answered those
questions. The Kochs were delighted
that one of their favorite politicians
had joined the ticket, although,
because of Trumps stance against
wealthy donors, Pence and the Kochs
agreed to cancel a speech that he had
been scheduled to give at their donor
summit that August. The Kochs con-
tinued to withhold nancial support
from Trump, but Short, the former
Koch operative, became a top adviser
to Pence on the campaign. Some bil-
lionaires in the Kochs donor net-
worksuch as the hedge-fund man-
ager Robert Mercer, who has also
nanced Bannons venturesbegan
backing Trump.
The Koch network gained even
further sway after Trump won the
Presidency. Three days after the elec-
tion, Trump pushed aside Christie,
who had been overseeing his transi-
tion team, and put Pence in charge,
with Short as a top deputy. Trump
had promised to drain the swamp
in Washington, but he had no expe-
rience governing, and few political
contacts. He was also superstitious,
and during his campaign he had
deected discussions about post-elec-
tion stang, fearing that it would
bring bad luck. Christies team had
been quietly gathering rsums and
making plans for months, but Pences
team threw out the research, dump-
ing thirty binders of material into
the trash. Donald Trump ran against
the establishment, but there was
a vacuum, a member of the earlier
transition team said. Movement
conservatives jumped in. There was
strong think-tank participation from
Heritage and others who saw the
opportunity.
Trump began to appoint an ex-
traordinary number of ocials with
ties to the Kochs and to Pence, espe-
cially in positions that aected Koch
Industries nancially, such as those
dealing with regulatory, environmen-
tal, and scal policy. Short, who a few
months earlier had tried to enlist the
Kochs to stop Trump, joined the
White House as its director of leg-
islative aairs. Scott Pruitt, the mil-
itantly anti-regulatory attorney gen-
eral of Oklahoma, who had been
heavily supported by the Kochs, was
appointed director of the Environ-
mental Protection Agency. Pruitt, in
turn, placed Patrick Traylor, a lawyer
for Koch Industries and other fossil-
fuel companies, in charge of the
E.P.A.s enforcement of key anti-pol-
lution laws. As the Times has reported,
a document called A Roadmap to
Repeal, written by Koch operatives,
has guided the E.P.A.s reversal of
Obama Administration clean-air and
climate regulations. Don McGahn,
who had done legal work for Free-
dom Partners, became White House
counsel. Betsy DeVos, a billionaire
heiress, who had been a major mem-
ber of the Kochs donor network and
a supporter of Pence, was named Sec-
retary of Education. The new direc-
tor of the C.I.A. was Mike Pompeo,
the congressman who represented
Charles Kochs district, in Wichita,
Kansas; before Pompeo ran for oce,
the Kochs had invested in his aero-
space business. Pompeo, the former
transition-team member said, wasnt head of Americans for Prosperity,
even on Trumps radar, but he was
brought in to meet him and got ap-
pointed, like, the next day. A recent
analysis by the Checks & Balances
Project found that sixteen high-
ranking ocials in the Trump White
House had ties to the Kochs. The
pattern continued among lower-level
political appointees, including in
Pences oce, which was stocked with
Koch alumni. Pence reportedly con-
sulted with Charles Koch before hir-
ing his speechwriter, Stephen Ford,
who previously worked at Freedom
Partners.
Senator Whitehouse, the Rhode
Island Democrat, believes that the
Kochs will stick one hundred of their
own people into the government
and Trump will never notice. As a
result, he said, the signs of a rap-
prochement are everywhere. White-
house continued, One by one, all the
things that Trump campaigned on
that annoyed the Koch brothers are
being thrown overboard. And one by
one the Koch brothers priorities are
moving up the list. Trumps popu-
list, nationalist agenda has largely
been replaced by the agenda of the
corporate right. Trump has made
little eort at infrastructure reform,
and he abandoned his support for a
border- adjustment tax after the
Koch network spent months cam-
paigning against it, and after Pence
and Short discussed it privately with
Charles Koch at a meeting in Col-
orado Springs this summer. Bannons
proposal to create a higher tax bracket
for citizens earning upward of ve
million dollars was dropped. The
Kochs enthusiastically support the
White Houses proposed tax-cut
package, which, according to most
nonpartisan analyses, will dispropor-
tionately benet the super-rich. (The
proposed elimination of the estate
tax alone would give the Koch broth-
ers heirs a windfall of billions of
dollars.)
Americans for Prosperity recently
announced plans to spend four and
a half million dollars on ads that will
press three Democratic senators in
red states to support the tax cuts. On
September 25th, Trump dined at the
White House with Tim Phillips, the
along with Short and a handful of
other conservative activists. After
keeping a careful distance from one
another during the campaign, Pence
and the Kochs reunited openly for
the rst time on October 12th, when
Pence attended a summit of Koch
donors in New York. Theyre aligned
on tax reform, Bannon said. The
Kochs are a hundred per cent with
you, so long as it means cutting taxes
for the Kochs. Anything that will
help the middle-class people? For-
get it.
nother consequence of Trumps
A choice for Vice-President may be
the widening federal investigation into
possible connections between his cam-
paign and the Russian government.
Before Pence took over the transition
team, Christie had warned Trump
not to give a high-level job to the re-
tired general Michael Flynn, whose
nancial ties to foreign interests trig-
gered the investigation. Flynn, whom
Obama had red as the director of
the Defense Intelligence Agency, was
not on any of the original transition
teams long lists for government ap-
pointments. Christie considered him
too risky.
On November 11, 2016, Christie was
chairing a transition meeting, when,
according to four sources, Flynn walked
in with an ally, General Keith Kellogg.
Gentlemen, can I help you? Chris-
tie asked. Ivanka Trump, who was a
member of the transition teams exec-
utive council, announced that she had
invited them. Christie tried to reclaim
control of the meeting, but Ivanka took
over. Praising Flynns amazing loyalty
to my father, she turned to him and
asked, General, what job do you want?
A participant at the meeting said, It
was like Princess Ivanka had laid the
sword on Flynns shoulders and said,
Rise and go forth. (A source close
to Ivanka didnt deny the account, but
said that it exaggerated her role, and
that she was merely trying to show
appreciation for Flynns support.)
Flynn expressed interest in becom-
ing Secretary of State or Secretary of
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 67
Defense. Eric Trump, who was also on
the team, asked Flynn if he had been
out of uniform long enough to head
the Pentagon. Flynn said that he could
probably get a congressional waiver, but
if not hed settle for national-security
adviser.
A few hours later, Christie was de-
posed. Kushner, he felt, had humiliated
him a second time. Bannon, who was
given the job of dismissing him, ad-
mitted to Christie that Kushner had
been against him all along, for per-
sonal reasons. In any event, when Pence
replaced Christie, the door of the
White House was opened to Flynn.
On November 17th, after little vetting,
Flynn was named Trumps nation-
al-security adviser, one of the most
sensitive posts in the U.S. government.
There is no indication that Pence
raised any objections about Flynn to
Trump, even after Representative Eli-
jah Cummings, the ranking member
on the House Committee on Over-
sight and Government Reform, sent
Pence a letter warning him about
Flynns questionable ethics: Flynn had
failed to disclose that, during the cam-
paign, he had done paid lobbying work
for Turkish interests. A member of
the original transition team told me,
Pence left his backbone in Indiana,
if he ever had one.
When reporters later asked Pence
why he hadnt heeded Cummingss
letter, he said that hed never seen it.
But Cummings produced an e-mail
from the transition sta acknowledg-
ing his letter and promising to review
it carefully. Either he read it and ig-
nored our warnings or someone on
his team did so, Cummings told me.
Either way, the outcome was horren-
dous, because President Trump should
never have given General Flynn ac-
cess to our nations most sensitive and
classied information.
It undoubtedly would have cost
Pence to take a political stand against
the worst instincts of Trump and his
family. But had Pence stopped Flynns
appointment Trump might not have
become the object of a sprawling
special investigation. Phil Sharp, the
former Indiana representative, said,
Theres a leadership test here. There
68 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
are real issues, and a failure to do some-
thing he was legally, ethically, and po-
litically responsible for. Sharp added,
It also failed the basic Washington
litmus test of self-preservation.
Pence soon delivered a series of
misleading statements about Flynn.
On January 15th, as questions about
Russian manipulation of the election
were mounting, Pence went on CBS
and assured the public that, during
the transition, Flynn had not discussed
the topic of sanctions with the Rus-
sian Ambassador. But then the Wash-
ington Post reported that the Justice
Department had wiretaps of Flynn
doing just that. The Justice Depart-
ment had informed the White House
counsel about this well before Pence
made his statement. On February 13th,
Trump red Flynn, ostensibly for de-
ceiving Pence, who looked like either
a liar or a chump.
Three months later, Trump red
James Comey, the F.B.I. director, who
had opened the federal investigation
into the Trump campaigns Russian
ties. Pence declared that Comeys
ring had nothing to do with Trumps
displeasure at the Russia investiga-
tion. Trump, he said, had merely fol-
lowed the Justice Departments rec-
ommendation. But Trump contradicted
Pence within hours, telling NBCs
Lester Holt that his anger over the
Russia probe led him to dismiss
Comey. Further damaging Pences
credibility, the Times revealed that,
before Comeys dismissal, Pence had
attended a White House meeting
where Trump discussed his intention
to re Comey and devised a plan to
get the Justice Department to sup-
port the move.
Several law professors have argued
that the Vice-President could be vul-
nerable to charges of obstructing jus-
tice, or misprision of a felony, for
participating in a meeting about shut-
ting down the federal investigation
and then providing a false cover story
to the public. Pence has hired an out-
side lawyer, Richard Cullen, and has
further strengthened his political
armor by hiring Nick Ayers as his
chief of sta. Laurence Tribe, a law
professor at Harvard, tweeted, The
VP appears to me to be in what we
lawyers have been known to call deep
doo-doo.
nlike most Vice-Presidents, Pence
U has been given no particular port-
folio of issues or projects. Hes contin-
ued to serve as the key contact for con-
servative groups and campaign donors,
and he has tried to help Trump contend
with Congress. But Pence was publicly
humiliated in July when John McCain,
the Republican senator from Arizona,
stood on the oor of the Senate, where
Pence had been pleading for his vote,
and gave a thumbs-down, killing Trumps
health-care plan. White House ocials
had miscalculated, believing that Mc-
Cain was on their side.
Whats Pence doing? Walter Mon-
dale, who served as Vice-President to
Jimmy Carter, asked me recently. I ask
myself that every day. Before taking the
job, Mondale got Carter to agree, in
writing, that he could attend every meet-
ing and see every memo that the Pres-
ident did. Mondale also requested that
his oce be moved from the Old Ex-
ecutive Oce Building to the West
Wing. Subsequent Vice-Presidents have
inherited these upgrades, but Mondale
felt that all Pence was doing was try-
ing not to make an enemy of the Pres-
ident. Trump is known to humiliate
subordinates, and Mondale noted that
Trump often asks Pence to act as a mas-
ter of ceremonies and introduce him at
events, which Mondale nds demean-
ing. Dan Quayle, who was Vice-Presi-
dent in George H. W. Bushs Admin-
istration, praised Pence, whom he has
known for many years, for fullling the
two major duties of a Vice-President:
to be supportive and to be prepared. But
when I asked Quayle if President Bush
had ever asked him to leave the room
as Trump reportedly asked Pence to do,
so that he could privately ask Comey to
ease up on Flynnhe said, Never.
Mark Knoller, who has covered the
White House for CBS since Gerald
Fords Presidency, said of Pence, Hes
the most publicly deferential to his Pres-
ident of any V.P. I can remember. At
Trumps rst full Cabinet meeting, Pence
said, This is the greatest privilege of
my life, to serve as Vice-President to a
President whos keeping his word to the
American people. Pence readily com-
plied when Trump asked him to stage
a protest at an N.F.L. game in India-
napolis on October 8th, by leaving the
stadium when some players refused to
stand for the national anthem. (Pences
trip reportedly cost taxpayers hundreds
of thousands of dollars.)
In private, however, Pence has be-
come a back channel for government
gures who are frustrated by the impul-
siveness and inattention of a President
who wont read more than a page or two
of bullet points. Erick Erickson, a con-
servative commentator who admires
Pence, told me, Everyone knows that
Mike Pence can get the job done, and
the President cant, but no one can say
it. According to NBC, Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson recently became so
enraged by the Presidents incompetence
that he called him a fucking moron in
front of others, and threatened to quit.
In an eort to calm Tillerson, and pre-
vent yet another high-level resignation,
Pence reportedly counselled the Sec-
retary of State on how to manage Trump,
suggesting that he criticize him only
privately.
Trump thinks Pence is great, Ban-
non told me. But, according to a long-
time associate, Trump also likes to let
Pence know whos boss. A sta mem-
ber from Trumps campaign recalls him
mocking Pences religiosity. He said that,
when people met with Trump after stop-
ping by Pences oce, Trump would ask
them, Did Mike make you pray? Two
sources also recalled Trump needling
Pence about his views on abortion and
homosexuality. During a meeting with
a legal scholar, Trump belittled Pences
determination to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The legal scholar had said that, if the
Supreme Court did so, many states would
likely legalize abortion on their own.
You see? Trump asked Pence. Youve
wasted all this time and energy on it,
and its not going to end abortion any-
way. When the conversation turned to
gay rights, Trump motioned toward
Pence and joked, Dont ask that guy
he wants to hang them all!
There have been other evangelical
Christians in the White House, includ-
ing Carter and George W. Bush, but
Ugh, we get ityoure in love.
Pences fundamentalism exceeds theirs.
In 2002, he declared that educators
around America must teach evolution
not as fact but as theory, alongside such
theories as intelligent design, which ar-
gues that life on Earth is too complex to
have emerged through random muta-
tion. Pence has described intelligent de-
sign as the only remotely rational expla-
nation for the known universe. At the
White House, Pence has been hosting a
Bible-study group for Cabinet ocers,
led by an evangelical pastor named Ralph
Drollinger. In 2004, Drollinger, whose
organization, Capitol Ministries, special-
izes in proselytizing to elected ocials,
stirred protests from female legislators
in California, where he was then preach-
ing, after he wrote, Women with chil-
dren at home, who either serve in pub-
lic oce, or are employed on the outside,
pursue a path that contradicts Gods
revealed design for them. It is a sin.
Drollinger describes Catholicism as a
false religion, calls homosexuality a sin,
and believes that a wife must submit to
her husband. Several Trump Cabinet
ocials have reportedly attended the
Bible-study group, including DeVos,
Pompeo, and Attorney General Je Ses-
sions. In a recent interview with the
Christian Broadcast Network, Drollinger
said that Pence has uncompromising
Biblical tenacity and brings real value
to the head of the nation.
Many Americans have debated
whether the country would be better o
with Pence as President. From a purely
partisan viewpoint, Harold Ickes, a long-
time Democratic operative, argues that
putting aside the fear that Trump might
start a nuclear warDemocrats should
hope Trump stays in oce, because he
makes a better foil, and because Pence
might work more eectively with Con-
gress and be more successful at advanc-
ing the far rights agenda. Newt Gin-
grich predicts that Pence will probably
get a chance to do so. I think hes the
most likely Republican nominee in 2024,
he said. Ron Klain, who was chief of
sta to the former Vice-President Joe
Biden, is skeptical of this, given Trumps
accumulating baggage. There is no
success for Mike Pence unless Trump
workshe cannot run far enough or
fast enough to not get hit by the falling
tree, Klain said. But he may think he
can. Evidently, the next chapter is on
Pences mind. Over the replace in the
Vice-Presidents residence, he has hung
a plaque with a passage from the Bible:
For I know the plans I have for you,
declares the lord, Plans to prosper you
and not to harm you, plans to give you
hope and a future.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 69

DARK FACTORY
The robotics revolution is changing what machines can do. Where do humans fit in?
hen David Stinson nished
W high school, in Grand Rap-
ids, Michigan, in 1977, the
rst thing he did was get a job build-
ing houses. After a few years, though,
the business slowed. Stinson was then
twenty-four, with two children to sup-
port. He needed something stable. As
he explained over lunch recently, that
meant nding a job at one of the two
companies in the area that oered se-
cure, blue-collar work. Either Ill be
working at General Motors or Ill be
working at Steelcase by the end of the
year, he vowed in 1984. A few months
later, he got a job at Steelcase, the worlds
largest manufacturer of oce furniture,
and hes been working at its Grand Rap-
ids metal plant ever since.
Stinson is now fty-eight. He has a
full, reddish face, a thick head of silver
hair, and a majestic midsection. His navy
polo shirt displays his job titleZone
Leaderand, like everyone else in the
plant, he always has a pair of protective
earplugs on a neon string draped around
his neck. His glasses have plastic shields
on the sides that give him the air of a
cranky scientist.
I dont regret coming here, Stinson
said. We were sitting in the plants caf-
eteria, and Stinson was unwrapping an
Italian sub, supplied by a deli that every
Thursday oers plant workers sand-
wiches for four dollars instead of eight.
Theres been times Ive thought about
leaving, but its just getting to be a much
more comfortable atmosphere around
here. The technology is really helping
that kind of thing, too. Instead of tak-
ing responsibility away from you, its a
big aid. Its denitely the wave of the
future here.
William Sandee, Jr., a sixty-four-
year-old worker on the paint line, sat
down next to Stinson with a carton of
fries and a cup of ketchup, and tossed
his safety goggles on the table. We try
to have some fun with it, he said in a
70 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY
BY SHEELAH KOLHATKAR
low near-growl. It can get intense.
