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 THE ANNIVERSARY ISSUE
FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018

8 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

27 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Jelani Cobb on the resistance to Trump;
an angel’s wings; gateway to Africa;
show-blitzing; the body in protest.
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
Jia Tolentino 34 Safer Spaces
How to prevent sexual assaults on campus.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Mia Mercado 41 What Will Food Be Like in the Future?
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY
Joshua Rothman 42 Jambusters
Unsticking the paper stuck in the machine.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
David Grann 48 The White Darkness
Alone in Antarctica.
FICTION
Rachel Kushner 76 “Stanville”
THE CRITICS
LIFE AND LETTERS
Jill Lepore 86 “Frankenstein” at two hundred.
BOOKS
Adam Gopnik 92 Why has crime declined so much in America?
97 Briefly Noted
THE THEATRE
Hilton Als 98 The fierce originality of Adrienne Kennedy.
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 102 Francisco de Zurbarán at the Frick.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 104 “Loveless,” “Permission.”
POEMS
Meena Alexander 44 “Kochi by the Sea”
Matthew Dickman 62 “Rhododendron”
COVER
Malika Favre “The Butterfly Effect”

DRAWINGS P. C. Vey, Barbara Smaller, Roz Chast, Edward Koren, Mick Stevens, Joe Dator, Farley Katz, Emma Hunsinger,
Teresa Burns Parkhurst, William Haefeli, Liana Finck, Frank Cotham, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Amy Hwang SPOTS Golden Cosmos,
Andy Rementer, Olimpia Zagnoli, Eleni Kalorkoti, Seth, Craig & Karl, Christoph Niemann, Luci Gutiérrez
 SEE THE BROADWAY musical ON EVERYONE'S LIST.

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 “Anyone in any
relationship at any CONTRIBUTORS
stage of life could
Jill Lepore (Life and Letters, p. 86), a pro- David Grann (“The White Darkness,”
stand to learn from fessor of history at Harvard University, p. 48), a staff writer, is the author of
the wisdom in will publish “These Truths: A History
of the United States” in September.
“The Lost City of Z” and, most recently,
“Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage
these pages.” Murders and the Birth of the FBI.”
Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 102),
—Andrew Solomon, National the magazine’s art critic, is the author Malika Favre (Cover) is an illustrator
Book Award–winning author of “Let’s See: Writings on Art from who lives in London. This is her sixth
of Far from the Tree The New Yorker.” cover for the magazine.

Rachel Kushner (Fiction, p. 76) has writ- Hilton Als (The Theatre, p. 98), The New
The ten the novels “Telex from Cuba,” “The Yorker’s theatre critic, won the 2017 Pu-
F lamethrowers,” and “ The Mars litzer Prize for criticism. He is an asso-
ROUGH PATCH Room,” which will come out in May. ciate professor of writing at Columbia.

Joshua Rothman (“Jambusters,” p. 42) is Jia Tolentino (“Safer Spaces,” p. 34) is a

the magazine’s archive editor and a fre-
quent contributor to newyorker.com.
Marriage and the Art
of Living Together Meena Alexander (Poem, p. 44) is the
author of the poetry collection “Atmo-
spheric Embroidery” and the editor of
the anthology “Name Me a Word: In-
BY dian Writers Reflect on Writing,” both
Daphne de Marneffe, PhD coming out in June.
staff writer. Previously, she was the dep-
uty editor at Jezebel and a contribut-
ing editor at the Hairpin.
Matthew Dickman (Poem, p. 62) is the
author of five poetry collections, in-
cluding “Wonderland,” which will be
published in March. He lives in Port-
land, Oregon.

Jelani Cobb (Comment, p. 27) teaches Mia Mercado (Shouts & Murmurs,
“There isn’t a couple in in the journalism program at Colum- p. 41) has contributed to McSweeney’s,
bia University. Bustle, and Hallmark Cards.
America who would not
benefit from a copy—or two
copies—of this book.”
NEWYORKER.COM
—Meg Jay, PhD, author of Everything in the magazine, and more.
The Defining Decade
and Supernormal

“Anyone grappling with

the bewilderment of midlife
LEFT: COURTESY JOANNA WORSLEY; RIGHT: CRISTIANA COUCEIRO

partnership...will be
at once provoked and
comforted by this
enormously wise book.”
—Dani Shapiro, author of
Hourglass: Time, Memory,
Marriage and Devotion: A Memoir MULTIMEDIA VIDEO
Photographs, audio dispatches, and Jia Tolentino on writing her story
Also available as an ebook and an audiobook. video from Henry Worsley’s journey about campus sexual assault, from this
across Antarctica. week’s issue.

SimonandSchuster.com SUBSCRIBERS: Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the
App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by location and device.)
6 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018

THE MAIL
BIG PHARMA’S DAUGHTER
Surely I am not the only reader who was
unsettled by Nick Paumgarten’s article
on Madeleine Sackler’s upcoming movie
“O.G.,” which was filmed inside a
maximum-security prison in Indiana
(“Getting a Shot,” January 29th). Sack-
ler is the granddaughter of Raymond
Sackler, whose descendants, as Paumgar-
ten writes, have derived their massive
fortune from Purdue Pharma and its
painkiller OxyContin, an opioid that has
unleashed a national epidemic of drug
abuse and incarceration. (Patrick Rad-
den Keefe wrote last year about the dev-
astation that OxyContin has caused.)
The inmates in Sackler’s film have, in
many cases, been adversely affected by
Indiana’s Draconian drug laws, yet she
thinks it’s baloney to connect her back-
ground with her project. It’s not: shortly
before filmmaking began, one inmate at
the prison died from a drug overdose. It
might behoove Sackler, as a beneficiary
of one of medicine’s most insidious sub-
stances, to dedicate any profits from the
film to the reform of national drug laws.
1
Mark A. Thompson
New York City
FACE OFF
My mom shared with me Jill Lepore’s
article about the legal and cultural bat-
tles over Barbie and Bratz dolls (A
Critic at Large, January 22nd). As an
eleven-year-old girl, I thought that I
would share my perspective. I never
wanted a Barbie or a Bratz doll until I
discovered doll reconstruction. What
you do is erase the features of the doll
with nail-polish remover, and then re-
move the hair and make other body
modifications. Then you give the doll
a new face, new hair, and new cloth-
ing. (My favorite part is ripping out
the hair, which is very therapeutic.)
What I like about doll reconstruc-
tion is that I am in control. I can make
them pretty, or not. The two dolls that
I have reconstructed represent two parts
of me: one nerdy and very unfashion-
able, and one strong and cool. I make
“An essential guide for
getting along and getting ahead
in our world today.”
— S E N AT O R JO H N M c C A I N
up their stories, and they represent my
passions, my hopes, and my feelings.
When I rip out a regular Barbie or Bratz’s
hair and wipe off its face, I am changing
the stereotypical body type, clothing,
and makeup. I give it tiny wire glasses,
bright-blue hair, and foam armor—my
response to the toys made for my de-
mographic. You should check it out!
1
Violette Sera Delfina Hiser Skilling
Honolulu, Hawaii
SHATTERED GLASS
Lindsay Gellman, in her article on Egon
Neustadt’s collection of Tiffany glass,
quotes the executive director of the col-
lection, who laments comparisons be-
tween Tiffany lamps and the “lousy”
“This should be the first book we
and “offensive” fixtures in T.G.I. Fri-
are all obliged to read in 2018.”
day’s or Ruby Tuesday restaurants (The
—T H E N EW YO R K T I M E S
Talk of the Town, January 29th). I am
a third-generation glass artist from the Available as ebooks and audiobooks
Somers family, which has manufac-
tured Tiffany-style lamps and stained-
glass panels for more than five hun-
dred T.G.I. Friday’s and about forty “This book is an act of
Ruby Tuesdays. Junk has been flood-
radical empathy through
ing American shores for years, but our
work isn’t part of that. Somers pieces which the author—and,
are made of glass from Kokomo (which vicariously, the reader—
also sold to Tiffany), Wissmach, Youghio- enters intimately into a
gheny, and Bullseye, all very reputable life that would otherwise
manufacturers. be unintelligible.”
Back in the seventies, Neustadt in- —ANNE FADIMAN, author of The Spirit
vited my father and my uncle to see his Catches You and You Fall Down
collection. They said that he told them
we were the only studio he would even
consider selling the collection to. Bruce
Randall, a glass collector who wrote
the foreword to a book on Tiffany lamps
by Neustadt, came to my studio in the
early nineties. Randall said that there
was only one problem with my fami-
ly’s work: our soldering was too neat.
Guy H. Somers
Stony Brook, N.Y.
• “Searing.”
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, —O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited “A marvel.”
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume —ESQUIRE
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 7
 FEBRUARY 7 – 20, 2018

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Every winter, New York goes to the dogs for a few days, during the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
(Feb. 12-13, at Madison Square Garden). One of the breeds competing this year is the Sussex spaniel.
Look familiar? You might have seen Stump, the ten-year-old who won top honors in 2009, the oldest
dog ever to do so. Pictured above is a one-and-a-half-year-old named CH Tara’s N Primetime Dark Star
Imperial Stout—but at the Garden, where she’s competing for the first time, she’ll just be called Star.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GRANT CORNETT


CLASSICAL MUSIC
1
OPERA
Metropolitan Opera
Rossini’s deft and propulsive musical style is so
synonymous with his comedies that his serious
operas don’t get taken all that seriously. Occasion-
ally, however, the Met will dust one of them off as
a vehicle for a remarkable talent, and in this sea-
son’s revival of “Semiramide” that singer is the so-
prano Angela Meade. Taking the titular role of the
warrior queen, she leads a first-rate bel-canto cast
that includes Elizabeth DeShong, Javier Camarena,
Ildar Abdrazakov, and Ryan Speedo Green; Mau-
rizio Benini conducts. Feb. 19 at 7:30. • Also playing:
Bartlett Sher’s picturesque rendition of Donizetti’s
feather-light comedy “L’Elisir d’Amore” returns
with a cast of full-bodied lyric voices, including
Matthew Polenzani, Ildebrando D’Arcangelo, and
Pretty Yende; Domingo Hindoyan. (These are the
final performances.) Feb. 7 and Feb. 14 at 7:30, Feb.
10 at noon, and Feb. 17 at 8:30. • David McVicar’s
fast-paced production of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” hurls
the opera’s characters toward their grisly fate with
just enough time for a string of explosive arias and,
of course, the work’s famous Anvil Chorus. The
show stars Maria Agresta, Yonghoon Lee, Quinn
Kelsey, and Anita Rachvelishvili; Marco Armili-
ato. (These are the final performances.) Feb. 9, Feb.
12, and Feb. 15 at 7:30. • The Met’s music director
designate, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, is deep in James
Levine territory as he conducts this season’s revival
of Richard Wagner’s magisterial valedictory opera,
“Parsifal.” Klaus Florian Vogt heads up an inde-
fatigable principal cast—including Peter Mattei,
René Pape, Evgeny Nikitin, and Evelyn Herlit-
zius—in François Girard’s postapocalyptic produc-
tion of the four-hour-plus work. Feb. 10 at 7, Feb.
13 and Feb. 20 at 6, and Feb. 17 at 11:30 A.M. • Met
audiences never have to wait long for Franco Zef-
firelli’s crowd-pleasing production of “La Bohème”
to reappear on the company’s schedule. The lat-
est revival has a promising cast headed by Sonya
Yoncheva (late of the Met’s new “Tosca”), Michael
Fabiano, Susanna Phillips, and Lucas Meacham;
Marco Armiliato, the Met’s trusted Italian hand,
is on the podium. Feb. 16 at 8. (Metropolitan Opera
House. 212-362-6000.)
New York City Opera:
Anna Caterina Antonacci
The rarity of the electrifying singing actress’s
appearances in New York turns each one into an
event. A connoisseur’s musician, she has assem-
bled an enchanting program—including works
by Debussy, Nadia Boulanger, Poulenc, Britten
(“On This Island”), and Respighi—for her recital
at Zankel Hall; Donald Sulzen accompanies her.
Feb. 20-21 at 7:30. (212-247-7800.)
“Six.Twenty.Outrageous”
ILLUSTRATION BY LORENZO GRITTI
Daniel Thomas Davis’s new piece, subtitled
“Three Gertrude Stein Plays in the Shape of an
Opera,” takes a fun, unpretentious approach to the
author’s famously nonsensical writing. The show’s
director and designer is Doug Fitch; David Bloom
conducts Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, Ariadne
Greif, Andrew Fuchs, and the Momenta Quar-
tet in the work’s world première. Feb. 9-10 at 7:30
and Feb. 11 at 2. (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th
St. symphonyspace.org.)
Juilliard Opera:
“Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor”
“Falstaff ” casts a long shadow over other oper-
atic adaptations of Shakespeare’s “The Merry
Wives of Windsor,” but Carl Otto Nicolai’s
singspiel, composed earlier, looks ahead to
Verdi’s masterwork with its rich orchestra-
tions and charming vocal writing; John Giam-
pietro directs, and Teddy Poll conducts. Feb.
14 and Feb. 16 at 7:30 and Feb. 18 at 2. (Rose-
1
mary and Meredith Willson Theatre, 155 W. 65th
St. juilliard.edu.)
ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES
New York Philharmonic
The Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is
confining his New York appearances this season
to concerts connected with the Philharmonic,
which he currently serves as artist-in-residence.
He’s exploring some off-the-beaten-track rep-
ertory; in the first of his programs, he performs
the Piano Concerto of Benjamin Britten (1938),
a moody yet exuberant piece that’s rarely heard.
Antonio Pappano conducts the concerts, which
also feature Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on
a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Saint-Saëns’s
sweeping Symphony No. 3, “Organ.” Feb. 8 at
7:30, Feb. 9 at 2, and Feb. 10 at 8. • Jaap van Zwe-
den, the orchestra’s music director designate,
returns to the Philharmonic podium to conduct
an ambitious program: the New York première
of a work by a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer
(John Luther Adams’s “Dark Waves”) and a
big excerpt from a challenging repertory opera
(Act I of Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” in a concert
performance that features the singers Heidi
Melton, Simon O’Neill, and John Relyea). Feb.
14-15 at 7:30 and Feb. 17 at 8. (David Geffen Hall.
212-875-5656.)
John Corigliano’s dual mastery of classical genres and film scores has made him an icon of American
composition. National Sawdust celebrates his eightieth birthday with a concert on Feb. 16.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 9
Philip Glass at Carnegie Hall
For all the latter-day ubiquity of Glass’s signa-
ture style, portions of his vast œuvre remain un-
derexplored and underappreciated. In the first
of two concerts presented as part of Glass’s sea-
son-long residency, Nico Muhly, a protégé and
close collaborator, airs his own new arrange-
ments of his mentor’s songs, joined by a clutch
of like-minded companions, including Laurie
Anderson and Caroline Shaw, at Zankel Hall.
The second event, at Stern Auditorium, finds
Glass taking the stage with his long-running
ensemble, plus the San Francisco Girls Chorus
and students from the San Francisco Conserva-
tory of Music, for a rare-as-hens’-teeth account
of “Music with Changing Parts,” a surging, ex-
ultant 1970 epic that memorably fuses motoric
rhythms with improvisatory liberties. Feb. 8 at
7:30; Feb. 16 at 8. (212-247-7800.)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
The commanding ensemble, long known for
its muscular brass section, begins a two-con-
cert residency at Carnegie Hall with a program
featuring a brand-new Low Brass Concerto by
Jennifer Higdon, a master of orchestral writ-
ing, along with epicurean favorites by Stravin-
sky, Chausson (“Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer,”
with the mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine),
and Britten (the Four Sea Interludes from “Peter
Grimes”). Riccardo Muti conducts, also bring-
ing his suave mastery to a concert of works by
Verdi, Samuel Adams (the New York première of
“Many Words of Love”), and Brahms (the Sec-
ond Symphony) on the following night. Feb. 9
at 8 and Feb. 10 at 7:30. (212-247-7800.)
Tōn: The Orchestra Now
The Metropolitan Museum’s smash-hit show de-
voted to the drawings and designs of Michelan-
gelo now has a musical component. Leon Bot-
stein will conduct Bard College Conservatory’s
pre-professional training orchestra in settings
of Michelangelo’s magnificent poetry by a com-
poser who could credibly stand beside him: Dmitri
Shostakovich. Tyler Duncan is the baritone solo-
ist. Feb. 11 at 2. (Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. 212-570-3949.)
1 CLASSICAL MUSIC
RECITALS
“In Tchaikovsky’s Shadow”
The Aspect Foundation, a recent addition to the
city’s chamber-music scene, presents a concert
(featuring such musicians as the violinist Philippe
Quint and the cellist Brook Speltz) that highlights
two late-Romantic Russian works that are enjoy-
ing a new lease on life: Taneyev’s towering Piano
Quintet in G Minor and Arensky’s brooding Quar-
tet in A Minor for Violin, Viola, and Two Cellos.
The writer Damian Fowler hosts the evening, which
includes an illustrated discussion of the compos-
ers and their work. Feb. 7 at 7:30. (Bohemian Na-
tional Hall, 321 E. 73rd St. brownpapertickets.com.)
Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk
Denk, one of America’s most persuasive pianists,
likes to collaborate in important concerts with his
glamorous violin colleague. Their program suits
Bell’s archconservative tastes—sonatas by Mozart
and Strauss and Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major—
with Janáček’s Sonata for Violin and Piano provid-
ing a dash of the unexpected. Feb. 7 at 8. (Carnegie
Hall. 212-247-7800.)
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
The Society’s mid-February schedule bursts with
talent. One concert, featuring the pianist Alessio
Bax and the violinist Benjamin Beilman, focusses
entirely on works by César Franck; another offers
music by Turina, Grieg, and Dvořák (the Quintet
in G Major, Op. 77, with the bassist Edgar Meyer);
and a third, “Through the Great War,” includes
pieces by Dohnányi, Ravel, and Elgar (the Piano
Quintet), played by such musicians as the clarinet-
tist Romie de Guise-Langlois and the violist Paul
Neubauer. Feb. 9 at 7:30, Feb. 11 at 5, and Feb. 20 at
7:30. (Alice Tully Hall. 212-875-5788.)
Dorothea Röschmann
At her best, the German soprano can cast an en-
during spell with a pure yet sizable voice that flows
seamlessly. She and the pianist Malcolm Martineau
offer an all-German program with weighty selec-
tions by Mahler (“Rückert-Lieder”), Schumann,
and Wagner (“Wesendonck-Lieder”). Feb. 13 at
7:30. (Zankel Hall. 212-247-7800.)
Infinite Palette
This young curatorial collective commingles indie-
pop and indie-classical artists in organic ways. The
first program features the popular Baltimore duo
Wye Oak and the Metropolis Ensemble in songs
from the 2014 Wye Oak album “Shriek,” and in
the world première of William Brittelle’s “Spir-
itual America,” which also features the Brook-
lyn Youth Chorus. On the second night, the styl-
ish Minneapolis synth-pop band Poliça reprises
its successful recent collaboration with Stargaze,
a Berlin-based ensemble, in “Music for the Long
Emergency,” plus pieces by Daniel Wohl and Steve
Reich. Feb. 16-17 at 8. (Symphony Space, Broadway
at 95th St. symphonyspace.org.)
Emmanuel Pahud and Alessio Bax
Pahud, the principal flutist of the Berlin Philhar-
monic, and Bax, one of the world’s most assured
young pianists, collaborate in a program that of-
fers not only sonatas for their combination by Bach
and Poulenc but transcriptions of sonatas for other
instruments by Schubert (the “Arpeggione”) and
Mendelssohn. It’s part of a busy mid-February at
the 92nd Street Y that also features concerts by the
guitarist Jorge Caballero and the tenor Christoph
Prégardien. Feb. 17 at 8. (Lexington Ave. at 92nd St.
212-415-5500.)
10 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
ART
1
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Metropolitan Museum
“Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer”
Michelangelo’s sixteenth-century Italian con-
temporaries very nearly worshipped him for col-
lapsing more than a millennium of distance be-
tween classical antiquity and a surge of avowedly
Christian but disruptively individual inspira-
tion. You can’t miss the atavistic power in this
show’s hundred and thirty-three drawings, which
are beautifully installed with a few of his cre-
ations in sculpture, painting, and design and with
works by related artists. The drawings are stu-
pendous—no surprise—though strikingly limited
in iconography and formal repertoire, except
those from a few years when Michelangelo exer-
cised a definitively Mannerist panache in gifts to
friends and patrons. (In a smoky portrait dated
1531-34, the hauntingly ambiguous expression of
an adored young friend, Andrea Quaratesi, qual-
ifies the sitter as kissing kin of the Mona Lisa.)
The effect is exhaustingly repetitive. How many
times in a row can you swoon to marks that sound
the same chord of rippling anatomy? Whether
the Sistine Chapel, undertaken in 1508 and com-
pleted in 1512, is the best work of art ever made
we can’t say, because nothing compares to it. The
ceiling is reproduced here with an overhead light-
box photograph, at one-fourth scale—a travesty,
aesthetically, but a useful reference for mapping
the destinations of the preparatory drawings on
view. The Sistine opus yields a faint sense of what
it must feel like to be God, jump-starting human-
ity, programming its significance, and then, with
“The Last Judgment” (which was added more
than twenty years later), closing it out. We will
never get over Michelangelo. But we will also
never know quite what to do with him, except
gape. Through Feb. 12.
Museum of Modern Art
“Stephen Shore”
This immersive and staggeringly charming ret-
rospective is devoted to one of the best American
photographers of the past half century. Shore has
peers—Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, Richard
Misrach, and, especially, William Eggleston—
in a generation that, in the nineteen-seventies,
stormed to eminence with color film, which art
photographers had long disdained. His best-
known series, “American Surfaces” and “Un-
common Places,” are both from the seventies
and were mostly made in rugged Western states.
The pictures in these series share a quality of
surprise: appearances surely unappreciated if
even really noticed by anyone before—in rural
Arizona, a phone booth next to a tall cactus, on
which a crude sign (“GARAGE”) is mounted,
and, on a small-city street in Wisconsin, a movie
marquee’s neon wanly aglow, at twilight. A search
for fresh astonishments has kept Shore peripa-
tetic, on productive sojourns in Mexico, Scot-
land, Italy, Ukraine, and Israel. He has remained
a vestigial Romantic, stopping in space and
time to frame views that exert a peculiar tug on
him. This framing is resolutely formalist: sub-
jects composed laterally, from edge to edge, and
in depth. There’s never a “background.” The most
distant element is as considered as the nearest.
But only when looking for it are you conscious of
Shore’s formal discipline, because it is as fluent
as a language learned from birth. His best pic-
tures at once arouse feelings and leave us alone
to make what we will of them. He delivers truths,
whether hard or easy, with something very like
mercy. Through May 28.
Guggenheim Museum
“Joseph Albers in Mexico”
From the mid-nineteen-thirties to the late six-
ties, Albers and his wife, Anni, often travelled to
Mexico; this striking show makes a case for the
country’s impact on his art, as the German mod-
ernist faces off with the craftspeople of Chichén
Itzá, Tenayuca, Uxmal, and Teotihuacán. A pho-
tograph, taken by Albers on his first visit to the
pre-Columbian ball court at Monte Albán, com-
presses the structure’s shadowed stone bleach-
ers into a thrumming zigzag pattern of narrow
diagonal stripes. Its formal connection to his
1942 lithograph “To Monte Albán,” in which
twin rectangles are circumscribed by concen-
tric boxes, is clear. The show includes scores
of photographs—many of them combined into
meticulous typological collages, never shown
in Albers’s lifetime—and a judicious selection
of drawings and paintings. For every pairing
that specifies inspiration—“To Mitla,” a 1940
oil-on-Masonite painting in a stepped pattern
of blue, red, brown, violet, and olive, echoes a
nearby photograph of serpentine stonework—
there are half a dozen juxtapositions emphasiz-
ing an affinity for geometric repetition. The ge-
nius of the show, organized in six geographically
themed segments, with an addendum of seven
“Homage to the Square” paintings, is to give
equal weight to the ruins and to Albers’s mani-
festly enraptured take on them, enabling view-
ers to participate in a living dialogue between
artists separated by centuries. Through March 28.
Whitney Museum
“Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined”
The young Nigerian artist, who is based in New
York, uses an evocative conceit to unite her fig-
urative works—and to heighten their intrigue.
Faux letterhead announces that the large-scale
works on paper, in charcoal, pastel, and graph-
ite, merge the collections of two aristocratic Ni-
gerian families. Her regal depictions of Africans
retool traditions of European portraiture, as well
as strains of contemporary photography (think:
Instagram), showing the wealthy at leisure or en-
shrining their belongings in luminous vignettes.
Ojih Odutola is known for her intense, even psy-
chedelic, renderings of black skin, an approach
echoed in her textured depiction of clothing, in-
teriors, and landscapes. The sumptuous collision
of gleaming tile, gauzy fabric, and desert scrub
in “Pregnant” (2017) is especially noteworthy. Its
off-kilter composition suggests an enlarged snap-
shot, but the pose of its subject is curiously for-
mal. “Wall of Ambassadors,” also from this year,
is an unabashed moment of meta-commentary,
showing a panelled wall of oval-framed portraits.
Each mysterious dignitary speaks to the dizzy-
ing detail of the artist’s invented history, as do
the hands entering the bottom edge of the still-
life, to complete it with an elegant arrangement
of leaves. Through Feb. 25.
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Brooklyn Museum
“Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the
Making”
Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” from 1974-
79, a monument of the American feminist art
movement—and an example of the second wave’s
triumphs and blind spots—found a permanent
home at the museum ten years ago. This show
commemorates the acquisition with a fasci-
nating behind-the-scenes look at the project’s
genesis, and the community effort behind its
realization. It took a small army of volunteers—
accomplished craftspeople, self-styled scholars
of suppressed herstory, and novice embroider-
ers among them—to create the thirty-nine place
settings on the triangular table, representing a
pantheon of female figures from “Primordial
Goddess” to Georgia O’Keeffe. (An additional
nine hundred and ninety-nine names of notable
women are written in gold script on the glazed
floor tiles.) In preparatory works—sketches, de-
signs, and test plates—we see the artist refine
her technique and develop the signature “cen-
tral core” imagery of her semi-abstract ceram-
ics—or, as she has jokingly referred to the plates,
“No Disrespect, Manhattan Courts, 1997,” by Jamel Shabbaz, is among the works by
fourteen photographers in “Prison Nation,” opening at the Aperture Foundation on Feb. 7.
12 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
ART
“vagina china.” Indeed, Chicago deserves the
last laugh. For years, “The Dinner Party” was
an object of outrage and ridicule, perhaps even
more than one of curiosity and reverence, but it
endures as a stunningly ambitious experiment.
Through March 4.
Bronx Museum
“Gordon Matta-Clark”
The SoHo-reared son of two artists (the Chilean
Roberto Matta and the American Anna Louise
Clark), Matta-Clark was a self-described “an-
architect” who made daring interventions in
urban environments until his untimely death,
in 1978, at the age of thirty-five. For his 1975
project “Day’s End,” the artist filmed himself
cutting a half-moon shape from the front of an
abandoned warehouse on a Manhattan pier, with
the aid of pulleys and a chainsaw. He described
the results as a “sun-and-water temple,” but wor-
ship was cut short when the police arrived with
an arrest warrant. One high point here is an ex-
tensive photographic archive of subway graffiti
and the controversial “Conical Intersect,” also
performed in 1975, for which Matta-Clark cut
pieces out of the façades of two historic houses
in Paris’s Les Halles neighborhood. (Though
the buildings were already slated for demolition,
the artist was nonetheless criticized for help-
ing to destroy them.) This essential retrospec-
tive is jam-packed with photographs and films
documenting these and other projects, such as
Matta-Clark’s hybrid of happening and restau-
rant, FOOD. Especially noteworthy, given the
context, are stunning pictures of big square holes
cut in the floors of abandoned buildings in the
South Bronx, both a powerful critique of the de-
liberate devaluation of real estate in marginal-
ized neighborhoods and a memorial to derelict
beauty. Through April 8.
Morgan Library and Museum
“Peter Hujar: Speed of Life”
Hujar, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia
in 1987, at the age of fifty-three, was among the
greatest of all American photographers and has
had, by far, the most confusing reputation. This
dazzling retrospective of a hundred and sixty-
four pictures, curated by Joel Smith, affirms
Hujar’s excellence while, if anything, compli-
cating his history. The works range across the
genres of portraiture, nudes, cityscape, and
still-life—the stillest of all from the catacombs
of Palermo, Italy, shot in 1963. The finest are
portraits, not only of people but of cows, sheep,
and, most notably, an individual goose, with an
eagerly confiding mien. The quality of Hujar’s
prints, tending to sumptuous blacks and sim-
mering grays, transfixes. He was a darkroom
master, maintaining technical standards for
which he got scant credit except among cer-
tain cognoscenti. He never hatched a signature
look to rival those of more celebrated elders
who influenced him (Richard Avedon, Diane
Arbus) or those of younger peers who learned
from him (Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Gol-
din). His pictures share, in place of a style, an
unfailing rigor that can only be experienced,
not described. Tall and handsome, volatile,
epically promiscuous, and chronically broke,
Hujar lived the bohemian dream of becoming
legendary rather than the bourgeois one of
being rich and conventionally famous. But he
craved more, hungering to have his art recog-
nized while repeatedly forestalling the event
with bristly pride. Hujar’s personal glamour
consorts so awkwardly with his artistic disci-
pline that trying to keep both in mind at once
can hurt your brain. But the conundrum de-
fines his significance at a historic crossroads
of high art and low life in the late twentieth
century. Through May 20.
Museum of Arts and Design
“Camille Hoffman: Pieceable Kingdom”
A painterly collage of brown vinyl and ocean-
themed imagery covers the floor of this small
show, which is an environmentalist cri de coeur.
Starfish and smiling dolphins lend a playful
air, while a nonbiodegradable mountain of col-
orful plastic—shower curtains, disposable ta-
blecloths, shopping bags—threatens to spill
out the window, suggesting a landfill. On the
walls, semi-abstract landscapes that feel both
topographical and expressionistic incorporate
more found materials, from shredded medical
COURTESY APERTURE
records to beach-resort ads. The titular work
riffs on the Edward Hicks painting “Peaceable
Kingdom,” of which he made several versions in
the early nineteenth century. Hoffman reimag-
ines it as warped, wrinkled, and layered with
flotsam and jetsam—in one pointed passage,
NEW LIFE FOR
AN OLD MASTER
Over the past two years, the J. Paul Getty Museum, in partnership with the National Gallery of Ireland,
has been studying, cleaning, and restoring Guercino’s nearly 400-year-old painting Jacob Blessing
the Sons of Joseph at the Getty’s state-of-the-art conservation facilities in Los Angeles. Discover how
conservators from Los Angeles and Dublin worked side-by-side to understand the painting’s past in
order to preserve its present state at getty.edu/world.

A World of Art, Research, Conservation, and Philanthropy.

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Photo: Associate Conservator Devi Ormond cleans Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, c. 1620, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino. On loan from the National Gallery of Ireland, NGI.4648
 ART
a Whole Foods bag and a golf-course calendar
threaten to edge Hicks’s animals out of the pic-
ture. Through April 8.
Queens Museum
“Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake”
Since the nineteen-nineties, the American art-
ist has been investigating gendered family roles
and stereotypes of Asian femininity in dead-
pan and visually lush performance-based work.
In this sprawling, essayistic exhibition, which
encompasses video, installation, photography,
and sculpture, Chang documents her travels to
China, Fogo Island, and the fast-shrinking Aral
Sea. Bleak landscapes illustrate catastrophic geo-
political shifts and provide poetic backdrops for
momentous personal events. In large projec-
tions, we watch Chang wash an abandoned fish-
ing boat and the corpse of a whale; in a video ti-
tled “Que Sera, Sera,” which is more intimate in
both size and tone, she sings to her infant son in
a hospital room where her father lies dying. Ac-
companying a three-part lecture-performance,
which incorporates footage from a trip along
the South-to-North Water Diversion Project,
in China, are dozens of handblown glass objects
that the artist calls “urinary devices,” absurdist
riffs on the plastic bottles she had to use as por-
table urinals during her journey. The piece epit-
omizes Chang’s gift for breathing humor into
1
her rebellious takes on profound, even heart-
breaking, subjects. Through Feb. 18.
GALLERIES—UPTOWN
Julian Hoeber
To depict one’s own consciousness may be a tall
order, but that’s the long-standing mission of
this Los Angeles artist. It takes enthralling if,
at times, high-handed form here in a series of
sculptural models of fantasy architecture and
trompe-l’oeil paintings of vision boards. One of
the latter, titled “4,000 Years of Trying to Fig-
ure Out the Shape of the Mind,” includes refer-
ences to René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Jacques
Lacan, and the phrenologist L. A. Vaught. “The
Appearance of Geometry in Nature as a Root of
Technology” charts the history of grids, from the
kindergarten blocks designed by Friedrich Frö-
bel to the Microsoft logo. Hoeber’s navel-gazing
takes on a Borgesian melancholy in the sculp-
tures, particularly “Permeable Tension Figure
Model,” in which a spiralling white tube punc-
tured with holes (part coral, part spinal column)
accompanies a coal-black bust of the artist, com-
plete with glass eyes, resting cheek-side down,
as if daydreaming. Through Feb. 24. (Blum & Poe,
19 E. 66th St. 212-249-2249.)
Katherine Hubbard
In these cryptic black-and-white photographs,
words are spelled out with stones on the floor of
a sunlit warehouse. (The exception is one lone-
some “S.”) The series was staged, in 2016, in an
unfinished space designed by Donald Judd, in
Marfa, Texas. Moving around the gallery, reading
the pictures, one longs for a coherent message,
but good luck parsing the phrase “s-end-for-the-
me-their.” A suspicion emerges: disorientation
may be Hubbard’s point. In the photograph
“Their,” she achieves a remarkable trick, as a
swath of bright desert, glimpsed through a miss-
ing concrete panel, oésets the word, seemingly
defying the optical laws of vanishing-point per-
spective. Through March 3. (Higher Pictures, 980
Madison Ave., at 76th St. 212-249-6100.)
14 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
“All Good Art Is Political: Käthe Kollwitz
and Sue Coe”
This crackling show, titled after a quote from
Toni Morrison, displays prints and drawings
by Kollwitz, a German social realist who died in
1945, and Coe, an English antiwar, anti-capitalist,
and pro-animal-rights illustrator who lives in
upstate New York. From opposite ends of the
twentieth century, they prove the capacity of art,
when both impassioned and adept, to dramatize
worldly injustice with fury and flair. Kollwitz
is the more appealing, with a style of masterly
touch and tender pathos, notably in delicately
shaded images of mothers and children indom-
itably bonded in poverty or facing unspecified
threats. Coe makes a burnt oéering of her own
fine artistic gifts by cultivating an ugliness to
befit the targets of her rage, including military
and sexual violence and, especially, the horrors
of industrial slaughterhouses, which, starting
in the late nineteen-eighties, she spent several
years researching in person. Both artists have as-
signed themselves an evergreen social mission:
to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the com-
1
fortable. Through March 3. (Galerie St. Etienne,
24 W. 57th St. 212-245-6734.)
GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN
Hervé Guibert and Luther Price
The prolific French writer and photographer
Guibert, who died of AIDS-related causes in
1991, at the age of thirty-six, searched for beauty
in the taboo. His gauzy black-and-white pictures,
which were taken in museums of anatomical odd-
ities, treat subjects, including a pair of conjoined
fetuses, with the same ethereal distance that he
was no doubt aiming for in “Autoportrait, Rue
du Moulin-Vert,” from 1986, for which he posed
as a cadaver under a sheet. Price, a mid-career
experimentalist, shares Guibert’s taste for the
morbid. Using found film footage, hair, glue,
and bubble wrap, he assembles tiny collages on
35-mm. slides, which he projects in conjunction
with instructional medical filmstrips scavenged
in Revere, Massachusetts, where he lives. The
strange visual poetry that emits from a pair of
slide carrousels in “Meat: Chapter 3” involves a
blue butterfly, burn victims, surgical incisions,
and ominous-looking men in lab coats. Through
Feb. 18. (Callicoon, 49 Delancey St. 212-219-0326.)
Sondra Perry
By painting the walls of her ingenious show
chroma-key blue (used in videos as a placeholder
for backgrounds added in post-production), Perry
suggests that her viewers might be on camera.
In other words, the way we live now, every room
that we enter could become a set, whether we like
it or not. In the show’s central video work, the
young New Jersey artist explores the dystopian
predicament of her twin brother, who discov-
ered that his animated likeness had been used as
a video-game avatar, after a developer licensed
the images of college basketball players with-
out their consent. His story unfolds alongside
footage of the siblings touring the Met and the
British Museum. Perry superimposes spinning
artifacts from the institutions’ African and Oce-
anic collections throughout the piece, as a robot
reads the colonialist details of their acquisition.
Perry’s lyrical, unpolished use of 3-D-modelling
software, a key element of her D.I.Y.-cyborg aes-
thetic, lends her insights into racial politics an
uncanny and timely power. Through Feb. 25. (Do-
nahue, 99 Bowery. 646-896-1368.)
 made DeMarco a star in certain circles. Sagar’s
latest record, “Fresh Air,” arrived last February;

NIGHT LIFE
1
he plays a suite of Valentine’s-week shows at the
Market Hotel. (1140 Myrtle Ave., Brooklyn. 718-
599-5800. Feb. 13-16.)

ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check
in advance to confirm engagements.
Rich Brian
In the past decade, rap has become increasingly re-
warding for everyone but traditional rappers: co-
medians, frat boys, actors, children of actors, strip-
pers, and countless other outsiders have quickly
garnered fans, who may be weary of a genre en-
tering its forties (with the worn-in habits to prove
it). Brian Imanuel, an eighteen-year-old Internet
yuckster turned rapper from Jakarta, should be
taken more seriously than such peers. His break-
out hit, “Dat $tick,” from 2016, isn’t just a racial gag,
in which a plucky Asian boy adopts the affect of a
tough trap star: it’s also ridiculously catchy, densely
lyrical, and as good as anything Migos made that
year. Following that, he continued producing and
releasing songs like “Who That Be” and “Glow
Like Dat,” each one better than the last, under
the name Rich Chigga. As his star rose, so did the
scrutiny: at the beginning of this year, he bowed
to growing pressure about his name and swapped
out the modified slur. “Brian” fits him better, obvi-
ously, but it’s also less reductive. He’s a talent who
deserves to be considered individually; his latest
single, “See Me,” is pensive and lucid, and all the
jokes still land. “Indonesian MC Hammer in this
bitch, beat your ass if you correct my grammar in
this bitch” is a quip word nerds can get behind.
(Terminal 5, 610 W. 56th St. 212-582-6600. Feb. 20.)
DJ Harvey
Harvey Bassett came of age in London in the late
nineteen-seventies, amid pivotal developments in
the city’s music and politics. Punk and disco ger-
minated alongside oil shocks, bloody culture wars,
and seismic shifts in government. Inspired by the
rapid change, Bassett sought out a new route; on
a trip to New York City in the early eighties, he
encountered hip-hop, which was then just blos-
soming. Soon, he was spending up to eight hours
a night behind decks in London, Cambridge, and
Bristol, playing everything from the Pop Group
to the Fat Boys. Now infamous for his marathon
sets, he takes the reins at Output this week, play-
ing from open to close. (74 Wythe Ave., Brooklyn.
outputclub.com. Feb. 16.)
Homeshake
Peter Sagar, the central member of this Mon-
treal band, came into his own as the tour guitar-
ist for Mac DeMarco, an outsized personality who
couldn’t have been easy to support from the side.
In 2013, Sagar quit playing in DeMarco’s whimsi-
cal stage shows and began releasing subdued, icy
indie compositions as Homeshake. His first two
albums, “In the Shower” and “Midnight Snack,”
showcase Sagar’s ear for yacht-soul songwriting
and minimalist production while retaining some of
the goofball humor and nineties-slacker slant that
Kelsey Lu
On her SoundCloud page, this classically trained
cellist and vocalist extends an invite to “dive into
my easily distracted mind.” Her work is anything
but distracted, though: Lu’s first EP, “Church,”
whirs with intent, and with discipline. Hailing
from North Carolina, she grew up in a devout fam-
ily of Jehovah’s Witnesses; she eventually moved
away from organized religion through music.
“Church” was recorded live, in one take, and Lu
typically performs alone, with just a loop pedal
and her cello, trusting herself while asking for our
confidence as well. She reprises the music of Alice
Coltrane, along with Laraaji, in a celebration of
the late musician’s life. (MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jack-
son Ave., Long Island City. 718-784-2084. Feb. 11.)
John Maus
Even fans of Maus hardly know what to expect
next from the synth-pop prince of darkness: ref-
erences to Oedipal drama or to Stockhausen, an
analysis of his former bandmate Ariel Pink, or a
twenty-four-thousand-word diatribe about life
and intent, much like the one he sent to the music
zine AdHoc, in 2012, after it published an open let-
ter to the musician. Maus, who has a Ph.D. in po-
litical philosophy, is a cult musical hero known for
crafting woozy, space-age baritone pop musings
about quantum leaps and the moon, most notably

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Gallagher is known for being the sharp lyricist
behind the Britpop band Oasis’s megahits, and
for the fact that he doesn’t mince words—partic-
ularly when speaking about his younger brother
and former bandmate, Liam. “He’s like a man
with a fork in a world of soup,” he once said of
Liam (who, in fairness, has contributed equally
to their lifetime of roasting each other, and has
repeatedly called Noel a “potato”). Since Oasis’s
explosive breakup, in 2009, both brothers have
embarked on solo music projects. Noel’s High
Flying Birds demonstrates where Oasis might
have gone had it taken the less travelled (and per-
haps riskier) path of experimentation. But from
the sound of the band’s psychedelia-tinged “Who
Built the Moon?,” the move has been a refresh-
ing one for the elder Gallagher. (Radio City Music
Hall, Sixth Ave. at 50th St. 212-247-4777. Feb. 15.)

Girlpool
Since 2013, Girlpool, the Los Angeles duo com- Alphonse Mucha, The Seasons, four decorative panels, 1896. Estimate $40,000 to $60,000.
posed of Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker, has
been spinning poignant punk songs about friend-
ship and relationships. On their latest album,
“Powerplant,” Tividad and Tucker have refined
Vintage Posters
Featuring Highlights from the Gail Chisholm Collection
their talents for penning evocative lyrics of heal-
ing and heartache, which often recall sweet dreams MARCH 1
one wakes up from just a moment too soon. The
creative dynamic between the two is fascinating: Specialist: Nicholas D. Lowry • posters@swanngalleries.com
their discordantly harmonious vocal stylings, typ-
ically sung in unison, meld in a way that makes Preview: February 24, 12-5; February 26 to 28, 10-6
lines about beige rooms and getting lost at the cor- 104 East 25th St, New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710
ner store feel thrilling. (Brooklyn Steel, 319 Frost SWANNGALLERIES.COM
St., Brooklyn. 888-929-7849. Feb. 8.)

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 15


on his 2011 album, “We Must Become the Piti-
less Censors of Ourselves.” His latest gig in New
York promises to be the most offbeat Valentine’s
Day a couple could wish for. (Elsewhere, 599 John-
son Ave., Brooklyn. elsewherebrooklyn.com. Feb. 14.)
Neon Indian
On its début album, “Psychic Chasms,” from 2009,
this Texas electronic act outlined the lo-fi, sample-
driven twist on pop, rock, and psychedelia which
would dominate music blogs and rooftop gath-
erings in the summers to come. As Neon Indian,
the singer and composer Alan Palomo, born in
Monterrey, Mexico, distilled the so-called chill-
wave sound down to potent concentrations: soft
and clipping drumbeats, synths modulated into
shivers, vocals sneaking acid-dream motifs in
through the fuzz. “Everything comes apart if you
find the strand,” he sings. “All it takes is a hand.”
Since then, Neon Indian has released two more
acclaimed records that have extended its grasp on
downbeat dance music, including, most recently,
“Vega Intl. Night School,” from 2015. Palomo re-
turns to Good Room for a d.j. set. (98 Meserole
Ave., Brooklyn. 718-349-2373. Feb. 16.)
Palm
This quartet from the Hudson Valley is slicing
and dicing indie rock in its own image, forging
a collaged, frantic take on worn-out structures.
Palm formed amid the fruitful live-music scene
at Bard College; its songs bob across odd time sig-
natures, looping together asymmetrical phrases
and barely tonal harmonies as if applying Wil-
liam S. Burroughs’s cut-up technique to pages
of sheet music. The jazz-ish result is entrancing,
with the knotty rhythms supporting the coy vo-
cals of Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt. “Shadow Ex-
pert,” the band’s last LP, is an essential listen for
long road trips through weird towns; Palm will
celebrate a new album, “Rock Island,” due out on
the day of this show. (Market Hotel, 1140 Myrtle
Ave., Brooklyn. Feb. 9.)
Romeo Santos
Bachata, the arpeggiated guitar music that origi-
nated in the Dominican Republic, often revolves
The Montreal-based singer-songwriter Peter Sagar performs flyaway synthesizer soul as Homeshake.
Market Hotel, in Brooklyn, hosts him for four nights around Valentine’s Day, Feb. 13-16.
16 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
NIGHT LIFE
around broken hearts and betrayals. Yet few prac-
titioners of the genre pine like Romeo Santos,
the superstar Bronx-born performer. His latest
album, “Golden,” features a song about infidel-
ity, sung in two parts: one from the perspective
of the lover, and one from the unsuspecting hus-
band. But it’s not all tears with Santos, who years
ago fronted the mega-successful boy band Aven-
tura; he gets raunchy on songs like “Propuesta
Indecente” and “El Amigo” (an ode to his mem-
ber) and goofy on the superhero-themed “Héroe
Favorito.” Santos will take over Madison Square
Garden for three nights. (Seventh Ave. at 33rd St.
800-745-3000. Feb. 15-17.)
Sophie
On Madonna’s 2015 comeback single, “Bitch,
I’m Madonna,” the contributions by the pro-
ducer and d.j. Diplo are clear: a mashing line of
saxophone-like bass plays through the chorus
like countless other E.D.M. climaxes. But the
staccato of Madonna’s lyrics and the synth ar-
peggios are trademark Sophie, the London pro-
ducer who is smoothing out club music’s hard
edge, one shiny composition at a time. The bub-
bly, tongue-in-cheek track “Lemonade” was irri-
tating electronic purists even before it ended up
in a McDonald’s commercial, and Sophie’s shad-
owy work with the label PC Music is regarded
as some of the best and most bewildering pop
around, all baby-pitched vocals and kawaii in-
dulgence. (Elsewhere, 599 Johnson Ave., Brook-
lyn. elsewherebrooklyn.com. Feb. 8.)
UNIIQU3
The d.j. and producer UNIIQU3 has helped to
popularize Jersey club, the riotous dance rhythm
built on strobing drums and vocal samples that
stutter and splash. She rose from home-studio
tinkering in Newark to scene notoriety with re-
mixes and celebrated club sets, providing an al-
ternative to the house music and Top Forty pop
that dominated venues in her home town. Hav-
ing grown out of the neighboring Baltimore club
sound, Jersey club is more concerned with repur-
posed source material and speed, and has found
fans through its hypnotizing blend of insolent
rap samples and heart-racing beats. UNIIQU3
plays alongside the Queens rapper Dai Burger.
1
(Rough Trade, 64 N. 9th St., Brooklyn. 212-673-
1775. Feb. 10.)
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
Bruce Barth
Heart, intangible yet palpable, is the quality that
most pervades Barth’s piano playing. A mainstream
modernist who wondrously calls to mind a host of
classic stylists without ever sounding precisely like
any of them, Barth rounds out a sharp quartet with
harmonious cohorts, including the saxophonist
Steve Wilson, the bassist Vicente Archer, and the
drummer Adam Cruz. (Smoke, 2751 Broadway, be-
tween 105th and 106th Sts. 212-864-6662. Feb. 9-11.)
Steve Davis
All modern jazz trombonists owe much to J. J.
Johnson, the man who brought bebop to the in-
strument. Davis is an obvious acolyte of the mas-
ter, his technical wizardry firmly wed to expres-
sive mirth. Here, Davis pays tribute to Johnson,
with an all-star sextet featuring Eddie Henderson
on trumpet and Harold Mabern on piano. (Smoke,
2751 Broadway, between 105th and 106th Sts. 212-864-
6662. Feb. 16-18.)
Javon Jackson
A champion of the rugged tenor-saxophone tradition
of such masters as Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane,
and Joe Henderson, Jackson came up through the
jazz boot camps of Art Blakey and Elvin Jones, and
he wears his rigorous training proudly. These days
he’s not averse to dipping into R. & B. and funk,
the better to reveal his soulful inclinations. (Iridium,
1650 Broadway, at 51st St. 212-582-2121. Feb. 15-17.)
Frank London
A card-carrying downtown eclectic, the trum-
peter and composer London juggles klezmer,
world music, new jazz, and contemporary classi-
cal, among other far-flung genres, with a healthy
mix of respect and irreverent daring. This residency
finds him mixing it up with ensembles both com-
pact and enlarged, all supplied with similarly bold
and diverse collaborators. (The Stone, Avenue C at
2nd St. thestonenyc.com. Feb. 13-18.)
Kate McGarry, Keith Ganz, Gary Versace
No self-respecting jazz club would have passed on
the opportunity to book a Valentine’s Day gig with
this trio—vocalist McGarry, guitarist Ganz, and
keyboardist Versace—whose new album, “The Sub-
ject Tonight Is Love,” examines the titular phenom-
enon through diverse song. Flitting from standards
to adaptations of the Sufi poet Hafiz to heartfelt
McGarry originals, the triumvirate ponders age-
old mysteries with delicacy and not a little spunk.
(Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. Feb. 14.)
John Lloyd Young
Is there life after Frankie Valli? Young, who won
a Tony and a slew of other theatrical awards for
his portrayal of the Four Seasons singer in the
ILLUSTRATION BY PETRA ERIKSSON
Broadway megahit “Jersey Boys” (he also reprised
the role in Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation),
has been attempting to satisfactorily answer that
question ever since he left the show. To his credit,
Young doesn’t lean on his alter ego’s trademark
falsetto style; instead, he forges his own identity
by way of a keen taste in classic pop and origi-
nals that showcase his flexible voice. (Café Car-
lyle, Carlyle Hotel, Madison Ave. at 76th St. 212-
744-1600. Feb. 13-24.)
 TELEVISION
The broadclub cuttlefish is one of the psychedelic creatures featured in “Blue Planet II.”
Into the Sea
BBC’s continuation of “Blue Planet.”
The nature documentary “Blue Planet II”
is oceanic in topic, tone, scope, and maj-
esty. A production of the BBC Natural
History Unit, the seven-episode series
flexes its broadcaster’s mastery of a genre
that it created. Over excellent footage shot
on a circumglobal photo safari, the ven-
erable narrator David Attenborough
orates zoological narratives as if delivering
a state-of-nature address. “Blue Planet II”
follows the network’s “The Blue Planet,”
from 2001, but it is less a sequel than a
subsequent quest, like Apollo 14.
Attenborough promises introductions
to “creatures beyond our imagination.”
Behold, for instance, the broadclub cut-
tlefish. When the cuttlefish needs to
subdue a crab to eat, its pigment flickers
hypnotically, to stupefy its prey. Creatures
beyond imagining, such as these, enrich
the imagination when encountered. The
moments are psychedelic and spiritual,
and “Blue Planet II” collects them into a
saga pulsing with sea serpents, multi-
armed beasts, protean freaks, photogenic
anemones, legends of kelp forests, and
cnidarians named for Gorgons.
In Episode 1, the first of ten vignettes
develops from crowd-pleasing footage of
bottlenose dolphins surfing gnarly South
African waves, the slick cinematography
COURTESY BBC
pumped up by deft editing. We descend
alongside a dolphin family to a coral reef
in the Red Sea to “properly appreciate
their true character,” as Attenborough
puts it, by watching a calf learn to brush
TANIA
against fronds that secrete an antibacterial
mucus. But, because the show’s sound is
BRUGUERA
as impressive as all the other technical
aspects, we hear the dolphins’ vocalization
with a horrifying new clarity—it sounds
like the screech of nails on a blackboard, UNTITLED
released with a whistling wet flatulence. (HAVANA, 2000)
The second vignette visits the Great
Barrier Reef, home to a tool-using
tuskfish. A subsequent sequence of fish THROUGH MAR 11 ONLY
leaping from the Indian Ocean to snatch
fledgling terns from the air is edited with
ideal savagery and a thrilling lack of sen-
timentality: a splashy half-dozen feather-
crushing strikes. The next mealtime is
more tranquil, with rays wheeling in
pursuit of bioluminescent plankton while
the score supplies balletic strings.
The last of the ten vignettes is a nail-
biter about a mother walrus nudging her
pup through an Arctic climate—an en-
vironment that’s changing to slush—as
the walruses struggle to navigate the
world’s new behavioral demands. The
walrus story is shaped to introduce a note
of poignancy, and it leads to Attenbor-
ough’s closing comment: “As we under-
stand more about the complexity of the
lives of sea creatures, so we begin to ap- Tania Bruguera. Untitled (Havana, 2000). 2000.
Sugar cane bagasse, video, and live performance.
preciate the fragility of their home.” Here The Museum of Modern Art, New York.The Modern
Women’s Fund and Committee on Media and
is the walrus, a symbol of interdepen- Performance Art Funds. © 2018 Tania Bruguera.
Installation view, VII Bienal de La Habana, 2000.
dence, who grunts, “You are me and we
Photo: Casey Stoll
are all together”—a living idol of an
11 West 53 Street, Manhattan
Earth mother.
—Troy Patterson
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 17

“Fire and Air” explores the May-December affair between Vaslav Nijinsky and Serge Diaghilev.
Love in the Afternoon
A new play tells an abridged history of
Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.
Terrence McNally’s “Fire and Air,” di-
rected by John Doyle (at Classic Stage
Company, through Feb. 25), is a sort of
account of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets
Russes, but very sort-of. Compressing
the twenty-year fortunes of this com-
pany, the most glamorous and influential
ballet troupe of the twentieth century,
into less than two hours, it’s like what
might have passed through Diaghilev’s
mind if he had had to undergo general
anesthesia.
18 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
DANCE
The play has only one set—two gilt-
edged mirrors, a scattering of gilt
chairs—and only six characters. First
come Diaghilev (Douglas Hodge, not
quite seigneurial enough) and his two
most famous dancer-lovers, Vaslav Ni-
jinsky ( James Cusati-Moyer, much
handsomer than the real Nijinsky) and
Léonide Massine ( Jay Armstrong John-
son). Then there’s Dunya (Marsha
Mason), Diaghilev’s childhood nurse,
an anachronistic presence (Diaghilev
didn’t take his nanny on tour), but good
to have around, because, amid the rages
and imprecations accompanying Dia-
ghilev’s love life, she tends to take
things in stride. Also present are Misia
Sert (Marin Mazzie), an important
Parisian salonneuse of the time and
probably Diaghilev’s best friend, and
his cousin, and first lover, Dima Filo-
sofov ( John Glover). I’m not sure why
Dima is there, except to give us a start
when he plants a big, smacking kiss on
Diaghilev’s mouth. (Dima’s trying to
get him back. None of this is altogether
accurate.) The locale shifts back and
forth. One minute we’re in Paris in 1912,
the next in Venice in 1929.
It’s fun to be backstage with these
people, to ooh and ah with them over a
new brocade that Leon Bakst, the
troupe’s excellent set designer, has sent
over, and to listen to their naughty jokes.
Diaghilev, almost twenty years older
than Nijinsky, laments that the younger
man has to look at the boils on his chest.
That’s O.K., Nijinsky says. His previous
lover, Prince Lvov, had a rear end covered
with hair. Even Nanny gets into the act.
This dumpling-shaped old lady tells us
that now and then, when the others are
gone, she takes the afternoon maid to
bed. The arrangement doesn’t mean
much to her, she says, but the maid gets
sentimental over it.
McNally, I believe, agrees with
Nanny, or wants to: sex is not very im-
portant. But the play seems to think
otherwise. Its most poignant passage
occurs when, after Nijinsky’s desertion
of Diaghilev, Massine, eighteen years
old, arrives to take the dancer’s place. He
knows this will be a hard job. Red-faced
with embarrassment, he lets Diaghilev
fall to his feet and kiss them. Then the
impresario rushes off to the bedroom.
The ghost of Nijinsky appears and tells
Massine to get a move on—Diaghilev
doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Chin
down, Massine goes. He, like Nijinsky,
will eventually leave Diaghilev for a
ILLUSTRATION BY RUNE FISKER
woman.
The play ends with Diaghilev, in a
gilt chair, dying as the image of Nijinsky
in his costume from “Afternoon of a
Faun” rises before his eyes. Amor vincit
omnia.
—Joan Acocella
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Our members
return each year
as faithfully as
the tides.
Now you too are invited for
a rare visit to our legendary
private club through the
pages of Living magazine.
Visit OceanReefClubMagazine.com
to request your complimentary copy
or call 305.367.5921 to
inquire about the possibilities
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PRIVATE • AUTHENTIC • UNIQUE
20 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
DANCE
New York City Ballet
Ever since Prokofiev composed “Romeo and Juliet,”
in 1935, the ballet has undergone reinterpretations.
In 2007, Peter Martins, the recently departed artis-
tic director of City Ballet, took a stab at the glis-
tening, cinematic score. The results are mixed; the
designs, by the Danish artist Per Kirkeby, are unat-
tractive, and the storytelling is not particularly con-
vincing. But the music is as heart-catching as ever,
and, in Tiler Peck and Sterling Hyltin, the company
has two sparkling Juliets. • Feb. 7 at 7:30 and Feb. 10
at 2: “Square Dance,” “Oltremare,” and “The Four
Seasons.” • Feb. 8 at 7:30, Feb. 9 at 8, and Feb. 11 at
3: “The Red Violin,” “Dance Odyssey,” and “Rus-
sian Seasons.” • Feb. 10 at 8: “Apollo,” “Mozartiana,”
and “Cortège Hongrois.” • Feb. 13-15 and Feb. 20 at
7:30, Feb. 16 at 8, Feb. 17 at 2 and 8, and Feb. 18 at
1 and 7: “Romeo + Juliet.” (David H. Koch, Lincoln
Center. 212-721-6500. Through March 4.)
Ronald K. Brown / Evidence
Arcell Cabuag, a dancer of dependable suppleness
and funk, has been Brown’s right-hand man for
twenty years, a key contributor to the company’s ir-
resistible physicality and spiritual uplift. Brown now
celebrates that long relationship by joining Cabuag
in a new duet he has made for the two of them, “Den
of Dreams.” A mixed repertory program also fea-
tures Brown’s liberating Nina Simone piece, “Come
Ye,” as well as an excerpt from “Lessons” that is set
to a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. (Joyce Theatre,
175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. Feb. 6-11.)
Dana Reitz
This year’s Lumberyard in the City festival has been
focussing on female artists whose work hasn’t been
seen in New York for a while. For decades, Reitz
has explored subtle interactions between light and
THE THEATRE
1 OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
Admissions
In this new play by Joshua Harmon (“Significant
Other”), Jessica Hecht is an admissions director at
a private academy who is diversifying the student
body while her own son applies to Ivy League col-
leges. Daniel Aukin directs. (Mitzi E. Newhouse,
150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200. Previews begin Feb. 15.)
The Amateurs
Jordan Harrison’s comedy, directed by Oliver But-
ler, follows a theatre troupe trying to stay ahead
of the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe.
With Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Michael Cyril
Creighton, and Thomas Jay Ryan. (Vineyard, 108
E. 15th St. 212-353-0303. Previews begin Feb. 8.)
Black Light
Daniel Alexander Jones performs a new show as his
alter ego, the soul-singing diva Jomama Jones. (Joe’s Pub,
425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. Previews begin Feb. 12.)
Escape to Margaritaville
The songs of Jimmy Buffett, from “Come Mon-
day” to “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” are the basis
of this new jukebox musical, directed by Christo-
pher Ashley. (Marquis, Broadway at 46th St. 877-250-
2929. Previews begin Feb. 16.)
silent movement, her unostentatious tenacity at-
tracting less attention than her more famous col-
laborators (Mikhail Baryshnikov, Sara Rudner, the
lighting designer Jennifer Tipton). She brings “Lat-
itude,” a new trio for herself, Elena Demyanenko,
and Yanan Yu. (New York Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St.
212-924-0077. Feb. 8-10.)
New York Theatre Ballet
This small troupe of hardworking dancers presents
a mixed bill that includes a ballet by the promising
young choreographer Gemma Bond, also a dancer
at American Ballet Theatre. Her fast-paced “Opti-
mists” is set to the vivace movement of a Prokofiev
piano sonata, played live by the company’s pianist,
Michael Scales. Pam Tanowitz’s “Double Andante,”
from 2015, also features a piano sonata, in this case
by Beethoven; Tanowitz’s style is spare, formal, all
lines and angles. The program closes with a master-
piece of chamber ballet, Antony Tudor’s mournful
1937 piece “Dark Elegies.” (Florence Gould Hall, 55
E. 59th St. 800-982-2787. Feb. 9-10.)
Noche Flamenca
The Joyce Theatre is less intimate than some of the
places where this superlative flamenco troupe per-
forms, but it’s small enough that you can still feel
the heat coming off the dancers and musicians. “Ín-
timo” happens to be the title of the current program,
which focusses, unusually, on duets. The opener,
“La Ronde,” borrows the chain structure from Ar-
thur Schnitzler’s eponymous play about sexual li-
aisons, creating its own passionate cycle of desire,
rejection, and reaction. And any program that in-
cludes, as this one does, Soledad Barrio wringing
herself out in “Soleá” is one worth witnessing. (175
Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. Feb. 13-18 and
Feb. 20. Through Feb. 25.)
Good for Otto
Ed Harris, Rhea Perlman, and F. Murray Abra-
ham star in David Rabe’s play, directed by Scott
Elliott for the New Group and set in an overbur-
dened mental-health center in Connecticut. (Per-
shing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-
279-4200. Previews begin Feb. 20.)
Hey, Look Me Over!
Encores! presents an evening of numbers from
shows it hasn’t got around to reviving, among them
“Mack & Mabel,” “Sail Away,” and “Wildcat.” The
cast includes Bebe Neuwirth, Vanessa Williams, Judy
Kuhn, and Bob Martin, reviving his theatre-loving
character from “The Drowsy Chaperone.” (City Cen-
ter, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. Feb. 7-11.)
Kings
Thomas Kail directs a new comedy by Sarah Bur-
gess (“Dry Powder”), about a Washington lobbyist
(Gillian Jacobs) attempting to manipulate a neo-
phyte congresswoman (Eisa Davis). (Public, 425 La-
fayette St. 212-967-7555. In previews. Opens Feb. 20.)
The Low Road
Bruce Norris (“Clybourne Park”) draws on ev-
erything from Henry Fielding to Monty Python
in this historical parable about the roots of free-
market capitalism. Michael Greif directs. (Public,
425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. Previews begin Feb. 13.)
 THE THEATRE

An Ordinary Muslim
In Hammaad Chaudry’s play, directed by Jo Bon-
ney, a Pakistani-British couple navigate religious
doctrine, their families’ expectations, and West-
ern secular culture. (New York Theatre Workshop, 79
E. 4th St. 212-460-5475. In previews.)
queens
Martyna Majok’s play is set in a basement apart-
ment in Queens, where two generations of im-
migrant women clash; Danya Taymor directs the
LCT3 production. (Claire Tow, 150 W. 65th St. 212-
239-6200. Previews begin Feb. 14.)
is a worthy testimony, but it does not register
much in theatrical terms. (Rattlestick, 224 Wa-
verly Pl. 212-627-2556. Through Feb. 18.)
John Lithgow: Stories by Heart
Lithgow, one of the more charming and emotionally
full actors alive, composed this evening of reminis-
cences about the effect that his late father—a man
of the theatre who lived for Shakespeare—had on
his life and his imagination. The two-act piece be-
gins with Lithgow’s recalling his amazement when
his father read Ring Lardner’s classic short story
“Haircut” aloud to him and his siblings. Before you
stop there. It’s 1988, and we’re in the fluorescent-lit
teachers’ lounge of an Ohio high school, where the
brain trust of the annual telethon gathers to dis-
cuss fund-raising goals and themes. Over a series of
meetings, passive-aggressive digs deepen into seis-
mic squabbles—a comedic variation on the commu-
nity acting classes in Annie Baker’s “Circle Mirror
Transformation” or the silent meditation sessions in
Bess Wohl’s “Small Mouth Sounds.” Unlike them,
“Miles for Mary” was written collaboratively—
there are five credited playwrights, including the
director, Lila Neugebauer—and creativity by com-
mittee, with all its buried hostilities, is the play’s

Relevance
In JC Lee’s play, directed by Liesl Tommy for MCC,
a fight between a veteran feminist author (Jayne
Houdyshell) and an up-and-coming young writer
(Pascale Armand) becomes an Internet sensation.
(Lucille Lortel, 121 Christopher St. 866-811-4111. In
previews. Opens Feb. 20.)
Returning to Reims
The German director Thomas Ostermeier stages
this metatheatrical adaptation of Didier Eribon’s
2009 memoir of class, sexuality, and right-drifting
politics in working-class France. (St. Ann’s Ware-
house, 45 Water St., Brooklyn. 718-254-8779. In pre-
views. Opens Feb. 11.)
Some Old Black Man
Wendell Pierce (“Treme”) plays a college profes-
sor who moves his elderly father (Roger Robinson)
into his Harlem penthouse, in James Anthony Ty-
know it, Lithgow becomes his father, expertly nav-
igating the tale with a physical sureness and energy
that illustrates just how much the senior Lithgow
loved acting, and how much his son loved looking
at and listening to his father. After the interval, we
learn of Lithgow’s parents’ decline—and of how the
habit of reading aloud passed from father to child.
It’s hard for a solo artist to hold an audience for as
long as Lithgow does; he succeeds because he un-
derstands the effort it takes to be still, and how si-
lence can add dramatic weight to tale-telling. While
not strictly a play, the Roundabout’s production is
an opportunity to watch a terrific actor do what he
does, splendidly. (American Airlines Theatre, 227
W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300.)
Miles for Mary
The nineteen-eighties are now generally regarded
as the decade when we all might as well have died
from collective embarrassment. This acid com-
edy of the banal, by the group the Mad Ones, gets
1
wickedly observed subject. (Playwrights Horizons,
416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.)
ALSO NOTABLE
Amy and the Orphans Laura Pels. • Balls 59E59. • The
Band’s Visit Ethel Barrymore. • Bright Colors and
Bold Patterns SoHo Playhouse. • Disco Pigs Irish
Repertory. • Farinelli and the King Belasco. • Hang-
men Atlantic Theatre Company. • He Brought Her
Heart Back in a Box Polonsky Shakespeare Center.
Through Feb. 11. (Reviewed in this issue.) • Hello,
Dolly! Shubert. • Hindle Wakes Clurman. Through
Feb. 17. • The Homecoming Queen Atlantic Stage 2.
Through Feb. 18. • In the Body of the World City Cen-
ter Stage I. • Jerry Springer—The Opera Pershing
Square Signature Center. • Latin History for Mo-
rons Studio 54. • Once on This Island Circle in the
Square. • The Parisian Woman Hudson. • SpongeBob
SquarePants Palace. • Springsteen on Broadway Wal-

1
ler’s drama. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200. laughs from bad perms and short shorts, but doesn’t ter Kerr. • Until the Flood Rattlestick. Through Feb. 18.
Previews begin Feb. 8. Opens Feb. 14.)

NOW PLAYING

Cardinal
Greg Pierce’s play is set in a dying industrial
town given an uneasy lease on life. Lydia (Anna
Chlumsky) has returned to her depressed home
town with a sanguinary idea: to paint a six-block
radius bright red. “The only way to survive is to
get your town into books like ‘A Thousand Places to
See Before You Kill Yourself,’ ” she tells the doofy
mayor, Jeff (Adam Pally). The plan works—too
well—and soon the area is overrun with foreign
tour groups. As directed by Kate Whoriskey, the
play feels both compressed and saggy. The sense of
place is vague, unhelped by Derek McClane’s ge-
neric sets, and the stakes, personal and municipal,
rarely seem high. The relationships are implausi-
ble, and the cast, which includes Becky Ann Baker
and Stephen Park, strains to make the thin char-
acters thicker. Another coat might help. (Second
Stage, 305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.)

Draw the Circle

Before Mashuq Mushtaq Deen’s autobiographi-
cal solo piece starts, a photo of a little girl is pro-
jected on the upstage wall. Her name is Shireen
Deen, and she is now the sturdy man we’re about
to see onstage. Deen tells the story of transition-
ing into his true self via recollections and ob-
servations from various perspectives, including
those of his loving girlfriend, Molly; his Indian-
immigrant parents, who are mostly uncompre-
hending; his baffled high-school buddies; and his
annoying wise-child niece, Rabia. Under Chay
Yew’s direction, a sympathetic picture emerges,
albeit an unengaging one. A big problem is that
Deen does not create, in either his writing or his
acting, distinctive portraits of the people he em-
bodies. Repetitive and overly earnest, the show

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 21


Sven Nykvist’s cinematography heightens the performances of Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona.”
The Bergman Touch
Ingmar Bergman unfolded personal and
social traumas in a seven-decade career.
Film Forum is celebrating Ingmar Berg­
man’s centenary with a forty­seven­film
retrospective (Feb. 7­March 15). For all
the modernist audacity of his work and
its ongoing influence, Bergman (who died
in 2007) is very much a man of his times.
The breathtaking intimacy of his films is
inseparable from their relentless rage and
cruelty; they’re filled with physical and
emotional violence, secrets and lies, in­
trigues and betrayals. The relationships
he depicts—whether romantic or erotic,
creative or familial—are equally fraught
with destructive passion.
In Bergman’s work, the force of desire
and the pursuit of pleasure are bound to
the allure of pain; he depicts stringent
Christian faith that’s commensurate with
the wanton impulses it’s meant to control.
The fury of his films is rendered derisive
by their social settings. Bergman filmed
mainly in his native Sweden, often among
the artistic bourgeoisie, showing charac­
ters with suave manners and a shared
22 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
MOVIES
cultural heritage who yield to atavistic
drives that are all the more terrifying for
the refined, intellectual justifications of
their explosive expressions.
The summit of Bergman’s career, “Per­
sona,” from 1966, is the story of a young
actress, Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann),
who falls silent onstage and remains cata­
tonic. When a hospital stay proves useless,
she’s sent to a remote cottage in the care
of a young nurse named Alma (Bibi An­
dersson). As Elisabet gradually engages
with domestic life, Alma confides in the
still silent star and a sort of personality
meld results, turning the oddly close re­
lationship into an overheated bond and
a furious rivalry—one that Bergman
captures in a radical sequence in which
the two women fuse. The film’s extreme
visual inflection transforms the meticu­
lous study of their day­to­day wrangles
into symbols of psychological disturbance.
With uncomfortably intense closeups,
disorienting angles, harsh contrasts, and
abrupt editing, along with dream imagery
and fantasy sequences, he evokes his
prime subject: the inner life, and, above
all, his own turbulent visions.
There’s a family connection between
Bergman’s movies. In the 1968 drama
“Hour of the Wolf,” Ullmann plays Alma,
the wife and model of an artist (Max von
Sydow), whose patron (Erland Josephson)
reunites him with a former lover, Veronica
Vogler (Ingrid Thulin). “The Passion of
Anna,” from 1969, also starring Ullmann
and Andersson, involves an intellectual
named Andreas (von Sydow), who is drawn
into a vortex of jealousy by an architect
named Vergerus ( Josephson). In “The
Touch,” from 1971, Elliott Gould plays an
American archeologist (and a Holocaust
survivor), who’s treated by a doctor named
Andreas Vergerus (von Sydow) and begins
an affair with his wife, Karin (Andersson).
In the 1958 drama “The Magician,” Berg­
man introduced the names of Vogler, ac­
tors, and Vergerus, a doctor. Throughout his
career, he fused his emotional life and the
spirit of the times with a ruthless frank­
SNAP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
ness. Anguished allusions to the Vietnam
War and the Second World War mark his
films with political passions as well; the
private furies that Bergman revealed are
as tenacious as those of history itself.
—Richard Brody
1 NOW PLAYING
MOVIES
A Fantastic Woman
Sebastián Lelio’s new movie, set in Santiago,
Chile, stars Daniela Vega as Marina, a young
transgender woman who loves and loses. Then
her real troubles begin. We never learn how she
met Orlando (Francisco Reyes), a middle-aged
man with a wife and family, but we know that he
abandoned his former life for Marina, and we see
them dining and dancing and planning a vacation
together. Then, without warning, Orlando dies,
and Marina discovers, to her horror, that she is
forbidden—both by the family of the deceased
and by the regulations that govern a conserva-
tive society—to grieve her beloved as she wishes.
The movie is steady and controlled, and the hero-
ine’s composure rarely cracks; only during a few
brief excursions into fantasy and daydream is she
granted any form of release. There is a tranquil
nobility in Vega’s defiant performance, yet the
story stays morally flat; her character is with-
out blemish, whereas the response that she en-
genders, in other mourners and in persons of au-
thority, earns nothing but the movie’s contempt.
In Spanish.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue
of 1/29/18.) (In limited release.)
Golden Exits
The stressful intersection of life and work exposes
hidden conflicts and sparks new ones in the writer
and director Alex Ross Perry’s taut, intimate melo-
drama of families and friends in the comfortable
confines of Cobble Hill. Nick (Adam Horovitz), a
freelance archivist, is organizing the materials of
his late father-in-law, an editor. Nick is married to
Alyssa (Chloë Sevigny), a therapist, whose sister,
Gwen (Mary-Louise Parker), the manager of the
estate, makes Nick a pawn in their rivalry. His assis-
tant, Naomi (Emily Browning), newly arrived from
Australia, is twenty-five; she makes Alyssa jealous
and Gwen suspicious. Meanwhile, a family friend
oë Naomi’s, Buddy (Jason Schwartzman), runs a re-
cording studio with his wife, Jess (Analeigh Tip-
ton), whose sister, Sam (Lily Rabe), is Gwen’s as-
sistant. As Naomi faces the uncertainties of youth,
she’s befriended by the nearly middle-aged, who
are struggling furiously against its passing. Deftly
juggling characters and plotlines, eliciting fierce
emotions with coolly controlled performances,
Perry evokes simmering frustrations and stifled
furies, galling resentments and bitter self-recog-
nitions. The frank, confrontational images (with
cinematography by Sean Price Williams) capture
high-tension vectors head on; Robert Greene’s ed-
iting keeps the mood swings sharp and swift. With
the characters’ flayed vulnerability, the film plays
like Bergman in Brooklyn.—Richard Brody (Metro­
graph and streaming.)
Half-Cocked
This raw and moody drama from 1994, by the
husband-and-wife team of Suki Hawley and Mi-
chael Galinsky (they co-wrote, she directed and
edited, and he photographed, in appealingly grainy
black-and-white), captures a moment of grungy
charm, when independent art-rock scenes were
new and resolutely local. A quintet living in a ram-
shackle house in Louisville gets a gig at a club, but
the show turns sour when the vain, pretentious
glam-punk Otis (Ian Svenonius) goes onstage and
smacks Tara (Tara Jane O’Neil), the quintet’s spir-
itual leader—and his sister—for spoiling his en-
core. In revenge, Tara steals his van and equipment
and drives the rest of the band to Chattanooga,
where they scuffle along in fear and desperation.
Though the aesthetic is rough-and-ready, Hawley
is a sincere and sensitive storyteller who brings
Fine Antique Ruby Jewelry
(Yellow gold, platinum and diamonds, 1890-1910)
the characters to life with subtle, oblique touches
that show who they are without saying too much
about them. Casting highly regarded indie rock-
ers and filling the soundtrack with their songs,
Hawley movingly roots their music in a way of
life as well as in the grimy urban landscapes they
inhabit.—R.B. (Quad Cinema, Feb. 13.)
The Heartbreak Kid
Elaine May’s anxious, exhilaratingly imaginative
1972 comedy is about two young New York Jews,
Leonard Allen Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a sport-
ing-goods salesman, and Lila Ina Kolodny (Jean-
nie Berlin, May’s daughter), whose work is un-
specified. They meet in a singles bar and are soon Trifoliate design
brooch with
wed. But, on the first day of their honeymoon in pendant drop,
Miami Beach, Len meets Kelly Corcoran (Cy- Burma rubies
bill Shepherd), the porcelain shiksa goddess of $16,500
his dreams, for whom he neglects—and prepares Knot
to leave—his bride. May directs with bristling design
restraint: the camera runs at length, keeping the bracelet,
characters trapped in the excruciating moment, Burma
rubies
and, with the central trio of typecast actors tightly $13,500
held on this side of parody, the humor oscillates
between sour comedy and droll tragedy. Accord-
ing to May, it’s a man’s world; working with a Neil
Simon script based on a novel by Bruce Jay Fried-
man, she captures the implausibly boundless sense
SHOWN Double cluster ring
of wonder, possibility, and entitlement of a time ACTUAL Siam ruby (about 1.50cts.)
when even a self-proclaimed schmuck like Len, SIZE $12,500
endowed with little but the gift of gab, attempted
daring feats of self-liberation.—R.B. (Anthology
Film Archives, Feb. 15 and Feb. 17.)
FIRESTONE AND PARSON
30 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116
(617) 266-1858 • www.firestoneandparson.com
Hostiles
In this drama, set in 1892, the director and writer
Scott Cooper turns a classic Western setup into
a Western-by-numbers. Christian Bale plays the
grizzled Captain Joseph Blocker, the unwilling
leader of a military convoy accompanying the
aged and ailing Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk
(Wes Studi) and his family from a jail in a New
Mexico fort to their Montana homeland. Blocker,
a veteran of Wounded Knee, hates Native Ameri-
cans but is ordered to protect Yellow Hawk, who
fought there, too, against him. Early in the jour-
ney, the convoy picks up Rosalie Quaid (Rosa-
mund Pike), a homesteader who survived a Co-
manche raid in which her husband and children
were killed. En route, the men of the group, in-
cluding Yellow Hawk, fight for their lives against a
diverse set of enemies—whites and Native Amer-
icans alike. Cooper dramatizes the relentless kill-
or-be-killed ethos of Western life and the severe
mental and moral toll that it exacts from all who
face it. Yet the bare script seems written by tele-
gram, reducing the characters to pieces on a his-
torical chessboard, and the portentous pace and lu- It’s Raining
gubrious tone of Cooper’s direction take the place
of substance.—R.B. (In wide release.) Cats and Dogs
Even the most torrential
I, Tonya
This comedic drama, directed by Craig Gilles- downpour hasn’t got a
pie, offers a detailed, empathetic view of Tonya chance against George Booth’s
Harding, the real-life Olympic figure skater who, irascible cats and dogs. Beautifully
in 1994, was involved in a plot to injure her main made collapsible umbrella,
rival, Nancy Kerrigan. (The script, by Steven Rog-
ers, is partly based on his interview with Harding.)
featuring a steel-reinforced black
In the filmmakers’ version of the story, Tonya, as a shaft, fibreglass-reinforced ribs,
child, is bullied and beaten by her mother (Allison and a 43” canopy. $49.95
Janney), who’s depicted as a brutally judgmental
waitress with big dreams for her daughter—and
the adult Tonya (played by Margot Robbie), a bold
and gifted athlete, escapes her mother’s clutches To order, please visit
by marrying Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), who newyorkerstore.com
also beats her. Though Tonya rises brilliantly
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 23

through the sport’s competitive ranks, the skating
establishment holds her gaudy taste, rough man-
ners, and rude family against her. That endemic
class discrimination and the ensuing bad publicity
are the backdrop for Jeff’s scheme to harm Kerri-
gan—and for the beleaguered and abused Tonya’s
inability to oppose it. The heart of the movie is
its recognition of Tonya’s dependence on peo-
ple and institutions that have betrayed her. But
Gillespie’s empathy is mixed with condescension;
much of the movie’s bluff comedy mocks the tone
and the actions of Tonya and her milieu. With
Paul Walter Hauser, as Jeff’s delusional partner
in crime.—R.B. (In limited release.)
The Insult
Ziad Doueiri’s new film begins with a drainpipe
and winds up with angry mobs and burning cars.
The pipe is the cause of a brief exchange between
two men, from different—or, as they see it, oppos-
ing—sides of the Lebanese divide. One is Tony
Hanna (Adel Karam), a Christian who runs a ga-
rage, and the other is Yasser Salameh (Kamel El
Basha), a Palestinian refugee who works on a con-
struction crew. Both men, having wounded each
other’s pride, find it almost impossible to back
down, despite mollifying advice from their wives,
and, once lawyers get involved and the media learn
of the dispute, the quarrel bursts out of control.
Much of the story, written by Doueiri and Jo-
elle Touma, is set in courtrooms, where we are
schooled in the past—not only in the individual
histories of the protagonists but in the sufferings
endured by their respective communities. With
all the weight of these matters, the movie often
feels clunky and didactic, grimly bent on balanc-
ing the argument; fortunately, there are fight-
ing performances—from Camille Salameh, as a
mischievous attorney, and from El Basha, whose
graven features tell a sorry tale. In Arabic.—A.L.
(1/15/18) (In limited release.)
Night Across the Street
The late Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s final film,
released in 2012, is one of the cinema’s grandest,
most graceful farewells to life. Its protagonist,
Celso Robles, an aging bachelor and small-town
office clerk on the verge of retirement, is a poetic
dreamer and local character whose premonition of
his own mortality arrives in the person of his land-
lady’s nephew, whom he suspects of plotting to
kill him. The town’s charming romantic intrigues
meld with Celso’s reminiscences of childhood;
his erstwhile fantasies—involving Long John Sil-
ver, who taught him the art of living; the novel-
ist Jean Giono, who awakened his literary imag-
ination; and Beethoven, whom he introduced to
electricity and movies—join with visions of the
grudges, joys, and political conflicts that marked
his prodigious youth. But, when fate takes over,
it does so in a series of fanciful masterstrokes—
such as a rechannelling of 007’s spiral-grooved
gun barrel—that exalt and prolong the last glim-
mer of life even as they embrace death with noble
serenity. Ingenious digital effects turn nostalgic
and chatty home-town strolls into dreamlike ad-
ventures, but ultra-low-tech toys become Ruiz’s
tenderly exuberant metaphor for the surprising
ricochets of an entire lifetime’s play of memory.
In Spanish.—R.B. (Film Society of Lincoln Center,
Feb. 11 and Feb. 18, and streaming.)
Phantom Thread
The role taken by Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul
Thomas Anderson’s strange and sumptuous
film—the actor’s final screen appearance, he has
claimed—is, in every sense, tailor-made. He plays
24 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
MOVIES
Reynolds Woodcock, a fashion designer of the
nineteen-fifties, who, in the London house that he
shares with his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville), cre-
ates immaculate dresses for a selection of wealthy
women. As devout as a priest in his calling, he
seems to resent any intrusion upon his profes-
sional peace, yet he invites a waitress named Alma
(Vicky Krieps) into his life as a model, and, even-
tually, as far more. The result is a pact as peril-
ous and as claustrophobic as that between the
guru and his disciple in Anderson’s “The Master”
(2012), with the camera closing in remorselessly
on stricken or adoring faces, and a strong tincture
of sickness in the romantic atmosphere. All three
leading players respond with rigor to this Hitch-
cockian intensity, and Reynolds—fussy, cold, and
agonized—is a worthy addition to Day-Lewis’s
gallery of obsessives. The costumes, every bit as
alluring as you would expect, are by Mark Bridges,
and Jonny Greenwood contributes a swooning
score.—A.L. (1/8/18) (In wide release.)
The Post
The new film from Steven Spielberg, like his
“Lincoln” (2012), is a solidly rousing act of his-
ABOVE & BEYOND
Lunar New Year
Sara D. Roosevelt Park is a treasure of the Lower
East Side, a bright stretch of green tucked into the
shadow of Pace University High School. Residents
of nearby Chinatown frequent the park for refuge
from downtown’s grit, and it will burst with even
more life than usual during the annual Lunar New
Year festival. On Feb. 16, more than five hundred
thousand fireworks will float above elaborate cho-
reographed performances and venders serving a
bevy of traditional dishes. The parade takes place
on Feb. 25, at 1; beginning at Mott and Canal Sts., it
will snake through Little Italy and Chinatown, past
the Manhattan Bridge, and back up toward the park,
11
to ring in the Year of the Dog. (Canal St. at Chrys-
tie St. Feb. 16-25.)
AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES
Sotheby’s launches a week of Asian-art sales on Feb. 19
with a session devoted to paintings by modern and
contemporary artists from India and the subconti-
nent. Alongside abstract and semi-abstract pieces
by modernists like Sayed Haider Raza and Maq-
bool Fida Husain are paintings in a more romantic
vein, such as Raja Ravi Varma’s highly aestheticized
depiction of a partially nude Tillotama (a celestial
nymph). Also included are works that aim to cap-
ture the poetry of everyday life, like Bikash Bhat-
tacharjee’s view of a crowded neighborhood in Cal-
cutta, “Untitled (Rooftops).” Chinese art (porcelains,
torical re-creation. Meryl Streep plays Katha-
rine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post,
with Tom Hanks as its swaggering editor, Ben
Bradlee. Most of the story is set in the early
nineteen-seventies, at a vertiginous time for
the nation and its capital. The so-called Penta-
gon Papers, obtained by Daniel Ellsberg (Mat-
thew Rhys), unveil a reluctance, on the part of
multiple Administrations, to inform the public
about the true state of the Vietnam War. When
the Times is prevented, by legal injunction, from
publishing the Papers, the Post gets its chance to
step in and continue the job; what will Graham
do, given that further revelations will rock the
very establishment of which she is such a doy-
enne? The movie is a little too confident of its
own righteous stand (listen to the strenuous John
Williams score), but the battle between hesita-
tion and decisiveness is beautifully managed by
Streep. With Bob Odenkirk, Tracy Letts, Sarah
Paulson, Bradley Whitford, and a lethally smil-
ing Bruce Greenwood, as Robert McNamara,
and delicious period costumes, starting with
Bradlee’s striped shirts, by Ann Roth.—A.L.
(12/18 & 25/17) (In wide release.)
sculpture, furnishings) follows on Feb. 20. (York
Ave. at 72nd St. 212-606-7000.) • The Feb. 13 sale at
Christie’s is mainly an extravaganza of chairs—Re-
gency chairs, Eames chairs, uncomfortable-looking
Qing-dynasty chairs—with a few other objects mixed
in, all from the collection of the L.A.-based antique
dealer JF Chen. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St.
212-636-2000.) • When the photographer Lewis W.
Hine worked as a teacher at New York’s Ethical
Culture School, in the early nineteen-hundreds, he
sometimes took his students to Ellis Island to pho-
tograph the sea of arriving immigrants. Several of
these shots—showing families, young women travel-
ling alone, and mothers with infants—are included in
Swann’s “Icons and Images” auction of photographs
on Feb. 15. (104 E. 25th St. 212-254-4710.)
READINGS AND TALKS
Strand Bookstore
Tavi Gevinson founded Rookie Mag in 2011, at the age
ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO
of fifteen, as a destination for writing, art, and pho-
tography surrounding youth culture, feminism, and
fashion. This January, Gevinson edited and published
“Rookie on Love,” an anthology of new and original
essays, interviews, poems, cartoons, and more, with
contributions from forty-five writers, including Jenny
Zhang, Emma Straub, Hilton Als, and Janet Mock.
She launches the book at this talk, with a crafts table
where attendees can make their own D.I.Y. Valen-
tine’s cards. (828 Broadway, 212-473-1452. Feb. 14 at 7.)

TABLES FOR TWO
MeMe’s Diner
657 Washington Ave., Brooklyn
(718-636-2900)
If the theme of MeMe’s Diner, in Pros-
pect Heights, is the subversion of
norms—its owners, Bill Clark and Libby
Willis, recently described it as a “very, very
gay restaurant” in an interview with Jarry,
a magazine that “explores where food and
queer culture intersect”—the proof is in
the pudding, literally. One of the best
things on the menu is a brunchtime dish
called Milk and Cereal, which reimagines
not only that archetypal combination—
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
it’s a dome of luscious, tangy yogurt
panna cotta so shiny you can see the over-
head lights reflected in its surface, ringed
by pink Cara Cara orange, kiwi, and Corn
Pops—but also the concept of brunch as
a whole. At most restaurants, brunch is
an afterthought, an easy way to make a
high return on eggs and mimosas. At
MeMe’s, it’s full of truly inspired delights,
beginning with complimentary bowls of
mixed junk-food cereals—Cinnamon
Toast Crunch, Froot Loops, Lucky
Charms—to snack on while you decide
what else to eat.
Anything that began as dough is a
good bet: Clark and Willis, who oversee
the dining room and kitchen, respectively,
met working at Ovenly, a bakery in
Greenpoint. The Everything Bagel
Babka looks more like a popover—but
FßD & DRINK
who are we to say what babka is supposed
to look like? What matters is that it’s
absolutely delicious, coated in the classic
garlic-and-seed mixture, which goes
flying like confetti as you tear off the
crusty top to reveal flaky layers of pastry
marbled with scallion cream cheese. Wil-
lis is a whiz with eggs, too: gently boiled
and mashed into a silky salad; crispy
sunny-side up, on a shallow pool of yo-
gurt drizzled in chili oil and spangled
with nuts and kale; scrambled, Texas
migas style, inside a snipped-open bag
of Fritos. Throw in a side of deep-fried
breakfast potatoes, soaked in spicy maple
syrup, and brunch is made great again.
Willis and Clark are committed to
making MeMe’s as inviting as possible
for everyone, from staff (many of whom
identify as queer) to guests. At dinner,
things get extra cozy as the menu veers
toward comfort-food-as-camp, in hom-
age to Willis’s native Midwest and to
Clark’s grandmother MeMe, for whom
the place is named. MeMe’s Manhat-
tan—according to Clark, she still enjoys
one daily—goes down easy, as do
MeMe’s BBQ Meatballs, an impressively
fluffy gluten-free meatloaf, and a boun-
tiful salad tossed in hippie-staple Green
Goddess dressing and topped with
crunchy-skinned Buffalo fried chicken.
It’s food meant not to impress you, only
to bring you joy. The best part is, it does
both. (Entrées $8-$20.)
—Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 25
1 BAR TAB
Cocoa Bar
21 Clinton St. (212-677-7417)
Down a quiet street on the Lower East Side, warm
amber light spills onto the sidewalk, and the smell
of chocolate drifts into the cold air. Inside at Cocoa
Bar, shelved wines reach to the ceiling, burgundy
reds and mellow whites and a few rosés. Behind a
broad blond-wood counter, an obliging staff mixes
full-bodied cocktails that intertwine cocoa and li-
quor; the French hot chocolate, made with port
wine, is as potent as a tyrant and as dark as three
o’clock in the morning. The chairs wouldn’t be out
of place in a cafeteria and the décor is modest, but
the couples aligned in this cozy room look as if they
wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Almost every-
one is part of a pair: casually but fashionably
dressed, and arranged in a metropolitan diorama
of the stages of love, from polite first-date chatter
to earnest longing. Lattes are served with delicate
feathers etched in foam; the music is unobtrusive;
and the soft glow from teardrop-shaped fixtures
stipples drinkers’ faces with chiaroscuro. On a re-
cent night, a redhead whispered something to her
beau and brushed his hand; a waitress delivered a
steaming crêpe and it was instantly forgotten. Sake
brought a touch of headiness to a sweet chocolate
“martini,” and the room’s gentle aura felt like an
overture to confess romantic sentiments. Robust
house wines, nicely priced at eight dollars, let talk
flow freely, and perhaps stray into dangerous ter-
ritory. The gianduja cake, bittersweet chocolate
and hazelnut praline, had a complex mix of tex-
tures—milky, supple, crunchy—with a hint of
smoke for the discerning tongue. For the lover of
chocolate, or of one’s companion, a plate of bon-
bons; with a cheap red and a tender kiss, it’s a per-
fect New York valentine.—Talia Lavin
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 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
STATE OF THE RESISTANCE
nder normal circumstances, refer-
U ring to the address that the Presi-
dent delivers each January as the “State
of the Union” is a familiar bit of hyper-
bole. It is more aptly thought of as a
summary of the year that was—not un-
like the countless news and pop-culture
roundups that appear at New Year’s—
and as a projection of the Administra-
tion’s priorities for the upcoming year.
The President gives a pro-forma state-
ment that “the state of our union is
strong,” because what else would it be?
But these are not normal circumstances.
Trump’s statement regarding the
strength of the Union in last week’s ad-
dress carried about the same credibility
as his denial that he cheated on his post-
partum wife with a porn star, or his claim
that Mexico would pay for his quixotic
border wall. Americans, by a nearly two-
to-one margin, believe that Trump has
further divided the country. Superficially,
his speech conformed to the conven-
tional structure of a State of the Union
address. But, at the very moment that
the President was attesting to the Union’s
durability, his Administration and its Re-
publican abettors were actively engaged
in a feud with the F.B.I., attempting to
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
discredit the special counsel Robert
Mueller’s investigation and to release a
secret memo about that investigation,
despite objections from senior officials
in the Department of Justice. In a new
book, “How Democracies Die,” Steven
Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that
democracy does not typically succumb
during a catastrophic event, such as a
seizure of power by a military junta. It
fails more commonly through the grad-
ual weakening of crucial institutions, such
as the judiciary and the press. In short,
the Union is precisely as strong as its in-
stitutions, and those institutions are being
assailed in ways that we’ve seldom seen.
It is for this reason that, since the in-
ception of Trump’s Presidency, the mem-
bers of his opposition have tended to
understand themselves not simply as de-
fenders of particular policy positions but
also as stalwarts of democracy itself—a
resistance. As such, the Trump Resis-
tance has differed from, for instance, the
Tea Party in key ways. The latter was in-
tent upon “taking the country back”; the
former hopes to insure that the country
remains standing. Yet it has been in par-
ticulars of policy that Trump’s impact on
women, immigrants, and minorities—
the groups most antagonized by him
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 27
during the 2016 campaign—can be seen.
The President who has been accused
of sexual harassment or assault by at least
nineteen women has also overseen a re-
vision of the Department of Education’s
guidelines on sexual assault on college
campuses that raises the standard of
proof for accusers. He has made it eas-
ier for employers to refuse to include
birth control in their health-care plans
and reinstated the “global gag rule” on
abortion counselling. He created an “elec-
tion integrity” commission that was a
thinly veiled attempt to nationalize
voter-suppression techniques. He has
rescinded deportation protections
granted to two hundred thousand Sal-
vadoreans and almost sixty thousand
Haitians, and tried to remove transgen-
der people from the military and to ban
people in certain majority-Muslim coun-
tries from travelling here. His Justice
Department has issued new guidance
that could lead to more prosecutions for
marijuana-related crimes, which will dis-
proportionately affect African-Ameri-
cans, who are far more likely to be ar-
rested on such charges.
Lest this litany seem too sunny, in
January the Doomsday Clock, which
measures the likelihood of human an-
nihilation, moved closer to midnight
than it has been since the nineteen-fifties.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which
sets the clock, called out Donald Trump
specifically for his inflammatory rheto-
ric on North Korea, the Iran deal, cli-
mate change, and nuclear weapons.
Given this record, the pronounce-
ments of the Commander-in-Chief were
hardly an accurate depiction of our
Union. Last year, the Washington Post
noted, Trump’s actions prompted some
eight thousand seven hundred protests
across the country. The A.C.L.U., which
greeted the incoming Administration
by saying, “We’ll See You in Court,” has
sued the Administration over DACA, the
rescission of Obama-era guidelines con-
cerning the use of drones, the travel ban,
the case of an undocumented teen who
was refused access to an abortion, and
that of a ten-year-old girl with cerebral
palsy, who was detained at the border
rather than being allowed to return to
her family. (The A.C.L.U. of Virginia
also sued for the right of alt-right pro-
testers to gather in a Charlottesville
park—a decision that had disastrous
consequences when, predictably, they
resorted to violence against counter-
demonstrators.) The N.A.A.C.P. has
challenged Trump’s ruling on Haitians;
sued the Department of Homeland Se-
curity, arguing that Trump’s “shithole”
THE BOARDS
WINGS
hen Tony Kushner’s “Angels in
W America” opened on Broadway,
in 1993, the part of the Angel was played
by an athletic Ellen McLaughlin, who,
suspended from a pair of twin guy wires,
flew twenty feet above the stage. At the
same time, she maneuvered a tremen-
dous pair of wings: a steel frame glued
all over with feathers—real and fake—
attached to a sturdy corset.
In the Broadway revival of the play,
which begins previews later this month,
the wings have metastasized. They have
their own supporting cast: a team of six
performers, known in the production as
Shadows. Four of them lift the Angel
off the earth, and two of them manipu-
late one eight-foot wing each, holding
them aloft with the use of a handle and
a pole. “The wings are used in three ways,”
Finn Caldwell, the show’s puppetry-and-
movement director, who designed the
wings along with the puppet-maker Nick
Barnes, explained the other day. “Primar-
ily, they are used in an anatomical way:
28 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
comment reflected intentional discrim-
ination in immigration policy; and fought
the election-integrity commission, which,
stymied by its lack of progress, was dis-
banded last month.
There is also a direct line connecting
Trump’s election with the many wom-
en’s marches that have taken place across
the country and with the #MeToo move-
ment that emerged last fall. The cultural
tide that saw the resignations of elected
officials that included Senator Al Fran-
ken and Representatives John Conyers
and Trent Franks was, on many levels,
a backlash against the conditions that
allowed Trump to win the Presidency
despite his accusers’ credible allegations
of harassment and assault. The energy
of that moment has resulted in record
numbers of female candidates running
for office. While the main narrative of
the wave of victories in the Virginia
House of Delegates last November was
its potential as a predictor of the 2018
if she moves, they propel her. But they
also work in an abstract way, making
shapes like images from religious ico-
nography. And they reflect her emotional
state—they show her anger, her fear, her
insecurity.”
The six Shadows—all of whom are
new to the production, which is trans-
ferring from the National Theatre in
London, where it débuted last year—
gathered with Caldwell in a studio in
Dumbo to rehearse the Angel’s first ex-
tended confrontation with Prior Wal-
ter, the character at the center of Kush-
ner’s opus, who is suffering from AIDS.
The Shadows sat in a circle on the floor.
Lucy York, the right wing bearer, was
new to puppetry, and to the challenges
of appearing both visible and invisible
to the audience. “Everything else is quite
naturalistic, and then we are, like, Hello! ”
she said.
“We are not people that hide behind
beds,” Curt James, the show’s associate
director for puppetry and movement,
said. “We are absolutely a part of her,
and a part of the action in the scene.”
They ran it through. The Angel—
played by Jane Pfitsch, who is normally
a Shadow but is understudying the Angel
on Broadway—was hoisted into the air
by a huddle of the three remaining wing-
less Shadows, while York and Rowan
midterms, Election Night also brought
eleven women—the first trans woman
and the first Asian-American and Latina
women among them—into that state’s
legislative body.
The amorphous shock and outrage
of a year ago have given way to the broad
contours of a movement. Trump’s au-
thoritarian tendencies have been met by
a majority in both houses of Congress,
led by a stunningly pliable Republican
Party. (At the State of the Union, Dem-
ocrats registered dissent by boycotting,
dressing in black, and wearing kente
cloth and purple ribbons.) That con-
junction has made it far easier for the
President to achieve his agenda than for
concerned citizens to place barriers in
his path. These are perilous times. But
it’s possible, when looking from just the
right angle and at exactly the right mo-
ment, to discern something that looks
strikingly similar to inspiration.
—Jelani Cobb
Magee, the Left Winger, hovered in her
orbit. “Greetings, Prophet! The Great
Work begins,” Pfitsch announced as she
rose, facing in this instance an empty
bed, upon which Prior Walter, played by
Andrew Garfield, is to cower.
The Shadows spun her slowly around
as she spoke, and the wings, which are
built from layers of tattered linen and
crinoline on an articulated wood-and-
carbon-fibre frame, swirled around
her like the skirts of a ball gown. The
pair of wings with which the actors were
rehearsing had been brought over from
London, but new ones were under
construction for Broadway. “Obviously,
the Angel is quite destroyed in the show—
she is glorious and decrepit at the same
time,” Caldwell said. “The wings are sup-
posed to look old and damaged, but these
ones actually are old and damaged.”
Afterward, the team talked through
the Angel’s emotional state, and how
they might best represent it with the
wing movement. Should they flap while
she’s twirling? Should they pulse while
she is still? James suggested ways in which
York and Magee might bring life to the
wings with slight movements. “It’s, like,
my foot might be tapping—like my body
giving away what’s in my brain,” he said.
Caldwell showed how a cunning lift of
the wings at just the right moment could
enhance the audience’s sense that the
Angel is not just an actor being hefted
around the stage, but a heavenly being
descending to earth, toe first.
In the new production, which is di-
rected by Marianne Elliott, the Angel is
zombie-like and haggard—a celestial
being for a world that has fallen further
even than might have been imagined
when the play premièred. After the re-
hearsal, Caldwell reflected upon Kush-
ner’s eerie prescience in “Angels in Amer-
ica,” whose dramatis personae include
Roy Cohn, the lawyer and fixer, played
by a snarling, charismatic Nathan Lane.
The real-life Cohn, who died from com-
“Will this take me where I want to go, no questions asked?”
plications of AIDS in 1986, was an im-
portant mentor to a young New York real-
estate developer by the name of Donald
Trump. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Pres-
ident Trump reportedly exploded after
Jeff Sessions recused himself from the
Justice Department’s Russia investigation.
“It’s sort of like Tony wrote it for now,”
Caldwell said. “There’s a sense that the
world is ending—that everybody’s world
in the play is ending.” He recalled a line
delivered by the Angel a few pages on
from the section they had just finished
rehearsing: “Before Life on Earth be-
comes finally merely impossible / It will
for a long time before have become com-
pletely unbearable.” Greetings, Prophet,
indeed. They would get to it next time,
1
wings and all.
—Rebecca Mead
FIELD TRIP DEPT.
ROOTS
hen Ashley Johnson, an artist
W from Chicago, heard about Taglit-
Birthright—the program offering trips
to Israel for young Americans of Jewish
descent—she wondered why a similar
program didn’t exist for people of the
African diaspora. She Googled “birth-
right” and “Africa,” and was pleased to
learn that one did—at least in theory.
In 2005, Walla Elsheikh, a former
Goldman Sachs associate whose father
had been a Sudanese diplomat, heard a
friend rave about a Taglit trip. She reg-
istered a Web site with the name Birth-
right AFRICA. She let the idea marinate,
and nothing much happened, until she
got a Facebook message from Johnson.
The two began a correspondence and
eventually decided to launch the pro-
gram together. In October, 2016, John-
son, who is thirty-three, and Elsheikh,
who is thirty-eight, travelled to Ghana,
where they met local entrepreneurs and
saw relevant sights: everything from the
notorious Cape Coast Castle, the cen-
ter of the transatlantic slave trade, with
its “door of no return,” to W. E. B. Du
Bois’s last home, in Accra.
Elsheikh, who grew up in Uganda,
Sudan, and Sweden, said, “Ghana is re-
ally seen as the gateway to Africa. Birth-
right AFRICA is built around the Gha-
naian principal of sankofa—in order to
know where you’re going, you have to
know where you’re from.” The organi-
zation has, to date, financed a trip en-
abling seven young Americans to make
the journey.
One evening, a City University pro-
gram called Black Male Initiative,
which supports access to higher edu-
cation for students from underrepre-
sented demographics, held a fund-raiser,
in part for Birthright AFRICA. The m.c.
was Jeff Gardere, also known as Dr. Jeff,
a popular TV psychologist (Orion TV’s
“Lauren Lake’s Paternity Court,” Reelz’s
“They Got Away with It”). Lots of B.M.I.
students attended the event, which fea-
tured an open bar and trays of choco-
late desserts. Guests could be overheard
chatting about clubbing (“We used to
slow-jam at Leviticus back in the day”)
and medical appointments (“Black men
don’t like two things: prostate exams
and therapy”).
All CUNY B.M.I. students of African
descent between the ages of eighteen and
thirty are eligible to apply for free Birth-
right AFRICA trips. Those who make the
cut, Gardere said, explaining the program
to the crowd, will first visit the African
Burial Ground National Monument, in
downtown Manhattan, and the National
Museum of African American History
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and Culture, in Washington, D.C. Then,
he said, dropping his voice to a whis-
per—“we’re going to give them ten days
in Ghana.”
At Gardere’s prompting, guests began
to raise their hands and pledge dona-
tions. An employee of Brooklyn College
said, “A hundred dollars!” Gardere en-
couraged the crowd with impromptu
personal incentives—“You wanna meet
Phaedra from ‘Real Housewives’?”
Meanwhile, prospective Birthright
AFRICA applicants were learning about
the program for the first time. Jaleel
Thomas, a young man in a suit, who was
from Chicago, said he was intrigued. “I
have a potential internship with Deloitte
this summer,” he said. “But if you say,
‘Hey, Jaleel, I want you here in Ghana
for ten days,’ I will make it happen.”
Devon Simmons, a tall criminal-
justice student at John Jay, is the first
graduate of CUNY’s Prison-to-College
Pipeline, and he was interested in Birth-
right AFRICA’s international opportuni-
ties. “I just came back from study abroad
in Cape Town, doing some research in
regards to incarceration over there,” he
said. “Next stop is Cuba, this summer.”
Elsheikh, Birthright AFRICA’s co-
founder, is still in New York, but John-
son, now the program director, moved
to Langma, Ghana, last year, in order to
oversee ground operations. Elsheikh said,
“Some of the scholars who made the trip
were so into this myth” fuelled by the
negative image of Africa presented to
Americans. Making the trip “changed
their life trajectory.”
The myth was further fuelled when
President Trump referred to Haiti and
some of the nations of Africa as “shithole”
countries. “So it’s that much more rel-
evant to dispel,” Elsheikh said, “partic-
ularly for people of African descent. Be-
cause it really hits your soul.” Johnson
said, “We are not pushing a political
agenda. But it’s inherently political to
educate and empower black people.”
On the evening of the B.M.I. fund-
raiser, a New York State assemblyman
named Michael Blake gave the closing
comments. “Don’t tell us our kids are
not exceptional!” he shouted. “And I say
to you, in the words of the great philos-
opher Fat Joe”—the Bronx’s own—
“Nothing can stop you, you’re all the
way up!”
—Amos Barshad
32 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
1
THE PICTURES
HAPPY CAMPERS
onald Sutherland, Officer of the
D Order of Canada, and Helen Mir-
ren, Dame Commander of the Order of
the British Empire, were in town to talk
about their movie “The Leisure Seeker”
(it opens next month), in which they play
a married couple who drive an R.V. from
Massachusetts to the Florida Keys. In
New York, they were subjected to a differ-
ent sort of road trip: the morning-show
blitz. It began at 7 a.m., when they were
picked up at the St. Regis in separate cars.
Sutherland’s smelled of gas fumes, and,
by the time he got to the “Today” show,
he felt nauseated.
“You should have demanded to drive
yourself, like you did in the movie,” Mir-
ren told him, in the dressing rooms in
the bowels of Rockefeller Center. Suther-
land, eighty-two, wore a purple scarf over
a suit. Mirren, seventy-two, was in her
first outfit of the day: a plaid kilt and a
black sweater bejewelled with safety pins.
“All right,” she said, “I’m going to go next
door and finish tarting myself up.”
The actors were brought onto a set
furnished with Adirondack chairs and a
fake campfire and answered questions
from Hoda Kotb. (“How did you get
that Southern accent down?”) When it
was over, Sutherland went on to “Live
with Kelly and Ryan.” Mirren changed
into her second outfit—pink turtleneck,
leather boots—and filmed a segment
with Kotb to be aired later.
They reconvened at “The View,” eigh-
teen blocks north. Sutherland had a
pounding headache and looked pale. He
asked an aide to find him a grilled-cheese
sandwich. He said he hadn’t slept well.
“When I was in Yugoslavia in 1968, I
contracted spinal meningitis and died,”
he said, taking a bite. “For whatever it
was, five or ten seconds. You watch your
body go down this blue tunnel. It’s iri-
descent, like an oyster shell. It’s very se-
ductive, dying. But I pulled myself back.”
Since then, he hasn’t slept more than
four hours a night.
Mirren was in her dressing room, in
outfit No. 3: a sheer skirt with “Femi-
nist” spelled out in sequins. She spun
around in her makeup chair to greet her
co-star: “Hi, darling!”
“I’m not very well,” Sutherland said.
“I don’t know what the bloody hell’s
happened.”
“Just go with the flow,” she said.
“Well, the flow might be coming from
my stomach through my mouth.” He
downed a ginger ale and went to the set,
as the “View” hosts wrapped up a seg-
ment on party-invitation etiquette. In-
stead of vomiting on television, Suther-
land teared up when Whoopi Goldberg
mentioned presenting him with his life-
time-achievement Oscar, in November.
A co-host, Sunny Hostin, interjected,
“Dame Mirren, your skirt is everything.”
Their next appointment was at Sir-
Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren
ius XM. “The thing about these morn-
ing shows is you arrive and you’re half
dead,” Mirren said in the car. “You walk
in and they’re like greyhounds, going a
thousand miles a minute.” She had man-
aged to sleep seven hours.
“See, I can’t do that,” Sutherland said.
“Marijuana, darling,” she advised.
“That would help.”
After their Sirius interview, in which
they discussed the pronunciation of
“pecan” and whether or not they enjoy
being called legends, Mirren turned to
Sutherland and said, “Your voice sounds
so fantastic on the radio.”
“I started in radio when I was four-
teen, at CKBW in Nova Scotia,” he said.
His headache had subsided. Half an hour
later, they were back at the St. Regis.
Mirren ordered a Reuben sandwich and
a Bloody Mary. Sutherland got a lob-
ster roll and another ginger ale.
The actors first met on the 1990 film
“Bethune,” also playing husband and
wife. Their big scene was shot on a rope
bridge in Montreal. “I did one of the stu-
pidest things I’ve ever done, which was
not understand that when you have to
hit someone on film, you’re supposed to
not really hit them,” Mirren said. “Don-
ald’s hat fell off into the water. He was
quite cross with me.”
“My friend Helen Mirren was dan-
gerously attractive,” Sutherland said.
“You hardly noticed me, Donald. I
was completely intimidated by you.
Luckily, that’s over.”
In “The Leisure Seeker,” they drive
a banged-up 1975 Winnebago Indian.
“You’re a car guy, are you?” Mirren said.
In the early seventies, Sutherland owned
a red Ferrari, purchased with poker win-
nings from the set of “Kelly’s Heroes.”
When his second wife left him with
their two kids, Kiefer and Rachel, he
traded it in for a Volkswagen camper.
Years later, he recalled, he was driving
from Atlanta to Quebec, and stopped
at a motel. “I was flipping through the
channels, looking for a baseball game,
and there was a Texas car auction—and
on the podium was my Ferrari, selling
for more than a million dollars!”
Mirren said she once took a camp-
ing trip in France with Liam Neeson,
her boyfriend at the time, in a Deux Che-
vaux with a tent in the back. “A small
tent with a very big Liam Neeson in it.
Very different style from your Ferrari.”
Sutherland gazed at her. “I was very
smart. I looked at her in Montreal, and
I went, Oh, is that dangerous.”
Mirren laughed. “He’s such a big,
1
fat liar.”
—Michael Schulman
RESISTANCE DEPT.
INTERPRETIVE PROTEST
concerned citizen searching for
A her place in the resistance but at
a loss for words might head over to
Gibney Dance Center, across from
City Hall, in lower Manhattan, for a
class called “Body Politic, Somatic
Selves.” Somatics studies the body as
it’s perceived from within—something
like a goldfish that, wishing to know
the feel of the ocean, rejects the con-
struct of the bowl. Performance is not
the point. “Physical experience can
empower us like nothing else,” Jill Sig-
man, the teacher, said the other day.
“Dance can inspire compassion in ways
that words can’t.”
As a child, Sigman trained with
the Joffrey Ballet, and later she re-
ceived a doctorate in analytic philos-
ophy at Princeton; now she describes
herself as “a choreographer, interdis-
ciplinary artist, and agent of change.”
Her credits include “Vision Begins,”
which combined, among other things,
the poetry of Adrienne Rich with the
theme song to “The Mary Tyler Moore
Show”; “RUPTURE,” in which she lit-
erally walked on eggshells; and “The
Hut Project,” which involved build-
ing shelters out of garbage. She is
around forty, with short brown hair
flecked with gray.
“After the Presidential election and
Inauguration, I was doing all these typ-
ical activisty things that a lot of us were
doing,” Sigman said. “Writing my sen-
ators, calling, and stuff. At some point,
after a few months of that, I felt like
I was leaving my body out of the equa-
tion.” She went into the studio. “I spent
a lot of time lying on the floor, think-
ing, I don’t know what the fuck I’m
doing.” Gradually, she began to move.
“I felt like my body had things to say.”
Within a couple of months, she
invited colleagues to join her. “There
was a stuckness I was seeing in a lot
of dancers—people I saw caring about
a lot of issues were now getting shut
down.” She wondered, How can I
get them moving? By summertime,
she had opened her workshop to the
public.
“A verbal landscape may define us
more starkly,” she said. “But when we
start moving we realize that the uni-
verse is teeming with options.” She
was delighted by the turnout—people
of all backgrounds, some of them weary
of posing for Instagram at marches.
“We’re not signing a petition, we’re
not clicking on Facebook, we’re part
of the resistance by living a certain
way,” she said.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 33
At a recent session, Sigman asked
students to introduce themselves with
their names and pronouns—there were
five “she/her”s, one “he/him”—and had
them say a word that was on their
minds. “Muscles,” one said. After a
beat, she clarified, “Not m-u-s-s-e-l-s.”
For the next hour, the group sat in
a circle and dabbled in words. “What
is protest?” Sigman asked. It’s about
opposing something, a woman with
a long braid said. It’s about commu-
nity, said the only “him.” Does it
mean showing up? Not necessarily,
the dancers agreed. The woman with
the braid explained that, last year, in-
stead of marching, she’d knit her own
line of pussy hats. “It was hard, be-
cause all the yarn stores were out
of pink.”
“Does protest have to be public?”
“No,” a young woman with a messy
bun said. “I have been protesting some-
one in secret for almost a year, and this
person does not know.”
It was time to dance. Sigman in-
structed the class to begin exploring
protest based on what was said, or not
said, during their circle conversation.
One person wriggled on the floor, as
though she were struggling to drift
off to sleep. Another sashayed around
the room with arms outstretched. A
young woman with curly hair leaned
over a piano in the corner and swept
her ringlets gently across the keys,
moving her head back and forth as if
operating a miniature car wash. Then
she picked up an electrical cord and
fondled it. (Later, she explained,
“There was a sign that said ‘Do Not
Touch.’”)
Next, Sigman suggested, “Think
about taking it further.” Then, “Think
about stillness.” After twenty minutes,
she asked everyone to stop: “Think
about alternatives to protest.” The
dancers milled. Soon, everyone had
joined hands and was weaving in and
out of one another’s port de bras—
Matisse’s “La Danse” meets sea anem-
one. “Remember to not only do what’s
best for the group, but also what feels
true to you,” Sigman advised.
The female dancers joined together,
encircling “him” in a kind of cage. Then,
without a word, they lifted their arms
and let him go.
—Betsy Morais