Sandee, who has neatly combed gray
hair and an alert, owlish face, began
working at Steelcase in 1972, after wait-
ing in line with six hundred people just
to put in an application. They made it
very lucrative to be a Steelcase employee,
back in the day, Sandee said. Plant man-
agers were known to drive fancy cars
and have second homes on the lake; the
company paid the college tuition for
employees children, who often spent
summers working at the local plants;
and there were company picnics and a
bowling tournament, which once had
fteen hundred players. (The tourna-
ment is still held, now with around three
hundred participants.)
In the nineties, Steelcase employed
more than ten thousand workers in the
United States and operated seven fac-
tories around Grand Rapids, making
chairs, ling cabinets, desks, and tables,
and the screws, bolts, and casters that
went into them. Packed shoulder to
shoulder, workers polished and painted
wood and assembled steel parts by hand.
Today, there are only two Steelcase plants
in Michiganthe metal factory, which
makes desks and ling cabinets, and a
nearby wood plant, which produces
wood furniture. In total, they employ
fewer than two thousand workers. The
companys only other U.S. plant, in Ath-
ens, Alabama, employs a thousand full-
time workers.
The history of Steelcase, in many
ways, is the history of manufacturing in
America. The company was founded in
1912 with one product, a reproof metal
wastebasket. As the economy boomed
in the following decades, Americas bur-
geoning corporations needed to furnish
their oces with desks and shelving and
cubicle walls. If you were a high-school
kid growing up in Grand Rapids in the
eighties and you didnt want to go to
college, and you got a job at a Steelcase
factory, you were set, Rob Kirkbride,
who covered Steelcase for almost two
decades at the Grand Rapids Press and
industry publications, told me. It was
like winning the lottery.
Then the dot-com bubble burst and
countless startups found themselves auc-
tioning o their oce furniture. By 2001,
Steelcase had lost a third of its sales and
started closing plants throughout west-
ern Michigan. Its manufacturing was
moved to Mexico, China, and eventu-
ally India. In 2011, the company an-
nounced a new series of closings and
layos, shutting another plant near
Grand Rapids, one in Texas, and one in
Ontario, Canada. Almost all the com-
panys chair manufacturing was relo-
cated to Mexico.
These days, as U.S. companies re-
port record prots and demand mil-
lions of sleek new workspaces, Steelcase
is again on the upswing. Its corporate
headquarters, housed in a refurbished
factory, is a laboratory of workplace
trends, with open oor plans and glass-
sheathed work pods where people re-
cline with their laptops or hover at
standing desks. In the two Michigan
plants that remain open, employees cre-
ate metal components for furniture sets
and conference tables in dozens of
shades of wood veneer.
As technology is making the work
faster, more ecient, and more environ-
mentally sound, the products are being
created with far fewer workers. Com-
panies are obviously not sending out
press releases saying, Were not hiring
more people, but thats what I hear on
the street, Kirkbride said. There are au-
tomated assembly lines, and robotic arms
lifting tabletops that were once hauled
by men. Stinson took me across a dense
wall of machinery and past a giant con-
traption that makes cardboard boxes so
that the plant doesnt have to order them.
You can just punch it into the touch
screen there and go, I need 86-17, boom-
boom-boom, I need fourteen of em. Hit
At Brown Universitys Humans to Robots lab, a machine learns how to manipulate delicate and irregular objects.
PHOTOGRAPH
BY GRANT CORNETT THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 71
the button, and it cuts it for you, he
said. That kind of stu is really cool.
So it isnt so much that were eliminat-
ing jobs, were eliminating the waste.
As a zone leader, Stinson is respon-
sible for about fteen employees on a
section of the production line that makes
parts for Steelcases Ology series
height-adjustable tables built for the
standing-desk craze. Until last year, the
plant workers had to consult a long list
of steps, taking pains to remove the cor-
rect parts out of a cart lled with vari-
ously sized bolts and screws and pins
and to insert each one in the correct
hole and in the correct order. Now com-
puterized workstations, called vision
tables, dictate, step by step, how work-
ers are to assemble a piece of furniture.
The process is virtually mistake-proof:
the system wont let the workers pro-
ceed if a step isnt completed correctly.
We stood behind a young woman wear-
ing a polo shirt and Lycra shorts, with
a long blond ponytail. When a step was
completed, a light turned on above the
next required part, accompanied by a
beep-beep-whoosh sound. A scanner over-
head tracked everything as it was hap-
pening, beaming the data it collected to
unseen engineers with iPads. Employ-
ees who follow a strict automated pro-
tocolsome call them meat robots through employment during the course
Memoir, Chapter 1. At times, I think I may have never
fully gotten over the death of my parents
need little training. Even the drill was
attached to a computer-assisted arm;
the worker just had to move it to the
right position and let the machine do
its magic. A decade ago, industrial ro-
bots assisted workers in their tasks. Now
workersthose who remainassist the
robots in theirs.
or decades, the conventional view
F among economists was that tech-
nological advances create as many op-
portunities for workers as they take away.
In the past several years, however, re-
search has begun to suggest otherwise.
Its not that were running out of work
or jobs per se, David Autor, an M.I.T.
economist who studies the impact of
automation on employment, said. But
a subset of people with low skill levels
may not be able to earn a reasonable
standard of living based on their labor.
We see that already. As automation de-
presses wages, jobs in factories become
both less abundant and less appealing.
This process, Autor and other econ-
omists argue, can also exacerbate in-
equality. The labor market is built around
the idea of labor scarcity: each person
has a bundle of laborhis or her own
capacity to workthat employers need
and that she can sell in the job market
a decline in jobs and in pay. Technol-
of a career of thirty years or so. That
model is eroding. It doesnt mean theres
no money around, but its just accruing
to the owners of capital, to the owners
of ideas, Autor says. And capital is less
equitably distributed than labor. Every-
one is born with some labor, but not ev-
eryone is born with capital.
In the Steelcase metal factory, auto-
mation has led the company to seek
out more highly educated managers,
who are now expected to have a col-
lege degree, not just a high-school di-
ploma. The company, following the
lean manufacturing model pioneered
by Toyota, hires young engineers to scan
factory data for additional eciencies,
which can translate into further auto-
mation. For people who have techni-
cal degrees and can manage automated
systems, and for owners of companies
that are in the process of automating,
the potential for increased wealth is
signicant. But for less skilled workers
its a dierent story. In a paper from
earlier this year, the economists Daron
Acemoglu, of M.I.T., and Pascual Res-
trepo, of Boston University, studied local
job markets in the United States be-
tween 1990 and 2007, and they found
that the concentration of industrial ro-
bots in an area was directly related to
ogy can compound the eects of glo-
balization. By one measure, the aver-
age manufacturing worker in the United
States earned nine per cent less in 2015
than the average worker in 1973, while
the economy over all grew by two hun-
dred per cent. At Steelcase, Stinson ac-
knowledged, workers were earning
around the same dollar salary that they
had in 1987.
Neither Stinson nor Sandee thought
that automation posed a threat to their
jobs, though. Sandee remembers when
Frank Merlotti, a legendary gure at
Steelcase who retired as president and
C.E.O. in 1990, used to visit the plant
and deliver rousing speeches to the work-
ers. Frank would look at you, and he
would say this before he would even say
much of anything, Sandee recalled.
Listen, he says, its you people, you
people, all you people out here who make
this thing work, who make it happen.
Sandee speaks fervently about the
dignity of manual labor. He told
me about a trip he had taken with his
grandkids to New York City, where they
had visited the Empire State Building.
Youve probably seen that picture of
those guys, where theyre sitting way up
there on all that steel, up there, theyre
eating their lunch together, Sandee said.
And they got some rivets and stu there.
But the rivets, in my opinion, are the
people. He seemed to be describing a
famous black-and-white photograph ti-
tled Lunch Atop a Skyscraper. That
was one of the nicest things I saw there,
of all of New York City, it was those
old-timers. Building that building. How
did they do it, you know? Its amazing.
In Sandees opinion, there was some-
thing irreplaceable about the combina-
tion of sentient judgment and human
hands. Think of all the things that ro-
bots couldnt do: get their hands into
things; unpack a box; close a twist-tie.
Even in an automated future, he thought,
youd need people to apply the wisdom
gained through age and experience.
Youre still gonna have to have the peo-
ple here, he said. Somebodys still gotta
man that machine thats supposed to be
able to do everything. And tell us when
that machine doesnt want to work the
way its supposed to.
he Humans to Robots Laboratory,
T at Brown University, is on the
ground oor of a red brick building in
the center of Providence, Rhode Island.
It has the feel of an oversized garage,
lled with stained, lumpy sofas and scat-
tered gadgets and toys, along with the
odd takeout food carton. There, on a
recent afternoon, a robot with bulky red
arms set about pulling the petals from
an articial daisy. The robot, known
around the lab as Winnie, held the ower
in a pair of rubber-tipped pincers, then
retracted its other arm, rotated it slightly,
and pointed it down toward the daisy.
It emitted an idling-motor sound, as
though contemplating what to do next.
Then the hand jerked down toward the
ower, grabbed a petal, and ung it on
the table. It retracted again, with a me-
chanical reeeh-raaah! noise. The move-
ments evoked a prehistoric bird.
The lab was created by Stefanie
Tellex, a computer-science professor
who studies ways to create robots that
can work coperatively with humans.
Broadly, my research program is about
making robots that can work with peo-
ple on complex tasks, Tellex told me.
Were trying to make robots that can
robustly perceive and manipulate the
objects in their environment.
The word manipulate comes up
often among roboticists. Even in highly
automated factories, jobs that involve
packing boxes or putting tiny parts to-
gether are done by people. The most
agile robot, confronted with an object
that its never seen before,
can pick it up only ninety
per cent of the time, which
isnt good enough for in-
dustrial purposes.
Solving this problem
teaching a machine to han-
dle a random assortment of
irregularly shaped objects
would have an immense im-
pact; Tellex envisages ma-
chines that change diapers
and prepare dinner. In her class Topics
in Collaborative Robotics, one student
proposed to teach a robot to make a
salad. Its very dicult, and probably ower have more than one way to fall.
not very cost ecient, for a robot to
make a salad, Tellexs teaching assis-
tant, Josh Roy, said. We joked that we
could make a thirty-thousand-dollar
salad with a robot. Part of the chal-
lenge, whatever the task, is devising an
end eectorthe handlike tool at the
end of the robots armthat can grip
a variety of shapes and sizes and tex-
tures with dierent levels of pressure.
The more complex part, and the part
that preoccupies Tellex, involves teach-
ing the robot to perceive the dierent
objects so that it understands what its
supposed to do.
Winnie was programmed by one of
Tellexs students, Rebecca Pankow, a
rst-year Ph.D. candidate with bright
brown eyes and dimples. Its not very
rened, Pankow said, as Winnie con-
tinued pulling petals. This is more of
a proof of concept. She went on, I
chose this project because I thought it
was an interesting computer-vision prob-
lem. Its applicable to other things that
I work on outside this class. And I just
thought it was very cute.
An industrial robot will pick up
the same object, in the same location,
over and over. The challenge, and the
multibillion-dollar business opportu-
nity, was to teach a robot to function in
an environment that was constantly
changing. This was Winnies assign-
ment. Theres a saying in robotics: Any-
thing a human being can do after age
ve is very easy for a robot, one of Tell-
exs students had said to me earlier.
Learn to play chess, no problem. Learn
to walk, no way.
John Oberlin, another Ph.D. stu-
dent, who wore a long brown ponytail,
safety goggles, and sandals with wool
socks, bent his tall frame
over a computer on a side
table. The screen showed
what Winnie was seeing
through its hand-camera.
If I were going to try and
pick up this tape over and
overOberlin picked up
and dropped a roll of mask-
ing tapeit only exists
in one way, on the table,
he told me. So I can just
memorize what it looks like in one way,
and then all I have to do is search this
space, basically. But these petals on this
Sometimes they can be rotated a little
bit, sometimes they can droop, some-
times they can curve, so these petals are
deformable. And that makes them in-
herently harder to localize.
Pankow had retrotted an articial
ower with little magnets on its petals,
so that they could be reattached and
reused. The camera is currently tak-
ing a picture of the table, she said. And
then you put the ower there, and it
will take the picture again. And it will
say, Oh, look at the dierence between
the twoa ower has appeared.
Winnies arm moved in, clamped its
pincers around a petal, plucked it o,
and then threw it onto the table. It
made the reeeh-raaah! noise and then
went back to idling. The cycle contin-
ued until there was only one petal left.
It was sticking out at an awkward angle,
and Winnies arm hovered for a long
time above it. Pankow and Oberlin
watched nervously.
Winnie moved in, its arm quivering
slightly, and positioned its arm to the
outside of the ower in a way that looked
unlikely to succeed. The grippers opened,
trying but failing to close around the
petal. Then the arm pulled up again.
Reeeh-raaah!
Oberlin adjusted the ower. I bet it
comes down a little bit he said. This
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 73
time, Winnie managed to peel o the
nal petal.
Pankow and Oberlin spoke about
the adjustments that would have to be
made for the technology to be usable
in the real world. You can imagine this
ability to classify or examine plants or
other structures in terms of their parts,
in order to compose or localize each one
of those petalsthat has applications
in actual industry, Oberlin said. You
can imagine applying that modelling
technique to real plants.
Blueberries, Tellex said quietly, lean-
ing against the window. Thats my goal.
People arent going to pay us to take
petals o of daisies. But they will pay
us to pick blueberries. She looked down
at the table and the bare daisy stem.
Did it just pick all of these? In order?
This is awesome. This is not something
Ive ever seen a robot do. And thats
cool. And now weve gured some things
out, as a result of doing this.
Harvesting fruit and other produce,
which involves hours under the hot sun,
is the kind of job that Americans are
increasingly reluctant to do and that
often goes to low-paid immigrant labor.
Yet the implications extend beyond ag-
riculture. A robot that could eciently
pick blueberries could probably do a lot
of things that are currently the exclu-
sive province of human beings. Poten-
tially, it could advance on a frontier chal-
lenge of industrial roboticsnot only
picking a wallet out of a bin but riing
through it and pulling out a credit card.
I usually like to ask the question:
How can this help make society better?
Tellex said. What is something that
people do now that robots might do?
orporate executives want to know
C the answer to that question, but
they seldom ask it publicly. Automa-
tion is a topic that gets treated with
enormous diplomacy, both in Europe
and in the United States. The Dutch
supermarket chain Ahold Delhaize,
which owns the Stop & Shop and
Peapod grocery-store brands in the
U.S., hopes to have all its retail outlets
cleaned by robots within ve years. Al-
though the company was not eager to
publicize the details of the venture, the
images that spring to mind are part
Isaac Asimov and part Dr. Seuss
doors closing with a thud and the aisles
74 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
bursting to life, with metallic objects
scampering across the oor, brightly
colored squeegees and sponges drop-
ping from the ceiling, followed by an
explosion of soapsuds and baby car-
rots. But the goal wasnt to replace
human workers, a company spokesper-
son insisted. With store-cleaning ro-
bots, our associates in our stores will
have more time for customers.
Such initiatives arent limited to pri-
vate businesses; neither are the sensitiv-
ities. In southern Denmark, the regional
government hired a chief robotics ocer,
Poul Martin Mller, to help integrate
more robots into the public sector, largely
as a money-saving measure. He decided
that the Danish hospital system, which
was under pressure to reduce costs, could
benet from robotic orderlies. There
were few medical-oriented robots on
the market, though, so Mller and his
team took small, mobile robots with
movable arms, designed for use in ware-
houses, and refashioned them, so that
they could carry supplies to doctors and
nurses. The machines worked well, scut-
tling through surgery wings and psych
wards like helpful crabs, never com-
plaining or taking cigarette breaks. But
Mller wasnt prepared for the reaction
of the hospital sta, who recognized
their mechanical colleagues as poten-
tial replacements, and tried to sabotage
them. Fecal matter and urine were left
in charging stations.
Since then, Mller has evangelized
about change management, and the
need to handle people carefully as new
technology is introduced. As a tax-
payer, here we pay thirty-three, thirty-
four dollars an hour for unskilled work,
like orderlies, he told me. Robots cost,
at most, around ninety-ve cents an
hour. If you do the math, you can have
thirty-ve robots for one human. So
you might as well face reality and face
facts. That means you have a bunch of
orderlies who need jobs. By way of re-
dress, he proposes using the robot-
derived savings, at least initially, to re-
train the displaced humans for more
sophisticated jobs that the robots cant
(yet) do.
In the United States, where auto-
mation in the workplace is no less po-
litically fraught, corporate executives
are reluctant to be quoted on the sub-
ject; when they are, their usual line is
that robots arent replacing humans but
simply helping to make their jobs less
taxing. This is not entirely a misrepre-
sentation. When I asked Dave Stinson
and his colleagues at Steelcase about
how automation had aected the as-
sembly line, they said, for the most part,
that it had made things easier. The fac-
tory was cleaner, less noisy, more pro-
ductive. When something went wrong
with the assembly, they could diagnose
the problem swiftly, by consulting the
data. Most workers welcomed being
rotated through dierent positions,
rather than doing the same thing for
years at a time.
The work placed less stress on their
bodies, too. At one time, twenty-ve
hundred steel tabletops came o the
assembly line each day, requiring two
men to sweat and strain to get each
one into the right place; now a robotic
arm with grippers moved the tops.
Workersthe ones who had survived
the economic downturns, oshoring,
and technological changeshad an
easier time than ever before. In the old
days, Stinson said, It was, How much
longer am I going to be able to do this?
Thats kind of a question that you would
always askhow much longer can I
hold up doing this, physically just hold-
ing up? Ergonomically, the dierence
today is huge. Huge. Now he could
work longer without burning out, and
the work was easier. Who could com-
plain about that?
utomation has also increased the
A amount of manufacturing in the
United States, by making it more
ecient. The most immediate way that
it makes manufacturing more ecient,
of course, is by requiring fewer work-
ers. Still, when manufacturing that has
been sent overseas comes back, it brings
some jobs back, too, even if they are
not the same complement of jobs, and
not in their old numbers. Last year,
for the rst time in decades, the num-
ber of Americans employed in manu-
facturing increasedmore jobs re-
turned or were created than leftand
automation-enabled reshoring is a
big reason for that.