AMERICAN CH RONICLES
SAFER SPACES
Could small changes in campus life reduce the risk of sexual assault?
BY JIA TOLENT I NO
f I were asked by a survey to describe
Icollege,
my experience with sexual assault in
I would pinpoint two inci-
dents, both of which occurred at or
after parties in my freshman year. In
the first case, the guy went after me
with sniper accuracy, magnanimously
giving me a drink he’d poured upstairs.
In 2015, Columbia launched SHIFT, an unprecedented, wide-ranging study of the sexual behavior of undergraduates.
In the second case, I’m sure the guy had
no idea that he was doing something
wrong. I had joined a sorority, and all my
social circles were as sloppy, intense, and
tribal as the Greek system—the groups
that made these incidents possible are the
same ones that made my life at the time
so good. In college, everything is Janus-
faced: what you interpret as refuge can
lead to danger, and vice versa. One of the
most highly valorized social activities,
blacking out and hooking up, holds the
potential for trauma within it like a seed.
I got to thinking about this—and pic-
turing my college self as a sort of avatar
34 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
in an extended risk simulation—after
talking with Jennifer Hirsch and Claude
Ann Mellins, at Columbia University’s
Mailman School of Public Health, in
Washington Heights, on a biting, windy
day last December. Hirsch, an anthro-
pologist, and Mellins, a clinical psychol-
ogist, are Columbia professors. Both
women are in their fifties, have shoulder-
length brown hair, and grew up in Jew-
ish families in Manhattan. They share a
sharp, maternal pragmatism—between
them, they have five sons, ranging in age
from fifteen to twenty-three. For the past
three years, they have been leading a
$2.2-million research project on the sex-
ual behavior of Columbia undergradu-
ates. The project is called SHIFT, which
stands for the Sexual Health Initiative
to Foster Transformation.
The problem of campus sexual as-
sault can seem unfathomable and intrac-
table. We generally think of it as a mat-
ter of individual misbehavior, which,
various studies have shown, most pre-
vention programs do little to change. But
Hirsch and Mellins think about sexual
assault socio-ecologically: as a matter of
how people act within a particular envi-
ronment. They are doggedly optimistic
that there is, if not a single fix, a series
of new solutions.
A four-year residential college is what
sociologists call a total institution: it con-
trols the conditions under which stu-
dents eat, sleep, work, and party. “You
can just imagine all these contextual di-
mensions in college that could be tin-
kered with to create a less stressful, less
hard-drinking, more respectful environ-
ment,” Hirsch said. The assumption is
that some college students are commit-
ting sexual assault when they don’t
intend to, and that many are more vul-
nerable to sexual harm than they ought
to be. Either idea can be controversial,
and focussing on contributing factors,
such as drinking, rather than just on the
bad acts of perpetrators, can seem be-
side the point. But Hirsch and Mellins
insist that their approach to prevention
does not ignore personal responsibility;
rather, it aims to nudge students toward
responsible behavior on a collective scale.
The first time we met, on Columbia’s
main campus, Hirsch put it to me more
plainly: “We have to stop working one
penis at a time!”
ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE SCHEFFE
 SHIFT was born out of a crisis. In
the past several years, as students all
over the country became more vocal
about the problem of rape in college,
the press seized on a series of dramatic
incidents, including one at Columbia.
A rare combination of academic talent
and initiative was then unleashed by
the university, which may have felt the
need to demonstrate its commitment
to the cause, and this produced, after
two years of sunup-to-sundown effort,
the most rigorous, nuanced, and wide-
ranging examination of the problem
that has ever been carried out on a col-
lege campus. “It’s better for universi-
ties if sexual assault is positioned as a
matter of sexual health, rather than as
a scary threat,” the journalist Vanessa
Grigoriadis, who published a book last
year, “Blurred Lines,” about sexual as-
sault on campus, told me. She added,
“We’re in a new phase of the movement.”
ou can trace that movement back
Y at least four decades, to 1977, when
a senior at Yale named Ann Olivarius—
along with another student, three grad-
uates, and a male professor—sued the
school, citing quid-pro-quo sexual ha-
rassment by professors, a hostile envi-
ronment, and a lack of reporting proce-
dures. The plaintiffs, advised by a recent
Yale Law graduate named Catharine
MacKinnon, argued that this was a vi-
olation of Title IX—the federal statute,
passed five years before, that prohibits
gender discrimination in educational in-
stitutions. The women lost the case, but
the district court ruled that it was “per-
fectly reasonable to maintain that aca-
demic advancement conditioned upon
submission to sexual demands consti-
tutes sex discrimination in education.”
Two years later, MacKinnon published
her landmark book, “Sexual Harassment
of Working Women,” which argued that
“economic power is to sexual harassment
as physical force is to rape.”
The proper scope of Title IX was ar-
gued in court over and over in the years
that followed; rulings narrowed its ap-
plication, then expanded it again. Mean-
while, anti-rape activism progressed on
campuses across the country. Take Back
the Night marches, which had begun in
the seventies, became a feature of col-
lege life in the eighties; Columbia’s first
Take Back the Night march was held,
in front of the Barnard gates, in 1988.
The Columbia University Senate passed
the first school-wide sexual-assault pol-
icy in 1995—it required that complaints
be handled through an alternative form
of the school’s standard disciplinary pro-
cedure. Student activists weren’t satisfied:
they wanted the deans who handled
sexual-assault cases to receive additional
training, and they wanted to know how
many incidents were being reported.
They staged a prolonged campaign that
culminated, in 1999, in a twenty-three-
hour vigil, during which hundreds of
students marched through campus
shouting, “Red tape can’t cover up rape!”
Seven years ago, the Office of Civil
Rights, under President Obama, issued a
“Dear Colleague” letter, reasserting that
sexual violence on campus was a viola-
tion of Title IX, and pushing universities
to handle sexual-assault cases in a timely,
transparent, accuser-friendly manner. A
year later, the Department of Justice ex-
panded its definition of rape to include
male victims and multiple types of viola-
tions. (The previous definition—“the car-
nal knowledge of a female, forcibly and
against her will”—had been in place since
1927.) Today, the D.O.J. defines sexual as-
sault as unwanted sexual contact, which
means that groping counts, as does at-
tempted assault. The crime hinges on in-
tention, and there are often no witnesses,
which makes it uniquely difficult to ad-
judicate in any legal system, let alone one
made up of college administrators. Cam-
pus judiciary systems don’t have a crim-
inal court’s investigative powers or evi-
dentiary procedures, but they do have
many of a criminal court’s responsibili-
ties. To complicate matters further, ev-
eryone involved in the process—accuser,
accused, administrator—essentially works
under the same roof. Betsy DeVos,Trump’s
Secretary of Education, has called the
current approach a “failed system,” and
said that she would seek to replace it.
It might seem simpler to let the crim-
inal-justice system handle things, but uni-
versities have a responsibility to insure
that women have equal access to educa-
tion. And, in addition, many students pre-
fer to address these matters outside that
system—they don’t necessarily want to
send their assaulters to prison, and they
may not be able to prove their cases be-
yond a reasonable doubt. Columbia now
has twenty-three staffers with Title IX
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 35
responsibilities, including case managers,
investigators, and administrators, and pro-
vides free legal services to accusers and
accused. The school’s gender-based mis-
conduct policy is thirty-one pages long.
reshman year at Columbia, as at
F any college, can be overwhelming:
awkward encounters at parties in the
“social dorm,” where the long wooden
doors can be taken down to serve as
beer-pong tables; a rush to find a home
base in extracurriculars and clubs. Ju-
liana Kaplan, a Barnard junior, told me,
“On the one hand, you have kids at
Columbia who come from kings of
Wall Street—you have a secret society
based completely on wealth. On the
other, you have a demographic of
first-generation, low-income students
of color. People come in through very
different contexts.” When I asked her
about the tenor of student conversa-
tion on sexual assault, she told me, “I
try to remember that some people have
been super aware of these issues for
their whole life, due to any number of
factors, and then there are some peo-
ple, such as men, who have to actively
learn about it while they’re here.”
Five years ago, a Columbia sopho-
more named Emma Sulkowicz filed a
complaint with the university, accusing
another student of rape. (Sulkowicz,
who has been working as an artist since
graduation, identifies as non-binary, and
uses the gender-neutral pronouns “they”
and “them.”) A consensual encounter
on the first day of the school year had
turned violent, Sulkowicz alleged: in
the midst of sex, the student anally pen-
etrated and choked them while they
struggled and told him to stop. (He has
consistently maintained that the entire
encounter was consensual.) Sulkowicz
decided to report the incident after an-
other student said that she’d had a sim-
ilar experience with the same man.
Columbia held a series of hearings and
found the man “not responsible,” and
Sulkowicz was subsequently denied an
appeal. The following April, twenty-
three students and alumni, each with a
story of assault, filed a hundred-page
federal complaint against the university.
Student activists formed a group called
No Red Tape, evoking the protests of
the nineties. When the fall semester
began, Sulkowicz, an art major, started
carrying a fifty-pound, twin XL mat-
tress around campus. It was a perfor-
mance project: they would stop carry-
ing it, they said, when the student who
had raped them was expelled. (Sulko-
wicz carried it until graduation; the man
they accused later sued Columbia, ar-
guing that the university’s support of
the project, for which Sulkowicz had
received academic credit, constituted
gender discrimination, negligence, and
intentional infliction of emotional dis-
tress. The university settled with him
out of court.) Soon after Sulkowicz
began carrying the mattress, dozens of
other Columbia students brought mat-
tresses to the steps of Low Library and
told their own stories of sexual assault.
It was around this time that Jennifer
Hirsch attended a meeting of Colum-
bia’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies Council, where faculty members
gathered in a conference room and picked
over a catered breakfast. She sat next to
Suzanne Goldberg, who at the time was
a special adviser to Columbia’s president,
Lee Bollinger, on the subject of sexual-
assault prevention and response. The de-
bates concerning rape on campus and
what to do about it have been waged pri-
marily between students and adminis-
trators, with professors off to the side.
Hirsch had become frustrated by the
focus, in those debates, on adjudication
and punishment, rather than on the ways
in which the environment of college
makes students vulnerable. As the meet-
ing ended, and people began collecting
their things, Hirsch turned to Goldberg
and spontaneously proposed conducting
an ethnography: she would interview stu-
dents, learn the everyday context of their
sex lives, document the stories that the
university couldn’t see. Goldberg said that
sounded terrific, and told Hirsch to write
up a few pages pitching the project.
A couple of weeks later, Hirsch
popped into Mellins’s office, two floors
down from hers in the Mailman build-
ing. The two professors have been friends
since 2005, when Hirsch, who teaches in
the sociomedical-sciences department,
began doing work at the H.I.V. center
at Columbia, which Mellins co-directs.
Hirsch handed Mellins the paper she’d
drafted, and began peppering her with
questions. Mellins was the lead author
of a 2011 study into the mental health,
drug use, and sexual behavior of adoles-
36 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
cents who had been infected with H.I.V.
in the womb or as infants. She knew
something about discussing uncomfort-
able matters with young people, and
quantifying those conversations for re-
search purposes. She answered Hirsch’s
questions, and started asking her own.
Hirsch looked at her closely. “Do you
want to do this with me?” she asked.
They spent the next few weeks brain-
storming—on the phone, over e-mail,
in each other’s offices, on whiteboards.
They thought about the relevant exper-
tise of their colleagues. Who really knew
about interpersonal violence? Who re-
ally knew about epidemiology? Statis-
tics? Trauma in young adults? As the
fall turned crisp, they tracked down the
faculty members whose help they
wanted, and asked them if they would
join SHIFT. In November, 2014, they
submitted their proposal, and Goldberg
quickly secured the university’s approval.
Goldberg, who is in her mid-fifties
and speaks with a flat, equanimous affect,
became Columbia’s first executive vice-
president for university life in 2015. She
has a long career of progressive advo-
cacy—she was a co-counsel for the de-
fendants in Lawrence v. Texas, which
nullified Texas’s sodomy law. She leads
Columbia Law School’s Center for Gen-
der and Sexuality Law, and she was in-
tegral to the development of SHIFT. (“We
had many breakfasts,” Hirsch explained.)
But she has become a maligned figure
among student activists. Amelia Roskin-
Frazee, a senior involved with No Red
Tape, spoke to me dismissively about
the Sexual Respect Initiative, a con-
sent-education requirement, instituted
by Goldberg in 2014, that included an
arts option: students could write a poem,
submit a drawing, or perform a dance.
When I asked Goldberg about this crit-
icism, she said, “The initiative meets stu-
dents where they are.”
Roskin-Frazee is a queer activist who,
at fourteen, founded a nonprofit that
provides schools and shelters with
L.G.B.T.Q.-themed books. She is cur-
rently suing Columbia. She says that,
two months after arriving on campus,
she was violently raped in her dorm
room by a stranger, and that, a few
months later, she was raped again, by
an assailant she suspects to be the same
person. (She told me more than once
that she knew this was not a typical cam-
pus assault; last year, she wrote a piece
for HuffPost criticizing the notion that
“true stranger rapes” are any more seri-
ous than those committed by people who
know their victims.) She asked to move
out of her dorm room, and alleges that
Columbia violated Title IX by requir-
ing her to do so within twenty-four
hours, and telling her it would cost five
hundred dollars. Columbia has moved
to dismiss Roskin-Frazee’s lawsuit, ar-
guing that she obstructed her own in-
vestigation by waiting months to file an
official report. In October of last year,
with a group of protesters, Roskin-Frazee
barged into one of Goldberg’s law classes
to publicly accuse her of endangering
student survivors.
he creation of SHIFT was announced
T to the university at the end of Feb-
ruary, 2015, in an e-mail from President
Bollinger. Hirsch and Mellins began so-
liciting applications for a paid under-
graduate advisory board, ultimately se-
lecting a dozen or so students, including
members of the Greek system, student-
government leaders, a ballerina in Co-
lumbia’s General Studies program, anti-
sexual-assault activists, a sex educator, a
Barnard student, and an R.A. For the
next two years, when school was in ses-
sion, the group met over bagels at
8 A.M. every Monday. The board created
a typology of Columbia students—the
hyper-involved, the completely disinter-
ested, the kids who find their thing and
stick to it—and corrected the research-
ers in their sometimes fumbling attempts
to classify student identities. (Each time
they pointed out such a mistake, one stu-
dent-board member told me, the re-
searchers’ eyes would pop in surprise, and
then they’d come back the next week
saying, “We had seventeen meetings since
the last time we saw you, and we’re going
to do what you say.”) The students
planned promotional events, setting up
SHIFT tables outside the dining hall and
the gym. They brought the researchers,
who answered questions for students,
and made sure they always had snacks.
“Snacks, we learned, were a really big
thing,” Hirsch said.
Meanwhile, Hirsch and the Columbia
sociologist Shamus Khan prepared a
team of ethnographers—current and
recent grad students, who were close
to their subjects in age—to talk with
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undergraduates about intimate subjects.
These interviews would be the first big
component of SHIFT’s information-gath-
ering. The ethnographers began, that fall,
with “participant observation”—i.e.,
hanging around football games and
drinking club soda at student bars. Shortly
afterward, a story appeared in the stu-
dent newspaper the Daily Spectator, in
which an unnamed sophomore said that
Khan had been spotted taking notes at
1020, a popular bar near campus. (The
plans for the ethnographic research had
been announced in the Daily Spectator
months before.) The story was picked
up by the Post, which reported that “Co-
lumbia University researchers are spying
on the school’s students at bars and cam-
pus parties as part of a new study about
sexual health and violence—and the stu-
dents say it’s creeping them out.”
In fact, by all accounts, the process
went pretty smoothly. Some students,
after talking to the researchers for a while,
invited them to parties, or to kick it in
dorm rooms. Many university employ-
ees are required to report sexual assault
to the Title IX coördinator, but the re-
searchers received a waiver so that they
could promise students confidentiality
while engaged in SHIFT research. Alex-
ander Wamboldt, an affable, bearded
Princeton Ph.D. who worked as a SHIFT
ethnographer, told me that it was im-
portant, in these encounters, to “model
“I was almost like Robin Hood. I took from the rich, but then I kept it.”
good, consensual research behavior”—
he announced his name and his pur-
pose, along with a disclaimer about
confidentiality, before entering a con-
versation. He and the other researchers
conducted one-on-one interviews with
a hundred and fifty-one students about
their sex lives and their experiences at
Columbia. (Students were paid for the
time they spent in these interviews.)
Hirsch and Khan sorted through the
data and adjusted their approach when
they weren’t getting all the information
they needed. Wamboldt was hired to
focus on so-called high-status men, such
as those involved in athletics and fra-
ternities, a group of students who hadn’t,
up to that point, spoken much with the
ethnographers, perhaps wary of the pos-
sibility that they’d be portrayed badly in
whatever the researchers wrote up.
The interviews were bracing. Talk-
ing about sex brings a lot to the sur-
face—students discussed loss, family,
trauma, hardship, fear. Some of the
men Wamboldt spoke to cracked
offhand jokes about having been raped.
The members of the ethnography team
soon decided that they needed to do a
mental-health check-in at their weekly
meetings: they would go around the
room, and everyone would relate how
he or she was coping with the work.
In one advisory-board meeting, Mel-
lins and Hirsch shared preliminary ob-
servations, and Mellins brought up affir-
mative consent—the practice of actively,
mutually soliciting enthusiasm through-
out a sexual encounter, which is now
the legal standard for universities in
New York and California. Most college
students learn about it in orientation
seminars or from online modules that
they are required to complete. Mellins
told the administrators that affirmative
consent rarely factored into the experi-
ences that students were describing.
“One of our institutional advisers
pretty much fell off her chair,” Mellins
told me. “She said, ‘How can it not be
a thing? We’re working so hard to teach
them.’ And our point was: there’s a re-
ally broad disjuncture between what
students learn and what they actually
practice.” The researchers found that
the practice is much simpler to under-
stand than its detractors, who tend to
picture a stack of paperwork accompa-
nying every make-out session, seem to
think—and also less common than its
proponents would like to believe. (SHIFT
plans to publish a paper on affirmative
consent later this year.)
irsch and Mellins launched the
H second phase of the study, an
enormous daily-diary project, in Oc-
tober. Four hundred and twelve stu-
dents were asked to fill out a short on-
line questionnaire every day for sixty
days. (The student board convinced
the researchers that the only way to
maintain subject participation through
midterms was to pay: diarists got a dol-
lar an entry.) The idea was that re-
searchers would be able to quickly scan
each twenty-four-hour period for mood,
sleep, sexual activity, substance use, and
unusual experiences. The pool of data
could then be parsed for patterns and
fine-grained interactions. Researchers
might find, for example, that unwanted
sexual contact is more likely to occur
in the midst of other crises, or after a
person has experienced unwanted sex-
ual attention in another setting.
In January, 2016, the SHIFT team re-
cruited students for Part 3: a sweeping,
onetime survey. The student board roped
in peers with the promise of gift cards,
and by talking to them about how im-
portant the project was, how it could
show that Columbia took sexual assault
more seriously than other universities,
and how, if they participated, they’d get
snacks. (Students who took the survey
in SHIFT’s temporary office got fruit,
candy, pizza, and chips.)
The survey contains hundreds of ques-
tions, many of them startlingly intimate.
It seems likely that no previous survey
has so accurately reflected how sexual as-
sault actually occurs in college—as an
event embedded within the fabric of ev-
eryday life, which both perpetrator and
the victim understand based on their back-
ground, their habits, their state of mind.
The survey asks students about sleep, ex-
ercise, eating habits, mental health, where
they get alcohol, what sort of dorm room
they live in, where they party and how. It
asks about money, family, friends, their
sexual experiences before college, their
sense of agency and of self-worth. It asks
about gender identity and attraction, about
the moments just before an incident—
who was around, what was happening—
and what followed, immediately and in
the long term. It asks about consent: if
students expect their partners to ask, if
they think it’s a matter of body language,
if they think that asking once at the be-
ginning of a hookup is fine. It asks about
attitudes regarding sex and gender, suss-
ing out common cultural biases: To what
degree do they think that women lie to
get ahead? Do they think that men should
reveal vulnerability? Do they believe that
it can’t be rape if both people are drunk?
Are they not at all sure, a little sure, some-
what sure, pretty sure, or very sure that
they could say no to having sex with some-
one if they want to date that person? What
if they want the person to fall in love with
them, or if the person won’t use a con-
dom? What if they’ve had sex with the
person before?
Twenty-five hundred Columbia and
Barnard undergraduates were invited
to participate in SHIFT’s survey, and
sixty-seven per cent of them did so. I
took the survey myself one day at the
end of December—answering in the
present, as a twenty-nine-year-old, and
thinking about how I would have an-
swered at eighteen. In the course of a
half hour, I felt nauseated, and then
oddly comforted, by how well the ques-
tions were outlining my life. A detailed
constellation emerged of all the things
that had protected me in college: a
chemically stable disposition, satisfying
relationships, a sense of control over my
experience at school, a lack of confu-
sion about what I wanted sex to be. My
vulnerabilities—a certain recklessness,
a freshman-year social life that depended
on spaces and substances provided by
men—were just as clear. I could see the
desires and the habits, sexual and oth-
erwise, that traced the path between
then and now. I started to wonder if the
research that SHIFT is pro-
ducing might start closing
the gap between two seem-
ingly contradictory reali-
ties. Sexual assault on cam-
pus is frequently portrayed
as lurid and dark and com-
plex. But the experiences
that live in our heads are
often obvious and ordinary,
sometimes heartbreakingly
so. SHIFT is, in a sense, a reporting proj-
ect of unprecedented scale, a map that
genuinely reflects the size of the terri-
tory. It could be one of the first endeav-
ors to show the magnitude and the tex-
ture of the problem at the same time.
HIFT’s research concluded in the fall
Sanalyzing
of 2017. Since then, the team has been
the data and preparing to pub-
lish a slew of papers about the results in
peer-reviewed journals. (In December,
Hirsch and Khan sold a book about SHIFT,
tentatively titled “The Sexual Project,” to
Norton, to be published in 2019.) The
first paper, which appeared in the open-
access online journal PLOS ONE in No-
vember, laid out what the team learned
about the frequency of sexual assault at
Columbia. Sexual-assault research is no-
toriously contested and spotty—many
regularly cited statistics come from stud-
ies with big design flaws, such as small
sample sizes, or loose definitions of “col-
lege student.”The record-setting response
rate for the SHIFT survey makes its data
unusually comprehensive and reliable. In
certain important respects, its numbers
are in keeping with previous findings: a
little more than one in five respondents
said they had experienced sexual assault
since starting college—twenty-eight per
cent of women, twelve per cent of men,
and nearly forty per cent of gender-non-
conforming students. (The survey did not
use the term “sexual assault”; it asked
about “unwanted sexual contact.”) But
there were also surprises. It’s long been
established that women and L.G.B.T.Q.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 39
students are especially vulnerable to as-
sault; SHIFT found that students who are
struggling to pay for basic necessities
are, too. Men in fraternities are, in fact,
more likely than other male students to
be perpetrators; SHIFT found that they
were more likely than other men to be
victims as well. A culture that doesn’t
teach men to ask for consent often
doesn’t teach them that they
can withhold it, either.
Hirsch and Mellins
avoid the term “rape cul-
ture” when discussing their
work. I’ve never liked that
phrase, not because it doesn’t
name something real but
because it emphasizes the
way that the world is al-
ready prepared to hurt me,
rather than emphasizing my personal,
and not entirely predictable, relation-
ship to the world. (As Jennifer Doyle,
an English professor at the University
of California, Riverside, puts it in her
book “Campus Sex, Campus Security,”
the term distances sexual violence from
“the force of the ordinary.”) Hirsch and
Mellins often talk about “sexual citizen-
ship,” which they define as a “person’s
understanding of his or her right, and
other people’s equivalent right, to sex-
ual self-determination.” In the confer-
ence room at the Mailman building,
Hirsch told me, “Part of what I see our
work doing is disrupting these scripts
that women give consent and men se-
cure it—that men are sexual agents and
women are gatekeepers, which is affirmed
by consent education that frames men
exclusively as potential perpetrators.”
“Of course, you don’t want to mini-
mize the fact that women are still hold-
ing the burden on this, in terms of abso-
lute numbers,” Mellins said. She hesi-
tated. “But you want to work in a way
where there isn’t a single story.” A trans
student who is assaulted at a party is ex-
periencing something different from a
freshman girl whose hookup is ignoring
her protests in a dorm room. Both of
them are experiencing something differ-
ent from a boy who has never imagined
that he would ever give or receive a no.
Mellins pointed to an article about a
Brown University student who’d been as-
saulted in a bathroom by another man,
and then, later that day, attended a stan-
dard prevention workshop, where he felt
entirely alone. “If you don’t give some-
one permission to be at risk, then they
can’t seek help,” Mellins said.
The researchers discussed their find-
ings with the student board—they’re all
still in a group chat together—and also
with administrators. Certain fixes, they’ve
realized, are impossible to implement.
All college students would benefit from
drinking alcohol in a gentler manner:
often with food, rarely in basements. But
colleges can’t encourage that among un-
derage students without breaking federal
law. When I was talking with Hirsch and
Mellins, I thought about my own expe-
rience with the Greek system. The Na-
tional Panhellenic Conference, which ad-
heres to rather antiquated gender norms,
forbids sororities from holding parties
where alcohol is served—which means
that, at many schools, the most accessi-
ble parties for freshmen take place on
fraternity terms, and on fraternity turf.
Every school’s environment is differ-
ent—where students drink, how they get
home from parties, the geographies and
the conditions of their vulnerability—
and the nudges and interventions have
to vary accordingly. But Hirsch and Mel-
lins hope that their research can serve as
the beginning of a network of innova-
tive cross-campus studies. In the mean-
time, they’re talking to administrators
about the interrelationship of mental
health, substance abuse, and sexual as-
sault, and about how different types of
incidents and different types of students
require different types of prevention and
response. Many of these conversations
have echoed long-standing conclusions
in public-health research, and also what
some students are already asking for: more
crisis support, more consideration for
specific populations, more access to spaces
on campus that feel like their own. “I’m
grateful the SHIFT team chose to do this,”
Roskin-Frazee told me. “I hope they are
persuasive to administrators who are not
easily persuaded.”
ne night in January, I called Emma
O Sulkowicz to talk about Hirsch and
Mellins’s project. Sulkowicz was disarm-
ing and philosophical, despite having
spent five hours in the dentist’s chair ear-
lier that day. Sulkowicz had not heard
about SHIFT before, and was politely re-
sistant to the idea: “My view in this whole
thing is that, the more that Columbia
40 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
can retreat behind ‘Here’s a program,
here’s a study, here’s a process,’ the less
that any human that finds themselves in
this machine will ever be incentivized to
act based on their moral compass.”
What if, I asked, the idea behind
the study was tinkering with the ma-
chine, figuring out how to reorient that
moral compass?
“That makes me think of asking some-
one to wash the dishes, and they tell you,
‘I’ll try,’ ” Sulkowicz said. “I think that’s
the difference between spending two
million dollars to try to understand the
conditions that create a community that’s
conducive to sexual assault versus just
doing the right thing—expelling people
who sexually assault other students.”
Sulkowicz wants to change behavior,
too, but thinks that punishment is more
efficacious than tweaks to campus life.
When Columbia settled the lawsuit filed
by the man Sulkowicz accused of rape,
it put out a statement, noting that his
“remaining time at Columbia became
very difficult for him and not what Co-
lumbia would want any of its students
to experience.” But Sulkowicz believes
that what he went through had a salu-
tary effect. “He’s been scared shitless,”
they said. (The man’s lawyer called this
statement “preposterous,” and said that
he had done nothing wrong.)
Sulkowicz also said something that
I kept hearing from Columbia students:
“It’s about finding a way to make your
institution, and the people who run it,
more human.” Earlier that week, I’d spo-
ken to a former SHIFT student-board
member named Morgan Hughes, a laid-
back twenty-three-year-old hip-hop
musician. She called me from a coffee
shop in Cleveland, where she’d moved
after graduation. She had been a disen-
gaged student, by her own account,
mainly focussed on her music. Her
friends at school, most of whom were
people of color, had found it difficult to
secure space and permission from Co-
lumbia to hold their own events, she
told me. “Everything is so regulated, so
limited, everything’s super uptight,” she
said. “Columbia always says they’re lis-
tening, taking students into account,
and then they turn around and make a
decision that doesn’t acknowledge any
of that conversation. But SHIFT did lis-
ten. They changed their agenda based
on what we talked about. It didn’t feel
like we were just wasting our breath.”
Would SHIFT make things different
at Columbia? “Every four years, there’s
a new student body, and I think Colum-
bia is used to just waiting it out,” she
said. “But this time there are professors
involved. Shamus Khan is going to be
there, Jennifer Hirsch is going to be there.
It’s up to Columbia if they want to shoot
themselves in the foot and ignore it, but
people are actually paying attention to
this.” She paused, and coffee-shop noises
tinkled in the background. “I mean, Co-
lumbia, you should want to solve the
problem, so you don’t keep having to solve
the problem, you know what I mean?”
he question now is whether Co-
T lumbia values SHIFT as a flagship
research project or as a practical guide
to institutional change. I asked Gold-
berg, over the phone, whether she thought
Columbia would change after SHIFT.
She had spoken carefully throughout our
conversation, seeming to calibrate every
word against the various, sometimes com-
peting interests that she’s expected to
balance. “I think,” she said, “that SHIFT’s
research is profoundly important to the
work we are doing here.” It will be diffi-
cult, under Title IX, for people who live
or work on campus to entirely separate
sex from bureaucracy. When I asked Mel-
lins what she hopes to ultimately accom-
plish with SHIFT, she said, “I’m a clini-
cian. I’ve come to feel that, if the work
we do makes the lives of even a small
amount of students better, that’s what
we want. We want to eradicate sexual
assault, but, short of that, I think we just
want to make a difference.”
The SHIFT approach, for all its rigor
and scope, is in some ways remarkably
modest: the idea is that small structural
adjustments to student life could change
how students interact with one another—
help them find their moral compass more
easily, feel more at home on campus, have
some obstacles cleared out of their path.
These humble expectations can seem
deflating. But SHIFT makes a powerful
argument that sexual-violence preven-
tion must embrace the ordinary and the
particular. Its programming suggestions
may matter less than its potential to trans-
form how people think about the prob-
lem. At one point in my conversation
with Hirsch, she brought up an optimis-
tic analogy. Forty years ago, alcohol played
 a role in more than sixty per cent of traffic
deaths. Since then, a comprehensive, mul- SHOU TS & MURMURS
tilevel campaign against drunk driving
has cut that number in half. This re-
quired institutional change, in the form
of new laws, and social change, as school
and community programs taught peo-
ple to designate a driver and to inter-
vene when a wobbly friend grabbed his
car keys. It also involved changes to the
physical environment: cities established
police checkpoints, and offenders were
required to install Breathalyzer locks on
their cars. Citizens lobbied for better
street lights, more speed bumps.
A version of this thinking applies to
life in college: there are checkpoints and
speed bumps that could decrease the

WHAT WILL FOOD

likelihood of harm. Picture the freshman
who’s depressed but doesn’t realize it, or

BE LIKE IN THE FUTURE?

can’t get an appointment at the counsel-
ling office, or doesn’t trust the counsel-
lors. It’s easier to just drink twenty beers
each weekend. On one of those week-
ends, he goes to a party and meets a girl
who hasn’t slept in two days and is sub-
sisting on cereal; she didn’t want to come
to this party, but her roommates gave
her an iced-tea bottle full of Fireball and
dragged her out. The boy and the girl
start talking. Their friends cheer when
they make out. At 2 A.M., when the party
begins to clear, one of them says they
should get a bite, but no place on cam-
pus is open. They go to her bedroom,
but there’s nowhere comfortable to sit
except the bed. What happens next is a
blur of mismatched fears and assump-
tions. The girl panics, freezes, thinks the
guy will hurt her if she yells at him, starts
making horrible calculations of futility:
anyone who hears this story will think
it’s her fault for inviting him in. The guy,
having half-deliberately drunk himself
beyond conscious decision-making, ig-
nores her stiffness and whatever she’s
mumbling; he thinks he’s doing exactly
what college students are supposed to
do. There are at least a dozen small
changes beyond their control that might
have led to a different outcome. There
will always be people, mostly men, who
experience a power differential as license
to do what they want. But SHIFT pro-
poses that it is possible to protect poten-
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
BY MIA MERCAD O
Iwithntothewhat
future, food will be similar
it is today, only bigger and
much better Wi-Fi.
In the future, gluten will be free
but only if you are very, very rich.
The rainbow-colored-food trend
will go away in the future, as will
naturally occurring rainbows.
In the future, we will not use
plates, only pieces of toast. Utensils
will come in four flavor-blasted va-
rieties: Ranch, Cool Ranch, Lame
Ranch, and Shitty Plastic.
In the future, eggplants will not be
food and I don’t have to tell you why.
In the future, pumpkin-spice sea-
son will be recognized by the scien-
tific community, and avocados will
scream at you when they are ripe.
In the future, Nature Valley gra-
nola bars will come with an extra bag
of crumbs that you can dump right
onto the seat of your car, because Na-
ture Valley just, like, gets me.
In the future, fast-food restau-
rants will no longer exist. Except for
Wendy’s, where all they will serve is
hot political takes, Sick Burns™, and
the sky because Rebecca’s vision
board actually fucking worked.
In the future, there will be no more
hunger, because hunger will get re-
branded as “opposite full.”
In the future, there will be no more
pizza. We abused our pizza privi-
leges for one too many generations,
and so it will cease to exist. You will
still be able to get food that is pizza
flavored, but pizza flavoring will taste
less and less like pizza and more and
more like the way vomit smells.
There will still be burritos, though,
because, in the future, our burrito
standards will drop to “I don’t know—
just wrap a food in a different food?”
In the near future, people will stop
talking about eating Tide pods and
start talking about whether we can
cook full meals in the dryer.
In the future, chocolate will be-
come extinct, but we’ll have traded
it to get the dinosaurs back, which
is a pretty good deal.
In the future, brunch will extend
from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., and the re-
maining time will legally be referred

tial victims and potential perpetrators si-
multaneously, and that we are, at this
moment, less eager to hurt one another
than we seem to be. 
old chili. to as “fourth meal.”
The beer of the future will all be Everyone will be vegan in the fu-
rosé, rosé will be La Croix, and La ture, so eventually we’ll all run out
Croix will literally rain down from of things to talk about. 
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 41
 fifty but looks almost two decades
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY younger. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up
in Puerto Rico before going to gradu-

JAMBUSTERS
Who you gonna call?
B Y J O S H UA R O T H M A N
uilding 111 on the Xerox engineer-
B ing campus, near Rochester, New
York, is vast and labyrinthine. On the
social-media site Foursquare, one vis-
itor writes that it’s “like Hotel Califor-
nia.” Conference Room C, near the
southwest corner, is small and dingy;
it contains a few banged-up white-
process, the paper was supposed to
cross a gap; flung from the top of a ro-
tating belt, it needed to soar through
space until it could be sucked upward
by a vacuum pump onto another belt,
which was positioned upside down.
Unfortunately, the press was in a hot
and humid place, and the paper, nor-
ate school in Rochester, where he is
now a fixture of the city’s wintertime
indoor beach-volleyball scene. Wear-
ing designer sneakers, hip-hugging
maroon trousers, a trim plaid shirt
rolled to the elbows, and elegant stub-
ble, he began to pace in front of a
whiteboard.
Bruce Thompson, the computer
modeller who sat at the head of the
table, had spent days creating a simula-
tion of the jam. “We’re dealing with a
highly nonlinear entity moving at a very
high speed,” he said. On the screen, his
wireframes showed a sheet of paper in
mid-flight. He called up a shadowy
slow-motion video made inside the

For printer engineers, solving paper jams is “the ultimate challenge,” combining physics, chemistry, and programming.

boards and a table. On a frigid winter
afternoon, a group of engineers gath-
ered there, drawing the shades against
the late-day sun. They wanted to see
more clearly the screen at the front of
the room, on which a computer model
of a paper jam was projected.
The jam had occurred in Asia,
where the owners of a Xerox-manu-
factured printing press were trying to
print a book. The paper they had fed
into the press was unusually thin and
light, of the sort found in a phone
book or a Bible. This had not gone
well. Midway through the printing
42 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
mally lissome, had become listless. At
the apex of its trajectory, at the mo-
ment when it was supposed to connect
with the conveyor belt, its back corners
drooped. They dragged on the plat-
form below, and, like a trapeze flier
missing a catch, the paper sank down-
ward. As more sheets rushed into the
same space, they created a pile of loops
and curlicues—what the jam engineers
called a “flower arrangement.”
“It’s the worst-case scenario,” Erwin
Ruiz, the leader of the paper-jam team,
said. In the study of paper jams, Ruiz
has found his Fountain of Youth: he is
press. “There’s a good inch before the
vacuum takes effect,” he observed.
The team began to consider their
options. The most obvious fix would
have been to buffet the paper upward
from below using a device called an air
knife. This was off limits, however, be-
cause the bottom side was coated with
loose toner. “An air knife will just blow
the toner right off,” Ruiz said. Another
possibility was to place “fingers”—small,
projecting pieces of plastic—where they
could support the corners as they began
to droop. “That might create a higher
jam rate on different paper shapes,” an
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL SAVAGE
engineer said—it could be a “stub point.”
A mystified silence descended.
A mechanical engineer named Dave
Breed pointed toward the upside-
down conveyor belt. “The vacuum pump
actually works by pulling air through
holes in the belts,” he said. “So what is
the pattern of those holes relative to the
corners? Maybe there’s no suction there.”
On the whiteboard, Ruiz sketched
a diagram of the conveyor belt—the
V.P.T., or vacuum-paper transport—
showing the holes through which the
suction operated. “Optimize belt pat-
tern,” he wrote.
“If my understanding of air systems
is right,” Breed went on, “then the
force that gets a sheet moving isn’t
really pressure—it’s flow.”
Thompson nodded, miming the
pushing of air away from himself with
his hands. “It’s flow,” he concurred.
“Could we somehow create more
acquisition flow?” Breed asked.
By this point, Ruiz appeared to be
vibrating. “Here’s a stupid idea,” he said.
“Bernoulli!” Bernoulli’s principle, dis-
covered in 1738, entails that fast-moving
air exerts less air pressure than slow-
moving air. Because the top side of an
airplane wing is flat, while the under-
side is curved, the air above moves faster
than the air below, and the wing rises.
“If you have jets of air shooting above
the corners, the airflow will lower the
pressure, and they’ll lift,” Ruiz said.
Using the flat of his hand, he mimed
the paper levitating like a wing.
“We could take the output from the
vacuum pump and port it around to
make it the air source for your Ber-
noulli,” Breed said.
“Stupid idea No. 7!” Ruiz said, grin-
ning triumphantly. The whiteboard
now contained an elaborate diagram
of rollers, conveyors, vacuum pumps,
air knives, air jets, stub points, and
fingers. “Jets on corners to lift with
Bernoulli,” Ruiz wrote. Outside, the
wind howled. Lake-effect snow had
begun to dust the parking lot. The en-
gineers were aglow: conspirators who’d
just planned the perfect crime.
ate in “Oslo,” J. T. Rogers’s recent
L play about the negotiation of the
Oslo Accords, diplomats are finalizing
the document when one of them re-
ports a snag: “It’s stuck in the copy ma-
chine and I can’t get it out!” The em-
ployees in Mike Judge’s 1999 film
“Office Space” grow so frustrated with
their jam-prone printer that they de-
stroy it with a baseball bat in a slow-
motion montage set to the Geto Boys’
“Still.” (Office workers around the
country routinely reënact this scene,
posting the results on YouTube.) Ac-
cording to the Wall Street Journal, print-
ers are among the most in-demand ob-
jects in “rage rooms,” where people pay
to smash things with sledgehammers;
Battle Sports, a rage-room facility in
Toronto, goes through fifteen a week.
Meanwhile, in the song “Paper Jam”
John Flansburgh, of the band They
Might Be Giants, sees the jam as a
stark moral test. “Paper jam/paper jam,”
he sings. “It would be so easy to walk
away.”
Unsurprisingly, the engineers who
specialize in paper jams see them
differently. Engineers tend to work in
narrow subspecialties, but solving a
jam requires knowledge of physics,
chemistry, mechanical engineering,
computer programming, and interface
design. “It’s the ultimate challenge,”
Ruiz said.
“I wouldn’t characterize it as annoy-
ing,” Vicki Warner, who leads a team
of printer engineers at Xerox, said of
discovering a new kind of paper jam.
“I would characterize it as almost ex-
citing.” When she graduated from the
Rochester Institute of Technology, in
2006, her friends took jobs in trendy
fields, such as automotive design.
During her interview at Xerox, how-
ever, another engineer showed her the
inside of a printing press. All Xerox
printers look basically the same: a
million-dollar printing press is like an
office copier, but twenty-four feet long
and eight feet high. Warner watched
as the heavy, pale-gray double doors
swung open to reveal a steampunk won-
derland of gears, wheels, conveyor belts,
and circuit boards. As in an office copier,
green plastic handles offer access to the
“paper path”—the winding route, from
“feeder” to “stacker,” along which sheets
of paper are shocked and soaked, curled
and decurled, vacuumed and super-
heated. “Printers are essentially paper
torture chambers,” Warner said, smil-
ing behind her glasses. “I thought, This
is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 43
There are many loose ends in high-
tech life. Like unbreachable blister
packs or awkward sticky tape, paper
jams suggest that imperfection will
persist, despite our best efforts. They’re
also a quintessential modern prob-
lem—a trivial consequence of an oth-
erwise efficient technology that’s been
made monumentally annoying by the
scale on which that technology has
been adopted. Every year, printers get
faster, smarter, and cheaper. All the
same, jams endure.
utenberg invented his printing
G press around 1440; the modern
paper jam was invented around 1960.
During most of the years in between,
jamming was impossible, because
printing was done one sheet at a time.
Traditional presses lowered inked type
onto individual sheets of paper; their
successor, the rotary drum, was hand-
fed. In 1863, an inventor and newspa-
per editor named William Bullock
created the Bullock press, which was
fed by a single roll of paper several
miles long. Bullock’s press revolution-
ized the printing industry by vastly
increasing printing speeds. Sadly, in
1867 Bullock’s leg was caught in the
press; it became gangrenous, and he
died. There are jams worse than paper
jams.
The Bullock press was one of the
first presses with a paper path, but by
today’s standards its path was simple.
The most complex step, the composi-
tion of type, happened off-line; if a
printer wanted to change the type, he
had to stop the press to reset it. The
holy grail of printing—a paper path
that incorporated composition, and so
could produce different pages, one
after another—remained inconceiv-
able. The creation of a miniature press,
for use in offices, was an even wilder
dream.
The solution was xerography, in-
vented by Chester Carlson, the phys-
icist co-founder of Xerox, in 1938. In
xerography, static electricity quickly
and precisely manipulates electrostat-
ically sensitive powdered ink—a.k.a.
toner. As the term “photocopier” sug-
gests, a xerographic machine is less
like a traditional printer and more
like a darkroom. Using an early Xerox
machine required placing an original
under a glass pane, reflecting light off
it onto a statically charged photosen-
sitive plate, using the charged plate to
draw toner from a tray, transferring
the toned image to plain paper, and
then melting the toner into the paper
in a miniature electric oven. (Between
the charging of the plate and the ding
of the oven, or “fuser,” each copy took
around three minutes to make.) The
Xerox 914, introduced in 1959, auto-
mated this process. Caressed by sultry
secretaries in advertisements, it resem-
bled an instrument console from the
Starship Enterprise and shipped with
a fire extinguisher, in case its heating
elements set the paper alight; seven
plain-paper copies per minute trun-
dled through its paper path. Between
1960 and 1979, the 914 earned Xerox
around forty billion dollars—funding,
among other things, the construction
of the corporate campus in Rochester,
and jump-starting the development of
the personal computer, at Xerox PARC,
in California. (Xerox failed to capital-
ize on the P.C. revolution; recently,
Fujifilm announced plans to acquire a
majority stake in the company.) Today,
not all Xerox printers are xerographic;
many are ink-jets, which work by con-
verting an image into a waveform,
then using the waveform to control an
ink nozzle. Almost all, however, follow
the template of the 914 paper path:
feeder, printer, fuser, stacker.
Jams emerge from an elemental
struggle between the natural and the
mechanical. “Paper isn’t manufac-
tured—it’s processed,” Warner said, as
we ambled among the copiers in a vast
Xerox showroom with Ruiz and a few
other engineers. “It comes from living
things—trees—which are unique, just
like people are unique.” In Spain, paper
is made from eucalyptus; in Kentucky,
from Southern pine; in the Northwest,
from Douglas fir. To transform these
trees into copy paper, you must first
turn them into wood chips, which are
then mashed into pulp. The pulp is
bleached, and run through screens and
chemical processes that remove biolog-
ical gunk until only water and wood
fibre remain. In building-size paper
mills, the fibre is sprayed onto rollers
turning thirty-five miles per hour,
which press it into fat cylinders of
paper forty reams wide. It doesn’t take
44 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
KOCHI BY THE SEA
The tin roof of the hospital has claw marks—
Bruised indigo
The kind you left on your thigh
That awful night when no one could come near you.
On the road from the hospital
You pass me the prescription—Same?
I peer then nod, shortsighted already.
You crane your neck, point out rain clouds
Noke—the sky has pink streaks shiny as a shell.
You always saw those things so well
You were the artistic one, keen and lovely.
I was your shadow self, strolling into water
Lying in wait for boys
So they could burn away the hurt in me
My hair black and angular
Cut into wedge shapes, flapping like sails.
At six you hid in the attic
much to reverse this process. When hundred and eighty-five degrees. “It’s
paper gets too wet, it liquefies; when it like wringing a shirt through an old
gets too dry, it crumbles to dust. washing machine,” she said, miming the
To a sheet of paper, a paper path is motion with her hands. Later, she gave
like a Tough Mudder—a multistage ob- me a flowchart of the printing process;
stacle course that must be run in hos- it featured a cartoon of a paper sheet,
tile conditions. With a hint of swagger, its mouth agape in terror.
Warner walked me through the paper Ruiz gestured down the length of
path of a hulking, truck-size iGen the iGen, which resembled many
printing press (around a million dollars copiers daisy-chained together. “The
and a hundred and fifty pages per min- straighter the path, the less probabil-
ute). “We start by sucking a sheet off ity of damaging the paper,” he ex-
the stack with vacuum feeders,” she plained. For this reason, printing-press
said. “Then it travels along thirty feet paper paths tend to sprawl horizon-
of path at one thousand three hundred tally. Office printers must be smaller,
and fifty millimetres per second, chang- and so their paths must fold back on
ing speed and direction at accelerations themselves, making a series of hairpin
reaching 3g.” In xerographic printers, turns. “Think about being in a car,”
she continued—she had to shout above Ruiz said. “The more turns you take,
the press’s vacuum pumps, which sound the more likely you are to get into an
like a copier’s, but louder—“the sheets accident.” Contemplating the “tight
are charged with sixty-five hundred radiuses” of office printers and their
volts. In ink-jets, they’re soaked in liq- other daunting requirements—they
uid. Then we have to keep the image must be quiet, cheap, and low-power,
from shaking or wiping off.” Warner and “people without master’s degrees”
pointed to the back of the paper path, must be able to clear their jams—Ruiz
where the fuser was situated: a set of shook his head with parental indul-
black rubber rollers heated to three gence. “For us, the smaller ones are
 Nosh, Viavattine held the menu up to
the light to assess its “flocculation” (the
Scrawling half-inch creatures degree to which its fibres had clumped
infelicitously together). He launched
Scarlet word balloons jostling their lips, into a fabulous paper-jam war story. “I
Radiant ciphers no one could tell was asked to go to Chicago to visit the
Chicago children’s court,” he said.
Your imaginary friends, Susie Kali with corkscrew curls, “This was the mid-nineties, and a sales
Mad Thoma axe in hand. rep had put our printers—I think they
were 400 Series—all over the court
Sometimes you gathered stray cats, fed them milk system. What was happening was, law-
From Mama’s refrigerator, bits of bread soaked in honey yers had to deliver certain court docu-
ments to the defense attorneys within
You sang to them O Shenandoah a certain amount of time. Otherwise,
Your voice rising to the locust trees. the defendant was let go. And they
were losing two out of three cases be-
This road is covered with rocks and dirt cause of paper jams.” He paused. “Two
Buses with pilgrims hurtle past out of three defendants were gone—
walking out the door—because of
You squint at a boy pedalling his cycle rickshaw paper jams!”
Close, far too close, drops of mud splatter us both. Ruiz looked both fascinated and
skeptical. “So, just so I understand—
You lean sideways, touch my cheek— the repeated jams were delaying the
Let’s live in Kochi by the sea process so much that—?”
“That two out of three times they
Find a house with a white balcony, would be late, and the defendant would
I think the angels will call on me. be released!” Viavattine said. “And the
problem was that they were using some
—Meena Alexander off-brand, really down-in-the-dumps
paper.”
Ruiz turned to me with a twinkle
more challenging than the bigger ones.” humidity. (In general, winter jams are in his eye. “Paper jams!” he said. “Now
The owners of printing presses have more common than summer jams.) you know why the crime rate in Chi-
exotic tastes: they print on magnets, Sheets cut from the same forty-ream cago went down.”
tinfoil, windshield decals. Xerox exec- roll can vary in quality. At the center
utives push the engineers to accom- of the roll, paper fibres tend to arrange aper jams are a species within a
modate new kinds of stock, which
might open new markets. But even
themselves in an orderly matrix; nearer
the edges, they become jumbled.
P larger genus. Traffic jams, too; so
do tape decks, guns, and sewing ma-
plain office paper is full of hidden dan- (“Think of logs going down a river; the chines. On humid days, voting ma-
gers. In the facility some engineers call flow is different at the edges of the chines jam, leading to recounts; over
the Paper Torture Lab—officially, it’s river from down the middle,” Katz the aeons, tectonic plates jam, result-
the Media Technology Center—Bruce said.) When heated, wood fibres con- ing in earthquakes. Ice floating down
Katz, a soft-spoken paper technologist, tract; neatly arranged fibres contract a river makes an ice jam; floating logs
examined some copy paper through a equally in both dimensions, but badly join up into logjams. (Before railroads
microscope. “The edge of a sheet of aligned fibres do so unevenly, creating transformed the transportation of
paper is really a third dimension,” he curl. The team from the Paper Torture lumber, logjams had to be addressed
said. Magnified, the edge resembles a Lab travels around the world, helping by “jam breakers”—experts who spot-
snowy mountain range about four thou- paper mills improve their product, and ted and removed the “key logs” jam-
sandths of an inch thick; the snow is raising the quality of printer paper has ming up the river.) Jamming happens
paper dust, ready to drift into a printer’s played a major role in increasing print whenever something that’s supposed
jammable gears. More expensive paper speeds. Still, even the highest-quality to flow through a space fails to do so,
is more cleanly split, and its straighter paper can be ruined by poor “paper perhaps because of overcrowding, or
edges have less dust-generating surface handling.” A half-used package of bending, or because its constant move-
area. (They are also more likely to paper left to sit will grow damp and ment degrades the space through
cause paper cuts.) curly or dry and “tight.” Reams of which it travels.
“Papers are not created equally,” paper that are thrown around or kept To some extent, jamming is what
John Viavattine, the head of the Tor- in stacks can develop hidden curls that engineers call a “scheduling” problem.
ture Lab, said. Some stocks generate lead to jams. Picture a warehouse in which thou-
excessive friction; others swell in the At a hip Rochester restaurant called sands of packages are travelling on
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 45
intersecting conveyor belts. If the dis-
tance between the packages isn’t care-
fully maintained, they will collide and
pile up, creating jams. Printer design-
ers solve this problem by making the
paper path smart. In a typical office
photocopier, a host of small optical
sensors monitor the location, angle,
and speed of individual sheets of
paper; if one gets too close to its
neighbor, the rollers slow it down.
Similarly, if a sheet is subtly off-angle,
rollers on the slow side accelerate to
straighten it; if the sheet is duplex—
that is, printed on both sides—they
adjust on the fly to insure that both
sides are aligned. Printer engineers
call this “agile registration.”
“The tolerances are very tight,” Ruiz
said. “When you’re moving a box from
here to there, if you’re off an inch it’s
probably fine. But our images cannot
be off by more than eighty-five mi-
crons”—a third of a thousandth of an
inch—“or else they’ll be fuzzy.” Dave
Gurak, a software engineer who de-
signs printer control systems (“It’s his
brain in there!” Ruiz said) thinks that
the biggest jump in print speed hap-
pened in the nineteen-nineties, when
cheaper microprocessors enabled paper-
path designers to control scheduling at
a minute level. Today, he said, “twenty-
five thousand independent events
happen per page.” In some printers,
if a sensor in a paper tray detects a
curl in a sheet the tray tilts to make
up for it.
In the largest sense, jamming is a
problem in a field called tribology—
the study of friction, lubrication, and
wear between interacting surfaces. In
the nineteen-sixties, the British gov-
ernment asked an engineer named
H. Peter Jost to investigate this sub-
ject; the 1966 “Jost Report” found that
poorly lubricated surfaces—sticky ball
bearings, rusty train rails, and the
like—cost Britain 1.4 per cent of its
G.D.P. (The term “tribology,” coined
by Jost, comes from the Greek verb
“to rub.”) The smooth functioning of
the world depends on invisible tribo-
logical improvements. We rely on
axles and gears that don’t grind, artifi-
cial joints that don’t stick, and hard
drives that spin smoothly. Everything
in a printer, likewise, must slide
quickly and smoothly over everything
46 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
else. Paper-path engineers work to ac-
celerate a system that wants to get
stuck.
im Slattery, a recent graduate of
T R.I.T., stood in Erwin Ruiz’s paper
lab, inspecting a stacker—the final com-
ponent of a large printing press. The
owners of an identical machine hoped
to print on thick, laminated plastic la-
bels—the kind that might mark the price
of an item in a big-box store. The prob-
lem was static electricity. “There’s so much
static between the sheets that they levi-
tate in the stacker,” Slattery said. I grabbed
one, and had to make a concerted effort
to push one sheet across another. “Our
fluffers are constantly on, and we’re al-
ternating our vacuum and air knife,” Slat-
tery noted, but it wasn’t working.
“Instead of sliding the sheet, we’re
going to corrugate it,” Ruiz said.
“Corrugating is when we put an in-
tentional wave in the sheet, like in a piece
of corrugated cardboard,” Vicki Warner
explained. “It adds stiffness.” The plan
was to corrugate the sheet lengthwise by
running it over a line of rollers turning
at variable speeds before “flying it” into
the stacker. If a physical fix was neces-
sary, a part might be 3-D-printed and in-
stalled, on-site, by one of the engineers.
(On some occasions, printer-jam fixes
are propagated through software updates.)
For a little while, I watched the team
at work. Then I asked whether it would
ever be possible to build a jamless printer.
“Well, we have printers on subma-
rines, and also in space,” Ruiz said. “For
the right amount of money you can
build lots of redundant systems. So I
think the answer is maybe yes.”
“I think the answer is no,” Warner
said. “It’s paper. There will always be
something unpredictable about paper
that will cause a jam.”
Perfectly made synthetic paper might
eliminate jams; it might also create un-
foreseen problems of its own. They
stood, contemplating the problem, while
the copiers whirred.
Xerox’s engineering campus can be a
spooky place. Over time, the workforce
there has dwindled. Warehouses con-
tain pyramids of unused office chairs,
and groups of copiers lurk in utility cor-
ridors like robots preparing to take over.
(If the machines ever do rise up, jams
may be what save us.) While we walked
through mazes of cubicles, Ruiz thought
about his future. He and his team are
very good at their jobs—printing speeds
keep rising, and jam rates hold steady
or decline—and his promotion seems
inevitable. But he loves paper jams too
much to move on.
“Once, a cell-phone company tried
to hire me,” he recalled. “They said,
‘You’re going to be working on the
frames of the cell phones.’ I said, ‘What
else?’ They said, ‘No, that’s it—the
frames of the cell phones.’ That’s so
boring! I don’t think they sell this job
well enough. It’s, like, ‘Printers—I used
to have one, it used to break.’ But, if
you really want to learn more about
everything, this is what you should do.”
He grinned. “I like solving problems.
Once you go to Toner Tower”—Xe-
rox’s coal-black skyscraper in down-
town Rochester—“life starts passing
you by.” In the hallway, we walked past
another engineer, who gave Ruiz a dis-
creet fist pump. Ruiz turned to me:
“Volleyball buddies!”
In one of the company’s climate-
controlled testing chambers, the team
working on the Asian dog-ear prob-
lem had gathered around a printing-
press component identical to the one
the customer owned. Earlier, condi-
tions within the chamber had been set
to eighty degrees and eighty-per-cent
humidity, to match those at the cus-
tomer’s facility; now the room was
cooler and crowded with engineers.
There was an atmosphere of convivial
fascination. Everyone took a turn bend-
ing down to squint at the area that
Bruce Thompson had represented so
clearly in wireframe, on the computer.
“Can you see it?” Ruiz asked, sinking,
with athletic fluidity, into a deep squat.
He pointed to the small upside-down
conveyor belt. “It’s tiny! Actually, maybe
just one finger would do it.”
“Can you see the stripper fingers
going?” Gurak asked. “Or is it just the
air knife? We used to have the stripper
fingers down there.”
“Yeah,” Ruiz said. “In theory, we
could have stripper fingers pick up the
lead edge, but then they might touch
the belt, and that would be super bad.”
Someone turned the machine on,
and paper began flowing through the
path. The engineers drew closer, look-
ing for the flower arrangement. 
 Bestselling and Award-Winning
WINTER READING

Pulitzer Prize Winner Winner of the Man Booker International Prize A Best Book of the Year
National Book Award Winner and Jewish Book Award The New York Times, The Washington Post,
NPR, and more
A Best Book of the Year
“An American masterpiece.” The New York Times, The Washington Post
—NPR
“Powerful.... As haunting a postapocalyptic
“Astounding.... A magnificently comic universe as Cormac McCarthy [created] in
“Potent.... Devastating.... Essential.” and sucker-punch-tragic excursion The Road.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times into brilliance.” —Gary Shteyngart,
The New York Times Book Review

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“Astonishing.... An absorbing exploration of “A rare book that makes you question
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as it is terrifying.... Completely impossible the natural world.”—The Atlantic —The Wall Street Journal
to put down.” —NPR

VINTAGE Read excerpts at VintageAnchor.com ANCHOR


THE WHITE DARKNESS
A solitary journey across Antarctica.
I. MORTAL DANGER
he man felt like a speck in the
T frozen nothingness. Every di-
rection he turned, he could see
ice stretching to the edge of the Earth:
white ice and blue ice, glacial-ice
tongues and ice wedges. There were no
living creatures in sight. Not a bear or
even a bird. Nothing but him.
It was hard to breathe, and each
time he exhaled the moisture froze on
his face: a chandelier of crystals hung
from his beard; his eyebrows were en-
cased like preserved specimens; his eye-
lashes cracked when he blinked. Get
wet and you die, he often reminded
himself. The temperature was nearly
minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, and it
felt far colder because of the wind,
which sometimes whipped icy parti-
cles into a blinding cloud, making him
so disoriented that he toppled over, his
bones rattling against the ground.
The man, whose name was Henry
Worsley, consulted a G.P.S. device to
determine precisely where he was. Ac-
cording to his coördinates, he was on
the Titan Dome, an ice formation near
the South Pole that rises more than
ten thousand feet above sea level. Sixty-
two days earlier, on November 13, 2015,
he’d set out from the coast of Antarc-
tica, hoping to achieve what his hero,
Ernest Shackleton, had failed to do a
century earlier: to trek on foot from
one side of the continent to the other.
The journey, which would pass through
the South Pole, was more than a thou-
sand miles, and would traverse what is
arguably the most brutal environment
in the world. And, whereas Shackle-
ton had been part of a large expedi-
tion, Worsley, who was fifty-five, was
crossing alone and unsupported: no
48 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
A R E P O R T E R AT L A R G E
B Y D AV I D G R A N N
food caches had been deposited along
the route to help him forestall starva-
tion, and he had to haul all his provi-
sions on a sled, without the assistance
of dogs or a sail. Nobody had attempted
this feat before.
Worsley’s sled—which, at the out-
set, weighed three hundred and twenty-
five pounds, nearly double his own
weight—was attached to a harness
around his waist, and to drag it across
the ice he wore cross-country skis and
pushed forward with poles in each hand.
The trek had begun at nearly sea level,
and he’d been ascending with a merci-
less steadiness, the air thinning and his
nose sometimes bleeding from the pres-
sure; a crimson mist colored the snow
along his path. When the terrain be-
came too steep, he removed his skis and
trudged on foot, his boots fitted with
crampons to grip the ice. His eyes
scanned the surface for crevasses. One
misstep and he’d vanish into a hidden
chasm.
Worsley was a retired British Army
officer who had served in the Special
Air Service, a renowned commando
unit. He was also a sculptor, a fierce
boxer, a photographer who meticu-
lously documented his travels, a hor-
ticulturalist, a collector of rare books
and maps and fossils, and an amateur
historian who had become a leading
authority on Shackleton. On the ice,
though, he resembled a beast, hauling
and sleeping, hauling and sleeping, as
if he were keeping time to some pri-
mal rhythm.
He had grown accustomed to the
obliterating conditions, overcoming
miseries that would’ve broken just about
anyone else. He mentally painted im-
ages onto the desolate landscape for
hours on end, and he summoned mem-
ories of his wife, Joanna, his twenty-
one-year-old son, Max, and his nine-
teen-year-old daughter, Alicia. They
had scrawled inspiring messages on his
skis. One contained the adage “Suc-
cess is not final, failure is not fatal: it
is the courage to continue that counts.”
Another, written by Joanna, said, “Come
back to me safely, my darling.”
As is true of many adventurers, he
seemed to be on an inward quest as
much as an outward one—the journey
was a way to subject himself to an ulti-
mate test of character. He was also rais-
ing money for the Endeavour Fund, a
charity for wounded soldiers. A few
weeks earlier, Prince William, the Duke
of Cambridge, who was the patron of
the expedition, had broadcast a message
for Worsley that said, “You’re doing a
cracking job. Everyone back here is keep-
ing up with what you’re up to, and very
proud of everything you’re achieving.”
Worsley’s journey captivated peo-
ple around the world, including legions
of schoolchildren who were following
his progress. Each day, after trekking
for several hours and burrowing into
his tent, he relayed a short audio broad-
cast about his experiences. (He per-
formed this bit of modern magic by
calling, on his satellite phone, a friend
in England, who recorded the dispatch
and then posted it on Worsley’s Web
site.) His voice, cool and unwavering,
enthralled listeners. One evening, two
weeks into his journey, he said:
I overslept a little this morning, which, ac-
tually, I was grateful for, as the previous forty-
eight hours’ labor has been hugely draining.
But what greeted me opening the tent flap was
not my favorite scene: total whiteout and driv-
ing snow borne on an easterly wind. And so it
remained all day and has showed no sliver of
change this evening. Navigation under such
circumstances is always a challenge. I certainly
SEBASTIAN COPELAND

Before Henry Worsley set off alone, his family painted messages on his skis. “Come back to me safely, my darling,” his wife wrote.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 49