In a hundred-and-twenty-ve-
thousand-square-foot factory in the
town of Hateld, Pennsylvania, forty-
ve minutes north of Philadelphia,
dozens of giant, automated industrial
presses loom over a cement landscape.
They belong to the Rodon Group, one
of the largest family-owned injection-
molding companies in the country.
Founded in 1956, the company makes
millions of high-end plastic parts each
year: containers for cosmetics, caps,
pushpin heads, bottle tops.
One of Rodons subsidiaries was a
construction toy companycompa-
rable to Lego and Fischertechnik
called KNex. The KNex line had been
invented by the son of the Rodon
Groups founder, and, in the late nine-
teen-nineties and early two-thousands,
it was run by a former Hasbro execu-
tive. Hasbro, like most of the Ameri-
can toy industry, had moved its pro-
duction to China, and the executive
decided to do the same thing with
KNex. There were trade-os with out- I cant wait to introduce you to all the people I used to be friends
sourcing: quality control was less re- with, before I started spending all my time with you.
liable, and it was harder to respond
nimbly to changing customer demands
in the trend-driven toy business. But

the savings were dramatic; on average,
it cost less than half as much to make enormous blocks of stainless steel, Wilsons three years at the company,
a product in China as it did in the precision-fabricated in an adjacent tool twenty-four new automated presses
United States. shop to create the shape of the desired have been introduced. There was a time
Michael Araten, the current C.E.O. part. (The molds used to be hand- when a plant worker was dedicated to
of KNex Brands and the grandson-in- fashioned by tool-and-die-makers, who each press, shovelling in plastic poly-
law of Rodons founder, told me that were considered artisans; now a series mers, pulling the cranks and pushing
business had been relatively stable until of programmable robots do most of the buttons, and scooping out the
the nancial crisis arrived, and sales the job.) Automated arms lift the parts nished products and loading them
plunged. Rodon laid o around forty up to cool, before depositing them in onto trucks. Now, Wilson explained,
people, about a third of its workforce. boxes. The completed parts are bright one operator manages between eight
Araten said that when business picked orange, purple, and red, and resemble and ten presses, which are overseen by
up the discussion quickly turned to dime-store candies. Once the boxes are digital systems. As at Steelcase, the ro-
how the company could rehire those full, human workers replace them, and bots have reduced accidents. When I
people. One obvious solution presented wheel the full ones away to be shipped asked if there were any jobs in the plant
itself: KNex could bring its manufac- out to their customers. that automated machines couldnt do,
turing back to the United States so A twenty-ve-year-old automation Wilson thought for a moment and said,
long as it could remain price-competitive tech named John Wilson had been Cleaning up the oor after these ma-
with the China-sourced toy compa- hired to help integrate robotics into chines, and machine-tending.
nies. KNex managers concluded that the plant as it moved toward increas- By installing robots and controlling
reshoring was feasible, but they would ing automation. Wilson is pale and its payroll and other costs, the com-
have to automate as much of the pro- thin, with glasses and a dark beard; he pany has been able to make ninety per
cess as possible. speaks in a low monotone, and gives cent of its parts and products in the
On a recent visit, the plants man- the sense of someone who is more com- United Statesa move that Araten
ufacturing oor was lled with the fortable interacting with screens than likes to describe as patriotic capital-
sound of molding presses clamping with people. The child of two accoun- ism. Rodon and KNex use their made-
down with as much as four hundred tants, Wilson completed a mechanical- in-the-U.S.A. credentials in their mar-
tons of pressure. No people were visi- engineering degree at Philadelphia Uni- keting. President Obama visited the
ble. Most of the presses work twenty- versity in 2014, and said that he had Hateld plant in 2012; Hillary Clin-
four hours a day, drawing plastic resin sought out a manufacturing job where ton stopped by in 2016. The choice of
into a hopper, heating it to six hun- he could work directly with dierent how you spend your money really mat-
dred degrees Fahrenheit, and then blast- types of automated machines. The ters, Araten said. If you buy stu from
ing the liquid into molds, which are Rodon Group had obliged. During an American farmer or manufacturer,
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 75
youre helping an American family.
Sitting in a company conference room
that was lined with shelves displaying
plastic toys and framed vintage produc-
tion orders from the nineteen-fties,
Araten said, I talk to C.E.O.s all the
time who say, Its not my job to worry
about the rest of the country. And I say,
Well, whose job is it? Youve got to do
what you can in the United States to
keep the United States strong. He went
on, If you think there is a benet to
having a stable citizenry that has good-
paying jobs, that can support a family,
you need to be willing to make some
trade-os there. Our responsibility
is, yes, to our shareholders but also to
our employees, and to our community.
We made a decisionwe are willing to
make less of a prot in order to keep
jobs here.
Araten acknowledged that, relative
to sales, the Hateld factory employed
fewer people than it had done in the
past. (Rodons revenue has grown by
an average of fteen per cent over each
of the past ve years, while its stang
has increased much more modestly.)
But the jobs that they do have and will
have, he said, will be higher skilled and
better paying. He argued that the gov-
ernment could encourage similar moves
by other companies, through tax pol-
icy and major investments in educa-
tion, while also preparing for the com-
ing technological changes. Still, even
Araten isnt immune from the call of
high nance: last year, he and the rest
of the family decided to sell KNex to
a Chinese-French private-equity rm,
Cathay Capital. It is unclear whether
his new partners will be aligned, over
the long term, with his people-before-
prot philosophy.
The winds are changing, Araten
said. I think part of the reason popu-
lism is rising around the world is that
the gap is getting too big. Having so
much inequality creates instability in a
country. Maybe twenty years ago, we
still had too many poor people, but they
believed that they had a shot. I believe
some of that is being sucked away.
anufacturing jobs now account
M for less than ten per cent of the
American workforce. As plants have
closed, displaced employees have
sought work in fast-food restaurants
76 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
GOOGLING OURSELVES
These strangers with my name,
busy being kidnapped, embezzled,
honored and dying at a frightening rate.
The cross-dressing exterminator convicted of rape
in Kensington, Ohio, sentenced
to 72 years without bail, the policeman killed
stopping a burglary in Thermopolis, WYcould they
have imagined a Florida painter with their name
communicating with extraterrestrials through sculptures
made out of railroad tracks, or being written about
in a poem by another member of our redundant family
for a reason none of us can explain?
Sometimes I fear Im imaginary, dont really exist.
Catch myself wondering why I only seem to like myself
when, say, Im wearing a teachers face
because I see myself only through others eyes?
In that case, who am I really? Alone at night,
watching a ballgame, Im always surprised when
I speak to myself in the third person, wondering why
this man cares so much about something he plays no part in.
or in big-box retail stores, where the a bright spot. Even if fewer people are
pay and the benets are substantially required to sta a Target or a Sams
less attractive. And, increasingly, even Club outlet, the movement of products
those jobs are fading away. Storefront requires a network of warehouses to
retail is fast losing ground to the on- store and ship goods. Amazonthe
line marketplace. McDonalds is in- worlds largest online retailercur-
troducing digital ordering kiosks that rently has more than ninety thousand
are expected to replace human cashiers employees at its U.S. distribution cen-
at fty-ve hundred restaurants by the ters, and plans to hire tens of thousands
end of 2018. Meanwhile, companies more. Workers still do the picking in
like Uber and Google are investing a warehouse, using their dexterous
heavily in autonomous-driving tech- ngers and discerning brains to take
nology, betting that such vehicles will soap and coee and tubes of toothpaste
reshape transportation. In August, 2016, and millions of other products o the
Uber purchased Otto, a startup based shelves and put them into boxes to
in San Francisco that sells technol- fulll the online shopping orders that
ogy designed to automate long-haul make up an increasing portion of con-
trucking. There are nearly two million sumers buying patterns.
long-distance truck drivers in the But the same factors that make
United States, most of whom are male warehouses a draw for labor have made
and lack a college degree; paying for them a tempting target for automa-
them accounts for a third of the costs tion. In 2012, Amazon spent almost
in the seven-hundred-million-dollar eight hundred million dollars to buy
trucking industry. Construction jobs, a robotics company called Kiva, which
too, are threatened by automation; a makes robots that can zoom around a
New York-based rm has introduced factory oor and move tall stacks of
a laser-guided system that can lay eight shelves of up to seven hundred and
hundred to twelve hundred bricks a fty pounds in weight. A Deutsche
day, more than twice as many as an av-
erage mason.
Bank research report estimated that
Amazon could save twenty-two mil-
For low-skilled workers, warehouse lion dollars a year by introducing the
jobs have seemed to be something of Kiva machines in a single warehouse;
 automated system, Gahagan notes,
produces more eciencies than are
Its easier to wonder why Nietzsche sought obvious at rst glance. Because it can
his souls sympathy, a truth he knew hed despise, store more products in a smaller space,
probably feared he wouldnt survive. To imagine him up late, companies could have more compact
seeking his ever-evolving, unidentifiable self, warehouses closer to their retail out-
a past more inhabitable and less unforgiving, lets, requiring less trucking. The ro-
anxious to know why someone with his name would say, bots dont need light to operate, so
Poets lie too much . . . who among us has not adulterated his wine? the warehouse could use, Gahagan
estimated, thirty-ve per cent less
Late at night the Web is a dangerous swamp energy than a conventional one, while
of voyeuristic self-scrutiny and addictive impersonation, reducing labor costs by eighty per
the ego testifying for and against itself, seeking evidence cent. Many warehouse operators run
of triumph and complicity, sanction without malice, their businesses based on labor hours,
pretext or God. Who is this man obsessively looking up in order to minimize overtime pay,
all his persona narrators, feeling like a hodgepodge, among other things. But an automated
trapped somewhere between Heaven and earth, system could run twenty-four hours
spitting against the wind? Is it because he knows a day. A typical system costs around
hes getting closer to the end, will soon vanish fty million dollars to install, Gaha-
and become nothing? Is this why hes studying gan saidnot an insignicant invest-
everyone who answers to his name, because ment. But, he maintained, it would
one may have invented time or sympathy or God pay for itself, on average, in four and
and will love him, even momentarily, for who he is? a half years.
We walked past a Safety Is Our
Philip Schultz First Priority sign on the wall, an ar-
tifact from a time when there might
have been frequent worker injuries in
the savings company-wide could reach storage cage. A eet of little green ro- such a place, and clambered up a set
into the billions. With such a power- bots that look like race cars in a Pixar of steel stairs. All around us, machines
ful incentive, Amazon is on a quest to lm come to life and zoom inside the were moving, gracefully and tirelessly
acquire or develop systems that can cage on dedicated tracks, emitting high- executing their tasks.
replace human pickers. When, in June, pitched whirring sounds. They collect You start to look at all the costs
it announced plans to buy the Whole the cases of products and stash them that you can avoid, he told me. Its
Foods supermarket chain, speculation on shelves until they are needed. Then phenomenal. So, as soon as one com-
quickly spread that the company in- an algorithm directs the little car-bots pany does this, it makes it more com-
tended to automate the grocers food- to go back in and bring the desired petitive. That instantly puts pressure
distribution centers as well as its stores. products out. on competitors to follow suit. You
Simply automating a legacy ware- This absolutely reinvents the ware- cant just sit there being that in-
house, however, is a halfway measure, house, Chris Gahagan, Symbotics ecient, Gahagan went on. Your as-
as a visit to Symbotic makes clear. A C.E.O., said as he showed me around. sortment in your store is not as good,
privately held company based in an in- He is a muscular fellow with dirty- youre paying more for labor, more for
dustrial park outside Boston, it sells blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, trucking. If a new startup came along
fully automated warehouse systems to and looks as if he could have had an in retail, it would start with this. He
large retail chains, and the new ware- alternate career leading tourists on spe- gestured around at the cavernous,
houses resemble the old ones about as lunking trips through Belize. Now you chilly space.
much as a Tesla resembles a Model T. can build an even smaller warehouse, The most important human job at a
The companys twenty-thousand-square- or carry more skus, or serve more stores Symbotic warehouse is that of the sys-
foot test center is a giant cube of in- out of the same warehouse. It gives you tem operator, which is akin to a job in
terlocking green, yellow, and white steel huge exibility. ight operations, where you sit all day
shelving, tracks, and cages that extend Gahagan was recruited in 2015 by behind a bank of screens and make sure
from the oor almost to the ceiling. Symbotics owner, Richard B. Cohen, that everythings working right. A cou-
There are no aisles for lifts to pass the press-shy billionaire owner of the ple of human workers were needed
through, and no stations for human C&S grocery wholesaler. Cohen had for nowto help unload and load the
product pickers. There is no space in- wanted a system that would make his trucks as they came and went with the
side the matrix for people at all. grocery warehouses more ecient; inventory, and four or so mechanics were
Robotic arms unpack pallets of to- then he realized that he could make kept on sta to service the bots when
mato sauce, salsa, toilet paper, and soda, a business of selling it to other retail- they needed it (because shit happens).
and place them on a blue conveyor belt, ers. Symbotic says it now has more In all, the average system requires eight
where they are carried deep into the orders than it can swiftly fulll. The or nine people per shift, a fraction of
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 77
what a traditional warehouse requires.
Most jobs in warehouses are unde-
sirable and hard to ll, Gahagan as-
sured me. A typical worker might lift
thousands of pounds of goods each
day and walk the equivalent of a mar-
athon, ve or six days a week. It could
be freezing in the winter, and swelter-
ing during the summer months. Their
turnover is huge, he said. With the
robotic version, one higher-skilled per-
son sits behind a console and types in
commands, and is paid almost twice
as much per hour as a manual laborer
would be.
Gahagan was reluctant to talk about
Symbotics customers, who arent keen
to draw attention to their interest in
nearly human-free warehouse sys-
tems. There is some sensitivity, given
our . . . political situation, he said. Its
just a reality of the times that we live
in. But the Wall Street Journal has re-
ported that Target is trying a Symbotic
warehouse and that Walmart has in-
stalled several. Gahagan allowed that
what he called the red cola giant
Coca-Colais using two Symbotic
distribution centers. (It was tricky with
the unions, but theyve made it work.)
Now, he said, Cokes main competitor,
the blue onePepsiwanted to try
the system.
If someone can start a warehouse
with automation and sell for less, ev-
eryone else has to follow, Gahagan said.
Consumers buy on price, so the cost
on the supply chain matters. Walmart,
it made a very ecient supply chain and
thats why it was able to oer the low-
est prices in its stores, so everyone else
had to compete. And now youre see-
ing that happen with automation.
He observed that technological in-
novation has been happening in one
way or another for a hundred years.
Tractors replaced manual plows, but
we were now able to produce much
more food, he said; A.T.M.s replaced
tellers, but banks still employ hundreds
of thousands of people. Imagine plac-
ing a phone call when you had to have
someone place a wire into a socket for
you, he said. Being on a switchboard pointed out that other countries were
those were good jobs. Every time tech-
nology has evolved, yes, individual peo-
ple are impacted. . . . But the standard
of living has gone up. Id rather be in
the world were in today than a world
without computers, without cell phones,
a world without elevators.
We walked onto a platform where
we could see a track on which the mo-
bile robots were lined up, waiting to be
called into action. Occasionally, one of
them would whirr its motor and blast
o, like a little rocket. Gahagan looked
down on his robot army with aection
and awe. Depending on whos in the
White House next, you get to the
fteen-dollars-an-hour labor or twenty
dollars an hour? Gahagan said. Im
voting for a thirty-dollar-an-hour min-
imum wage. Thatd be fantastic mar-
keting for us.
Ifromfwastheitsa fully automated warehouse
structurally dierent entity
precursors, what about the
fully automated factory? Gahagan had
embracing industrial robotics more
aggressively than the United States
was. I saw the scale of this during a
recent trip to China. One steamy af-
ternoon, I boarded a bus in down-
town Shanghai and headed south
along the Huangpu River, far from
the citys noodle shops and glittering
luxury fashion emporiums. About half
an hour later, I reached a vast, low
building, where hundreds of bicycles
were parked in a covered lot. Inside,
I was greeted by Gerry Wong, the
C.E.O. of Cambridge Industries
Group, which manufactures telecom-
munications equipmentmore than
three million items a monthfor com-
panies such as Huawei, Nokia, and
Alcatel-Lucent. Wong grew up in Bei-
jing, studied electrical engineering at
M.I.T., and worked at Bell Labs for
fteen years. He started C.I.G. in 2005,
and says that the company produces
between two and three million prod-
ucts each month. He has the air of an
excitable gnome, with a mop of black
hair, thick seventies-style eyeglasses,
and a wicked laugh.
Wong sat with his back to a wall of
dozens of screens, which depicted var-
ious production metrics and live video
of the manufacturing oor, where
workersand an increasing number
of robotswere fabricating circuit
boards. (I was there on a trip with a
nonprot called the China-U.S. Ex-
change Foundation.) He quickly
demonstrated the lack of sentimental-
ity with which many businesspeople
in China approach the subject of au-
tomation. C.I.G. is trying to replace
as many human workers with robots
as possible, he explained. Three or so
years ago, the company had thirty-ve
hundred people at work in the factory.
Two years ago, it was twenty-ve hun-
dred. Today, it is eighteen hundred.
Over the same period, he said proudly,
the companys output had doubled.
Chinas labor costs are increasing,
or doubling, every few years, Wong
explained. We are actually overcom-
ing the diculty by increasing our
eciency, through automation. For
Chinese businesses, Wong said, lean
manufacturing must include industrial
automation, and they couldnt make it
happen fast enough.