• •
made a dog’s breakfast of the first three hours,
at one stage wondering why the wind had sud-
denly switched from the east to the north. Stu-
pid error! The wind hadn’t changed direction—I
had. I reckon I lost about three miles’ distance
today from snaking around, head permanently
bowed to read the compass, just my shuffling
skis to look at for nine hours. Anyway, I’m back
on track and now happy I can part a straight
line, even through another day of the white
darkness.
By the middle of January, 2016, he
had travelled more than eight hundred
miles, and virtually every part of him
was in agony. His arms and legs
throbbed. His back ached. His feet
were blistered and his toenails were
discolored. His fingers had started to
become numb with frostbite. In his
diary, he wrote, “Am worried about my
fingers—one tip of little finger already
gone and all others very sore.” One of
his front teeth had broken off, and the
wind whistled through the gap. He had
lost some forty pounds, and he became
fixated on his favorite foods, listing
them for his broadcast listeners: “Fish
pie, brown bread, double cream, steaks
and chips, more chips, smoked salmon,
baked potato, eggs, rice pudding, Dairy
Milk chocolate, tomatoes, bananas, ap-
50 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
ples, anchovies, Shredded Wheat,
Weetabix, brown sugar, peanut butter,
honey, toast, pasta, pizza and pizza.
Ahhhhh!”
He was on the verge of collapse. Yet
he was never one to give up, and ad-
hered to the S.A.S.’s unofficial motto,
“Always a little further”—a line from
James Elroy Flecker’s 1913 poem “The
Golden Journey to Samarkand.” The
motto was painted on the front of
Worsley’s sled, and he murmured it to
himself like a mantra: “Always a little
further . . . a little further.”
He had just reached the summit of
the Titan Dome and was beginning to
descend, the force of gravity propel-
ling him toward his destination, which
was only about a hundred miles away.
He was so close to what he liked to
call a “rendezvous with history.” Yet
how much farther could he press on
before the cold consumed him? He
had studied with devotion the decision-
making of Shackleton, whose ability
to escape mortal danger was legend-
ary, and who had famously saved the
life of his entire crew when an expe-
dition went awry. Whenever Worsley
faced a perilous situation—and he was
now in more peril than he’d ever been—
he asked himself one question: What
would Shacks do?
enry Worsley’s father, like Shack-
H leton, had been a celebrated leader
of men. While growing up, Henry had
heard stories about how his father,
Richard Worsley, had fought with dis-
tinction during the Second World War,
helping his regiment win battles in the
deserts of North Africa and on the
streets of Italy. The Independent had
praised his ability to maintain “morale
in bruising situations.” Over the years,
he had risen to the highest ranks of the
British Army, becoming Quartermaster-
General in 1979.
To Henry, his father often seemed
like a Biblical force: commanding, re-
vered, looming but absent. A relative
recalled, “Henry barely saw his dad,
and when he did it was, like, shaking
his hand. It wasn’t like a hug or like
love or anything like that.” Richard
Worsley was often posted overseas, and
when Henry was seven he was sent
to a boarding school for boys, in Kent.
Henry, who was slight, with unnerv-
ingly steady blue eyes, found solace in
sports, excelling at cricket, rugby, ski-
ing, and hockey. Although he was not
physically overpowering, he competed
as if something were gnawing at him,
diving head first after balls and skiing
off marked trails to plunge through
murderous woods.
At the age of thirteen, he moved to
the Stowe School, in Buckinghamshire,
where he was the captain of the cricket,
rugby, and hockey teams. Kids tended
to follow him around, but he preferred
to wander alone across the school
grounds—forests and meadows that
spanned seven hundred and fifty acres.
He hunted for birds’ nests, marking their
locations on a map. Every few days, he
checked on them, jotting down in a note-
book how many eggs had been laid, or
how fast the hatchlings were growing.
He had little interest in his classroom
studies, but he often disappeared into
the library and read poetry and tales of
adventure. One day, he retrieved a copy
of “The Heart of the Antarctic,” Shack-
leton’s account of his gallant but doomed
attempt, in 1907-09, to reach the South
Pole. (The journey was known as the
Nimrod expedition, for the ship he had
commanded.) Worsley read the open-
ing lines: “Men go out into the void
spaces of the world for various reasons.
Some are actuated simply by a love of
adventure, some have the keen thirst for
scientific knowledge, and others again
are drawn away from the trodden paths
by the ‘lure of little voices,’ the myste-
rious fascination of the unknown.” The
book was illustrated with photographs
from the expedition, and Worsley stared
at them in wonder. There was the hut,
crammed with a stove and canned goods
and a phonograph, where Shackleton
and his men had wintered on Ross Is-
land, off the coast of Antarctica. There
were the Manchurian ponies that had
been brought to pull sleds but soon suc-
cumbed. And there, walking across the
majestic deathscape, was Shackleton, a
broad-shouldered, handsome man who
seemed to embody the motto on his
family crest, Fortitudine Vincimus: “By
Endurance We Conquer.”
Worsley read everything he could
about Shackleton and other polar ex-
plorers. He was delighted to discover
that Frank Worsley, a trusted member
of one of Shackleton’s expeditions, was
a distant relative of his, and had writ-
ten his own thrilling memoir, in which
he described braving an “unending se-
ries of blizzards, gales and blinding
snowstorms.”
In 1978, Henry Worsley graduated
from Stowe. Though he burned to be-
come a polar explorer, he enlisted in
the Army. His mother, Sally, recently
recalled, “He definitely didn’t want to
go into the Army, but then we sort of
persuaded him that he might enjoy it
and why not give it a go.” He attended
the Royal Military Academy Sand-
hurst, in Surrey, where he trained to
become an officer. At his graduation
ceremony, in 1980, he was paraded past
some of the Army’s military brass, in-
cluding his father, who, in 1976, had
been knighted. Henry snapped his hand
to his forehead in salute.
Henry became a second lieutenant,
and was assigned to the same regiment
in which his father had once served.
During this period, he began to revisit
the stories of Shackleton, which he no
longer considered merely romantic tales.
“I became mesmerized by the extraor-
dinary levels of hardship these men
were prepared to endure,” Worsley later
wrote in a book, “In Shackleton’s Foot-
steps,” which was published in 2011.
“Shackleton had become more than a
hero to me,” he noted. “I looked upon him
as a mentor. I was going into the busi-
ness of leading men and as a nineteen-
year-old, new to his trade, I believed
that there was no better example to
follow than his.”
II. HELL IS A COLD PLACE
rnest Shackleton was, in many ways,
E a failure. His initial foray into polar
exploration came in 1901, when he joined
an expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott,
who hoped to become the first person
to reach the South Pole—a place that,
in Scott’s words, had “hitherto been un-
trodden by human feet, unseen by human
eyes.” Scott, a British naval officer, was
a dogged and courageous commander,
and committed to scientific inquiry. Yet
he could also be dogmatic, distant, and
bullying, ruling over the members of his
party with the kind of absolute author-
ity to which he had grown accustomed
in the Navy. He once ordered that a cook
be put in irons for insubordination, not-
ing that the punishment instilled in the
man a “condition of whining humility.”
Shackleton, who had served a decade in
the merchant marine, bridled against
such overbearing methods.
In February, 1902, the group set up a
base camp on the frozen rim of Antarc-
tica. The continent has two seasons: sum-
mer, which lasts from November to Feb-
ruary, and winter. For much of the
summer, because of the tilt of the Earth,
sunlight lingers through the night. In
winter, the darkness is enveloping and
the conditions are even more anathema
to human life; the temperature one July
was recorded at minus a hundred and
twenty-eight degrees. And so Scott
waited until November 2nd, when the
summer light began to grace the sky, be-
fore he embarked, with Shackleton and
a third man, Edward Wilson, on the
eight-hundred-mile journey to the Pole—
what another member of the expedition
called “the long trail, the lone trail, the
outward trail, the darkward trail.”
As the three men walked, they were
blinded by the polar glare, and their
flesh was eaten away by hunger, frost-
bite, and scurvy. Scott frequently lashed
out at his men, once shouting, “Come
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 51
here, you bloody fools!” Shackleton re-
sponded, “You’re the worst bloody fool
of the lot.”
On December 31, 1902, more than
four hundred and eighty miles from
the Pole, Scott gave the order to re-
treat. As they struggled back, Shack-
leton was coughing up blood, and by
the time he reached their ship he was,
as he admitted, “broken.”
Four years later, Shackleton, assum-
ing his first command, mounted the
Nimrod expedition. This time, he and
three companions went closer to the
South Pole than anyone had previously
gone: ninety-seven nautical miles away.
(A nautical mile, which is used in polar
navigation, is fifteen per cent longer
than a regular mile.) Yet Shackleton,
fearing for his men’s welfare, retreated
again. After returning to England, he
didn’t discuss his failure with his wife,
Emily, though he said, “A live donkey
is better than a dead lion, isn’t it?”
“Yes, darling, as far as I am con-
cerned,” she replied.
Meanwhile, others made history. In
1909, an American explorer, Robert E.
Peary, claimed to have been the first to
reach the North Pole. (Whether he
made it precisely to the Pole was sub-
sequently disputed.) Two years later,
the Norwegian explorer Roald Amund-
sen won the race to the South Pole.
Using teams of dogs instead of men to
pull sleds, and often skiing, he beat a
party led by Scott by thirty-three days.
After Scott discovered a Norwegian
flag planted at the Pole, he wrote in
his diary, “Great God! This is an awful
place.” On the return journey, he and
his four men, including Edward Wil-
son, ran out of food. “We shall die like
gentlemen,” Scott scribbled in his diary,
before they all perished.
With the poles conquered, Shack-
leton, who was approaching forty,
turned his restless attention to what he
considered the sole remaining prize—a
trans-Antarctica crossing. “From the
sentimental point of view, it is the last
great Polar journey that can be made,”
he wrote in a proposal, emphasizing
that it would be the “most striking of
all journeys.”
Polar expeditions, marked by depri-
vation and claustrophobia, serve as a lab-
oratory for testing human dynamics.
History is studded with accounts of
members of parties bickering, backstab-
bing, slandering, and even, in some cases,
mutinying and murdering. Shackleton,
who had witnessed on the Scott expe-
dition the corrosive tensions among team
members, sought recruits with the qual-
ities that he deemed essential for polar
exploration: “First, optimism; second,
patience; third, physical endurance;
fourth, idealism; fifth and last, courage.”
One person who, Shackleton believed,
perfectly reflected these criteria was
Frank Worsley. A forty-two-year-old
seaman from New Zealand, with a broad
chest and a square jaw, he was among
the twenty-eight members chosen for
the expedition, and Shackleton appointed
him captain of the party’s ship. “I was
committed to my fate,” Worsley wrote.
On October 26, 1914, the ship—a
hundred-and-forty-foot wooden schoo-
ner rechristened the Endurance, after
Shackleton’s family motto—set out
from Argentina, carrying the men and
three lifeboats. Ten days later, the ex-
pedition stopped at South Georgia, a
glacier-covered island about eleven
hundred miles east of Cape Horn,
Chile, which Shackleton called “the
Gateway to the Antarctic.” The island,
deserted except for a few whaling sta-
tions, was the explorers’ last contact
with civilization.
On December 5th, the party sailed
toward the Weddell Sea, the southern-
most arm of the Atlantic Ocean, and
headed for Antarctica. As Alfred Lan-
sing detailed in his monumental his-
tory, “Endurance,” published in 1959,
Shackleton planned to navigate through
these waters, which were choked with
pack ice and bergs, and establish a base
camp on the shore. Then, after wait-
ing out the winter, he would trek with
six men across the continent, complet-
ing the journey at the Ross Sea, a bay
that flows into the Pacific Ocean, south
of New Zealand.
On January 18, 1915, barely a hun-
dred miles from the base camp, the
Endurance became encased in sea ice—
frozen, as one of the men put it, “like
an almond in the middle of a choco-
late bar.” The floe drifted out to sea,
carrying the Endurance with it, and
by late February, with the onset of win-
ter, Shackleton realized that he and his
party would be imprisoned in the ice-
bound ship until the November melt.
52 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
While they floated through the dark-
ness, Shackleton strove to keep his party
united. His methods were considered
unorthodox and even radical, at least
in the eyes of those accustomed to the
mores of the British Navy. He ignored
the stifling hierarchies of class and rank,
and required that each man receive the
same rations and perform the same
chores. And though Shackleton some-
times erupted in anger and left no doubt
who was in charge—everyone called
him the Boss—he participated in me-
nial tasks and mingled easily with his
men. A former naval officer on the ex-
pedition, writing in his diary, expressed
shock that Shackleton “errs on the side
of over familiarity and does not rebuke
members who occasionally address him
with a lack of respect.” He said of the
Boss, “He is the very reverse of Cap-
tain Scott.”
To ease the boredom and the dread,
Shackleton tried to give the wayward
ship a playful atmosphere. The men held
regular poker games, and on Sundays
a phonograph wafted music through
the berths. Once a month, the men
gathered, by lantern, in the dining
room—the Ritz, as they called it—to
watch Frank Hurley, a photographer
who was documenting the expedition,
present slides of places around the world
that he had visited. The most popular
showing was “Peeps in Java,” with im-
ages of palm trees and maidens from
the tropical island. Frank Worsley wrote
that Shackleton “appreciated how
deeply one man, or small group of men,
could affect the psychology of the oth-
ers,” adding that “he almost insisted
upon cheeriness and optimism.”
But Shackleton was powerless over
the ice, and on October 27th the hull’s
wooden planks began to crack under
the pressure. Water burst through the
seams, flooding the berths. While the
men tried to drain the bilge, the stern Ernest Shackleton’s ship the Endurance, from
of the ship thrust toward the sky, as
if in prayer. Shackleton cried, “She’s God I can manage to get the whole
going, boys!” party safe to civilization.”
Everyone quickly lowered the three The waterways were too clogged
lifeboats and the provisions onto the with pack ice to launch the lifeboats,
surrounding ice, and abandoned the and so the men trekked on foot, drag-
Endurance. They were marooned on ging not only the sleds with their sup-
an ice floe more than a thousand miles plies but also the lifeboats, which they
southwest of South Georgia Island, would need when the ice gave way.
with no means of signalling for help. Each vessel—the largest was twenty-
In his diary, Shackleton wrote, “I pray two and a half feet long and six feet
his transcontinental expedition. In 1915, the ship became encased in ice and sank into the Weddell Sea, leaving the crew marooned.
wide—weighed at least a ton, and
Shackleton told the men that they
must discard any nonessential items.
One of Shackleton’s most cherished
belongings was a Bible given to him
by Queen Alexandra, the wife of Ed-
ward VII, which she had inscribed,
“May the Lord help you to do your
duty & guide you through all the dan-
gers.” Shackleton laid the Bible on the
ice, along with several gold sovereigns.
The other men began to winnow
their possessions. Still, the boats were
nearly impossible to haul, and two days
later Shackleton suspended the march.
For months, they remained trapped in
tents on the island of ice, which they
dubbed Patience Camp. Frank Worsley
wondered “why people had always pic-
tured Hell as a place that was hot,” in-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 53
stead of a realm as “cold as the ice which
seemed likely to become our grave.”
To prevent unrest, Shackleton kept
three of the most troublesome charac-
ters in his own tent. Nevertheless, one
day at the end of December, the ship’s
carpenter, who was in another tent, began
to revolt, insisting that, with the Endur-
ance lost, the crew was no longer bound
to obey its commander. Shackleton
summoned the other members of the
party, who professed their loyalty to him,
and, after the carpenter was left to con-
template the prospect of his survival
alone, the mutiny ended.
On April 9, 1916, the ice floe began
to crack, and Shackleton gave the long-
awaited order: “Launch the boats.” After
nearly a week, the party reached Ele-
phant Island, a rocky, barren scrap of
land a hundred and fifty miles from
mainland Antarctica and eight hun-
dred miles southwest of South Geor-
gia Island. Shackleton realized that
many of the men could not survive a
longer boat journey—one had to have
five frostbitten toes amputated—and
announced that he would leave most
of the group on Elephant Island while
he pressed on with five men, includ-
ing Worsley, in one of the lifeboats.
Amid a hurricane and towering
waves glittering with ice, they navigated
across the open ocean. The men were
“Folks, today we’re going to have perfect weather and some great
views of states that are swinging to the Democrats.”
soaked and freezing, and Shackleton
doled out bits of food from their dwin-
dling rations to keep them conscious.
On May 10th, nearly a year and a half
after departing from South Georgia Is-
land, they stumbled upon its shores
again. They looked like the survivors of
an apocalypse. Shackleton then took
Worsley and another crew member and
trekked north for twenty-six miles,
climbing over uncharted glaciers, to get
to a whaling station on the island’s op-
posite coast, where they could summon
help. During the journey, Shackleton
said, he felt a divine presence—a “fourth
man”—guiding them.
When they staggered into the whal-
ing station, thirty-six hours later, Shack-
leton immediately turned his atten-
tion to rescuing the twenty-two men
stranded on Elephant Island. But it
took him until August 20th to obtain,
from the Chilean government, a steam-
ship big enough to break through the
sea ice. As he approached the island
with Worsley, he peered through bin-
oculars to see if anyone was alive. “There
are only two,” he muttered. “No, four.”
After a pause, he said, “I see six—eight.”
Then he exclaimed, “They’re all there!
Every one of them!” Worsley later mar-
velled at Shackleton’s “genius for lead-
ership,” which “enabled us to win
through when the dice of the elements
were loaded most heavily against us.”
Shackleton later wrote that he and his
men, in the course of their journey, had
“pierced the veneer of outside things”
and “reached the naked soul of man.”
But Shackleton had failed in his
mission to become the first person to
cross the continent, and in 1922 he died
of a heart attack, at the age of forty-
seven. His fame soon dimmed, while
the grim march to death of his rival,
Scott, held the public’s imagination.
As the historian Max Jones notes in
his 2003 book, “The Last Great Quest,”
heroes are a reflection of the societies
that venerate them. And at a time when
Britain’s empire was in decline, and the
world was grappling with the slaugh-
ter of the First World War, Scott was
seen as a martyr who had sacrificed
himself for his country. By the end of
the twentieth century, though, the era
of polar exploration was increasingly
viewed through the lens of strategy,
and Scott was criticized for his impe-
rious, mercurial nature and his inflex-
ible methods. In a 1999 essay, the travel
writer Paul Theroux captured this re-
visionist view: “Scott was insecure, dark,
panicky, humorless, an enigma to his
men, unprepared, and a bungler.”
In an age preoccupied with human
mastery—over companies, battlefields,
bureaucracies, and, most of all, oneself—
Shackleton was revered for the way he
had recruited and managed his men,
coolly guiding them to safety. His con-
duct was studied by entrepreneurs, ex-
ecutives, astronauts, scientists, political
strategists, and military commanders.
An entire subgenre of self-help litera-
ture devoted to analyzing his methods
emerged, books with titles like “Lead-
ing at the Edge: Leadership Lessons
from the Extraordinary Saga of Shack-
leton’s Antarctic Expedition.” Another
example, “Shackleton: Leadership Les-
sons from Antarctica,” included such
chapters as “Be My Tent Mate: Keep
 Dissidents Close,” “Camaraderie at 20
Below Zero: Creating an Optimal Work
Environment,” and “Sailing Uncharted
Waters: Adapt and Innovate.”
In reducing a man’s life to a how-to
guide, these books often glossed over
some of Shackleton’s weaknesses—his
almost naïvely ambitious endeavors and
his tactical mistakes. They all preached
the same gospel: “By Endurance We
Conquer.” Still, not even a cynic could
deny Shackleton’s gifts as a commander.
As one polar explorer put it, “For scien-
tific leadership, give me Scott; for swift
and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when
you are in a hopeless situation, when
there seems to be no way out, get on
your knees and pray for Shackleton.”
III. A SPINE OF STEEL
hen Henry Worsley began com-
W manding men in battle, he tried
to emulate Shackleton. Forgoing the
privileges of Army rank, Worsley be-
friended the members of his unit and
shared in their tasks. When his sol-
diers shaved their heads, he cut off his
hair, too—even though the look was,
as a superior pointed out to him, “rather
un-officer-like.” Worsley espoused pa-
tience and optimism, and tried to
demonstrate to his men that, as he put
it, “their welfare, and their lives, mat-
ter most of all.” Nick Carter, who is
now Chief of the General Staff, the
head of the British Army, said that
Worsley had a “very caring and sym-
pathetic attitude to his soldiers—or, as
we like to call them, his riflemen.” He
added, “He was one of those figures
who people followed because he was
quite an aspirational leader. People
would like to be him.”
Though Worsley generally dis-
played a modest temperament, he had
RESEARCH INSTITUTE/UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE/GETTY
moments of flamboyance. When he
wasn’t in uniform, he liked to wear a
PREVIOUS SPREAD: FRANK HURLEY/SCOTT POLAR
bright-colored belt or shirt. He kept
ferrets as pets and he drove a Harley-
Davidson, a cigar often clamped be-
tween his teeth. Like Shackleton, who
considered poetry “vital mental med-
icine,” he could quote verse by such
writers as Robert Browning and Rud-
yard Kipling. When he was stationed
abroad—his initial posting, in 1980,
was in Cyprus—he painted the novel
landscapes, and when he first faced the
threat of violence, in Northern Ireland,
he took up sewing to calm his nerves.
He could often be seen in his quarters
with his needlepoint, at work on a rug
or a cushion, before seizing his weapon
and heading into the streets. When
back in London, he volunteered at a
prison to teach tatting—a form of
lace-making—to inmates.
In 1988, Worsley, by then promoted
to captain, was drawn to the Special
Air Service, whose forces, clad in black,
had a mystique of unsurpassed fitness
and derring-do. Just as there were self-
help books on Shackleton’s methods,
there were manuals on how to master
the S.A.S.’s “endurance techniques” and
“practical leadership” skills, including
how to foster a “team mind” and the
“will to survive.” Worsley signed up for
the S.A.S.’s selection course, which is
so physically punishing that partici-
pants have died trying to pass it. In
2013, two men on a prolonged trek fa-
tally collapsed from heat exhaustion; a
third was rushed to the hospital, and
later died of organ failure. (According
to legend, after two candidates lost
their lives during a test in 1981, the chief
instructor remarked, “Death is Nature’s
way of telling you you’ve failed.”)
The course lasted six months, and
during its first stage Worsley had to
complete a series of timed marches—
known as “death marches”—through
the Brecon Beacons, a mountain range
in South Wales. He trekked for days
in full combat gear, consuming little
more than water and carrying a heavy
rucksack. He could see other applicants
collapsing and quitting; their minds
often gave out before their bodies. The
marches culminated in what was known
as the Endurance—a forty-mile hike,
over a three-thousand-foot-high peak,
that he had to finish in less than twenty-
two hours while carrying a fifty-five-
pound rucksack.
After completing this part of the
course, he was flown to Brunei, where
he was helicoptered into a jungle filled
with orangutans and cloud leopards and
poisonous snakes. He had to survive for
a week while eluding a band of soldiers
tasked with hunting him down. The
administrators of the course had eyes
on the ground to observe him—to see
what kind of clay he was made of. Later,
he was subjected to an interrogation in-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 55
tended to break him. “You are beaten
up,” one applicant told a reporter, not-
ing that any vulnerability was exploited:
“If you’ve got a phobia about spiders,
they’ll use it against you.” Each year,
only about fifteen per cent of applicants
pass the selection course. Worsley was
among them. An S.A.S. officer close to
Worsley said that his “gentle, artistic
side could mask a very significant spine
of steel.” Worsley went on to serve two
tours with the S.A.S., a rare distinction
for a junior officer.
ne evening at a party in London
O in 1989, Worsley met Joanna Stain-
ton. Whereas he often stood back warily
in social settings, Joanna, a tall, grace-
ful woman with auburn hair, moved
with ease. She had worked for a time
in Los Angeles, producing music vid-
eos for MTV. Though she liked to travel,
she hated camping and the wintry cold,
and she especially hated ferrets. Still,
she and Worsley began dating. “Talk
about opposites attracting,” she said.
“Christ, I’m a complete pavement girl.”
Yet she loved the way that Worsley
seemed to come from a bygone age—“a
man out of his time,” as a relative once
described him—believing unabashedly
in ideals of courage and sacrifice. She
loved his eccentric hobbies, and how
he recited poetry to her and held her
with arms that seemed unbreakable.
He loved her brashness and her abil-
ity to talk to anyone, whether at an art
benefit or at a homeless shelter, where
she often volunteered. And he loved
the way she punctured his stoicism and
exposed his hidden self, always urging
him to “go out and achieve your dreams.”
For all her free-spiritedness, she was
the steadiest presence in his life. He
called her his “rock.”
They married in 1993. Max was born
the following year, and Alicia in 1996.
Nick Carter said, “Worsley lusted after
adventure but also relished being at home
with his family—teaching his son to
shoot or to ferret, or simply cutting wood
for the winter and cutting the grass.”
Because of his military postings, though,
Worsley was often separated from his
family, as his father had been. In 2001,
he was serving in Bosnia when a riot
broke out in the streets. A civilian was
beaten to death, and crowds began to
chase Worsley. As he recounted in his
book, he sought refuge in a café, but the
crowds closed in, throwing stones and
smashing the windows. “How would
Shacks get out of this, then?” he asked
himself. He knew that if he remained
in the café the situation would only
worsen: “I had to be decisive and make
a move, as Shackleton had done.” He
pinpointed a place in the distance where
he could find cover, and he made a break
for it, dashing through the onslaught
and summoning his regiment. He then
defused the uprising by deploying his
soldiers around the area and persuading
the ringleaders to back down—using
what Carter later described as “a very
subtle use of coercion and negotiation.”
In 2002, Worsley was awarded the
Queen’s Commendation for Valuable
Service, in “recognition of gallant and
distinguished services.”
Many officers and soldiers admired
him the way he admired Shackleton.
Carter described him to a reporter as
“one of the most understated but brav-
est people I have known,” and a soldier
who had served under Worsley hailed
him as a “fiercely capable leader of men.”
Yet his military career soon stalled. Jo-
anna recalled, “He loved the soldiering
part of soldiering, but once you com-
mand your regiment, at about the age
of forty, all the postings after that are
slightly more political desk-type jobs,
which Henry hated.” A former officer
said that Worsley refused to jockey for
position, noting, “That wasn’t his style.”
Worsley, who had been promoted to
lieutenant colonel in 2000, watched as
many of his closest friends were be-
coming brigadiers and generals.
His fascination with Shackleton,
meanwhile, seemed to deepen. He spent
hours at antique shops and auction
houses, in search of what he called
Shackletonia: autographed books and
photographs and diaries and correspon-
dence and other memorabilia. “Henry
lost a fortune on it all,” Joanna recalled.
At one auction, he bid feverishly on a
first edition of Shackleton’s book about
the Endurance expedition, “South,” in
which Shackleton had inscribed a mes-
sage to his parents: “With Love from
Ernest, Xmas 1919.” Every time Wors-
ley made an offer, a person bidding
anonymously over the telephone coun-
tered him, and finally made off with
the prize, at a price of seven thousand
56 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
dollars. Weeks later, on his tenth wed-
ding anniversary, Joanna gave him a
present: the inscribed book. Each had
been unaware that the other was the
rival bidder. He considered the gift to
be his “most treasured possession of all.”
In November of 2003, he made a pil-
grimage to a place that he had dreamed
of visiting since he was a boy: South
Georgia Island. Not only had Shack-
leton and Frank Worsley found refuge
there after the sinking of the Endur-
ance; the two men also had returned to
the island in 1922, preparing for a new
Antarctic expedition. The day after their
arrival, Shackleton had suffered his heart
attack and died. (“His stillness was star-
tling to me, for stillness was the one
thing that I found it impossible to as-
sociate with him,” Frank Worsley
wrote.) After Frank Worsley and other
members of the expedition buried
Shackleton, at a cemetery on the island,
they found stones and built a cairn to
mark the grave. And as they raised this
makeshift memorial, Frank Worsley re-
called, “a snowstorm beat down upon
us—a ghost, it seemed to me, of the
hurricane in which he and I had ap-
proached South Georgia after our boat
journey from Elephant Island.”
More than eighty years later, Henry
Worsley, carrying a rucksack and a
sleeping bag, pried open the cemetery
gate and went inside. It was twilight,
and he could just make out the cairn
and a granite tombstone, which was
engraved with a paraphrase of a line
by Robert Browning: “I hold that a
man should strive to the uttermost for
his life’s set prize.” Worsley put his
sleeping bag on the ground and climbed
inside it, facing the block of granite.
“Reaching out to touch it I considered
for a moment just how significant a
moment in my life this was,” he later
wrote, adding, “I was about to spend
the night . . . beside the grave of my
hero since childhood.”
Afterward, he found a sonnet, by an
explorer from New Zealand named
Hugh de Lautour, which echoed his
feelings so intensely that he annotated
it and often recited it aloud:
Rest, Sir Ernest, rest beneath your star;
All striving done and “life’s set prize”
attained:
Not geographic goals, but greater far
The pinnacles of leadership you gained.
Rest, Sir Ernest, rest. God knows there’s
none
Deserves it more: the long Antarctic night
Now friend, not foe, with South’s white
warfare won
And crew from death’s dark door led back
to light.
How was it your endurance overcame
The daily struggle just to keep alive
Long past the point where death would
bring no shame?
Half starved and frozen, how did you
survive,
And how was no man lost while in your
care?
God knows. God knows it well. For He
was there.
After his trip to South Georgia,
Worsley longed even more to make his
own polar journey, to obtain his own
“life’s set prize,” but he doubted that
he ever would. As he put it, “I was afraid
of the unknown—the planning, the
training, the fund-raising and, not least,
the risk of failure.”
IV. PLAN OF ATTACK
ne day in March, 2004, Worsley
O was contacted by Alexandra
Shackleton, the explorer’s granddaugh-
ter. He’d met her several years earlier,
at Christie’s in London, when he had
successfully bid on an autographed
photograph of her grandfather. After-
ward, Worsley periodically ran into her
at lectures on polar exploration, and he
had shared with her his desire to make
an Antarctic expedition.
Alexandra told Worsley that she
wanted him to meet another Shackle-
ton descendant—a great-nephew—
named Will Gow. “Like you, he ad-
mires my grandfather very much and
for a few years now has had an idea for
an expedition,” she said.
At a pub in South London, Wors-
ley met with Gow, a thirty-three-year-
old banker with a pudgy face and squinty
blue eyes that widened in moments of
excitement. Gow eagerly explained that
the centennial of the Nimrod expedi-
tion was a few years away, and that when
the anniversary arrived he wanted to
reënact the journey. Worsley was steeped
in the details of the failed journey. On
October 29, 1908, Shackleton had de-
parted for the South Pole with three
other men, including a meteorologist
named Jameson Boyd Adams, who was
his second-in-command. After coming
 The planned route for the Matrix Shackleton Centenary Expedition, in 2008-09.
within ninety-seven nautical miles of
the Pole, on January 9, 1909, Shackle-
ton planted a British flag in the ice, tak-
ing, in his words, “possession of this pla-
teau in the name of His Majesty King
Edward the Seventh.” He then faced a
terrible quandary: he knew that he could
reach the Pole in several days, captur-
ing the grail, but if he kept going he
would deplete the food the party needed
for the return journey and jeopardize
MAP BY LA TIGRE
the lives of his men, who were already
fading. Ultimately, Shackleton made
what Worsley considered “the most
selfless and astonishing decision ever in
the history of polar exploration”—he
turned back.
Gow envisaged that the new expe-
dition would be composed of descen-
dants of men who had explored along-
side Shackleton. They would try to
reach Shackleton’s farthest point on
January 9, 2009—exactly a hundred
years after he did—and then press on
to the South Pole, completing, in Gow’s
words, “unfinished family business.”
Worsley listened in amazement.
Here was the chance of a lifetime.
He was confident that the Army would
grant him a leave for the expedition.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 57
And so, like two conspirators, Wors-
ley and Gow began plotting their
journey. They needed to find an-
other recruit and to raise four hundred
thousand dollars to cover the costs of
equipment and travel. And they needed
to train: though they had polar explo-
ration in their genes, they had no ac-
tual experience.
They began a ruthless exercise reg-
imen. Each tied tractor tires to a har-
ness around his waist, and then dragged
them back and forth across an open
field. In 2005, they signed up for the
Montane Yukon Arctic Ultra, a race
 FRANK HURLEY/ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

During the Endurance mission, twenty-two men were stranded on Elephant Island, as Shackleton led a rescue team.
58 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
through the icy wilderness of northwest
Canada, which is billed as the tough-
est endurance competition in the world.
Temperatures can fall to minus fifty de-
grees, and participants have had toes
and fingers amputated because of frost-
bite. Newsweek once observed that the
event—which scientists have used to
study the impact of extreme conditions
on the human body—sounded like the
“premise for a Jack London novel.”
There were different categories for
the race, and Worsley and Gow en-
tered one that required them to trek
on foot for three hundred miles—a
third of the distance of their planned
South Pole journey—while hauling all
their supplies on sleds. They had eight
days to complete the race. “Beyond
coping with the physical demands, I
wanted to see if I had the mental
strength,” Worsley wrote, adding, “Any
sign of quitting on this short event
would spell disaster for the future chal-
lenge and, if I did give up . . . I would
have to seriously consider my place in
the expedition team.”
Armed with flares and swaddled in
layers of clothing, they dragged their
sleds through dense pine forests and
over mountains and across frozen
rivers, where Gow’s foot once broke
through the ice and into the water.
They had been told that if they got wet
they had only about five minutes to
prevent hypothermia, and Gow quickly
lit a fire, dried his foot, and changed
his clothing. Onward the men went.
Above them, the northern lights cast
a haunting green glow.
After several days of trekking, Wors-
ley and Gow suffered from sleepless-
ness and sensory deprivation, and they
grew dizzy from hunger. Soon, they
began to hallucinate. To keep going,
Worsley resorted to “drastic measures,”
imagining that he was pulling his sick
daughter on the sled and had to get
her to the doctor if she were to live.
He and Gow slumped across the finish
line, beating the time limit by several
hours. “That was really the first test,”
Gow recalled.
Ito nexpedition,
2006, two years before the planned
Worsley was dispatched
Helmand Province, in Afghanistan,
to provide “eyes and ears,” as he put it,
before British forces were deployed to
the region. He took with him his dog-
eared copy of “The Heart of the Ant-
arctic,” Shackleton’s account of the
Nimrod expedition; paints and brushes
and a sewing kit; and a bag of cricket
bats and balls, to play with the locals.
For months, he travelled across Hel-
mand, conferring with tribal elders and
mullahs. Worsley later wrote in an ar-
ticle, “Surviving in Afghanistan was as
much about an empathy with the peo-
ple and their culture as it was about
troop numbers and firepower.”
After gathering intelligence, he
warned his superiors that the arrival of
British forces risked “stirring up a hor-
nets’ nest” by agitating the population
and provoking violent reprisals from the
Taliban. His words were prophetic.
“Henry, rightly, foresaw the trouble that
was to come,” Tom Tugendhat, a mem-
ber of the British Parliament, later told
a reporter. But, at the time, Worsley’s
alarms rankled many military and polit-
ical leaders who were downplaying the
dangers to the public, and, if Worsley
had any remaining hope of military ad-
vancement, his candor ended it. Yet he
was no longer disappointed. In a com-
monplace book, he jotted down the ad-
vice Shackleton had given after the sink-
ing of the Endurance: “A man must shape
himself to a new mark directly the old
one goes to ground.” And it occurred to
Worsley that had he been promoted he
would not have had the time to prepare
for the upcoming expedition and become
the explorer that he had always wanted
to be. “He suddenly realized that he could
fulfill some dreams,” Joanna recalled.
By the time Worsley returned from
Afghanistan, Gow had found a third
recruit: Henry Adams, a thirty-two-
year-old shipping lawyer. Adams seemed
a bit pale and spindly for an explorer,
but he had a genial personality, and he
was deeply committed. What’s more,
he was the great-grandson of Jameson
Boyd Adams, the second-in-command
on the Nimrod expedition.
That April, Worsley and his two
companions headed to Baffin Island, a
Canadian territory nine hundred miles
west of Greenland. For several weeks,
they trained with Matty McNair, a fifty-
four-year-old American explorer, who,
in 1997, had led the first all-female ex-
pedition to the North Pole. This was
the men’s longest exposure yet to polar
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 59
conditions, and they made embarrass-
ing blunders. They forgot to turn off a
portable stove, and nearly engulfed
their tent in flames. They skied too
slowly and never seemed to navigate
along a straight line. One day, after
Worsley declined to wear tinted gog-
gles, he suffered from snow blindness.
But he and the others learned from
their mistakes, and emerged with a bet-
ter understanding, as Adams put it, of
how “to live on the ice.”
The trip, however, had brought to
a head a simmering problem: the team’s
lack of clear leadership. Gow was os-
tensibly in charge, but the expedition
was plagued by disorganization, caus-
ing tension among the men; moreover,
only a fraction of the necessary funds
had been raised. In their tent on Baffin
Island, Worsley broached the matter
with Gow, threatening to drop out of
the expedition if things didn’t change.
“Henry didn’t dodge bullets,” Adams
recalled. After some consideration,
Gow asked Worsley to take charge.
“With his military background, it made
very good sense,” Gow recalled. “Adams
and myself were young whippersnap-
pers. We were quite happy to have
some wise old owl leading us away.”
In the two years before their depar-
ture, Worsley was consumed with the
mission. Late at night, after complet-
ing his Army duties, he wrote letters
seeking meetings with potential do-
nors. “If he got his foot in the door, he
would usually come out with money,”
his son, Max, recalled. “His passion and
his fire—you could see it within him.
It gripped people.”
Like a general developing a plan of
attack, Worsley spent hours poring over
maps, laying out a precise route for the
expedition. The more he studied Ant-
arctica, the more forbidding it seemed.
The continent is nearly five and a half
million square miles—larger than Eu-
rope—and it doubles in size in winter,
when its coastal waters freeze over. Ap-
proximately ninety-eight per cent of
Antarctica is covered in an ice sheet,
which rises and drops and bends over
the varied topography. The sheet—
which, in places, is fifteen thousand
feet thick—contains about seventy per
cent of the freshwater, and ninety per
cent of the ice, on Earth.
Yet Antarctica is classified as a desert,
because there is so little precipitation.
It is the driest and highest continent,
with an average elevation of seventy-
five hundred feet. It is also the windi-
est, with gusts reaching up to two hun-
dred miles per hour, and the coldest,
with temperatures in the interior fall-
ing below minus seventy-five degrees.
(Scientists have used the Antarctic to
test spacesuits for Mars, where the av-
erage surface temperature is minus sixty-
seven.)
Worsley, Gow, and Adams planned
to begin their journey south of New
Zealand, on Ross Island. The island is
bound by the Ross Ice Shelf, which ex-
tends over the Ross Sea and is the larg-
est body of floating ice in the world—
more than a hundred and eighty
thousand square miles and, on average,
more than a thousand feet thick. Be-
cause the Ross Ice Shelf is easier to
reach by sea during the summer than
other parts of the continent, and be-
cause it is relatively smooth and stretches
nearly six hundred miles toward the
heart of Antarctica, it was the starting
point for expeditions to the South Pole
during the golden age of Antarctic ex-
ploration. Shackleton and Scott and
Amundsen all began their expeditions
on the shelf.
Like these explorers, Worsley and
his team would head south across the
ice shelf, a journey of nearly four hun-
dred nautical miles, until they reached
the Transantarctic Mountains, which
divide the continent and extend to the
Weddell Sea. To get to the Polar Pla-
teau—an elevated, almost featureless
part of the continental ice shelf, where
the South Pole is situated—the party
would have to cross these mountains,
which rise nearly fifteen thousand feet.
On the Nimrod expedition, Shackle-
ton discovered one of the few pass-
able routes: a glacier-covered valley,
twenty-five miles wide and a hundred
and twenty-five miles long, that runs
between the mountains like a frozen
causeway. “There burst upon our vi-
sion an open road to the South,” Shack-
leton wrote.
Still, the glacier—which Shackleton
named Beardmore, after William Beard-
more, a Scottish industrialist and a pa-
tron of his expedition—is treacherous.
Its elevation is eight thousand feet, and
its surface is riddled with crevasses. The
60 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
last of Shackleton’s Manchurian ponies
had disappeared into one. When Scott
crossed the glacier during his later ex-
pedition, one of his men suffered a fatal
head injury after falling into a crevasse.
Only a dozen people—the same num-
ber that have walked on the moon—
had trekked the length of the glacier.
Worsley referred to it as his “nemesis.”
If he and his companions survived
the crossing, they would emerge on the
Polar Plateau, where they would ascend
the ten-thousand-foot-high Titan Dome
to reach Shackleton’s farthest point: 88°
23' S, 162° E. Finally, Worsley’s party
would trek the remaining ninety-seven
nautical miles to the Pole, whose eleva-
tion is ninety-three hundred feet.
“Every spare hour was devoted to
the project and ‘bloody Shackleton’ be-
came a phrase frequently used by the
children,” Worsley wrote. By October
of 2008, he and his colleagues were
ready to embark on what had been offi-
cially named the Matrix Shackleton
Centenary Expedition. Before leaving,
Worsley and his family gathered for an
early Christmas celebration. Even
though Henry had been telling Joanna
for years about the glories of Antarc-
tica, it still seemed to her like the most
dreadful place in the world. Yet she be-
lieved that, to borrow Thomas Pyn-
chon’s words, “Everyone has an Ant-
arctic”—someplace people seek to find
answers about themselves. In the case
of her husband, it was the Antarctic it-
self. And so she gave her blessing to
the adventure, even though it threat-
ened to take from her the man she loved.
Worsley’s decision was harder for his
children to understand. Alicia, who was
twelve, saw his sled primarily as an ob-
ject to play on. When the family ex-
changed Christmas gifts, Max, who was
fourteen, seemed agitated. This was
different from when his father was de-
ployed by the military—he had not had
a choice then about leaving them be-
hind. This was a response to some mys-
terious inner calling. Max had written
a poem about Antarctica, a place that
now loomed in his own imagination,
and he composed a short essay about his
father’s upcoming journey. “I have heard
many stories about Shackleton since I
was very young and as I grew older, I
started to understand and admire Shack-
leton more,” he wrote. “I am very happy
for my Dad that he is doing what he
has always wanted to do, but I am also
worried for him. Even in the most bar-
ren place in the world there is a risk of
falling down a glacier or crevasse.”
Joanna drove her husband to the
airport, where she began to cry. He
told her not to worry, and quoted
Shackleton: “Better a live donkey than
a dead lion.”
V. GET WET AND YOU DIE
n October 30, 2008, Worsley, Gow,
O and Adams arrived in Punta Are-
nas, on the southern tip of Chile. They
went to a warehouse owned by a com-
pany named Antarctic Logistics & Ex-
peditions. During the summer, between
thirty thousand and forty-five thou-
sand tourists visit the continent, nearly
all of them travelling on small cruise
ships. Worsley’s party had hired A.L.E.
to provide logistical support, which in-
cluded transporting them by airplane
to their starting point on Ross Island.
At the warehouse, Worsley and his
companions collected freeze-dried
meals for the expedition. They faced
the same predicament that had bedev-
illed polar explorers for generations:
they could haul only so many supplies
on their sleds, a situation that left them
vulnerable to starvation. Shackleton,
during the Nimrod expedition, wrote
ruefully, “How one wishes for time and
unlimited provisions. Then indeed we
could penetrate the secrets of this great
lonely continent.”
Worsley estimated that the journey
would take nine weeks. Each of the
men would be limited to about three
hundred and ten pounds of provisions,
including a sled, and so they whittled
down their kit to the essentials. Wors-
ley packed his portion of the food, which
was sealed in ten bags—one for each
week of the journey, plus an extra in
case of emergency. His clothing in-
cluded two pairs of pants, a fleece shirt,
a down jacket with a hood, gloves, a
neck gaiter, a face mask, two pairs of
long johns, and three pairs of socks. He
brought cross-country skis and poles;
for climbing, he carried crampons and
ropes. As the only member of the team
with first-aid training, he transported
the medical bag, which contained an-
tibiotics, syringes, splints, and morphine.
 He made room for his diary and a copy
of “The Heart of the Antarctic.” And
he carefully stored what he considered
the most vital piece of equipment: a
satellite phone with solar-powered bat-
teries, which would allow the men not
only to record short audio dispatches
but also to check in every day with an
A.L.E. operator and report their coör-
dinates and medical condition. If the
team failed to communicate for two
consecutive days, A.L.E. would dis-
patch a search-and-rescue plane—what
Worsley called “the most expensive taxi
ride in the world.”
The men permitted themselves the
luxury of iPods, as well as a deck of
From left to right: Ernest Shackleton, Jameson Adams, and Frank Worsley, polar explorers of the early twentieth century.
cards and a few mementos. Worsley
carried an envelope filled with notes
from family and friends, which Joanna
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE/GETTY; CENTER: ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
had given him to open when he needed
encouragement. In his front pocket, he
had tucked away one more precious
LEFT, RIGHT: FRANK HURLEY/SCOTT POLAR RESEARCH INSTITUTE/
object: the brass compass that Shack-
leton used on his expedition. Alexan-
dra Shackleton had asked Worsley to
bring it with him, hoping that, this
time, it would reach the South Pole.
For Worsley, getting closer to Shack-
leton was a way of getting closer to him-
self. During an interview with an explo-
ration Web site, he outlined the qualities
that he most admired in Shackleton, in-
cluding his “optimism and patience,” his
“courage,” and his ability, when his men’s
lives were at stake, to instill in them the
“confidence that he would get them out
of the desperate situation.”
Commanding the expedition was
far trickier than commanding sol-
diers in the military. In Antarctica,
his authority was not official but
merely granted, and he had no more
experience as a polar explorer than
his peers did. Yet he felt the immea-
surable weight of being responsible
for their lives. He now formed a pact
with Gow and Adams: “There would
be no egos, no pride and if someone
was feeling unwell or traveling
slowly, then he should have no diffi-
culty in accepting the offer from one
of the others to carry some of his
weight.”
On November 10th, the A.L.E. plane
was ready for departure. After decades
of dreaming, Worsley’s Antarctic jour-
ney was beginning.
he plane—an enormous Soviet-
T designed freighter, which was so
loud that Worsley and the others could
barely hear their own voices—took
them to an A.L.E. camp on the side
of Antarctica that is south of Cape
Horn, a flight of four and a half hours.
On arrival, they skidded onto a run-
way of ice. After waiting for the weather
to clear, they boarded a smaller,
twin-propeller aircraft with landing
skis. As they flew across the continent,
they peered out the window at deep
gashes in the ice sheet below. “Every-
where we looked, there were crevasse
fields the size of a small parish,” Wors-
ley wrote. “What we were about to un-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 61
dertake was brought sharply into focus
in those few moments. None of us said
a word.” Finally, after flying eleven
hours and more than twelve hundred
miles to the southwest, the plane
touched down on the sea ice by Ross
Island. “My God, we’ve made it,” Wors-
ley exclaimed.
For years, he had been constructing
Antarctica in his mind, and after climb-
ing down from the plane he joyously
stamped his boots on three-foot-thick
ice. The temperature was about minus
fourteen degrees, and his nostrils
burned. It was late in the afternoon,
but because it was summer the sun re-
mained bright, and he could see two
of the volcanoes on Ross Island that
had been beacons for polar explorers:
Mt. Terror, which is more than ten
thousand feet high, and dormant, and
Mt. Erebus, an active volcano, which
is more than twelve thousand feet high.
Black smoke drifted from its icy cone.
Not far from the men, penguins slid
on their bellies across the ice—the world
not yet deadened. And on the southern
tip of the island, about twenty-two miles
away, was McMurdo Station, which was
opened by the U.S. government in 1955
and has served since then as a hub for
scientific research. In the summer,
around a thousand people live at the
base, the largest population in Antarc-
tica. With its power station and its dor-
mitories carved into the ice, the base
has the look of a grimy truck stop.
The men headed onto the island. As
they climbed a ridge overlooking a
bowl-shaped valley, Worsley came to
an abrupt halt. Down below, amid vol-
canic rock and ice, was a solitary wooden
hut with shuttered windows and an
iron chimney. Worsley didn’t need to
say what it was. They all knew. It was
the hut that Shackleton and his party
had built in February, 1908, and stayed
in that winter, before setting out for
the South Pole. Shackleton had called
the shelter “the Mecca of all our hopes
and dreams.” In 2004, a team of con-
servationists had begun restoring the
hut, and to Worsley it looked just as it
had in the grainy photograph in “The
Heart of the Antarctic.”
Gow raced over and opened the
door, and Worsley and Adams followed
him inside. In the dimness, Worsley
could discern the scattered debris of
the Nimrod expedition, as if the party
had momentarily stepped away. There
were canned goods, leather boots with
frayed laces, and blue bottles of med-
icine marked “diarrhea.” Two sleds
were suspended in the rafters, and hang-
ing on a wall was a framed photograph
of Queen Alexandra. Shackleton, in
his diary, had described a shaft of light
passing over the image before they set
out on their trek, which he had deemed
“an omen of good luck.”
Gow gasped at the ghostly scene.
Adams found the bunk where his
great-grandfather had slept, while
Worsley examined the dark recesses of
the room as if he were rummaging
through a tomb. “I could hardly get
closer to my mentor,” he later wrote.
“The only thing left to do was to walk
in his footsteps to the Pole.”
That night, the men camped inside
the hut, lying on the frozen ground in
their sleeping bags. The silence among
them betrayed their nerves. The next
morning, November 14th, Worsley was
the first to get up. “It had been impos-
sible to sleep,” he noted. “The enormity
of the task seemed overwhelming.” He
put on his boots, slipped outside the
tent, and called the A.L.E. operator.
“The Matrix Shackleton Expedition
calling in with our first report,” he said.
“We are setting off in a couple hours.
All is well. No medical problems.”
“O.K.,” the operator replied. “Have
a great journey.”
Worsley’s companions had awak-
62 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
RHODODENDRON
People pray to a vengeful
god because they seek revenge.
They chose a god who hates
what they hate
but also made the sea
and the sequoia.
I’m walking my infant
son through a stand of rhododendron
trees. It feels like we are walking
through a cloud of jellyfish
made of pink and purple paper
petals falling
to the ground.
These jellyfish are the fish of spring.
He is making sounds
like a mouse, small but all out
of his body. Inside,
his organs are so new
that they are both organs
ened, and the three men began mum- team; of getting injured; of letting down
mifying themselves in layers of cloth- all those people who had supported us;
ing and loading their provisions onto of plainly not being physically up for
their sleds. Worsley made sure to dis- it—put simply, I feared failure.”
tribute the weight evenly on his sled, The surface was generally flat and
and he covered his cargo with a tarp. smooth, and as he and the other men
The sled—which was emblazoned with headed south, toward the Ross Ice Shelf,
the words “Always a little further” and they began to gather some momen-
“By Endurance We Conquer”—resem- tum. Worsley made sure that they fol-
bled a torpedo. After attaching the sled lowed the advice of Matty McNair,
to a harness around his waist, Wors- who had instructed them on Baffin Is-
ley clipped his boots into his skis, see- land: “Stay together, never separate.”
ing the messages that his family had She had drummed into them one other
painted on them: “Don’t give up,” “Push rule: “If you get wet, you die.”
it, fat ass.” After several miles, they came upon
At 10 a.m.—the hour that Shackle- another desolate wooden hut. Robert
ton had set out—Worsley and his men Falcon Scott and his men had built it
leaned into their harnesses and began in 1911, on their fateful South Pole ex-
their trek. This was the moment that pedition. Ice crept over the timbered
he’d been waiting for nearly all his life, walls and glazed the windowpanes like
Worsley thought. Yet, as he strained jungle vines. Inside the hut, Worsley
with his arms and his legs to propel and his companions found the chart
himself forward and drag the heavy sled, table where Scott had studied his maps,
he was gnawed by doubts: “I was ner- and the bunk belonging to Captain
vous about lots of things; of failing the Lawrence Oates, who had left the par-

and the beginning of organs.
When he cries for his mother
to nurse him
he sounds like a rooster.
He is not
just hungry
but hunger itself.
He is the thing
he cries for. Sunlight is turning
the rhododendrons
into balls of pink light if light
were liquid
and something else,
splashing,
that’s what the pink is doing,
splashing all over us,
lucky without god,
animals under the bright pink
idea of earth.
—Matthew Dickman
ty’s tent on the return journey from the They began the cumbersome pro-
Pole, saying, “I am just going outside cess of making camp: pitching their
and may be some time.” He was never tent, which was roughly fourteen feet
seen again. long and seven feet wide; gathering
As Worsley inspected the objects, provisions from the sled; squeezing
he felt uneasy: “I couldn’t shake the inside the shelter and removing their
sense of pathetic sadness from my ski boots and sweaty socks, which
mind.” The men quickly resumed trac- they hung on a clothesline above their
ing the path of their forebears, which heads, along with any other damp
had long since been obliterated by the items; checking their bodies for frost-
windswept ice. The fresh tracks made bite and putting on dry socks and tent
by Worsley and his companions grad- “booties”; and firing up a gas cooker,
ually vanished as well; tiny granules of melting snow in a kettle, and pour-
ice swirled in the wind like ash. The ing hot water into packets of freeze-
men used a compass to maintain a dried meals.
southward trajectory. Their breath As the men ate, they talked about
smoked and their bodies sweated in the the relatively warm weather—the tem-
arid cold. After slogging for seven hours, perature had reached fourteen degrees.
Worsley gave the order to stop for the Adams delivered the evening broad-
day. They had covered nearly eight nau- cast, reporting that they had been
tical miles. In order to reach the ninety- blessed with “beautiful sunshine, ex-
seven-mile mark on January 9th, the actly as Shackleton had a hundred years
men would need to average between ago on his first day.” Privately, though,
ten and twelve nautical miles per day. Adams confessed to Worsley and Gow
But it was a promising start. that he felt like an amateur hauling his
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 63
sled, and had a deep sense of unease.
“He was right and honest,” Worsley
wrote. “None of us knew what the next
two months were going to be like.”
Following supper, the men dipped
their toothbrushes in the snow and
cleaned their teeth, which Worsley be-
lieved was essential to maintaining a
sense of humanity. Then, jostling for
space, they spread out their sleeping
bags. Worsley, however, didn’t climb
into his. In spite of his aching muscles
and the dropping temperature—the
sun was now hugging the horizon—
he went for an evening walk. He de-
cided to make this a daily ritual, like a
mystic who pursues enlightenment
through self-abnegation. The harsh re-
ality of Antarctica had seemed only to
deepen his entrancement with it. Out-
side, he often picked up objects—a
fragment of a penguin skull, a small
rock—and put them in a pocket, de-
spite the extra weight. “We used to take
the Mickey out of him for taking all
this rubbish,” Gow recalled.
After Worsley’s stroll, which lasted
about twenty minutes, he returned to
the tent and settled into his sleeping
bag. They all kept plastic bottles nearby,
in case they had to respond to what
Adams referred to as a “call of nature.”
Before falling asleep, Worsley wrote
briefly in his diary, ending with a quote
from Shackleton: “I pray that we may
be successful, for my heart had been so
much in this.”
Within eight days, they had cov-
ered more than seventy-five nautical
miles. The scale of the Ross Ice Shelf
was dawning on Worsley: it was big-
ger than France. Shackleton described
it as a “dead, smooth, white plain, weird
beyond description.” Worsley and his
men moved in single file and rarely
spoke, hearing only the thumping of
their sleds or the soundtracks on their
iPods. Adams loved to listen to Rach-
maninoff ’s Vespers; Gow sometimes
trudged along to an audiobook of Lan-
sing’s “Endurance.” Worsley’s playlist
included Bruce Springsteen and the
Seeger Sessions Band playing “Eyes on
the Prize” (“I got my hand on the gos-
pel plow / Won’t take nothing for my
journey now”) and “We Shall Over-
come” (“We are not afraid, we are not
afraid”).
With nothing to stare at but ice,
“We were back on an unblemished canvas,” Worsley said of the landscape, which has remained relatively untouched by man.
Worsley was becoming a connoisseur
of its varieties. It could be squeaky or
powdery or crusty. The wind often
sculpted it into waves, known as sas-
trugi, which rose as high as four feet
and sometimes extended, in parallel
rows, to the horizon. (Adams noted, in
a broadcast, that each of the men had
his own strategy for traversing the fro-
zen waves: “Henry tends to herringbone
over it, Will declares war on the sas-
trugi, and I tend to try and run at it.”)
Then, there was the deep, sludgy ice,
the most wretched of all, which made
them feel like they were plowing
through wet sand. Because it was more
taxing to be up front, breaking track,
the men took hourly turns in the lead.
They were burning between six
thousand and eight thousand calories
a day, and periodically paused to con-
sume energy drinks and snack on such
fatty foods as salami, nuts, and choco-
late; even so, they began to lose weight.
Worsley, knowing that it was impera-
64 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
tive to maintain positive thoughts, re-
called family holidays and planting
vegetables in the garden. He grew ac-
customed to the paradox of being re-
duced to irrelevance in the alien land-
scape while at the same time feeling
acutely aware of oneself: every aching
muscle, every joint, every breath, every
heartbeat. He said that he preferred
breaking track, despite its difficulties,
because all you saw in front of you was
“the infinite beyond.”
One day, Adams spotted in the dis-
tance something poking from the ice
and gleaming in the blinding sun.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“No idea,” Worsley said.
When they reached it, they realized
that it was a meteorological instrument
recording such data as temperature and
wind speed. A sign indicated that the
device belonged to the University of
Wisconsin. The men quickly moved
on, but for hours Worsley fumed, re-
senting the intrusion, and he was re-
lieved when he finally glanced back
and the instrument had disappeared
from view. As he put it, “We were back
on an unblemished canvas.”
he storm came upon the men sud-
T denly. The temperature was minus
twenty-two degrees, and frigid winds
whipped up ice that stung the eyes like
bits of glass. It was November 28, 2008,
and Worsley’s team was two weeks into
its journey. The men bent forward, but
the wind overwhelmed them, and
Worsley concluded that they needed
to stop for the day. Moments after they
unpacked the tent, the wind nearly
COURTESY SHACKLETON FOUNDATION
hurled it into the white oblivion. They
fastened its corners with ice screws and
buried the flaps under the snow and
used their sleds as barricades. Then the
men scurried inside, crouching together
and shivering as the tent’s nylon fab-
ric rattled.
Worsley called the A.L.E. operator
to give their coördinates. “We are caught
in a storm and won’t be moving today,”
he said.
“I can hear the wind,” the operator
replied.
The tempest intensified, the wind
hissing at fifty miles per hour. Ice drifted
over the tent. “It was as if the elements
were furious that we were there,” Wors-
ley wrote. When they awoke the next
day, the storm was even angrier. In a
broadcast, Adams said, “We are tent-
bound again.” They knew that in 1912,
less than ten nautical miles from their
position, Robert Falcon Scott and his
party had died during their trek back
from the Pole. “It’s a very, very sober-
ing thought for us,” Adams added.
The tent was virtually submerged
under ice, and inside the air reeked of
unwashed bodies and dirty socks and
stove fuel. Worsley—whom Gow and
Adams now called the General—tried
to foster a lighthearted atmosphere. The
men passed the time chatting and read-
ing and playing poker. They had previ-
ously named themselves the founding
members of the Antarctic Malt Whis-
key Appreciation Society; per its by-
laws, every Thursday evening the ex-
plorers would drink from a flask of
whiskey, which Gow had brought with
him, and the next morning they would
sleep in an extra two hours. Even though
it was a Saturday, the men passed around
the flask. The liquor warmed them.
Worsley, who, in the Army, had honed
a gallows humor, joked about their cir-
cumstances: if they could make fun of
dying, they still had some life in them.
In an earlier audio broadcast, Worsley
had reported, “Morale’s high,” adding,
“We’ve just had supper. Will is picking
his toes and Henry Adams is writing
in his diary. We’ll send you another re-
port tomorrow. Until then, farewell from
the Ross Ice Shelf.”
After two more days, the storm re-
lented. The men unzipped the tent and
began hacking through a wall of ice
about five feet tall and four feet thick.
They dug for more than an hour, until
they emerged into the blinding light,
like escaped prisoners. They packed
and pressed on, trying to make up time.
On a clear day, they could now dis-
cern the peaks of the Transantarctic
Mountains—“high points piercing the
horizon line,” as Worsley reported in
a broadcast. By the fourth week of their
journey, in mid-December, they had
made it across the Ross Ice Shelf, to
the base of the mountain range. The
terrain began to rise, and the surface
was scarred with deep fissures, a prod-
uct of the eternal churning of ice. “All
this disturbance meant only one thing—
the threat of crevasses,” Worsley wrote.
The following day, despite the dan-
ger, Worsley went on his walkabout,
and collected several rock specimens.
Hoping to do reconnaissance for the
upcoming route, he continued walking
for hours, at one point climbing onto
a ledge and looking south. Before him,
shrouded in mist, rose the Beardmore
Glacier. “I gazed into the gloom won-
dering just what my nemesis had in
store for us,” he wrote.
By the time he returned to the tent,
it was late, and Adams said, “Ah, Gen-
eral, we were beginning to think you’d
met an unfortunate end.”
The men gathered their belongings
and trekked to the mouth of the glacier.
As Adams looked up, he felt that he was
confronting a “Biblical terror.” Every
way they turned, it seemed, there was a
new obstacle: a boulder of ice, or a tow-
ering slope resembling a frozen water-
fall, or a snow bridge extending over a
crevasse. Some of the crevasses were
“wide enough to swallow a car,” as Wors-
ley put it. Others were only a few feet
deep, but that was enough for someone
to break an ankle or twist a knee. If one
of the men were injured, there would be
no place for miles for a rescue plane to
land. An A.L.E. doctor had warned
them, “You either get yourself out or you
don’t get out.”
Worsley decided that they could no
longer proceed on skis, and so they at-
tached crampons to their boots and put
on climbing harnesses, double-checking
the screws, slings, and carabiners. Then
the men roped themselves together:
Worsley in front, followed by Gow and
Adams. As they inched up the glacier,
their sleds felt like ship anchors being
dragged across an ocean floor.
The days were slow and draining.
Before each step, Worsley, who was re-
sponsible for finding a path, poked his
pole in front of him, to see if the ice
was solid. Whenever a hole opened, he
leaned over and glimpsed the under-
world—a chute swirling into darkness.
“The Antarctic can take your life in
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 65
one of two ways,” he noted. “It can wear
you down over a prolonged period of
time through starvation, cold, and ex-
haustion, often in the face of appall-
ing weather. Or it can take you into
the throat of a crevasse in a split sec-
ond.” Once, Worsley went to retrieve
his sleeping bag from his sled after a
day of climbing, and the ice cracked
open under his right foot. His leg
plunged into the shaft. Adams raced
over and yanked him out. Each time
you escaped, Worsley wrote, “you sensed
your luck was running out.”
Soon, the men encountered some-
thing startling beneath their feet: a
sheet of blue ice. The result of snow
accumulating on a glacier and being
compressed over thousands of years,
this kind of ice is so dense—so devoid
of air bubbles—that it absorbs long-
wavelength light, which is why it ap-
pears mesmerizingly blue. Yet, as the
men quickly discovered, its beauty is
deceptive. “It’s hard like concrete,” Gow
recalled. “Harder than concrete—lit-
erally indescribable how hard.”
Before long, the aluminum spikes of
the crampons began to bend and break.
The men slipped again and again, their
bodies smacking against the ice, their
sleds pulling them downhill. “It was
agony,” Worsley wrote. “I felt every ridge
of ice as I was dragged over its vicious
surface.” Bruised and bleeding, the men
cursed into the wind. “Beardmore had
us in its grip,” Worsley wrote.
One day, while they were cutting
southward through the middle of the
glacier, Adams said, impatiently, “I fun-
damentally disagree with the route we
are taking.” He pointed to a distant
part of the glacier, saying, “We should
be over there.” Gow argued that they
should maintain their course. Worsley
feared dissension as much as a mis-
guided route, and he said sternly to
Adams, “Look, mate, we need to keep
heading southward and upward.”
Adams quietly relented. “Henry had
a calm authority,” Adams recalled. “He
made crisp decisions. Sometimes they
were right, sometimes they were wrong.
You just didn’t know, because you were
walking through a maze. But he would
make those decisions, having listened
and consulted with us, so it made it
very easy to follow him.”
On December 24th, after nine days
of climbing, they reached the top of the
glacier. To the west, they could see the
Adams Mountain Range, named for
Henry Adams’s great-grandfather. In
a broadcast, Worsley said, “It’s Christ-
mas Eve, and today . . . we bade fare-
well to the Beardmore Glacier.” He
went on, “We certainly worked hard to
gain each mile, and that’s why I find it
such a rewarding phase of the journey.”
On Christmas morning, instead of
their usual breakfast of freeze-dried
porridge, the team prepared a special
meal of sausages, bacon, and beans.
Later, they emulated the holiday cele-
bration that Shackleton and his men
had shared, lighting cigars and swal-
lowing a teaspoon each of crème de
menthe. Worsley called home and spoke
to Joanna and Alicia, wishing them a
merry Christmas. Alicia, who had
painted on his skis “u r the best dad
ever,” asked him what it was like to
experience a white Christmas, and said
that she missed him dearly. Yet Max,
who was still wrestling with his father’s
absence, refused to come to the phone.
Worsley then called his own father,
hoping to share the news that he had
reached the top of the glacier. But Rich-
ard Worsley, who was now eighty-five
years old, had dementia, and when his
son reminded him that he was in Ant-
arctica he said, “What are you doing
there?”
he following morning, the forty-
T third day of the expedition, Wors-
ley, Adams, and Gow began the next
stage of their journey. They had trav-
elled four hundred and eighty-nine
nautical miles, and if they were to reach
Shackleton’s farthest point on Janu-
ary 9th, two weeks away, they needed
to cover as much as sixteen nautical
miles each day. In a broadcast on De-
cember 27th, Worsley echoed the words
of Shackleton: “Please God, ahead of
us is a clear road to the Pole.”
But, as they ascended the Titan Dome,
they confronted the most brutal condi-
tions yet: hurricane-force gales, and a
wind-chill temperature of minus sixty
degrees. The cold air singed the men’s
lungs as if they were breathing fire.
During a broadcast on December 28th,
Gow reported, “We were welcomed with
our worst whiteout yet,” adding, “All we
could see were the tips of our skis.”
66 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
Worsley kept a vigilant eye on his
companions. They were almost un-
recognizable from the young profes-
sionals who had set out from London.
Their skin clung to their skulls and
their eyes were sunken; they had wild
beards and untamed hair that gleamed
with ice. Because of the whiteouts,
Adams was suffering from motion sick-
ness. “I was moving and the surface
was moving,” he recalled. “It was like
being trapped inside a Ping-Pong ball
on a boisterous ocean.” Gow, who had
developed frostbite on his face, blasted
blues songs into his earbuds—strug-
gling, as he put it, to maintain a “sense
of sanity.”
Worsley tried to stay upbeat and
comfort the others, lending a hand with
their equipment or giving them Shack-
leton’s compass to carry for good luck.
But by December 31st it was Worsley
who was suffering and struggling to
keep pace. His body could not main-
tain sufficient body fat. “My days were
fast turning into a raw, bare-knuckle
fight against fatigue,” he wrote. “En-
ergy just poured from my body, to be
snatched away and dissipated by the
wind. My legs would not work any
faster. Each stride of the ski seemed
locked at a precise distance. I could go
no faster, just slower and slower.”
On New Year’s Day, he was again
lagging. Adams waited for him to catch
up and said, “General, let me carry some
of your load.”
Despite the pact they had made at
the start of the journey, Worsley said,
“I won’t have it. We are all completely
done in, so why should you?” He in-
sisted, “I’ll find a way. It’s my problem
to sort out.” Pointing to his temple
with his gloved hand, he added, “The
answer lies here.”
He was, he knew, blinded by pride;
as he later wrote, he could not be seen Worsley’s crew traversing the Beardmore
as “admitting to weakness.” And, rather
than accept Adams’s assistance, he dis- masters of our fate, that the task which
carded his emergency supply of food, has been set before us is not above our
which lightened his load by a few strength; that its pangs and toils are
ounces. He recognized that it was a not beyond our endurance. As long as
risky move: “I would go hungry . . . if we have faith in our cause and an un-
we arrived at the Pole after 18 January.” conquerable will to win, victory will
Inside the tent on January 5th, he not be denied us.”
opened the envelope that Joanna had “Read it again, General,”Adams asked.
given him. Some of the notes contained Worsley did, and then they all passed
inspiring quotations, and he read aloud out.
one from Winston Churchill: “We are The next day, during another white-
Glacier, which is pocked with large crevasses. Henry Adams likened the experience to confronting a “Biblical terror.”
out, Adams got such severe motion sick-
ness that he began vomiting. Though
Worsley had never felt, in his own words,
“so empty, so feeble and so beaten,” he
COURTESY JOANNA WORSLEY
told Adams that he would switch sleds
with him, given that Adams’s sled, which
was carrying unused fuel cannisters, was
heavier. Worsley then forged ahead at
his fastest pace in days. “Henry relied
on force of mind,” Adams recalled. There
was still a chance for them to make the
ninety-seven-mile mark on schedule. But
on January 7th, with just two days to go,
another storm descended, and they were
enveloped in the white darkness. Wors-
ley explained to the others that they could
either keep going or sit out the storm.
But if they waited they would miss the
anniversary. “I want to go on,” Worsley
said. But he stressed that the decision
had to be unanimous.
“No question,” Gow said.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 67
“C’mo-o-on!” Adams cried.
During the next two days, the storm
abated, and they covered more than
twenty-five nautical miles. On January
9th, they barrelled ahead for six hours.
Then Worsley took out his G.P.S. and
gripped it, as he put it, “like an old man
carefully carrying a cup of tea.” As Gow
and Adams anxiously looked on, Wors-
ley shuffled around until the G.P.S. con-
nected with satellites and coördinates
flashed on the screen: 88° 23' S, 162° E.
“That’s it!” he yelled, slamming his
poles into the ground. “We’ve made
it!” The men looked around, examin-
ing the place that had long consumed
their imaginations, and which had lured
them nearly to their demise. All they
could see was barren ice—their grail
was no more than a geographical data
point. As Adams later put it, “What is
Antarctica other than a blank canvas
on which you seek to impose yourself ?”
The temperature was minus thirty-
one degrees, too cold to linger. But Wors-
ley planted a British flag and arranged
a group photograph similar to one that
Shackleton had taken with his party.
Adams was on the left, as his great-
grandfather had been; Gow was in the
middle; and Worsley stood on the right,
in Shackleton’s place.
Worsley kept thinking about the pre-
dicament that Shackleton had faced a
hundred years earlier. Shortly before
reaching the ninety-seven-mile mark,
Shackleton had written in his diary, “I
cannot think of failure yet. I must look
at the matter sensibly and consider the
lives of those who are with me. I feel that
if we go on too far it will be impossible
to get back over this surface, and then
all the results will be lost to the world.”
He added, “Man can only do his best,
and we have arrayed against us the stron-
gest forces of nature.” When he finally
made the decision to retreat, on January
9th, he wrote, “We have shot our bolt.”
Worsley said to Gow and Adams,
“I simply cannot contemplate them
just turning round and heading back
the way they had just come.”
As Worsley and his companions con-
tinued toward the Pole, they were no
longer following in Shackleton’s steps.
To their relief, they began descending
in altitude, their sleds, lightened from
the consumption of food, scooting eas-
ily behind them. After eight days, they
had covered ninety-two nautical miles,
a reminder of just how close Shackle-
ton had been to realizing his dream. That
night, Worsley went for his stroll, wob-
bling on bone-thin legs. He was not a
religious man, but the landscape stirred
him. As Adams put it, “Henry felt the
spirituality of the Antarctic.”
The next morning, the men broke
camp, and embarked on the remaining
five nautical miles. In the distance, they
68 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
In 1909, Shackleton’s team took a picture at 88° 23' S—the southernmost point
could finally see a signpost: the smudged
outline of the Amundsen-Scott South
Pole Station, a U.S. scientific-research
base. After a few hours, Worsley no-
ticed that his skis were moving in tracks
that had been etched by snowmobiles.
Then he saw, dumped in a pile on the
ice, a broken washing machine, a mat-
tress, and crushed boxes. The scentless
air became infused with the sharp odors
of fried food and petroleum; occasion-
ally, a military plane roared overhead.
“We had been thrust back into the world
we had left behind,” Worsley wrote.
In front of the research station, pro-
truding from the ice, was a gleaming
metal rod, about waist-high, topped
with a brass globe. Scientists at the base
used it as a marker of the South Pole—
the place where all the lines of longi-
tude converge, and where the Earth
doesn’t rotate. Because the rod was
planted on a shifting ice sheet, it had
to be moved several feet each year, to
return to the Pole’s precise location.
On January 18th, at 4:32 p.m., after
sixty-six days, Worsley and his com-
panions—emaciated, with icicles drip-
ping from their beards—reached out and
grasped the rod. As the journey had ap-
proached its end, Worsley had felt tears
freezing under his eyes: he had not ex-
perienced such joy and relief since he
was a little boy. But now Worsley, whom
Adams called an “absolute bang-on nat-
ural leader,” laughed and hollered and
embraced the others. Only a few years
earlier, they had been strangers, yet they
had learned to trust one another with
their lives. What’s more, Worsley be-
lieved, they had mastered the seemingly
impossible by adhering to the lessons of
Shackleton; they had conquered through
endurance. In a broadcast, Worsley an-
nounced, “I’m calling you from ninety
degrees south, the South Pole!” Then he
took out Shackleton’s compass, lifted the
lid, and let the needle spin to a stop.
VI. THE INFINITE BEYOND
orsley didn’t think that he would
W ever go back to Antarctica again.
He happily returned to the Army and
relished being with his family. But he
gradually began to feel again the “lure
of little voices.” In his commonplace
book, he wrote down a quote, from the
Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nan-
sen, that seemed to address his own
compulsion to subject himself to more
suffering: “Why? On account of the
great geographical discoveries, the im-
portant scientific results? Oh no; that
will come later, for the few specialists.
This is something all can understand.
A victory of human mind and human
strength over the dominion and pow-
ers of Nature; a deed that lifts us above
the great monotony of daily life; a view
over shining plains, with lofty moun-
tains against the cold blue sky, and lands