Much of Chinas economic power
during the past two decades came from
its position as the manufacturing en-
gine of the world, but in the past sev-
eral years its growth has started to slow.
China was never a particularly conve-
nient place for Western companies to
have their sneakers and T-shirts and
widgets made; the main allure was
cheap labor. With Chinese wages in-
creasing sharply every year, though,
manufacturing there has
become less attractive, and
the Chinese government
is devoting enormous re-
sources to making the coun-
try the automation capital
of the world.
As we put on gowns,
hairnets, and cloth shoe
covers in preparation for
entering the clean manu-
facturing area, Wong elab-
orated on Chinas need for swift auto-
mation. There was a labor shortage, he
said, exacerbated by the longstanding
one-child policy. And, as the popula-
tion has become wealthier and the cost
of living higher, fewer people were will-
ing to do manufacturing work.
We are pushing all industries to go
to all automation, Wong said. And the
employees seemed compliant. Proba-
bly they dont care very much, not like
back in the industrial revolution, in
Europe, where they would go and de-
stroy machines. That was the old days.
They leave, anyway, Rose Hu, a
brisk, blunt woman who works as
C.I.G.s senior vice-president of mar-
keting, said. Every Chinese New Year,
almost eighty per cent of the people,
they will not come back. You have to
have new.
We passed through a pressurized
air lock that blasted away whatever
dust or lint we had on our persons,
and entered the clean part of the plant.
Rows of orderly white machines,
tended by workers wearing what looked
like chef s hats, were moving circuit
boards through the assembly line. Ro-
botic arms, behind windows, were
doing most of the work, while the mor-
tals did tasks that required ne motor
skills, like plugging tiny components
into place. Every now and then, a cute
little robotic trolley came ambling
down an aisle, playing Mozart to alert
the humans that it was approaching.
(Until recently, most industrial robots
were separated from human workers
by steel cages, to protect the workers
from injury. Now robots that can
work alongside humans without harm-
ing them have come into use.) Two
workers hovered at a workstation and
jammed connectors into holes in a
line of circuit boards before sending
them into a glassed-in chamber, where
robotic arms soldered the
pieces together.
There were thirteen
people doing this. Now we
have only one or two, Hu
said, gesturing at the two
workers, one man and one
woman, both young adults.
Before, we used people to
solder. We used to have
sixty-three people to n-
ish one thing, and as of
last year we need only sixteen people.
The circuit boards continued down
an automated conveyor belt. Other
robots placed stickers on boxes, be-
fore a group of humans moved in to
place the circuit boards in the boxes,
along with packing materials. Clos-
ing the boxthis is for some reason
hard to automate, Hu said, shaking
her head.
Each time I asked about what hap-
pened to the displaced workers, Hu
and Wong waved away the question,
amused at the predictable direction of
my inquiries. Hu insisted that factory
workers would simply nd another place
in the economy, such as the service sec-
tor. We already went through several
industrial revolutionsand we still have
a job! she said. I think its people who
havent lived through the industrial rev-
olution who dont understand this. The
world changes. You constantly have to
improve yourself to keep up.
Later, back in the room with the
surveillance monitors, Wong gave me
a slide show on the history of indus-
trial revolutions. The rst phase began
around 1800, in Wongs rendering, when
the steam engine came into use, and
was based in Britain, France, and Ger-
many. The second phase, in 1900, saw
the advent of electricity, and was cen-
tered in the U.S., the U.K., and Ger-
many. The third was the information-
technology revolution, beginning in
2000 and concentrated largely in the
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 79
U.S., Germany, Japan, and Korea.
Wongs point was that China intended
to be at the forefront of the fourth
phase, which would center on integrat-
ing robotics and articial intelligence.
Finally, he put up a slide that said The
future: Dark Factory.
You dont need workers, you turn
o the lights, Wong explained, chuck-
ling. Only when an American jour-
nalist comes in we turn on the light.
tefanie Tellex, the roboticist at
Sservative
Brown University, grew up in a con-
Catholic family in a suburb
of Rochester that abuts Lake Ontario,
where, she says, everyones got a house
and a yard, and theres no crime. Her
father was an accountant; her mother
taught second grade in downtown
Rochester. Tellex became interested in
computers as a child. Her father gave
her an old DOS 486 when she was in
grade school; her aunt, a programmer,
supplied books of simple coding exer-
cises. Tellex was admitted to M.I.T.
and planned to pursue a liberal-arts
degree, but her mother told her that
liberal-arts graduates didnt make any
money. (One of the best pieces of ad-
vice Ive ever gotten.) She completed
her computer-science Ph.D. there in
2010. She said that The Jetsons, the
sixties-era animated TV series, helped
spark her interest in robots.
When I think of A.I., thats what
I think of, the robot, she said. Theres
a scene where theyre drinking smooth-
ies together, the mom and the robot,
who has a relationship with the fam-
ily, but on the show shes a servant. And
she can do everything you can do.
After Winnie completed its petal-
plucking tasks in Tellexs lab, we sat
down in her oce. She told me that
she had never thought about the po-
litical implications of her eld until
the tense months leading up to the
2016 Presidential election. Her parents
were Trump voters, and she found her-
self disagreeing with them about what
the causes of societys ills were, and
what the best solutions might be. She
was alarmed by the anti-immigrant
sentiment emanating from Trumps
rallies, especially having spent her adult
life surrounded by researchers from all
over the world. Economic inequality
was a driving theme of the election,
80 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
and Tellex began to see that automa-
tion was a contributing factor. The
economy was generating wealth, but
almost all of it seemed to be going to
the wealthy. The ocial unemploy-
ment rate has dropped to 4.2 per cent
in the United Statesits lowest level
in ten yearsand the economy is ex-
panding, but wages for most workers
have scarcely budged.
In 2015, the Princeton economists
Anne Case and Angus Deaton iden-
tied a surprising data pattern that
reects these economic fault lines, nd-
ing that mortality rates for middle-aged
white non-Hispanic Americans with
only a high-school diploma have been
increasing since the late nineteen-
nineties. They attribute this trend to
deaths of despair tied to the long-
term loss of economic opportunity,
particularly blue-collar jobs, and to
possibly related factors such as opioid
abuse. Deaton listed globalization, im-
migration, and technological change
as likely factors behind the decline of
middle-income workers and the re-
lated rise in inequality, but noted that,
in the developed world, stagnant wages
and an associated increase in death
rates were unique to the United States.
The political explanation is the one
that seems to make most sense, he
told me. What does he worry about if
these trends continue? How about
pitchforks? Deaton said, laughing
awkwardly. I mean, I dont think this midst of the nancial crisis, Steelcase
is stable politically. The Trump thing
is probably just the beginning.
Tellex has been conducting her own
research into the causes of income
inequality and, with her friends, has
amassed a reading list of academic stud-
ies and news articles. She is drawn to
the idea of a universal basic income, in
which citizens would receive enough
money from the government to cover
living expenses. Ultimately, she knows,
blue-collar workers are not the only
ones who may need such economic as-
sistance. The disruption spurred by au-
tomation is not anticipated to be lim-
ited to low-skilled work; signicant
encroachments are expected in the
white-collar sector as well, with experts
predicting that professionals such as
accountants, doctors, lawyers, archi-
tects, teachers, and journalists will all
compete with increasingly capable com-
puters in the future.
There were ways, Tellex believed, to
mitigate the eects of rising inequal-
ity without vilifying immigrants or
blaming technology. Im one of the
few people among my friends who reg-
ularly talks to Trump voters, she said.
Theres enough money for everyone,
I keep telling themthere is. Its just
not in your pocket, its in the one per
cents pocket. If only we had the right
progressive tax system, this wouldnt
be such a problem. As a roboticist, I
feel a responsibility to communicate
this to people.
or twenty years, Steelcases Corpo-
F rate Development Center was
housed in a futuristic pyramid-shaped
building, which cost more than a hun-
dred million dollars to build. It became
a landmark of the Grand Rapids area;
employees returning home from busi-
ness trips would proudly make note of
it as their ights descended into the
Gerald R. Ford Airport. In 2009, in the
moved out of the building. It sat va-
cant until 2016, when a company called
Switch moved in. Switch is a third-
party data center, and plans to house
giant servers there for companies like
Disney and eBay.
Dave Stinson, at Steelcase, told me
that he often became emotional when
he saw the building, and was reminded
of what it represented. Its especially
cool at night, when the lights are on,
he said, as a loud beeping forklift sound
echoed in the background. Im get-
ting sentimental. Its a monument for
our city. There was talk that they were
going to tear it down. That would have
been a huge loss.
After decades on the factory oor,
hes seen enough workers laid o to
know something about losses. Bill
Sandee, his colleague, tries to put those
losses in perspective. It was rough to
see some of them leave, he told me,
referring to the waves of laid-o col-
leagues. Some of them, their jobs were
being eliminated because they just didnt
have enough work. And the company
has to do something to survive. But its
hard not to take it personally when
youre losing your job. You have to go
home and tell your wife and kids, Im
out of work. I remember one engineer
saying, I wont be seeing you anymore,
Bill, I just got RIFd. It didnt feel very
good. He paused. Lets face it, if you
love somebody, you care about em.
So many things in our lives are out of
our control.
That didnt feel very good, either.
Stinson described the time, months
before the Presidential election, when
a friend asked him which candidate
he was supporting, and he said, Im
not voting for another Bush, and Im
not voting for another Clinton. Pe-
riod. The night before the election,
he and his wife attended a Trump rally
in Grand Rapids, in the heart of a
state that Hillary Clinton had expected Folks, if thats not government interference I dont know what is.
to win comfortably. More than four
thousand people lined up for blocks
to hear Trump at a downtown con-
vention center. Stinson said he decided
that night to vote for the Republican dealing with the drama of their per- He gazed out at the smoothly func-
ticket. The way I voted was based on sonal livesthere were illnesses and tioning factory oor, the rows of ma-
the idea that were not losing jobs any- feuds and car accidents. No longer. The chines diving and pecking in front of
more, were not doing the NAFTA crews are thin; the pressure is less. The their human minders, performing a
thing, he said. I hope he fullls what youngest of his three sons, aged thirty, kind of dance. Even if the economy
he was trying to do when he was cam- works in a dierent department at the stayed strong and demand remained
paigning and its not going to be all Steelcase plant. He had dropped out high the head count was expected to
broken promises. of college, hit hard by his grandfathers decline through attrition, year after
He was accustomed to politicians death at sixty-ve, and Stinson said he year. Its got all the technology that
disappointing him. Robots hadnt yet. had encouraged him to go back to you could possibly think of, Stinson
Stinson used to spend his days remind- school or go into plastics. Still, he said, told me, when he showed me the vi-
ing workers of what they were sup- Hes happy here. sion table. Until next week, when we
posed to be doing, or trying to gure Stinson says he is, too. He explained nd something else that we could
out how faulty parts had sneaked into that his lines productivity had shot way change to make it better. Automation
the system. He used to jump in and upfrom a hundred and fty desk legs was bringing greater and greater
demonstrate precisely how a screw was a day a year ago to an average of eight eciency, even though, at a certain
supposed to go in, or whether the hundred a day, and growingwhich point, the logic of increasing eciency
torque was correct. Now none of that made him feel good. Thats a lot of would catch up with him, and he
was necessary. Automated machines butts in a lot of seats, he said. When wouldnt be around any longer to wit-
were driving everything. As opposed I asked how many new workers Steel- ness it. One day, the factory might go
to having to train, train, train, train, case had hired to accommodate the in- dark. In the meantime, he was enjoy-
train, making sure youre getting the crease in production, he said that work- ing the advantages of work that in-
muscle memory right, he said. It was ers were mainly being moved between volved less work.
hard, it was stinky, it was I gotta check production lines, to replace workers There were times when I thought
everything. who had retired. The company was I could do something else besides this,
Back when the factory oor was about to install two more automated you know? he said. I really like the
thick with workers, they used to bicker, workstations, though, to accommo- job a lot better than it was. Now I dont
and Stinson says he was constantly date this and future growth. feel overwhelmed anymore.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 81
 FICTION

82 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRUCE JACKSON

 ou hop into a car, race o in no
Y particular direction, and, blam,
hit a power pole. Then its o
to jail. I remember a monstrous tangle
of arms and legs and sts, with me at
the bottom, gouging at eyes and doing
my utmost to mangle throats, but I ar-
rived at the facility without a scratch
or a bruise. I must have been easy to
subdue. The following Monday, I pled
guilty to disturbing the peace and ma-
licious mischief, reduced from felony
vehicular theft and resisting arrest be-
causewell, because all this occurs on
another planet, the planet of Thanks-
giving, 1967. I was eighteen and hadnt
been in too much trouble. I was sen-
tenced to forty-one days.
This was a county lockup, with its
ground level devoted to the intake area
and the oces and so on and, above
that, two levels for inmates. They put
me on the lower tier, among the row-
dies and thugs. Down here, the dep-
uty promised me, if you sleep late,
youll get your breakfast swiped. The
air smelled like disinfectant and some-
thing else that was meant to be killed
by disinfectant. The cells stayed open,
and we were free to go in and out and
congregate in the central area or stroll
on the catwalk that girded the whole
tier. This resulted in a lot of wander-
ing around by as many as twenty men
in denim pants and blue work shirts
and rubber-soled canvas moccasins, a
lot of pacing and stopping, and lean-
ing and sitting, and getting up and pac-
ing again. Most of us would have t in
perfectly in a psych ward. Many of us
had already been there. I certainly had.
My cellmate was an older guy, late
forties, with a bald head and a bowling-
ball paunch, awaiting nal disposition
and sentencing. When I asked him
sentencing for what, he told me, Some-
thing juicy. My second night there I
overheard him talking to Donald
Dundun, a boy about my age who had
a habit of wandering the catwalk after
lights-out, climbing on the bars and
propping himself in cell doorways,
stretching out his arms and legs,
spread-eagling himself against the
jambs and suspending himself in the
air that way, and striking up idiotic
conversations.
My attorney already made the deal,
I heard my cellmate tell Dundun. Im
waiting for a date to go to court and
plead out to twenty-ve years. Ill get
released the day I start drawing my So-
cial Security.
If you dont mind me asking,
Dundun said, what are you down for?
A misunderstanding with the wife.
Ho ho! Maybe you can talk to
mine! Dundun danced away, apelike,
and left us alone. Hed been caught
leaving a third-story apartment by the
window. He wanted to stay in shape
for future high-elevation work.
The sounds of the cell block faded,
the last stray remarks, the thumping and
coughing, and the bunkmate below me
said, Youre the one they call Dink, right?
I have another name, I said. I lay
in the top bunk, talking to the metal
wall inches from my lips.
Not in here you dont.
Whats yours?
Strangler Bob.
After a while, I peeked over the
bunks edge and studied the face be-
low me, now only a black oval, like a
fencers mask, and, because I stared too
long in the dark, the face began to boil
and writhe.
The lower tiers standout resident
was a young giant with a blond pom-
padour hairdo and an urchins face
apple cheeks, fat forehead, happy blue
eyes. The jailers called him Michael,
but he referred to himself as Jocko, and
the other prisoners did, too. Jocko hus-
tled around all day looking for some-
body to listen to his opinions or, even
better, arm-wrestle him. He said hed
been in county jails here and there a
total of eighteen times, never for shorter
than thirty days. He was not yet twenty-
one. This time hed been arrested for
giving a man some well-deserved pun-
ishment in the dining area of the How-
ard Johnsons, which he described as
the wrong kind of restaurant for that.
Jocko knew all the deputies and sta
around the jailhouse. He whispered to
me that the sheri s wife, who worked
downstairs, in the administrative oce,
had many times propositioned him. He
lacked any ambition or strategy for
crowning himself king of the cell block,
but he was nevertheless a star, and the
lesser lights constellated around him.
Zit-suckers, he called them.
My rst morning on the tier I did
sleep through breakfast, and somebody
did steal mine. After that I had no trou-
ble rousing myself for the rst meal,
because, other than the arrival of food,
we had nothing in our lives to look
forward to, and the hunger we felt in
that place was more ferocious than any
infant s. Cornakes for breakfast.
Lunch: baloney on white. For dinner,
one of the canned creations of Chef
Boyardee, or, on lucky days, Dinty
Moore. The most wonderful meals Ive
ever tasted.
fter lunch most days, Jocko orga-
A nized a poker game that worked
as follows: hands of ve-card draw
would be dealt out and the draw ac-
complished, and the player with the
highest hand got the privilege of slug-
ging each of the others in the meat of
his shoulder with such a smack it
echoed around the metal environment.
Only half a dozen prisoners took part.
The rest of us could see that damage
was being done. I kept to the farthest
margins. I stood ve-seven and weighed
a hundred and twenty. As previously
acknowledged, my nickname seemed
to be Dinknot my choice.
One guy I never heard addressed by
any name. He had no friends, never said
Hi or Whats happening? He spent
hours shuing pigeon-toed around the
catwalk, his skinny frame clenched and
twisted by inner tension, throwing
punches at the level of his waist, as if
pummelling an invisible child, while
whispering, You sonofabitch fuckin pig,
you fuckin cop, punctuating his speeches
with explosive sound eects: Shhsspr-
gagahaBLAMMO! He had signal-ag
ears, a chinless chin, a scrunched fore-
head, his whole little face rushing out
onto a really big nose, a regular beaka
face like a Mardi Gras mask. After his
episodes he sat on the oor, rolling the
back of his head from side to side against
the steel rivets in the wall. The others
watched him from a distance. But closely.
Early in December, on an afternoon
proceeding no dierently from any other
afternoon, as far as I could see, as usual
very slowly unmasking itself as a dam-
nation without end, Jocko screamed,
Fifty-two pickup! and scattered the
cards in the air and left the central area
and disappeared into his cell. It was that
moment in the day when time itself grew
outrageously lopsided, getting further
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 83
and further from lunch but somehow
no closer to supper, and the bars became
harder than iron, and you really felt
locked up. The whole tiercommon
area, surrounding cells, and the catwalk
enclosing everythingwasnt much
larger than a basketball court, and any-
body in there could have told you that,
if you went promenading on the cat-
walk, two hundred sixty steps would
bring you back to where you
started. It was the moment
for another nap, or for star-
ing at the television. But this
day the card players, weary
and sore and absent a leader,
turned their eyes toward the
rest of us, and as soon as
they landed on the name-
less one, the crazy boy with
the Mardi Gras face, we
could feel a quickening, an
igniting of certain materials that had
been swimming around in our atmo-
sphere all along.
The poker players were well into
their twenties, a couple in their thir-
ties, men awaiting trial for felonies or
serving lengthy misdemeanor time.
Zit-suckers, Jocko called them, but
today these six or seven men who played
card games with their stsincluding,
today, Donald Dundunwere playing
an even crazier game out on the cat-
walk, making themselves heard, hol-
lering back and forth as they stalked
the perimeter and took up positions
on the outermost points of the com-
pass, this handful of them command-
ing the whole cell block and talking
only about the kid, conspiring against
his life while he watched TV and pre-
tended not to hear.
Come out on the catwalk. But he
wouldnt come.
Come onit wont hurt.
Strangler Bob and I sat in our cell,
side by side on his bunk. I didnt want
to try and climb into mine because I
was afraid to move.
Somebody push the button!
Who said that?
The boy was out of his chair now,
and halfway to the button. I didnt say it.
Dundun said, Dont push it.
I wont.
Then who said push it?
The big red button waited on the
catwalks wall, between the electric cig-
84 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
arette lighter and the clanging door to
the rest of the building, the same door
through which our meals arrived, and
in case of any trouble this button would
alert the deputies downstairs. But there
was usually a sentry, one prisoner or
another, posted beside the button to
make sure it got no use.
Dundun made himself the sentry
now. Dont try it.
I said I wasnt going to.
With his primitive hair
and compact musculature,
D undun looked like a
nasty little Neanderthal.
Youd better just face the
situation.
The boy went back to
the central area and sat
down. He grabbed the seat
of his chair with both
hands and pretended to
watch the TV bracketed to the corner
of the room.
Dundun followed the boy and stood
beside his chair. Together they watched
a commercial for half a minute, before
Dundun reminded him, What has to
happen has to happen.
You dont seem too broken up about
it, the boy said.
Jocko lost his cool. He pretty well
combusted in his cell and came out al-
ready burning alive. Leaped onto one
of the two long dining tables and stood
there looking at the ceiling, or the heav-
ens, somewhat like a movie star in a
climactic scene, and allowed a terric
energy to consume and become him.
Whether because he hated the idea
of killing the crazy boy or because he
thought they were taking too long to
do itwell, he wasnt making it clear
where he stood, except in the most gen-
eral way: I have HAD it! Standing
on the table, he lifted his arms and
strained against invisible bars. He re-
ally was enormous, both muscular and
overfed, looked fashioned from bal-
loons, at least usually, but at this mo-
ment looked sculpted from quivering
stone, his face plum-purple under the
heap of yellow hair. I have HAD it!
With a certain grace he stepped from
tabletop to chair to oor. He marched
around with vicious movements, crush-
ing hallucinatory animals. His foot-
steps thundered on the catwalk. I have
HAD it. HAD it. HAD it.
No one knew what to make of
these reworks. Whatever its motive,
Jockos display had a quelling eect
on the scene, if only because we all
knew the guards were hearing it.
Through the afternoon Jocko settled
down by very slow degrees, and the
next day he was his obnoxious, overly
fraternal, scary former self again.
In the meantime, on this afternoon
of the conspiracy against the kid with
no name, the others went from bla-
tantly murderous to ruminative and
confused, and their plan for assassina-
tion climaxed in nothing more violent
than sneaking up behind the boy on
tiptoe and shooting rubber bands at
the back of his head while he dedi-
cated all his focus to The Newlywed
Game and refused to inch, refused
to give them the satisfaction. The next
morning, the deputies called the boy
away from his breakfast and moved
him to the upper tier.
ubber bands were permitted, yes.
R Books, magazines, candy, fruit
also cigarettes, if someone brought them
to us, and, if they didnt, then every two
or three days the county provided each
of its prisoners a packet of rough-cut
tobacco called Prince Albert and a sheaf
of cigarette papersremember, 1967.
Pets and children wandered loose in
the streets. Respected citizens threw
their litter anywhere. As for us law-
breakers, we lit our smokes on a push-
button electric hotwire bolted to the
cell-block wall.
Donald Dundun showed me how
to roll a cigarette. Dundun came from
the trailer courts, and I was middle
class gone crazy, but we passed the time
together freely because we both had
long hair and chased after any kind of
intoxicating substance. Dundun, only
nineteen, already displayed up and down
both his arms the tattooed veins of a
hope-to-die heroin addict. The same
went for B.D., a boy who arrived the
week before Christmas. We knew him
only as B.D. My name cannot be pro-
nounced, it can only be spelled. That
was his dodge. I, on the other hand,
didnt know the meaning of my own
handle, Dink. Some grouchy, puy-
eyed prisoner would walk by, look at
me, and say, Dink.
Dundun was short and muscled, I
was short and puny, and B.D. was the known B.D., but I was acquainted with And hes crying. Well, I feel sorry for
tallest man in the jail, with a thick his girlfriend, Viola Percy, who lived Chuckie that he got married to a whore
body that tapered up toward freak- right there in our townin fact, in the and a nympho, but shouldnt that be
ishly narrow shoulders. His head, how- neighborhood of slum apartments his own shit to carry? So I shut the
ever, was pretty large, with a curly where I myself had spent the sum- door and drive o, and you gure thats
brown mane. On the outs with his mera formidable, desirable female the end of it. But no. Charlie has to go
girlfriend, and consequently drunk, in her late twenties, with a couple of and tell Viola. God! It baes me! Run-
hed decided to burgle a tavern. In the tiny kids and a monthly stipend from ning to a guys woman and saying, Boo-
wee hours after closing time hed the welfare department or Social Se- hoo, boo-hoo. Its so sleazy, and so
climbed onto the roof with some tools curity, altogether an excellent woman wrong, and so tiny. As a logical result,
to see if any way in could be found, to have in your corner. But Viola, whom me and this guy Ed Peaveydo you
stepped through the panes of a sky- B.D. described as both an angel and a know Ed Peavey? I had heard of him.
light, and landed at on his face on devil, both the sickness and the cure, Nobody else had. O.K., one guys heard
the billiard table sixteen feet below, refused to visit him at the lockup, of Ed Peavey. Anyway, me and Ed
and the police woke him up. wouldnt even talk to him. The situ- Peavey, we dropped by Chuckies, and
B.D. didnt seem any worse for his ation that got Viola Percy so mad at we said to him, Chuckie, hey, even if
plunge. It was understood hed be col- me, B.D. told us, was that I fucked youre a compulsive snitch and a cer-
lected soon and taken to the hospital Chuckie Charlesons wifebut, he tied eunuch, no hard feelings. Weve
and checked for invisible damage, but hastened to say, only once, and prac- got a case of beer, so lets be friends
days passed, and it grew obvious hed tically by accident. I dropped by Chuck- and go check out the river and sit in
been forgotten. ies just to say hi, but he was shopping the shade and get drunk or something,
Dundun, B.D., and I formed a con- for shoes or something, and theres his and we got him in my truck and took
gress and became the Three Muske- wife all bored and itchy, and pretty soon him maybe ten miles out of town on
teersno hijinks or swashbuckling, we did the evil deed. And, when I left the Old Highway, and I stuck a gun in
just hour upon hour of pointless con- the house, there was Chuckie sitting his ear and Ed wrestled o his pants
versation, misshapen cigarettes, and in his car out front, drinking a beer and and his undies and his shoes and socks
lethargy. pung on a Kool. Parked right behind and we drove o and left old Chuckie
B.D. told us he had a little brother, my rig. Probably sitting there the whole walking barefoot down the road like
still in high school, who sold psyche- time me and Janet are rolling around that toward town in just his T-shirt
delic drugs to his classmates. This in his bed. And when I open the door with his not very attractive ass hang-
brother came to visit B.D. and left to my truck, he ashes me the nger. ing out. But . . . Viola. Viola will not
him a hot-rod magazine, one page of
which hed soaked in what he told
B.D. was psilocybin, but was likelier
just, B.D. gured, LSD plus some sort
of large-animal veterinary tranquil-
lizer. In any case, B.D. was most
generous. He tore the page from the
magazine, divided it into thirds, and
shared one third with me and one
with Donald Dundun, oering us this
shredded contraband as a surprise on
Christmas Eve. We gave away our
suppers and choked down the paper
on empty stomachs and waited to get
lost. Jocko, the blond blimp, said, God
dang, your lips are black. And yours
and yours. Lemme see your tongue.
What is the story? Did you catch the
plague or something?
You got three extra suppers, so dont
worry about it. Jocko had eaten all
three of our meals, plus his own.
B.D. came from the town of Oska-
loosa, about eighty miles away. A lot
of disorderly characters rattled loose
from there and ended up in Johnson Ive been a mess since Jake left for college, so now
County, often in the Johnson County we have a boy who comes in a couple of times a week to leave
jail. Prior to this encounter, I hadnt wet towels all over and challenge everything I say.

Sure, I can let you in, but really its just a place I rented
to be alone and maybe write a little.
forgive, and Viola will not forget. Hey.
Is it snowing in here?
By now the drug wed swallowed
should have been doing its work, but
I felt no eect. When I asked the oth-
ers about it, Dundun shook his head,
but B.D. stared at me with eyes like
two shiny mirrors and said, All I know
is this: Janet Charleson will pleasure
any man alive.
Does she pleasure animals, too?
Dundun wanted to know.
I wouldnt doubt it.
You mean Janet Charleson will do
it with a goat? Shell let a billy goat
hump her?
Like I say, I wouldnt doubt it. But
B.D. frowned and withdrew into him-
self for a minute, and I bet he was won-
dering if, inside this insatiable woman,
Janet Charleson, hed mixed his pow-
ers with those of a goat.
Dundun started climbing on the
bars of the nearest cell. Hed slipped
o his shoes and socks and now clung
to the metal fretwork by his toes. B.D.
said, Is this shit hitting you like its
hitting me? and Dundun said, No,
man, Im just exercising.
Dunduns mental space, customar-
ily empty, had been invaded by an an-
86 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
imal spirit. He gripped the bars with
his left hand and foot, simultaneously
stretching his right arm and leg straight
out into the air, exactly in the style of
a zoo monkey.
Are you sure youre not feeling any-
thing? I asked him.
Im feeling all the way back to my
roots. To the caves. To the apes. He
turned his head and looked at us. His
face was dark, but his eyeballs gave out
sparks. He seemed to be positioned at
the portal, bathed in prehistoric mem-
ories. He was summoning the ancient
treestheir foliage was growing out
of the walls of our prison, writhing and
shrugging, hemming us in.
A voice laughedHah!coming
from my cellmate, Strangler Bob, who
sat nearby on the catwalks oor with
his arms folded across his chest. Like
all of us here, Strangler Bob knew how
to sleepfrom lights-out at ten until
breakfast at seven, and a nap after break-
fast, and a nap before supperbut this
Christmas Eve he stayed up late and
observed us with his dead, soulless gaze.
B.D., meanwhile, said, Ive never
seen snow catching so many colors.
The potion wasnt evenly distrib-
uted on the page. B.D. had got most,
if not all of it, which was fair, but sad.
The only eect I felt seemed to co-
alesce around the presence of Stran-
gler Bob, who laughed againHah!
and, when he had our attention, said,
It was nice, you know, it being just the
two of us, me and the missus. We char-
coaled a couple T-bone steaks and
drank a bottle of imported Beaujolais
red wine, and then I sort of killed her
a little bit.
To demonstrate, he wrapped his
ngers around his own neck while we
Musketeers studied him like something
wed come on in a magic forest.
Dundun clapped his hand on his
forehead with a sound like a gunshot
and said to the murderer, Youre the
man who ate his wife!
Strangler Bob said, That was a false
exaggeration. I did not eat my wife.
What happened was, she kept a few
chickens, and I ate one of those. I wrung
my wifes neck, then I wrung a chick-
ens neck for my dinner, and then I
boiled and ate the chicken.
Wait a minute, Mr. Bob, B.D. said.
Can I get you to explain this to me?
Do you mean to say you gobbled up a
T-bone steak and red imported wine
and all, and then you, you know, exe-
cuted your wifeand then you had
chicken? Like, immediately after the
crime, you were hungry again?
You sound like the prosecutor. He
tried to make it an aggravating circum-
stance. It was just a chicken, a goddam
chicken. Strangler Bobs body had dis-
appeared, his bald head oatingnot
just oating but zooming through space.
He said, I have a message for you from
God. Sooner or later, youll all three
end up doing murder. His nger ma-
terialized in front of him, pointing at
each of us in turnMurderer. Mur-
derer. Murdererpointing last at
Dunduns nose. Youll be the rst.
I dont care, Dundun said, and you
could see it was true. He didnt care.
B.D. shivered wildly, and actually
such a strong shudder ran through him
that his curly hair ew around his head.
Can you really talk to God?
At this I snorted like a pig. The idea
of God disgusted me. I didnt believe.
Everybody yacked and blabbered about
cosmic spirituality and Hindu yogic
chakras and Zen koans. Meanwhile,
Asian babies fried in napalm. Right
now I wished there was some way we
could start this whole night over, leav-
ing Strangler Bob out of it.
Immediately my wish came true,
when Dundunexcited, I guess, by
this conversation with a murderer and
by the prediction that he himself would
murder someonetendered a bizarre
suggestion: Lets bang the button.
While I stood in my tracks, trying
to decode these words, B.D. took them
at their plain meaning and got himself
in front of the button.
B.D. was tall, as Ive said, and looked
immovable. Dundun, however, swung
hand over hand from the prehistoric
vines and branches hed summoned,
and hung from the jungles ceiling and
pushed the red button with the heel of
one bare foot. We heard a delicate
soundlike an old-fashioned alarm
clock in a nineteen-thirties movie
tinkling distantly in the buildings sleep.
When a deputy arrived and called
through the doorWhats going on
in there?B.D. said, Nothing, but
the deputy was only asking to pass the
time while he got the key in the lock,
and then three of them came in with
batons and set about beating on the
heads and bodies of anybody within
reach. Murderer Bob went down in a
ball on the oor, the same as the Three
Musketeers, and the deputies, when
their arms were tired and they judged
their duty properly exercised, said,
Dont touch that button no more to-
night, and said, Thats right, gentle-
men, and also, Or somebodys gonna
get crippled.
We crawled o to our cells in a state
of terror and bewildermentthough
not Dundun, who seemed unaected
by the nightmare he himself had caused
to explode in our faces and strolled
around the catwalk humming and scat-
ting and uttering his ngers along the
bars. He didnt possess a complete brain.
I dragged my physical being, one
big throbbing pulse, into an upper bunk
I hoped was mine. During the festival
of horrors, my cellmate, Strangler Bob,
had evaporated. Now here he was, re-
constituted full-length in his bed. I
stepped on his knee climbing into my
bunk, and he didnt say anything. I ex-
pected some obscenities or at least a
bitter Merry Christmas, but not a
peep. I studied him surreptitiously over
the edge of the bunk, and soon I could
see alien features forming on the face
below meMartian mouth, Androm-
edan eyes, staring back at me with evil
curiosity. It made me feel weightless
and dizzy when the mouth spoke to
me with the voice of my grandmother:
Right now, Strangler Bob said, you
dont get it. Youre too young. My
grandmothers voice, the same aggrieved
tone, the same sorrow and resignation.
I llselfB.D.never
rst.
go back to jail. Ill hang my-
must have felt the same about
incarceration. About fteen years after
all this, in the early nineteen-eighties,
he hanged himself in a holding cell in
Florida. Looking at it one way, B.D.
thereby committed a murder, so Stran-
gler Bobs prediction for him came true.
May he rest in peace.
. . . We saw Viola Percy one night.
The county jail and courthouse lay
at the bottom of a hill on Court Street,
and near the top of the hill, where
Dubuque Street intersected, sometimes
the relatives or friendsgirlfriends,
mostly, drunken girlfriendsof in-
mates came and stood, and waved and
hooted, because we could get a pitiful
glimpse of that particular spot from
the cell blocks southeast corner, through
the very last window. It was the night
of New Years Eve and, when a pris-
oner called us to the window, we all
took turns looking at Viola, my soul
mate and my heartbreak, B.D. called
her, staged in the light of the street
lamp as at the far end of a long tun-
nel, dressed in a sort of go-go outt or
mini-raincoat made of plastic, with a
white yachting cap and white boots
halfway up her calves. A small, glitter-
ing rain would have perfected the pic-
ture, which was, all the same, as silent
and remote and unattainable and sad
as you could want. And very vague as
to its meaning. Allowing him the sight
of her in that lonely momentwhat
it signalled was left to B.D. to inter-
pret. During my brief stay there, Viola
never came to visit him.
While I was kept there I wondered
if this place was some kind of inter-
section for souls. I dont know what to
make of the fact that Ive seen those
same men many times throughout my
life, repeatedly in dreams and some-
times in actualityturning a corner
on the street, gazing out the window
of a passing train, or leaving a caf just
at the moment I glance up and recog-
nize them, then disappearing out the
doorand it makes me feel each per-
sons universe is really very small, no
bigger than a county jail, a collection
of cells, in which he encounters the
same fellow-prisoners over and over.
B.D. and Dundun, in particular, turned
up in my youth many times after this.
I think they may have been not human
beings but wayward angels. I wont go
into all the events they gured in, but
Ill report this much about Dundun: a
couple of years after we met in jail, he
partnered up with the blond socio-
pathic giant Jocko, and together they
robbed a notorious drug lord in Kan-
sas City. During the robbery, Donald
Dundun killed a bodyguardgiving
truth to Strangler Bobs prediction.
You might go further and say Stran-
gler Bobs second sight proved out one
hundred per cent. The day after the
Kansas City robbery, Dundun showed
up at my door, three hundred miles
east of the scene of the crime, amazed
at what hed done and looking for a
place to hide. We consumed a lot of
his stolen heroin while he outwaited
his pursuers in my little apartment, and
when he felt safe and went away he
left me with a large quantity of the
stu, all mine, and over the course of
the following month I became thor-
oughly addicted to heroin. Id been ad-
dicted before, and I would be again,
but this was the turning point. My fate
was sabotaged. Thereafter, I was con-
stantly drunk, treated myself as a gar-
bage can for pharmaceuticals, and
within a few years lost everything and
became a wino on the street, drifting
from city to city, sleeping in missions,
eating at giveaway programs. . . . Very
often I sold my blood to buy wine. Be-
cause Id shared dirty needles with low
companions, my blood was diseased. I
cant estimate how many people must
have died from it. When I die myself,
B.D. and Dundun, the angels of the
God I sneered at, will come to tally up
my victims and tell me how many peo-
ple I killed with my blood.
NEWYORKER.COM
Read more of Denis Johnsons short stories.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 87

THE SECRET OF SLEEP
Why do we need it, and are we getting enough?
hen I trained to be a doctor,
W some four decades ago, everyone
neglected sleep. On call duty for hos-
pital interns began at 6 A.M. and lasted
twenty-four hours; I often kept on work-
ing until early evening the next day,
after which I would stumble back to my
apartment and fall asleep in my clothes.
The ethic was not to complain. You
were being toughened upiron man
was the term we all usedto deal with
the demands of doctoring, which did
not respect the clock. But that wasnt
the only way in which sleep was disre-
garded. In medical school, the subject
had been covered in only the most cur-
sory way. In a class on the brain, an in-
structor mentioned a neural pathway,
the reticular activating system, that was
associated with wakefulness. In passing,
he also told us about narcolepsy, a rare
condition that could cause people to
sink into slumber at any moment and
that had other fascinating features, such
as vivid hallucinations and abrupt loss
of muscle control. That was it. Ordi-
nary sleep, it seemed, was not a subject
that medicine concerned itself with.
Today, interns still work dicult
hours, but the medical worlds opinions
on sleep have changed. Theres a eld
of sleep science dedicated to the biol-
ogy of repose. Sleep medicine has be-
come a specialty, with fellowship train-
ing programs and clinics devoted to
caring for those suering from sleep dis-
orders. And these disorders are not rare.
Some forty-seven million adults, accord-
ing to the National Sleep Foundation,
do not get a restorative nights sleep. In
the workplace, sleep deprivation results
in injuries and decreased productivity,
88 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
BY JEROME GROOPMAN
which is thought to cost the U.S. eigh-
teen billion dollars each year. As many
as 1.2 million car crashestwenty per
cent of the annual totalcan be at-
tributed to tired drivers, so it could be
said that lack of sleep causes thousands
of deaths and injuries every year.
These numbers have not escaped
the notice of the business world, and
there is now a thriving sleep industry.
Pharmaceutical companies ply us with
Ambien and Lunesta, and entrepre-
neurs have devised any number of out-
landish gadgets to foster slumber. In
January, merchants at the Consumer
Electronics Show unveiled smart
pajamas, containing a bioceramics
gel,which purportedly cool o the
bodys infrared heat emissions to fos-
ter longer, sounder sleep. There was
also a respiration sensor that straps to
ones chest and features an app, which
synchronizes breathing with tonal
music to help lower anxiety. Gadgets
that pipe relaxing neuroacoustic sounds
into earbuds are marketed as trigger-
ing brain waves that erase the sense of
time. Smart pillows are programmed
to record the quality of the previous
nights rest and then oer tips on im-
provements through an app. And, if
you have three thousand dollars to spare,
theres the Magnesphere, a pod, six feet
in circumference, which envelops the
body in allegedly restorative electro-
magnetic elds. Less expensive sleep
aids include weighted blankets, which
confer the sensation of being swad-
dled; customized goggles, which aim
to set your circadian rhythm by shin-
ing light at various wavelengths; and
mattresses that mold to your body.
Sleep, according to the Sunday Style
section of the Times, is a new status sym-
bol, a sign of prosperity and control in a
frenetic world. And, as if to conrm that
sleep science is an important, even trendy
eld, this years Nobel Prize in Medicine
went to three researchers who deciphered
the genes responsible for regulating our
circadian rhythms. Still, although we may
know more about sleep than ever before,
it remains one of the most enigmatic
phenomena in our daily lives. Why do
all forms of life, from plants, insects, sea
creatures, amphibians and birds to mam-
mals, need rest or sleep?Meir Kryger
asks in his new book, The Mystery of
Sleep (Yale). Kryger, a professor at Yale
Medical School, is a leader in the eld
of sleep medicine, and has treated more
than thirty thousand patients with sleep
problems during a career that spans four
decades. He draws on this voluminous
clinical experience in his book, which is
an authoritative and accessible survey of
what is known, what is believed, and what
is still obscure about normal patterns of
sleep and the conditions that disrupt it.
As he readily admits, No one has been
able to declare with certainty why all life
forms need sleep.
Imatnpers,
Chapter 4 of The Pickwick Pa-
which appeared in serial for-
in April, 1836, Charles Dickenss
readers were introduced to a fat and
red-faced boy, in a state of somnolency,
named Joe. Joe works as an assistant
ABOVE: TODD ST. JOHN
to a carriage driver, and continually
falls asleep in the middle of his tasks:
Very extraordinary boy, that, said Mr.
Pickwick; does he always sleep in this way?
Sleep! said the old gentleman, hes always
Lost sleep, a phenomenon previously neglected by medical science, is now held responsible for a growing range of ailments.
ILLUSTRATION
BY RICHARD MCGUIRE THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 89

Its small, but its bottomless.
asleep. Goes on errands fast asleep, and snores
as he waits at table.
How very odd! said Mr. Pickwick.
Ah! odd indeed, returned the old gentle-
man; Im proud of that boywouldnt part
with him on any accounthes a natural curi-
osity! Here, JoeJoetake these things away,
and open another bottledye hear?
The fat boy rose, opened his eyes, swal-
lowed the huge piece of pie he had been in the
act of masticating when he last fell asleep, and
slowly obeyed his masters orders.
Dickenss hyperactive imagination
produced hundreds of bizarre characters.
In the nineteen-fties, some researchers
were reminded of Joe when they stud-
ied an obese amateur poker player who
had fallen asleep in the middle of a game.
They gave the mans condition a name:
Pickwickian syndrome. Subsequent study
of what is now known as obesity hy-
poventilation syndrome has shown that
Joe was a product not of Dickenss imag-
ination but of powers of observation so
acute that the writer had accurately re-
corded a pathological condition more
than a century before medical science
took note of it. We now know that being
very overweight can prevent people from
breathing deeply enough and quickly
enough to keep themselves supplied
with oxygen. The resulting low oxygen
levels and high carbon-dioxide levels
explain not only why Joe is always falling
90 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
asleep but also why he is red in the face.
Meir Kryger, who tells the story of
Joe in his book, has been working since
the nineteen-seventies on a related con-
dition, sleep apnea, in which a persons
airway closes during sleep, breathing stops,
and, starved for air, the person awakens.
Apnea can lead to heart attack and stroke
from decreased oxygen, and may accel-
erate cognitive decline in older people.
Kryger writes that there are descriptions
of sleep apnea that predate Dickenss Joe.
Dionysius, a tyrant who ruled the Cre-
tan kingdom of Heraclea in the fourth
century B.C., was massively overweight.
Because he repeatedly fell asleep, Dio-
nysius hired people to poke him with
long, thin needles, probably to keep him
breathing. Sleep apnea was once thought
to be rare, but, now that there are sophis-
ticated diagnostic tools to measure res-
piration and muscle contractions, it is
known to aict some two to three per
cent of the U.S. populationve million
men and two and a half million women.
That makes it as prevalent as mental ill-
ness, and not all suerers are obese.
The early apnea studies pioneered by
Kryger and others showed that it dam-
aged vital organs, and this work became
a catalyst for medicines serious exam-
ination of sleep. Once it had been demon-
strated that certain conditions associated
with disrupted sleep could have dire clin-
ical consequences, it became clear that
sleep was a crucial factor in maintaining
good health. The technology of the sleep
laboratory provided insights into how
other disorders can disrupt sleep, includ-
ing Parkinsons disease, esophageal reux,
hormonal dysfunction of the thyroid and
pituitary glands, and traumatic brain in-
jury. Where doctors had previously as-
cribed poor nighttime sleep to anxiety
and daytime sleepiness to laziness or lack
of motivation, they now began to view
them as conditions worthy of diagnosis
and treatment.
Krygers book usefully outlines the
current state of knowledge of sleep sci-
ence in humans. The biology of sleep
and wakefulness is complex, involving
not just the one neural circuit I learned
about in medical school but numerous
pathways in the brain and countless
chemical mediators. Kryger condenses
this intricate neuroscience to explain the
mechanisms that start and stop sleep: a
wake gauge and a body clock. Just as a
cars fuel gauge tells us when we need to
rell the tank, a wake gauge tells us
when our body is in need of sleep. The
gauge begins to signal after we have been
awake for about fourteen hours, and in-
creases in intensity until the eighteen-
hour mark, after which we nd it hard
not to fall asleep. The wake gauge oper-
ates in the brain by means of a chemi-
cal called adenosine, which is involved
in energy transfer. The longer our brain
is active, the more adenosine accumu-
lates and the sleepier we feel. (The rea-
son coee keeps us up is that caeine
counteracts the eects of adenosine.)
The body clock synchronizes our need
for sleep with the rhythms of the world
around us. Daylight is the primary reg-
ulator. When light hits the eyes retina,
a wake-up signal is sent to a collection
of cells in the suprachiasmatic nucleus
of the brain, which keep time and mon-
itor our sleep-wake cycle. At dusk, when
light fades, the pineal gland (where Des-
cartes believed the soul resided) releases
melatonin and makes us drowsy. Mela-
tonin regulates the circadian rhythm of
a wide range of organisms; the molecule
is found in bacteria, insects, jellysh,
and plants. The visual basis of human
circadian rhythms is proved by the fact
that people who are blind because of
damage to the eye itself often have great
diculty synchronizing their body clocks,
and suer severe sleep problems, whereas
people whose blindness is caused by le-
sions in the visual cortex (and whose eyes
are undamaged) generally have a normal
circadian system.
Once weve nally nodded o, a va-
riety of things occur. By tracking eye
movements and using electroencephalo-
grams to measure brain waves, research-
ers have identied four main types of
sleep and have established that we typi-
cally progress through them in cycles of
about ninety minutes. The rst two stages
move toward so-called slow-wave sleep,
a state during which our neocortex pow-
ers down and which is thought to be
largely responsible for the feeling of being
refreshed when we wake. As we come
out of slow-wave sleep, we go through a
period of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or
REM, one of the most commonly stud-
ied phases. Kryger calls REM the enig-
matic state. During this phase, almost
all of our muscles are paralyzed, except
the diaphragm, which allows us to con-
tinue to breathe, and certain sphincters
at the top and bottom of our gastroin-
testinal tract. Meanwhile, the brain shoots
o electrical storms, resulting in rapid
movements of the eyes, and we start to
have vivid dreams. All humans dream,
usually three to ve times a night. And
every time a man dreams he has an erec-
tion; every time a woman dreams, the
blood vessels of her vagina become en-
gorged. These changes in our genitalia
are apparently unrelated to sexual thoughts
before sleep or to sexual content in the
dreams themselves. Rather, erections and
vaginal engorgement seem to be the re-
sult of the state of dreaming itself.
Even as we cycle through the various
stages, our sleep is frequently interrupted
by brief awakenings, called arousals,
each lasting only seconds. Kryger writes
that healthy sleepers typically experi-
ence about ve awakenings an hour, al-
though they do not remember them. Sci-
entists speculate that these brief periods
of wakefulness might have evolved so
that we do not place ourselves in danger
while asleepsuocating under bed-
ding, for example, or being vulnerable to
attack by a predator.
Kryger oers a comprehensive anal-
ysis of physical conditions that can im-
pair our sleep. Women may experience
insomnia owing to the normal hormonal
uctuations of the menstrual cycle and
to the changes in hormonal regulation
that occur with menopause. (He is rightly
cautious about whether so-called an-
dropause, a decline in testosterone lev-
els among one to two per cent of men
as they age, also contributes to insom-
nia.) Restless-leg syndrome, which causes
lower limbs to spontaneously move and
often cramp, is associated with certain
vitamin deciencies but often occurs
without a known reason. It is a common
cause of disturbed sleep in the elderly,
and treatment varies from replenishing
the decient vitamin to prescribing drugs
that alter neurotransmitters in the brain.
But for most of us it is the mind, rather
than the body, that disrupts restorative
sleep. Kryger explores in depth psycho-
logical conditions that are associated with
disordered sleep, as well as psychotropic
medications whose side eects can pre-
vent a restful night. He allows for the
need to medicate at times with sleeping
pills or melatonin, but prefers cognitive
behavioral therapy, a technique that in-
volves teaching patients to mentally pre-
pare themselves for slumber by devising
ways to bypass the thoughts that keep
them awake.
There is useful advice for less chronic
problems, like jet lag. Kryger explains
the dierence between ying east and
ying west. If you take a morning ight
from London to New York, youll most
likely arrive in the afternoon, but your
body thinks its night. He recommends
avoiding sleep for more than a short nap.
Instead, eat, watch movies, and, upon ar-
rival, try to stay awake until its bedtime
in the new location. When ying east,
he recommends getting as much sleep
as possibleasking the ight attendants
not to interrupt you, and using earplugs
and an eye mask. He oers other tips,
such as shielding your eyes from sun-
light until your body would normally
awaken by wearing sunglasses for about
two hours after landing: this helps reset
the bodys clock.
he mysteries that surround sleep
T are not merely scientic and clin-
ical but also cultural. In Wild Nights
(Basic), Benjamin Reiss, a professor of
English at Emory University, writes:
Sleep is both a universal need and a freely
available resource for all societies and even spe-
cies. So why is it the source of frustration for
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 91
so many people today? Why do we spend so
much time trying to manage it and medicate it,
and training ourselvesand our childrenhow
to do it correctly? And why do so many of us
feel that, despite all our eorts to tame our
sleep, its fundamentally beyond our control?
The fault, he believes, lies with our
xation on sleeping in one straight
shot through the night, a schedule that
conicts with the natural sleep rhythms
of many people. This xation leads to
worry and micromanagement, para-
doxically worsening insomnia. Sleep
aids end up causing more problems
than they solve, making us more in-
tolerant of small changes to routine
and environment, creating a society of
fussy, stressed-out sleepers.
But what is natural when it comes
to sleep? Reiss looks to the historian
A. Roger Ekirch, who, in 2001, docu-
mented that in early-modern Europe
and North America the standard pat-
tern for nighttime sleep was seg-
mented. There were two periods, some-
times termed dead sleep and morning
sleep, with intervals of an hour or more
when the person was awake, sometimes
called the watching, during which
people might pray or read or have sex.
In some indigenous societies in Nige-
ria, Central America, and Brazil, seg-
mented sleep persisted into the twen-
tieth century. Ekirch hypothesized that
segmented sleep was our natural, evo-
lutionary heritage, and that it had been
disrupted in the West by the demands
of industrialization, and by electricity,
which made articial lighting ubiqui-
tous. Reiss cites Ekirch, who asserted
that the fact that many people experi-
ence insomnia in the middle of the
night, after a few hours of sleep, indi-
cates that our ancestral rhythms have
been disrupted by modernization.
However, other studies cited by Reiss
challenge the idea of a universal model
of sleep across millennia. Jerome Sie-
gel, a neuroscientist at U.C.L.A., stud-
ied three contemporary hunter-gatherer
societies in Tanzania, Namibia, and Bo-
livia. All of them lacked electricity and,
he posited, occupied environments like
those inhabited by early humans, so
their sleep patterns most likely repre-
sented the truly natural way to sleep.
None of the tribes experienced seg-
mented sleep, but daytime naps were
important, especially during the sum-
92 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
mer months. Reiss emphasizes that these
tribes showed none of the adverse
health eectsincluding obesity, dia-
betes and mood disordersthat author-
ities so often link to sleep deprivation.
It seems questionable that humans
have so changed psychologically and
physically over the millennia that what
keeps us awake today didnt exist in
the past. Reiss, a professor of En-
glish, is doubtless familiar with the
many reections on sleeplessness
found in Shakespeare, whose Henry IV,
conscience-stricken after seizing the
throne, laments, O sleep, O gentle
sleep, Natures soft nurse, how have I
frightened thee, that thou no more will
weigh my eyelids down, and steep my
senses in forgetfulness?
Reiss himself details insomnia rem-
edies in the ancient world that included
crisp lettuce leaves, nutmeg, dandelion,
and onions. Restless nights existed, but,
instead of swallowing Ambien or mel-
atonin, people ingested soporic foods,
following an Aristotelian belief that
warm vapors of digested food reach
the brain. Going back even further,
undoubtedly the slumber of hunter-
gatherers was sometimes disrupted by
worry about access to food during dry
seasons, say, or by envy of more suc-
cessful tribe members.
Before industrialization, sleep pat-
terns were based largely on seasonal
daylight. But the idea that modern in-
dustrial society alone is responsible for
our discordant forms of sleep is belied
by the taxing rhythms of agrarian life.
Harvests required long days and late
nights; cows would have been milked
in the very early mornings, and shep-
herds, as the hymn says, watched their
ocks by night, to save them from pred-
ators. Speaking of hymns, Reiss also ig-
nores the demands that religious ritu-
als have long made on daily schedules.
In Judaism, there are three services for
prayer: morning, afternoon, and night.
(A famous passage in the Passover Hag-
gadah has a student barging in on ve
rabbis who were up all night discuss-
ing the Exodus, telling them that the
time had come for the morning Shema.)
In Islam, the muezzin calls the faithful
to prayer ve times a day, beginning at
dawn. And among monks, nuns, and
devoted Catholic laity the liturgy of
the hours species prayers every three
hours, from Lauds, at 3 A.M., through
to Vigils, at midnight.
Reiss writes that his books guid-
ing spirit and lead witness is Henry
David Thoreau. Thoreau suered from
insomnia, and his retreat, in 1845, to a
simple cabin at Walden Pond was, in
part, driven by a desperate need for
rest. Thoreau attributed his nightly
struggles to the fact that railroads and
other industrial changes had disturbed
the natural environment around Con-
cord. Reiss believes that we are victims
of the same environmentally devas-
tating mind-set that Thoreau decried:
an attitude of dominion over nature
(including our own bodies) through
technology and consumerism. As the
opposite of Thoreau, emblematic of
everything he was reacting against,
Reiss gives us Honor de Balzac, who,
while Thoreau was in Walden, was fu-
elling his writing with twenty to fty
cups of coee a day, often on an empty
stomach. Balzac believed that, with
caeine, sparks shoot all the way to
the brain, and forms and shapes and
characters rear up; the paper is spread
with ink. Balzac typically wrote be-
tween fourteen and sixteen hours a day
for two decades, producing sixteen vol-
umes of La Comdie Humaine within
six years. Thoreau rejected coee as an
articial stimulant and suggested that
communion with nature oered a su-
perior high: Who does not prefer to
be intoxicated by the air he breathes?
At the heart of Wild Nights is the
tension between the stimulation of in-
tense productivity and a longing for a
lost Eden of relaxation. But did Eden
ever really exist? The history of blam-
ing modernity for lost sleep runs long.
Where Thoreau once held railroads
responsible for his insomnia, we now
obsess over e-mail and social media
and the glowing screens of our com-
puters and smartphones. Societies have
been looking for ways of forcing peo-
ple to rest since at least the Iron Age,
when the Sabbath tradition emerged
in Judaism. As Kryger shows, sleep is
utterly essential to life, organically
speaking, but the act of living our lives
to the fullest, with all the attendant
toils, responsibilities, and worries, has
probably always been the enemy of
sleep. Even God needed a seventh day
to rest from all that he created.

BOOKS
MANAGER-IN-CHIEF
Herbert Hoover and the making of modern America.
BY NICHOLAS LEMANN
ast year, the economist Robert Gor-
L don published a book titled The
Rise and Fall of American Growth,
which set out to debunk the notion that
we live in a great age of innovation. The
celebrated inventions of the past half
century, like the personal computer and
the Internet, Gordon argues, have in-
creased productivity and transformed
peoples lives far less than did the lead-
ing inventions of the half century be-
tween 1870 and 1920, like household
electricity, indoor plumbing, and the
automobile. Most aspects of life in
1870 (except for the rich) were dark,
dangerous, and involved backbreaking
work, he wrote in a paper that appeared
Hoover was the sort of wizard of logistical efficiency prized by the new era.
ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN
a few years before the book. Peoples
homes were dark and poorly heated,
and smoky from candles and oil lamps.
But the biggest inconvenience was the
lack of running water, Gordon noted.
Every drop of water for laundry, cook-
ing, and indoor chamber pots had to
be hauled in by the housewife, and
wastewater hauled out.
It was into the lower end of such cir-
cumstances that Herbert Hoover, the
thirty-rst President of the United States,
was born, in 1874. Hoover was the son
of devout Quakers who lived in the fron-
tier village of West Branch, Iowa. His
father, a blacksmith, died when Herbert
was six, and his mother died three years
later. At the age of eleven, he was sent,
by train, along a just completed rail line,
to a small settlement in Oregon, to live
with an uncle, who treated him coldly
and loaded him down with chores. Quiet,
awkward, and a poor student, Hoover
somehow managed, by his young adult-
hood, to have made himself into an ex-
emplar of his generations America, a
technologically advanced world power.
By early middle age, he was a cele-
brated international hero. The times de-
manded industrial-scale achievements,
not limited to industry itself; Hoover
was a public-service superman, a mega-
bureaucrat. In 1910, the Kansas journal-
ist William Allen Whitewho became
one of Hoovers closest friends and his
leading publicistproclaimed the dawn
of a new age: Just as the same hundred
men or so are the directors of all our
big banks, of all our great railroads, and
of many of our public service corpora-
tionsdirecting the centripetal forces
of American societyso another group
of a hundred men, more or less, is found
directing many of the societies, associa-
tions, conventions, assemblies, and leagues
behind the benevolent movementsthe
centrifugal forces of American society.
Within a few years, Hoover had placed
himself at the head of that second group.
Among the cruelties of popular po-
litical history is that almost everyone
below the level of President winds up
being forgotten, and one-term Presidents
are usually remembered as failures.
Nobody demonstrates this better than
Hoover. He was elected in 1928 with four
hundred and forty-four electoral votes,
carrying all but eight statesand it was
the rst time he had run for political
oce. Four years later, he got fty-nine
electoral votes and carried just six states.
What intervened between his two Pres-
idential runs was the 1929 stock-market
crash and the early years of the Great
Depression. Hoover was doomed to be
remembered as the man who was too
rigidly conservative to react adeptly to
the Depression, as the hapless foil to the
great Franklin Roosevelt, and as the pol-
itician who managed to turn a Repub-
lican country into a Democratic one.
(The Democratic majority in the House
of Representatives that began during
Hoovers Presidency lasted for all but
four of the next sixty-two years.) Even
now, if you were a politician running for
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 93
oce, you would invoke Hoover only to
compare your opponent to him.
Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in
Extraordinary Times (Knopf ), by Ken-
neth Whyte, the former editor of the Ca-
nadian newsmagazine Macleans, help-
fully lays out a long and copious rsum
that doesnt t on this stamp of dismissal.
An inaugural graduate of Stanford, where
he studied mechanical engineering and
geology, Hoover became a mining engi-
neer at a time when that was as glamor-
ous and potentially protable a career as
launching a tech startup would be for a
Stanford graduate now. His rst job was
as a two-dollar-a-day mucker in a Cal-
ifornia mine, but not much more than
a year later he was supervising large
gold-mining operations in Western Aus-
tralia for a prominent London rm, at a
sizable salary. Before he turned thirty, he
was married and a father, running a large
gold mine in Tientsin, China, and highly
prosperous. Hoover seems to have been
an almost brutally tough, obsessively hard-
working manager; certainly charm was
not the secret to his success. It simply
comes to this: men hate me more after
they work for me than before, Whyte
quotes Hoover writing to his brother
during his Australia period. He soon
broke with his employers and struck out
on his own, mainly as a nancier of min-
ing projects, rather than as a manager of
them, and did very well for himself. The
Hoovers moved to London and lived
in a large town house. In his memoirs,
Hoover remarked, Pre-war England was
the most comfortable place in which to
live in the whole world. That is, if one
had the means to take part in its upper
life. The servants were the best trained
and the most loyal of any nationality.
The years of Hoovers rise, the rst
two decades of the twentieth century,
were a heyday for those innovations
which, in ways Robert Gordon has em-
phasized, made America modern. It was
also the period in which a good deal of
the familiar institutional architecture
of the United States was created: big
corporations and universities, the rst
government regulatory agencies, struc-
tured and licensed professions, charita-
ble foundations, think tanks. The proj-
ect had a glamour thats hard to conjure
today. Liberal intellectuals like Walter
Lippmann and Herbert Croly saw the
establishment of a class of trained, tech-
94 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
nocratic experts as essential to the fu-
ture of democracy. In business, eciency
experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor
and Frank Gilbreth systematized the
operations of industrial mass produc-
tion, down to the physical movements
of workers on an assembly line. Psy-
chologists like Lewis Terman invented
tests that could be used to sort the pop-
ulation en masse. Hoover was a crea-
ture of the engineering division of this
milieu. It is a great profession, he wrote
in his memoirs. There is the fascina-
tion of watching a gment of the imag-
ination emerge through the aid of sci-
ence to a plan on paper. Then it moves
to realization in stone or metal or en-
ergy. Then it brings jobs and homes to
men. Then it elevates the standard of
living and adds to the comforts of life.
That is the engineers high privilege.
iographers usually become well ac-
B quainted with their subjects not just
as public gures but also as people who
lead ordinary daily lives in the company
of their co-workers, friends, and family.
Unless the subject is a monster, all that
intimacy typically turns the biographer
into a personal partisan. This did not
happen with Whyte and Hoover. Dour,
phlegmatic, unreective, and unreveal-
ing, Hoover doesnt come across as being
much fun to spend time with, even if the
time youre spending is in his Presiden-
tial library, in Iowa. Biographers want
psychological access, but Hoover, though
the records he left behind are vast, has
the quality of not being personally pres-
ent in a life that, for a long while, pro-
duced one triumph after another. He was
largely a mystery to himself, as Whyte
puts it. At one point during his account
of Hoovers rise, were oered this char-
acter assessment: He was determined to
succeed by any means necessary, subor-
dinating questions of right or wrong to
the good of his career and driving him-
self crazy with his hunger for power and
control, his hypersensitivity to perceived
threats to his independence and stature,
and his overarching need to measure up.
It wasnt that Hoover was a hypocrite,
pretending to be something other than
a man preoccupied with operational
eciency; it was that emotional life just
wasnt his mtier. A letter he wrote to
one of his sons explaining why he
wouldnt be home for Christmas says it
all: I feel the separation more than you
will ever appreciate but I know that
you will understand that it is entirely in
the interest of other children. He was
self-involved in a way that extremely suc-
cessful people often are, but thats dier-
ent from being selsh. All the evidence
suggests that Hoover was genuinely de-
voted to what he construed as the pub-
lic good, with the proviso that he wanted
his devotion to be recognized.
What gave him renown enough to
make him a plausible Presidential can-
didate was his self-appointment as the
manager of an international eort to get
food into Belgium after it had fallen to
the Germans during the First World
War. His aim, Whyte writes, was to pro-
vide almost the entire food supply for a
nation of 7.5 million people, indenitely.
This required getting food mostly from
the United States, collecting it in Lon-
don, and then shipping it across the En-
glish Channel and into territory con-
trolled by a country with which Britain
was at warall with not much more
than a wisp of an ocial position. What-
ever qualities had made Hoover success-
ful as an operator of mines in remote
areas also made him successful at deliv-
ering relief under emergency conditions.
He borrowed money to buy food before
he had succeeded in getting government
assistance. He persuaded George Ber-
nard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, and other
leading authors to publish statements in
support of his eorts. He negotiated with
food brokers and shipping companies.
At a time when the world adored peo-
ple who had spectacular organizational
skills, here was somebody using them
not to build a factory or administer an
empire but for purely humanitarian pur-
poses. Hoover was a logistical saint.
In 1917, after many years in London,
Hoover returned to the United States,
won the friendship and admiration of
President Woodrow Wilson, and was
made the director of a new government
agency called the United States Food
Administration, which was charged with
managing the national food supply now
that the country was a participant in the
war. Hoover boldly asserted dominion
over the entire food chain in America,
Whyte tells us. He licensed all persons
and businesses engaged in the produc-
tion of food, from packers, canners, and
bakers to distributors, wholesalers, and
retailers. This was another widely pub-
licized triumph: the troops abroad and
the folks back home were well and reli-
ably fed. By 1920, Hoover was thinking
about running for President, as a get-
things-done type who wasnt identiably
Democratic or Republican. He wound
up not entering the race, but he eventu-
ally declared himself a Republican and
was appointed Secretary of Commerce
by President Warren Harding. Hoover
turned that usually obscure position, Im getting your dear, departed husbandhe cant
which he held through most of the believe you paid forty-ve dollars for this.
nineteen-twenties, into a platform for
further increasing his fame, culminating
in one more turn as the orchestrator of
a vast relief eort, after the Mississippi
River ood of 1927. McCormick, reporting on Hoovers In- Hoover launched infrastructure-
In those days, Hoover was, Whyte auguration, wrote in the Times. The building projects unprecedented in
observes, on the liberal edge of the Re- modern technical mind was for the rst scale. Convinced that the heavy repara-
publican Party. Whyte calls him pro- time at the head of a government. tions payments imposed on Germany
gressivism incarnate, meaning progres- after the First World War were making
sive in the sense of that era: a believer in hyte, however unsympathetic he the Depression more severe in Europe,
progress, planning, and an expanded fed-
eral government that used its power to
W nds Hoover personally, is almost
entirely on his side as a policymaker
he organized a politically risky morato-
rium on them. He created the Recon-
accomplish technical missions. Hoover, not least when it comes to his handling struction Finance Corporation to pump
who as Commerce Secretary made him- of the economic crisis that began a few government-supplied capital into the
self into the rst federal ocial with months into his Presidency. As early as economy, and he proposed some of the
power over new industries like aviation 1923, Hoover was warning publicly that, ideas that later became the heart of the
and broadcastingCongress created the sooner or later, the booming economy of New Deals response to the Depression,
F.C.C. partly to take control of the air- the nineteen-twenties was going to go like agricultural loans, deposit insurance,
waves away from himappears to have bust. He was particularly focussed on the a government home-mortgage agency,
been among the rst people to appear New York banks dangerous practice of and the forced separation of commercial
on long-distance broadcast television and lending money to investors so that they and investment banking. The atmosphere
to use radio as a way to reach a national could buy stocks on margin, which over- surrounding these activities was typically
audience during a crisis. He also loved heated the markets and generated white- Hooverian: he confronted the Depres-
taking on projects like standardizing the knuckle risk for the borrowers and the sion the way he had the humanitarian
sizes of bricks and wood screws. In 1928, banks alike. In the early months of his crises that brought him to the Presidency,
after Calvin Coolidge, perhaps feeling Presidency, he began selling his own stocks with sheer hard work. Surrounded by a
pressured by Hoovers obvious Presiden- in anticipation of a crash. And when the circle of loyal aides who had served him
tial ambitions, announced that he would crash came, on October 29, 1929, Hoover for decades and who were known col-
not be running for a second term, Hoover immediately grasped its importance and lectively as the Firm, he apportioned his
devised a notably modern Presidential began exploring what to most of Wash- long days at the oce (he was the rst
campaign, with a professional advertis- ington seemed like the outer acceptable President to keep a telephone on his
ing expert and a pollster on sta. We limit of an aggressive government re- desk) into series of eight-minute ap-
had summoned a great engineer to solve sponse to an economic crisis. It was just pointments. Whyte reminds us that the
our problems for us; now we sat back the sort of emergency the American peo- press, specically the Times, consistently
comfortably and condently to watch ple had with so much condence elected praised Hoovers eorts and took each
the problems being solved, Anne OHare him to meet, Whyte writes. temporary halt in the bad economic news
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 95
as a sign that the Depression had ended.
And, at least in the early innings of the
1932 campaign, it was by no means clear
that Franklin Roosevelt had in mind an
economic policy that was terribly dier-
ent from Hoovers.
Progressivism did not rest rmly
within either of the political parties; it
produced Presidents who were Repub-
lican, like Theodore Roosevelt, and
Democratic, like Wilson. The coming
of the New Deal turned most Repub-
lican Progressives into conservatives,
though, and none more than Hoover.
Like many politicians, Hoover preferred
to think of himself as someone who had
reluctantly answered a call to public ser-
vice, rather than as someone who craved
power, but he took losing very hard.
He blamed his defeat substantially on
the advent of a new kind of media smear
machine that he believed was directed
by the Democratic National Commit-
tee, whose products included a series of
widely publicized books with titles like
The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover
Under Two Flags and Hoovers Mil-
lions and How He Made Them. Two
weeks before Roosevelts Inauguration,
Hoover sent the President-elect a strained,
handwritten letter proposing a joint
eort to avert a looming banking cri-
sis; Roosevelt chose not to answer for
eleven days. In 1934, ignoring the ad-
vice of friends who thought it would
come across as the bitter musings of a
defeated man, Hoover published a
best-selling book that he imagined to
be a devastating critique of Roosevelt
(though it never mentioned his name),
called The Challenge to Liberty.
In 1936 and again in 1940, Hoover
hoped that his party would turn to him
again to set things right, and was sur-
prised and hurt when it didnt. As the rise
of Adolf Hitler forced Roosevelt to be-
come a foreign-policy President, Hoover
began to disapprove of him diplomati-
cally just as much as he did economically.
He believed that, if left alone, Hitler,
whom he had visited in 1938, would di-
rect his ambitions eastward and wage a
mutually destructive war with the Soviet
Union, leaving Britain and Western Eu-
rope alone. He published another of his
many books just before the attack on Pearl
Harbor, urging the United States to stay
out of the war, and he always considered
Roosevelts decision to form an alliance
96 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
with Joseph Stalin to be unconscionable.
Finally, not long after Roosevelt died,
Hoovers exile ended. Following a meet-
ing with Harry Truman at the White
House, he was made an honorary chair
of a body called the Presidents Famine
Emergency Committee. He used this
as an occasion to reprise his decades-past
role as a one-man food-distribution tsar
in postwar Europe. The following year,
a newly Republican Congress put him
in charge of a vast eciency study of
the federal government. The Hoover
Commission, run with typically obses-
sive thoroughness by its septuagenarian
namesake, produced nineteen separate
reports and two hundred and seventy-
three recommendations. A second
Hoover Commission, appointed by
Dwight Eisenhower, issued its three
hundred and fourteen additional rec-
ommendations just a few weeks before
Hoovers eighty-rst birthday.
Ibeentins returned
unlikely that any President elected
1928, even Roosevelt, would have
to oce in 1932. The mag-
nitude of the economic disaster was just
too great to be politically survivable.
Whyte asserts, implausibly, that, after
three years of backbreaking work, Hoover
had in fact stopped the depression in its
tracks and by most relevant measures
forced its retreat. In fact, when Roo-
sevelt took oce the unemployment rate
was at its all-time historical peak, twenty-
ve per cent, and the entire American
banking system had stopped function-
ing. Even if Hoover had been able to de-
vise a perfect plan for surmounting the
disaster, his lack of political skills would
have prevented him from enacting it. As
stoutly as Whyte defends Hoovers pol-
icies, he has to concede that his subject
wasnt much of a politician. Hoover set
out to govern in the manner in which
he had accomplished the spectacular
feats that had brought him to the Pres-
idency: as an administrator of genius.
Being a novice at electoral politics, he
was unused to campaigning, had a
strong preference for giving jobs in his
Administration to businessmen rather
than to politicians, didnt consider party-
building part of the Presidents job, and
didnt understand that the constitutional
system demands that an eective Pres-
ident spend a great deal of time court-
ing members of Congress. He tried to
defeat the Depression by grinding it
down from behind his desk. In 1932, he
felt it was unseemly for a sitting Presi-
dent to campaign for relection, so, for
the most part, he didnt.
In order to secure the rm support
of William Borah, a powerful Republi-
can senator from Idaho (in those days,
the Republican Partys hold over the
West was shaky, because its voters had
a strong liberal-populist bent), Hoover
promised during the 1928 campaign that
he would, if elected, call a special session
of Congress to consider legislation that
would help farmers. He kept the prom-
ise, but the special sessions main atten-
tion turned from agriculture to trade pol-
icy. A esta of politicking by hundreds
of narrow economic interests, which
Hoover was either unwilling or unable
to control, wound up producing the no-
toriously protectionist Smoot-Hawley
Tari Act, which certainly didnt ad-
dress, and may well have worsened, the
economic crisis. Another example of
Hoovers poor political instincts was his
handling of Prohibition, which was then
in its nal years. He had been raised in
a strict teetotalling environment. In his
memoir, he wrote, There was only one
Democrat in the village. He occasion-
ally fell under the inuence of liquor;
therefore in the opinion of our village
he represented all the forces of evil. He,
like many leading Republicans, had no
real anti-alcohol passion but worried
about oending the large dry constitu-
ency among the Partys voters. He wound
up saying nothing very clear about it,
and so let Roosevelt, who was rmly
wet, use Prohibitions unpopularity to
propel his campaign.
These were big mistakes, but Hoovers
fundamental erroror his fundamen-
tal stand on principle, depending on your
point of viewwas ideological as well
as political. It concerned the size and
the scope of the federal government.
Hoovers active confrontation of the De-
pression was limited to economic man-
agement; he staunchly resisted the idea
that the government should help indi-
viduals through employment programs
or direct payments. Roosevelt created
the Works Projects Administration, So-
cial Security, and other programs that
conferred benets directly on people in
need. During Hoovers term, federal rev-
enue was about three per cent of the
gross domestic product. Roosevelt had
more than doubled that gure even be-
fore the Second World War began. By
the time of his death, it was twenty per
cent, where it would roughly hover for
the next seven decades. Roosevelt in-
creased the number of federal employ-
ees from about ve hundred thousand
to more than six million. Republicans
may complain about big government,
but Roosevelts enlargement set a base-
line that we take for granted today, and
that frees us to think about politics along
other lines. Hoover believed that a small
central government was the only possi-
ble distinctively American alternative to
Socialism, Communism, and Fascism.
Roosevelt demonstrated that the United
States could respond to the Depression
by making government much bigger
without losing its identity as a capital-
ist democracy, and he couldnt have done
this if a voting majority hadnt been per-
suaded that he was right. Hoover, though,
considered Roosevelts tendency toward
statism to be morally wrong. He cer-
tainly couldnt have admired Roosevelt
as a manager.
Even loyal aides to Roosevelt found
him maddening. He used his charm as
an aid to elusiveness. Everybody left a
meeting with Roosevelt believing he had
agreed to whatever the person had asked
for. Nobody could gure out exactly what
he thought. He encouraged rivalries and
overlapping responsibilities. The man
who was a trusted family member to
Americans who listened to him on the
radio was unknowable to the people in
his immediate vicinity. Hoover, though
by no means open, was always forthright,
and he inspired intense loyalty among
those who worked for him. But it turns
out that managerial excellence doesnt
assure Presidential success in this coun-
trythough were still tempted by the
thought that it might. If you asked peo-
ple, in the abstract, whether theyd rather
have a President who was a superbly
charming professional politician or one
who had come from nothing, built a suc-
cessful business, and accomplished as-
tonishing feats of altruism, they would
probably choose the latter. We think that
we dont need politicians; we even think
that wed be better o without them. The
truth is that in a democracy, especially
during a national emergency, theyre the
only people who can get things done.
BRIEFLY NOTED
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy, by Adrian Shirk (Coun-
terpoint). In this memoir, the author chronicles her relent-
less quest for religious fulllment, which leads her from a
voodoo shrine in Louisiana to a Presbyterian church in
Brooklyn. Along the way, Shirk explores her troubled fam-
ily history, in which faith crops up as a perplexing recessive
gene. The book doubles as a catalogue of Americas diver-
gent prophetesses, such as Mary Baker Eddy, the founder
of Christian Science, the astrologer Linda Goodman, and
the silver-tongued evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson,
who faked her own kidnapping to spend ve weeks with her
lover. These accounts are brief, vivid portraits of women in
the spiritual avant-garde, and although Shirk struggles to
unify these threads, her wide-ranging curiosity delights.
The Dream Colony, by Walter Hopps, with Deborah Treisman
and Anne Doran (Bloomsbury). Culled from interviews with
the subject, this compilation oers an amiable portrait of the
inuential gallerist, curator, and museum director. Hoppss
analyses of artists work, including that of friends such as Frank
Stella and Edward Kienholz are enlivened by personal anec-
dotes: Jay DeFeo, who spent eight years on her sculptural mas-
terpiece, The Rose, which weighed more than a ton and was
layered nearly a foot thick with paint, is distraught when it is
removed from her apartment, while Robert Rauschenberg
restlessly paints over nished workseven if they are already
in someones collection. The book takes us on an intimate tour
through fty years of American art history.
Be My Wol, by Emma Richler (Knopf ). At the center of this
linguistically and structurally complex novel are two siblings,
one of whom is adopted, who are deeply in love. Rachel and
Zachariah, both Russian, share parents and a mania for box-
ing. Rachel is a scholar of the sport; Zach is a frustrated
ghter, benched by a clot in his brain. The couple invent a
lengthy story about a boxer named Sam the Russian, which
is written to create a lineage for Zach, an orphan. The novel,
while long-winded, nds its stride in the quiet moments be-
tween Rachel and Zachariah, particularly when they reect
on the world theyve built with their love, even as it shatters
the lives of those around them.
Modern Gods, by Nick Laird (Viking). This roving, ambi-
tious novel follows two sisters from Northern Island. When
Alison, who has never left Ulster, discovers her husbands
past as a Loyalist terrorist, she nds herself lost in a moral
labyrinth. Meanwhile, Liz, her anthropologist sister, travels
to a remote ctional island in the Southeast Pacic, called
New Ulster, to study an enigmatic cult. Laird, who grew up
during the Troubles, is well acquainted with the gods and
ghosts that populate Northern Ireland. The book can be
overly didactic about the role myth plays in all human so-
cieties, but the taut prose propels the story and describes the
process by which people make a future by entering into eth-
ical relations with the past.
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 97

THE CURRENT CINEMA
ACROSS THE AGES
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and Wonderstruck.
BY ANTHONY LANE
ll happy families are alike. Every
A unhappy family, in its own way, be
longs in a Noah Baumbach movie. Ask
him to tell the tale of a happy family, and
youd end up with a blank screen. In his
latest lm, The Meyerowitz Stories
(New and Selected), the pursuit of hap
pinessa mission as farcical as it is in
grainedbegins with Danny Meyero
In Noah Baumbachs lm, a family is dominated by a grandiose artist patriarch.
witz (Adam Sandler), who is driving in
Manhattan with his teenage daughter,
Eliza (Grace Van Patten), and looking
for somewhere to park. Was that a spot?
he cries, and in that tiny shriek of an
noyance you sense the man and his plight.
If theres ever a spot, in any zone of his
existence, hell miss it.
Change is afoot in the Meyerowitz
clan. Eliza, the sanest and the most poised
of them, will soon be heading to Bard for
freshman year. Danny, not long separated
from his wife (whom we never see), is
moving back in with his father, Harold
(Dustin Homan), the famous sculptor
or, to be precise, the sculptor who once
seemed as if he might become famous,
never was famous, but nonetheless acts
as if he were. The Whitney, which bought
98 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
a piece of his, appears to have lost it. Bard,
where he taught for a time, may mount
a retrospective of his work, though only
as part of a group show: clearly an insult,
for an artist whose regal insultability is
perhaps his proudest achievement. After
a visit to one of his exwives, Julia (Can
dice Bergen), who has the gracesub
limely conveyed by Bergen, in a substan
tial speechto acknowledge her faults as
a parent, Harold merely asks, You see
that big hug she insisted on giving me?
All in all, a charming fellow. Dont even
think about taking him to lunch.
Harold is one hell of a role, and
Homan, as bearded as a prophet, does
not hesitate to grab it. His bilious speeches
are issued like jeremiads; he doesnt de
liver the dialogue so much as bite it o
in chunks. And theres his distinctive lo
comotion. Think of the pavements that
he pounded, gasping more in panic than
for breath, in The Graduate, Marathon
Man, and Kramer vs. Kramer, then
check out Harolds idea of a run: an in
dignant shue, going nowhere fast, his
feet hardly leaving the ground. Needless
to say, hes always hurrying away from
thingsa restaurant he doesnt care for,
or an opening at MoMA, where he and
Danny are the only guests in tuxedos. Just
to twist the knife, the show is a solo aair,
honoring his contemporary L. J. Shapiro
( Judd Hirsch), whom Harold is eager to
decrya popular but minor artist, he
proclaims. Harolds old age is unsoftened
by muzziness or memoryfade. As for for
giveness, forget it.
All of which is no fun for other folks.
The Meyerowitz Stories is a comedy,
charitably stued with good lines, yet
the basic story is that of a neighborhood
Learthe hectoring hero, bereft of a
kingdom and surrounded by nothing but
fools. (The exception is Eliza, a sort
of cool Cordelia.) We meet Maureen
(Emma Thompson), Harolds current
wife, who is meant to have given up booze
but hasnt. According to him, she is made
uncomfortable by A.A. Then, there are
his kids: Danny and his doleful sister
Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), shielded by her
large spectacles and her long lank hair,
plus their half brother, Matthew (Ben
Stiller), a personalwealth investor liv
ing in Los Angeles, who claims that he
is tired of apologizing for doing well.
In truth, aside from his earnings, hes
doing badly. Phone calls to L.A. hint at
emotional problems ostage, as if the
ones that occur in the movies spotlight
were not demanding enough.
Baumbach has gathered quite a cast,
and theres no weak link. Grace Van Pat
ten, who is twenty, holds her own in style
amid the starry names. Stiller and San
dler are opened up by the movie, not ex
actly shedding their habitual shticks
anxious tension for one, gooness for the
otherbut oering glimpses of the un
quiet feelings from which those habits
might spring. The two of them bristle
and spar, coming to blows in one of the
least manly bouts of combat ever staged,
which results in a very minor nosebleed.
For all the horseplay, what matters most
is that we actually believe in Danny, Mat
thew, and Jean as siblings. Though tugged
apart by force of circumstance, they are
bound by a history of shared jokes and
unamusing pain. At one point, Jean spies
an elderly friend of Harolds and reveals
to Danny and Matthew that, when she
was young, and wearing a bathing suit,
the guy exposed himself to her. Danny
and Matthew, reluctant to assault a frag
ile man, decide to trash his car instead.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOO FAZENDA
They look jubilant, elated by this act of
vengeful justice on Jeans behalf, until she
says, I could smash every car in the park-
ing lot and burn down the hospital and
it wouldnt unfuck me up.
It is because of such moments that
The Meyerowitz Stories comes across
as Baumbachs ripest and wisest lm to
date, alert to the fact that so little in life,
especially a screwy or a super-ambitious
life, is open to resolution. Margot at the
Wedding (2007) was no less neurotic
than the gures who twitched and chat-
tered through it, and the calculated hip-
ness of Frances Ha (2012) has not worn
well, whereas the new work takes a step
back and observes its crowd of souls with
a calmer eye. Of course, its a small crowd,
low on diversity; were stuck in much the
same patch of time and space that was
colonized by earlier Baumbach projects,
and peoples throwaway talk betrays their
entitlement: Wheres the gourmet hum-
mus?; We didnt budget for the saltwa-
ter pool; and the terrifying Maureens
cooking shark. When Harold nds his
copy of Buddenbrooks at Julias place
and bears it away (Youve lived without
it now for thirty years, Matthew points
out), its worth reecting that Thomas
Manns novel ranges over four genera-
tions of a bourgeois family, while Baum-
bachs movie covers a matter of months.
On the other hand, Harold has had
four wives. And the movie, to be fair, feels
broad. The dilemmas that it grapples
with, involving parents and their frus-
trated ospring, could not be less paro-
chial. One clever shot, tracking Harold
and Matthew along a street, mid-argu-
ment, glides from left to right and back
again as if on the sideline of a soccer
eld; their antagonism, we realize, is an
established sport. Also, the theme of the
artist as a ruinous autocrat is explored
far more wittily here than in Darren
Aronofskys Mother!, not least because
Baumbach shows, in the case of Harold,
how the will to power can outlast the
wilting of a creative gift. Maybe hes not
so great, Matthew suddenly says of his
father, adding, Maybe hes undiscovered
for a reason. Yikes. Somehow, though,
the Meyerowitzes make it through the
movie, partly by watching other mov-
iesHarold and Danny laugh at Legal
Eagles, from 1986or by sitting at the
piano, as Danny and Eliza do, and sing-
ing a dopey song. Near the end, theres
even an echo of Raiders of the Lost
Ark, as Eliza walks past piles of crates,
at the Whitney, in search of her grand-
fathers missing masterpiece. She comes
in hope. Maybe discovery awaits.
he new lm from Todd Haynes,
T Wonderstruck, is about two
youngsters, aged twelve, whose stories
are told in parallel throughout. First, we
have Ben (Oakes Fegley), living in
Gunint, Minnesota, with his aunt. His
mother died in an accident, and he barely
knows who his father was, but he takes
a bus to New York, alone, to learn more.
All of this happens in 1977, in swelter-
ing color, whereas the adventures of the
second child, Rose (Millicent Sim-
monds), unfold half a century before, in
black-and-white. Shes a runaway, too,
though the trip is a short one, from
Hoboken to Manhattan. Rose is ob-
sessed, for reasons that we dont yet un-
derstand, by a movie goddess, Lillian
Mayhew ( Julianne Moore), who is now
appearing on the Broadway stage.
Wonderstruck, adapted by Brian
Selznick from his own novel, is an ex-
ercise in braiding. Almost every strand
is entwined with another; if Rose seeks
refuge in the American Museum of
Natural History, then so must Ben, and
a diorama that he nds there, of wolves
racing over snow, turns out to be set in
Gunint, of all places, and relates not
only to his wolf-infested nightmares
the rst thing we see in the moviebut
to an episode in Roses family past. Then,
there is the sound of silence. Ben loses
his hearing (after being struck by light-
ning, if you please) but he can still speak,
whereas Rose is both deaf and mute.
And the lms in which Lillian stars
Haynes concocts a melodrama called
Daughter of the Storm, which we
glimpse in snatchesare, of course, de-
void of speech, though the spell will
soon be broken by the talkies.
These are absorbing subjects, and
Hayness touch, especially in the
stitch-perfect reconstruction of bygone
times, is as sure as it was in Far from
Heaven (2002). Julianne Moore, the star
of that movie, is equally involving here;
she plays two roles, or four if you count
those played by Lillian, and utters pre-
cisely one audible wordHelp. She
radiates an eager sympathy, in her sign
language and in the unguarded warmth
of expression on her face. And yet, de-
spite these virtues, Wonderstruck fails
to convince, so intent is Haynes on ban-
ishing loose ends and slotting each co-
incidence into place. The result is itself
a kind of diorama: exquisitely detailed,
assembled with innite care, but lacking
the breath of life.
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017 99

 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 Christopher Weyant,
must be received by Sunday, October 22nd. The finalists in the October 9th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this weeks contest, in the November 6th issue. Anyone age thirteen
or older 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

I didnt get it at first, either. Then it hits you.

Jane Cerhan, Rochester, Minn.

It would work beautifully in that space we have

between the forest edge and the highway.
Brian K. Saxby, Chicago, Ill. Make a different wishyour bagel is really stuck.
Andrew Mattox, Woods Hole, Mass.
Youll love the headlight exhibit in the
next room. Its mesmerizing.
David Strom, Lockport, Ill.