anyone had yet reached. Worsley’s crew re-created the photo a hundred years later.
covered by ice-sheets of inconceivable
extent . . . the triumph of the living
over the stiffened realm of death.”
In 2012, Worsley launched a new ex-
pedition, to mark the centennial of the
race between Amundsen and Scott to
the South Pole. Gow and Adams, who
had married and settled down with fam-
ilies, declined to go, and so Worsley
drew recruits from the military. He and
a partner, Lou Rudd, followed the trail
of Amundsen and raced against another
party, which took the route of Scott.
Once more, Worsley proved an extraor-
dinary commander—Rudd called him
a “true inspiration”—and they won the
COURTESY SHACKLETON FOUNDATION; OPPOSITE: ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
nine-hundred-mile contest, which raised
nearly three hundred thousand dollars
for a Royal British Legion fund that as-
sists wounded soldiers.
Worsley had become the first per-
son to trace the two classic routes to
the South Pole. Outside hailed him as
“one of the great polar explorers of our
time,” and a reporter described him as
a “pioneer of the possible.” Worsley,
who had recently published “In Shack-
leton’s Footsteps,” gave lectures on ex-
ploration and leadership, becoming that
rare apostle whose life seems to affirm
his master’s teachings.
In 2013, he was stationed in Wash-
ington, D.C., as the British liaison to
U.S. Special Operations Forces. It was
his final military posting: in October
of 2015, after more than three and a
half decades of service, he would be
fifty-five, at that time the mandatory
retirement age. Joanna had accompa-
nied him to the States, and she sensed
his mind drifting. “Are you doing an-
other expedition?” she asked.
He said that the centenary of Shack-
leton’s Endurance expedition would co-
incide with his retirement, and that he
was considering an attempt of the
trans-Antarctica crossing that Shack-
leton had planned before the sinking
of his ship. What’s more, Worsley hoped
to make the nine-hundred-nautical-mile
journey by himself, and without assis-
tance, something that had never been
done. Paul Rose, a former base com-
mander for the British Antarctic Sur-
vey, which conducts scientific research
in the region, called such a trek “un-
heard of,” and another explorer deemed
it an “almost inhuman challenge.” For
Worsley, the expedition represented the
culmination of all his energies. Not only
would it be his longest, hardest, and
most punishing quest; he would have
to survive entirely on his own wits.
Henry, though, told Joanna that he
would return to Antarctica only if she
approved. He was sensitive to the toll
that his expeditions had taken on their
family. He often struggled to express
his emotions—the tumult that he had
kept masked, even as it drove him—
and in his book he had included a pas-
sage that seemed intended for his fam-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
ily, a way to convey what he could not
say directly. “Looking back now, I re-
alize that I lost track of where my real
priorities should lie,” he wrote. “I can
see now that I was not dividing up the
time sensibly and making my family
feel important and special.” He went
on, “Passion for something can so eas-
ily tip into obsession, which is a dan-
gerous thing, especially when those
affected are the very people who so loy-
ally ‘stand and wait.’”
Joanna, who often joked that the
Antarctic was her husband’s “mistress,”
had expected that, upon his retirement,
they would no longer be apart. But she
had never tried to limit his aspira-
tions—“He went with my blessings ev-
erywhere,” she once told a reporter—
and she understood how much the
proposed trip meant to him. And Henry
wasn’t just doing it for himself—he
hoped to raise a hundred thousand dol-
lars for the Endeavour Fund, the other
charity for injured soldiers. As he later
put it, “I want to leave a financial leg-
acy to assist my wounded mates.” And
so she gave Worsley her backing. The
children were equally supportive. Max,
who would be twenty-one by the time
of the expedition, and who was helping
to build ships in the South of France,
had come to terms with his father’s ad-
venturist spirit, and even lionized him
for it.They talked about eventually doing
a polar journey together. “Everyone
dreams, but Dad’s the guy who goes out
and achieves them,” Max said.
In the fall of 2015, before Henry de-
parted on the expedition, he and Jo-
anna travelled to Greece. While visit-
ing ancient sites and drinking wine at
tavernas, they plotted out the things
they would do when he returned. They
would go to India and teach under-
privileged children, and travel to Ven-
ice, where he could study art and she
could do charity work. Max recalled,
“Mom was waiting twenty-five years
for the moment when he left the Army
and they could do these things together.”
Worsley no longer journeyed in
obscurity, and his plan received admir-
ing news coverage. “intrepid ex-army
officer is set for antarctic
trek,” the Glasgow Herald announced.
A Washington Post headline declared
that Worsley would be “all alone on
the coldest continent.” Worsley
69
was interviewed by National Geographic
and by the BBC, whose announcer said,
“You must be mad to do it.” Prince
William invited Worsley to Kensing-
ton Palace and signed a Union Jack
for him to carry with him on his trip,
which was similar to the one that King
George V had given to Shackleton be-
fore he departed.
On October 20th, Joanna drove him
to Heathrow Airport. She was more
worried about this expedition than any
other, given his age and the lack of help.
In a video that Worsley posted on his
Web site, he had spoken of the risks
of journeying solo. The biggest threat,
he said, was falling into a crevasse: no
one could pull him out or call for res-
cue. The other major threats, he said,
were a “severe medical injury” and “se-
vere weather.” But he believed that his
meticulous preparations would miti-
gate the risks. While travelling alone,
he noted, “there is no one there to com-
pare thoughts with and seek their opin-
ions on, but I want to do this on my
own.” He later put the matter even
more starkly: “Success or failure of this
journey is completely up to me.”
At the terminal, Joanna broke down,
and he repeated what he always told her:
“Better a live donkey than a dead lion.”
Then he kissed her and said, “Onwards!”
his time, Worsley’s route was to begin
T on Berkner Island, an icebound
chunk of rock off the Atlantic coast of
Antarctica, south of Chile. From there,
he would trek five hundred and seventy
nautical miles to the South Pole. Then,
heading in the reverse direction from the
one he had followed with Gow and
Adams, he would ascend the Titan Dome
and make his way down to the rim of
the Ross Ice Shelf, on the Pacific side.
This second section would cover three
hundred and thirty nautical miles, and
he estimated that the expedition would
take him nearly eighty days. He was de-
termined to finish before February, when
winter set in and the conditions became
too perilous for a rescue plane to land;
even A.L.E. shut down in winter. At that
point, there would be no exit.
Worsley had hoped to fly to Antarc-
tica shortly after arriving in Punta Are-
nas, on October 21st. But foul weath-
er—“our lord and master at the moment,”
as he called it—forced A.L.E. to delay
70 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
his flight for a week, and then another.
“Greetings from Patience Camp,” he re-
ported on his broadcast. “Unfortunately,
this is Patience Camp in Chile.”
By the time he reached Berkner Is-
land, on November 13th, he was signifi-
cantly behind schedule. He would need
to arrive at the South Pole by January 1,
2016—a gruelling pace. Within moments
of exiting the plane, he was packing his
sled, which, because of the length of the
journey, weighed three hundred and twen-
ty-five pounds—even more than on his
expedition with Gow and Adams. “Re-
ally worried about weight,” he had writ-
ten earlier, in his diary. Noting that “anx-
iety builds,” he reminded himself that he
needed to “banish negative thoughts.”
He pushed off, and heard a familiar
symphony: the poles crunching on the
ice, the sled creaking over ridges, the
skis swishing back and forth. When he
paused, he was greeted by that silence
which seemed unlike any other. His
doubts soon dissipated, and after a brief
baptismal trek he made camp. The sun
was shining and the temperature was a
balmy nineteen degrees. “So, so happy
to be back,” he wrote in his diary. “Many
days of struggle ahead but a glorious
start. My spirits lifted as soon as I got
going. I thought, ‘I can do this.’” In his
broadcast, he described Antarctica as
the “best place on Earth right now.”
The next morning, he began what
he called his “first full day in the sad-
dle.” He trekked for eight hours, listen-
ing to tracks by David Bowie, Johnny
Cash, and Meat Loaf and pondering
what he might say, upon his return, in
a lecture about the trip. He covered a
good ten nautical miles, but it was a
shock to his system. “First few days re-
ally are hell—never forget that,” he
wrote. If he focussed on the length of
his journey, he would never make it, and
so he concentrated on immediate tasks.
“It’s just chipping away at it, bit by bit,
and dealing with the moment,” he later
said on a broadcast. On the third day,
after crossing the eighty-first degree of
latitude, he convened a one-man meet-
ing of the Malt Whiskey Appreciation
Society, downing a shot of liquor, which
he had cooled with snow. He knew that
more and more people were following
his broadcasts, including schoolchil-
dren—“young explorers,” he called
them—and, despite his exhaustion, he
took time each evening to relay updates
and respond to inquiries that had been
sent to him. He answered questions
about whether he had seen any animal
life (“sadly not”), about his favorite
freeze-dried meal (spaghetti Bolognese),
about his least favorite time of day (pre-
paring to set off in the morning) and
his favorite (climbing into his tent after
a long march). He was asked which
actor should portray him in a movie
about his adventures. Admitting that
his answer offered a “strong exposé of
my vanity,” he suggested Matt Damon
for his younger self and Anthony Hop-
kins for his older self. He even replied
to a question about how he went to the
loo. “If you need to pee, throw your back
to the wind, unzip, and have a pee,” he
explained. “Really not a big deal about
that. On the other hand, if you need to
go No. 2, you need to be a little more
organized, particularly if there’s a strong
wind, which, generally, there is. This
time, you face into the wind. You make
sure that you’ve grabbed your outer trou-
sers, your long johns, your pants, and
you drop them as quickly as possible.”
One evening, after answering several
queries, he playfully signed off from
“somewhere” in “a complete whiteout.”
By the end of the first week, he had
travelled nearly seventy nautical miles.
His body, he reported to listeners, was
in remarkably good shape. He’d just en-
joyed a hot meal of chicken cacciatore,
with rice pudding for dessert. “I am
now off to my sleeping bag,” he said.
hen, as on Shackleton’s Endur-
T ance expedition, everything began
to go wrong. On November 22nd, a
little more than a week into his jour-
ney, he was engulfed in a whiteout
and was pinned down in his tent.
“Proper Antarctic storm!” he wrote in
his diary, noting that there was no
chance of moving forward that day.
The next morning, the gusts felt strong
enough to hurl a small dog; one of
the tent poles broke, and he had to
repair it. “A salutary reminder just
who is in control around here,” he
said of the conditions. “Trespassers
will be punished.”
He emerged on November 24th, and
found himself plowing through a dust
bowl of ice in which all he could see,
hour after hour, was his compass
strapped to his chest and his skis with required.” Two nights later, after an- and often I had to stop to give them
their metronomic rhythm—an experi- other whiteout, he lamented that he some warmth,” he said. “And the light
ence that he described as “miserable, hadn’t had enough strength “to pull the was so flat that on two occasions, im-
mind-numbing, monochromatic mo- sledge through” the storm. His diary mediately after stopping, I fell straight
notony.” He was ascending a section entries became a litany of suffering: over, such is the disorienting effect it
of the Transantarctic Mountains, and “hard day”; “a very difficult day”; “a bru- has on your senses.”
on November 25th he came upon a tal day”; “awful day—floundering The next day, he blindly skied over
steep slope of ice that rose hundreds around in a complete whiteout”; “an- a ridge, and the sled overtook him and
of feet. He tried to climb with his cram- other awful day—worse than yester- pulled him down. His head and back
pons but the sled wouldn’t move. Again, day”; “swimming against a strong tide”; and legs slammed against the ice. The
he tried. Again, it wouldn’t budge. “still swimming against the tide”; “to- sled flipped over twice, dragging him
If he didn’t keep moving, he would tally spent and demoralized.” Each for twenty yards. He lay splattered on
freeze. He decided to lighten his sled, morning, he unzipped the flap of his the ice, cursing. When he got to his
and unloaded most of his bags of food tent and peeked out, hoping for clear feet, he nervously checked his fuel can-
and stored them on a flat part of the skies, only to behold what he called nisters. One crack and he would be
ice. Then he began to climb. When he “more of the white darkness.” At times, doomed, but there were none, and,
reached the top of the ridge, gasping he could not even discern the tips of conscious of time slipping away, he un-
for air behind his face mask, he depos- his skis through the murk, which, he tangled his harness and set off again.
ited what he’d dragged up. After a short wrote, was as “thick as clotted cream.”
rest, he scaled back down to retrieve On December 1st, he marched into nd incredibly, despite every obsta-
the rest. He made trip after trip.
Once, in the poor visibility, he failed
what he described as “the mother of
all storms.” Trudging uphill, with his
A cle and every calamity, he was on
track to reach the South Pole around
to notice the scar of a crevasse and his head bowed against a fusillade of ice New Year’s Day. Nothing seemed to stop
foot broke through the surface. He felt pellets, he moved at less than a mile him. One morning, he forged on even
himself slipping into the hole, which per hour. After many hours, he abruptly when the conditions were so awful that
was widening around him. He grabbed paused. “I sat huddled on my sledge, he conceded that it was “crazy” to set
the edge and clung to it, dangling over down jacket on, wondering whether to off. Another time, he wrote in his diary,
an abyss, before he hauled himself up. go or to stop,” he later recalled. It was “I just can’t go further—I don’t have it
When he peered into the chasm, he so windy that he did not know if he in me.” And yet he rose the next day and
wrote in his diary, he “suddenly felt could set up his tent, and so he resumed marched onward. On December 18th,
very alone, vulnerable and scared.” trekking. “My hands took a battering, the thirty-sixth day, he walked more than
His body was weakening more rap-
idly than on his previous expeditions.
Not only was the sled heavier; he con-
stantly had to break track, and he had
to carry out alone the tiresome tasks
of making camp each night and pack-
ing up in the morning.
On November 30th, after trekking
for nearly three weeks and travers-
ing a hundred and sixty-five nautical
miles, he reported that he had “ach-
ing shoulders, lower-back pain, very
snotty nose . . . and coughing due to
breathing in cold air.” He developed a
rash on his groin. His feet were cov-
ered in bruises and blisters, and he took
a knife to his boots, hoping to smooth
the lining and alleviate the pain. One
day, he suffered from a mysterious stom-
ach ache, which was aggravated by the
sled harness yanking at his waist.
Though he usually maintained a
buoyant tone in his broadcast, he was
more despairing in his diary. “It was a
real physical battle with fatigue,” he
wrote, adding, “I was stopping literally
every minute or so to catch my breath
or just get ready for the next exertion “ You’re calling it love, but it’s really just static electricity.”
seventeen nautical miles, a remarkable
trek that took him fifteen hours. After
another punishing day—which he de-
scribed as a “combination of eating, bend-
ing, driving, tying, pushing, bracing,
draining, swearing, pausing and despair-
ing”—he told himself, “I just have to ac-
cept it and keep moving.”
His existence had been reduced to
a single purpose: making his mileage.
When approaching sastrugi, he com-
manded himself to “attack, attack, at-
tack.” After one such battle, he wrote
proudly in his diary that he had stormed
“the ramparts of every piece that was
unfortunate enough to get in my way.”
He added, “The sledge, now a batter-
ing ram and not a burden, smashed
through all in its path.” When he was
asked by his radio listeners how he
persevered, he said that it was less about
physical prowess than about how
“strong your mind and will are—hours
at the gym cannot prepare you.”
Robert Swan, a British adventurer
who had trekked to both poles, was mon-
itoring Worsley’s journey, and expressed
awe at his daily progress. In an audio
message posted on Worsley’s Web site,
on December 5th, Swan said, “His av-
erage is fantastic,” adding, “He’s facing
some quite odd conditions, but, being
Henry, he’s slugging it out.” In a second
message, posted later that month, Swan
described Worsley proceeding as if a
traffic light were glowing in front of him:
“Very, very rarely in your mind do you
ever see the color green,
for the simple reason if
you’re in green you’re prob-
ably not pushing hard
enough. . . . You’re think-
ing about your feet, your
legs, your calves, your hips,
your arms, your neck, your
shoulders, and you’re con-
stantly doing these checks
to see whether everything’s
O.K. . . . As Henry has said, as he moves
towards those last few hours every day,
you can feel that he’s pushing into the
red zone. And the red zone is not a place
to stay in, because in the red zone your
body is starting to eat itself. You’re much
more likely to get frostbite. So you live
on the edge of the orange, occasionally
push into the red, and then, very sensi-
bly, he comes back off the red, back into
the orange. And hopefully, when he’s
72 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
into his sleeping bag and speaking to us,
you know he’s back into the green.”
By Christmas Day, Worsley was
nearly within a hundred nautical miles
of the Pole. Prince William broadcast
a message, saying, “We’re thinking of
you at the Christmas period as you’re
lugging all your kit up and down the
slopes and the hills of the southern At-
lantic in the Antarctic.” Worsley opened
a package that Joanna and the children
had given him. Inside were minia-
ture versions of traditional Christmas
sweets: a mincemeat pie and a fruit-
cake. Alicia had written him a note
that quoted lyrics from “The Jungle
Book”: “Look for the bare necessi-
ties /The simple bare necessities / For-
get about your worries and your strife.”
And Joanna had included a sample of
Amouage Journey Man cologne. “I
figured his tent would be so smelly by
then,” she recalled.
On his broadcast, Worsley said,
“Packages from home, especially at
times like this, no matter where you
are in the world, carry special mean-
ing. And none more so for me this
morning.”
Using his satellite phone, he called
Joanna and Alicia, in London, and then
Max, in France. Throughout the jour-
ney, Worsley had made a record in his
diary of virtually every communication
that he had had with them. Once, after
speaking to Joanna, he wrote, “I do love
her so much.” Another time, after he
received a text from Ali-
cia saying “I am thinking
of you constantly, and love
you more than ever,” he
jotted down, “Sweet text
from Shrimp”—his nick-
name for her. And he
noted that a conversation
one morning with Max
had “lifted my spirits.” On
Christmas Day, he wrote
in his diary, “Lovely to hear their voices.”
Despite the holiday, Worsley marched
twelve nautical miles. As he lay in his
tent that night, he lit a cigar, the sweet
smoke filling the air, and ate his Christ-
mas treats. It was, he said, like a “little
heaven.”
Soon, he was almost at nine thou-
sand feet, the elevation of the South
Pole. He was so tired that once, while
sitting on his sled during a snack
break, he nodded off, even though the
wind-chill temperature was minus
twenty-two. “I may be drained of all
power and energy,” he reported on a
broadcast. “But I still seem to have
the will that says, to my heart and
nerves and sinews, Hold on.” He kept
telling himself, “Keep your eyes on
the prize.”
On January 2nd, only a day behind
schedule, he reached the Pole. He was
greeted by a group of well-wishers from
the scientific-research station. They
were the first people he had seen in
fifty-one days. But this was not the cli-
max of his journey—it was only the
end of the first phase—and, because
he was making his trek unaided, he
couldn’t go inside the base to receive a
hot meal or even to take a bath. “It was
weird arriving here and not stopping,”
he wrote in his diary, adding, “Very
tempting to stay at Pole—eat and sleep.”
But he set up his camp as usual, main-
taining his self-imposed exile.
During his broadcast, he told his
listeners, “I owe so much to all of you
for your support in getting me this far.
I cannot emphasize too strongly just
how much it has urged me on over the
darker days, of which there have been
many. But those I have to thank most
are Joanna, Max, and Alicia.” His voice
cracked. “They have been with me every
step of the way, each with a warm hand
in the small of my back, lifting me when
I am down, strengthening me when I
am weak, and filling me when I’m
empty. I owe them everything.” He
concluded, “At the southerly point
where the world spins on—good night.”
Iingnbroadcasts
London, Joanna listened to his
each evening before fall-
asleep. Shortly before Christmas,
she was interviewed by a reporter from
the Daily Express, and she said, “Henry
was away abroad a lot in his army days
so we’ve been used to separations . . .
but I miss him much more now. I do
worry about him because I know how
frail he is getting—he does lose a huge
amount of weight and he has had a re-
ally rough time with the weather.” She
went on, “He is so determined. In my
head I know there’s no way he won’t
succeed, even if he has to walk all day
and night. He has enormous mental
strength.” She was overcome: “He’s an
amazing man—isn’t it wonderful to be
married to someone like that?”
Worsley estimated that it would
take him about three weeks to com-
plete the rest of his journey, and he
hoped that the hardest part was be-
hind him. In his diary, he had written,
“Just pray going North is that much
easier.” Yet, as he climbed the Titan
Dome, he found the ascent to be “a
killer.” He had lost more than forty
pounds, and his unwashed clothing
hung on him heavily. “Still very weak—
legs are stick thin and arms puny,” he
noted in his diary. His eyes had sunk
into shaded hollows. His fingers were
becoming numb. His Achilles tendons
were swollen. His hips were battered
and scraped from the constantly jerk-
ing harness. He had broken his front
tooth biting into a frozen protein bar,
and told A.L.E. that he looked like a
pirate. He was dizzy from the altitude,
and he had bleeding hemorrhoids.
On January 7th, he woke in the mid-
dle of the night with another stomach
ache. “I felt pretty awful,” he admitted
on his broadcast. “The weakest I felt
in the entire expedition.” The earbuds
on his iPod had broken, leaving him
in silence. “I feel alone,” he confessed
on a broadcast, adding, “Occasionally,
it would be nice to have somebody to
talk to about the day.”
He kept thinking that he would
soon reach the top of the Titan Dome.
“I’ll be okay if the promised ‘downhill’
materializes,” he wrote in his diary. But
the peak eluded him—he was trapped
in an infinite beyond. On January 11th,
he told his listeners, “I’m desperate to
go down and into air thick enough to
breathe.”
Listening to the broadcasts, Joanna
was increasingly concerned. “I felt in
his voice this exhaustion and sadness,”
she recalled. He had no companion to
tell him that he had remained too long
in the red zone; nor was he held back
by the worry that his actions might jeop-
ardize the lives of others. And he was
confident that he could do what he al-
ways had done: prevail through unbend-
ing will. In his commonplace book, he
had once written down a quote, from
the cyclist Lance Armstrong, that said,
“Losing and dying: it’s the same thing.”
And so Worsley pressed on, mutter-
ing to himself a line from Tennyson’s
“Coastal élite!”
• •
poem “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, to
find, and not to yield.” Once, he looked
up in the sky and saw, through his fro-
zen goggles, a dazzling sun halo. On the
edge of the circle, there were intense
bursts of light, as if the sun were being
splintered into three fiery balls. He knew
that the phenomenon was caused by
sunlight being refracted through a scrim
of ice particles. Yet, as he stumbled on-
ward through the void, he wondered if
the light was actually some guiding spirit,
like the “fourth man” that Shackleton
had spoken of. Perhaps Worsley, too,
had pierced the “veneer of outside
things”—or perhaps his mind was sim-
ply unravelling. His diary entries had
become sparer and darker: “So breath-
less . . . I am fading . . . hands/fingers are
forever shutting down . . . wonder how
long they will last.”
On January 17th, he staggered
through a whiteout, pulling his sled for
sixteen hours. When he stopped, it was
late evening, and he struggled to build
his camp again—to plant the tent poles
in the ice, to unload his food, to light
the cooker, to melt snow for water. “It’s
now one o’clock in the morning,” he
said in his broadcast. “In sum, it’s been
a punishing day.” He continued, “What
little energy I have left . . .” His voice
faded in and out.
Joanna panicked upon hearing the
broadcast. She called many of Wors-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 73
ley’s close friends, asking if someone
should ask A.L.E. to dispatch a rescue
plane. They thought that Worsley
would be O.K., given his experience
and abilities, and that he should be the
one to make such a call. Robert Swan,
in one of his earlier broadcasts, had
noted that Worsley had on his belt “a
wonderful, unbelievable” Iridium sat-
ellite telephone, adding, “If he does
have a problem, he can hit the button
and get some support and rescue very,
very quickly.”
On January 19th, after man-haul-
ing through another storm, Worsley
was too tired to give a broadcast, and
with his frozen hand he scribbled only
a few words in his diary, the writing
almost illegible: “Very desperate . . .
slipping away . . . stomach . . . took pain-
killers.” He was incontinent, and re-
peatedly had to venture outside to squat
in the freezing cold. His body seemed
to be eating itself.
The next day, the sixty-ninth day of
his journey, he could drag his sled for
only a few hours. He built his tent and
collapsed inside. At one point, he called
Max on the satellite phone, waking him
in the middle of the night in France.
All Henry kept saying was “I just want
to hear your voice, I just want to hear
your voice.”
Max told him, “You will always be
a polar warrior in my eyes. You just
need to pull out and come home.”
On the morning of January 21st, Jo-
anna spoke to him. He was suffering
from, as she put it, “complete shutdown.”
He couldn’t even muster the energy to
boil water or to brush his teeth, and she
pleaded with him to call A.L.E. and
evacuate. “You’ve absolutely got to call
them,” she said.
He told her that, though he wasn’t
going to leave the tent, he needed some
time to think through what to do next.
He spent the day wrestling with his
predicament, wondering what Shacks
would do. Worsley had written in his
diary, “Just want it all to end,” adding,
“Miss everybody badly.” But the G.P.S.
had informed him that he had finally
passed the apex of the Titan Dome,
and had started to descend. History
was within his grasp. In his diary, he
had written, “Never, ever give in.” It
echoed a lesson from one of the Shack-
leton self-help books, which Worsley
had once posted on his Web site: “Never
give up—there’s always another move.”
But maybe that was wrong. Hadn’t
Shackleton survived because he had re-
alized that, at a certain point, he had no
more moves and turned back? Unlike
Scott and others who went to a polar
grave, Shackleton reckoned with his own
limitations and those of his men. He
understood that not everything, least of
all the Antarctic, can be conquered. And
that within defeat there can still be tri-
umph—the triumph of survival itself.
On January 22nd, after seventy-one
days and a trek of nearly eight hundred
nautical miles, Worsley pushed the but-
ton and called for the most expensive
taxi ride in the world. “Greetings, ev-
erybody,” he said on his broadcast.
“When my hero Ernest Shackleton
walked ninety-seven miles from the
South Pole on the morning of January 9,
1909, he said he’d shot his bolt.” Wors-
ley continued, “Well, today I have to
inform with some sadness that I, too,
have shot my bolt. . . . My journey is at
an end. I have run out of time and phys-
ical endurance—and a simple, sheer in-
ability to slide one ski in front of the
other. . . . My summit is just out of
reach.” But he sounded relieved: “I’ll
lick my wounds. I will heal over time,
and I’ll come to terms with the disap-
pointment.” His spirits were buoyed by
the outpouring of donations to the En-
74 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
deavour Fund, which had exceeded his
goal and would eventually surpass a
quarter of a million dollars. “It is in-
credible and does make me smile,” he
said. He explained that the rescue plane
would arrive shortly, and that he was
looking forward to a cup of hot tea. He
concluded, “This is Henry Worsley,
signing off, at journey’s end.”
He had already told Joanna of his
decision, and she couldn’t wait to see
him and hold him. As she later noted,
“Obviously, he will feel disappointed,
but Shackleton never reached his goals,
and what Henry has done is extraor-
dinary.” She notified Max and Alicia
and many friends, all of whom expressed
relief that he had decided to come home.
Or, as Joanna thought of it: He chose us.
When the plane arrived, later on
January 22nd, he rose proudly and
walked under his own power, though
he needed help climbing the stairs into
the cabin. He knew that he had made
the right decision: he had seen his naked
soul. Worsley was flown to A.L.E.’s
base camp, on the other side of Ant-
arctica, where, according to a company
report, he was “talking happily about
home and his upcoming lecturing en-
gagement.” That evening, he called Jo-
anna and said, “I’m having a cup of tea
and I’m going to be fine.”
“I love you so much,” she said.
“Darling, I love you, too,” he said,
promising to call her the next morning.
round two in the afternoon on
A January 23rd, the phone rang. But
it wasn’t Henry—it was Steve Jones,
A.L.E.’s expeditions manager. He ex-
plained that the doctors had discov-
ered that Worsley was suffering from
bacterial peritonitis, an infection of the
thin tissue that lines the inner wall of
the abdomen. It might have been caused
by a perforated ulcer, and if an infec-
tion spread into his bloodstream it could
produce septic shock. A.L.E. had flown
Worsley to a hospital in Punta Arenas,
and he was being rushed into surgery.
He was still talking about his family
and his upcoming lecture, as if unable
to comprehend the sudden turn of
events. Hadn’t he turned back? Jones
asked Joanna if she wanted to speak to
him. She feared delaying the opera-
tion, and said no, promising to be on
the next plane to Chile.
She caught the first flight out and
arrived in Santiago, where she waited
for a connecting flight to Punta Are-
nas. While she was in Santiago, she
met the British Ambassador to Chile,
Fiona Clouder, who told Joanna that
Henry’s condition was grave. Joanna
continued to get updates from the
hospital, and was informed that his
liver had failed. You can live without
a liver, can’t you? Joanna thought. Then
she heard that his kidney had failed,
and thought, Can’t you live without a
kidney? Then, just before Joanna was
to board the plane for Punta Arenas,
the Ambassador got a call from the
British Embassy. Afterward, Clouder
knelt beside Joanna, held her hand,
and said what Joanna already knew:
Henry was dead.
Accompanied by the Ambassador,
Joanna flew to Punta Arenas. She went
past city streets and pedestrians, but
didn’t see anything; it was as if she
were in a whiteout. She was taken into
a church: light filtering through stained-
glass windows, a cross on the wall. In
front of her was an open wooden cas-
ket. Henry was inside. She had been
told that several rock specimens had
been found in his possession when he
was evacuated, which was so like him:
to carry them even as he was strug-
gling to pull his weight. She looked
down at his face. “I was completely
terrified,” she recalled. “But he looked
incredibly peaceful. Almost happy.”
She leaned over and kissed him, his
skin still warm.
Joanna was filled with regrets. She
wished that she had spoken to him be-
fore he had gone into surgery. She wished
that he had abandoned his quest sooner,
and that she had called A.L.E. herself.
“I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life,”
she said. She was facing “an absolute
wall of pain,” her own Antarctica.
Joanna called their children. Alicia,
who had always shared some of her fa-
ther’s stoicism, nearly collapsed. Some
time later, she looked through her fa-
ther’s writings about his journey and
found a line that has stayed with her:
“You are sitting on a large white plate
looking out to the edge and I would
draw myself back up into the sky and
into space and look down and think of
myself as this atom on an ice cube in
the middle of nowhere.” Long after-
 ward, Max found himself waiting for
his father to appear. “He was always the
invincible man—not physically but men-
tally—and I still expect him to come
back,” he recalled. “I’m still waiting.”
Despite his grief, he was overwhelmed
with pride when he thought of his fa-
ther: “If I’m even half the man Dad
turned out to be, I’d be so pleased.”
Whereas his father would ask himself,
“What would Shacks do?,” Max asked
himself, “What would Dad do?”
When the news of Worsley’s death
reached Great Britain, Prince William
said, “We have lost a friend, but he will
remain a source of inspiration to us
all.” The press hailed Worsley as “one
of the world’s great polar explorers”
and a “hero from a bygone age.” He
was posthumously awarded the Polar
Medal, which had been given to Scott
and Shackleton. In a Facebook post,
Nancy F. Koehn, the author of the
book “Ernest Shackleton, Exploring
Leadership,” wrote, “Worsley consid-
ered Shackleton his hero, and now we
see Worsley as one of ours.”
The funeral was held on February 11,
2016, at St. Paul’s Church in Knights-
bridge. Hundreds of people gathered,
among them Prince William, General
Nick Carter, Henry Adams, and Will Worsley called his wife and said, “I’m having a cup of tea and I’m going to be fine.”
Gow. In tribute to Worsley, many of
the mourners wore brightly colored ties he had written about Antarctica when a ceremony for Worsley in the chapel.
or scarves. Although Worsley’s remains he was thirteen years old and his father After a while, they headed outside, and
were cremated, there was a casket, was embarking on his first expedition: hiked up an icy slope. A light snow
draped with Polar Star white roses; his was falling, and Joanna had wrapped
What beauty is seen through the mist of
military medals had been placed on the white snow, herself in the down coat that Worsley
lid, resting on an embroidered cushion The depths of Antarctica, where no one had worn on his final expedition. “I
that Worsley had sewn, depicting will go. felt as if he was walking beside me,”
Shackleton and his men. The biting wind will freeze thoughts from she recalled.
In a eulogy, Adams said of Wors- your mind, She and her children climbed until
And the deathless cold will leave you
ley, “His exploits and the way in which behind . . . they reached a peak that overlooks the
he undertook them have quite rightly cemetery where Shackleton is buried.
seen him portrayed as a hero. But I’m Now that it’s morning the beauty shows, They had brought a wooden box, which
not sure he would have been entirely And as the sun rises, Antarctica glows; Worsley had made for one of his ex-
comfortable with that moniker. His And as I leave this beautiful land, peditions. Inside were his ashes. At the
The life beyond me starts to expand.
heroism is just one part of the fabric chapel, Max, who had begun to con-
of an incredibly rich character.” He template attempting his own polar ex-
went on, “He was primarily a father n December of 2017, almost two years pedition, had recited the sonnet about
and a husband. He was a soldier. He Iafter the funeral, Joanna, Max, and Shackleton that his father had loved:
was an artist. A raconteur. I loved him Alicia travelled by boat to South Geor-
COURTESY JOANNA WORSLEY

as the kindest of friends and the most gia Island. “I wanted to go to the place All striving done and “life’s set prize”
attained:
honorable of men. He had the most Henry so loved,” Joanna said. They Not geographic goals, but greater far
substance of any man I have ever met.” disembarked on the eastern shore of The pinnacles of leadership you gained.
Max rose to speak. Tall and thin, with the island, where, beneath towering
curly black hair and intense brown eyes, glaciers, there was a small wooden Joanna and her children dug a
he was as striking a man as his father chapel built in 1913 by whalers from hole and buried Worsley’s ashes in the
had been. Max recited the poem that Norway. Joanna and her children held frozen earth. 
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 75
76 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALL

f his students could learn to think
I well, to enjoy reading books, some
part of them would be uncaged.
That was what Gordon Hauser told
himself, and what he told them, too.
But there were days, like when a
woman walked into the prison class-
room and flung boiling sugar water
into the face of another woman, when
he did not believe it. There were days
when it seemed as though the real
purpose of the work he was doing was
to destroy his own life by trying to
teach people who wanted to burn each
other’s faces off. The guards made
everything more difficult, with their
contempt for the women and their
hostility toward free-world staff like
Gordon. The guards had been forced
to undergo sensitivity training and
were furious about it. “It’s because you
cunts cry and demand explanations,”
they said. “Everything with you bitches
is why, why, why.” They all reminisced
about better times, when they had
worked in men’s facilities, where they’d
observed high-blood-volume stab-
bings on closed-circuit monitors from
the safety of the watch office, and dealt
with prisoners who lived by strictly
self-enforced convict codes. Female
prisoners bickered with the guards and
contested everything, and the guards
seemed to find this more treacherous
than having to subdue riots. No guard
wanted to work in a women’s prison.
Gordon had not understood this until
he got to Stanville Women’s Correc-
tional Facility, which he’d chosen be-
cause working with women prisoners
seemed less threatening to him than
working with men.
His first placement had been with
juveniles in San Francisco. He’d done
that for six months, but it was too de-
pressing. Kids in cages telling him sto-
ries about their foster homes, about
sexual abuse, all kinds of abuse. Most
didn’t have parents but some did. Gor-
FICTION
STANVILLE
B Y R AC H E L K U S H N E R
don saw them in the court’s waiting
area, before he passed through a sally
port to get to his classroom: people
with holes in their sweatpants, T-shirts
emblazoned with random logos, inad-
equate shoes—poor people with cha-
otic lives. Couldn’t the juvenile judges
understand, from looking at the guard-
ians, that the kids didn’t stand any kind
of fair chance?
There were notices instructing ju-
veniles to pull up their pants, because
to wear them low was disrespectful.
One of Gordon’s students was always
getting into trouble for wearing his
pants too low, a big white boy whose
eyes were set close together in the cen-
ter of his face. “You talk like you’re
black,” a black kid had said to him,
“but you look like you’re retarded.” “No
Bare Feet,” a sign at the building en-
trance warned. As if someone would
try to walk into a detention center and
court, a municipal building on a bleak,
windy corner, far from the beach, with-
out shoes. Another sign: “No Tank
Tops.” Under it, typically, an entire
three-generation family, all in tank tops,
flesh spilling out. What was it about
shoulders? Why did law enforcement
fear them?
hen you Google the town of
W Stanville, faces pop up: mug
shots. After the mug shots, an article
that cites Stanville as having the high-
est percentage of minimum-wage
workers in the state. Stanville’s water
is poisoned. The air is bad. Most of
the old businesses are boarded up.
There are dollar stores, gas stations
that serve as liquor outlets, and coin-op
laundromats. People without cars walk
the main boulevard in the hottest part
of the day, when it’s a hundred and
thirteen degrees outside. There are
no sidewalks, so they amble along in
the gutters, scooting empty shopping
carts, piercing the dead zone of late
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 77
afternoon with a loose metallic rattle.
Gordon found a place to rent sight
unseen, a cabin up the mountain from
Stanville proper, in the western Sierra
foothills. The cabin was a single room
with a woodstove. It would be his Tho-
reau year, he wrote to his friend Alex,
sending him the realty link.
“Your Kaczynski year,” Alex wrote
back, after looking at the photos of the
cabin.
“True, both lived in one-room huts,”
Gordon responded. “But I don’t see
much connection between them.”
“Reverence of nature, self-reliance.
K was even a reader of Walden,” Alex
wrote. “It’s on the list of books from
his cabin. Also R. W. B. Lewis, your
idol.”
“Aren’t you kind of oversimplifying?”
“Yes. But also: both died virgins.”
“Kaczynski’s not dead, Alex,” Gor-
don wrote back.
“You know what I mean.”
Over goodbye beers at their bar on
Shattuck Avenue, Alex gave Gordon,
as a kind of joke, a Ted Kaczynski reader.
Gordon had looked at the manifesto.
Everyone had. The guy had once been
an assistant professor at Berkeley.
They toasted Gordon’s departure.
“To my rustication,” Gordon said.
“Isn’t that when they boot you from
Oxford?”
“They just send you down to the
country for a while.”
is mountain place also had a poi-
H soned water supply, but not from
agriculture. There was naturally occur-
ring uranium, so you had to bring in
bottled water. He liked the cabin. It
smelled of fresh-planed pine. It was
logical in its compactness. Cozy, even.
It was up on stilts, on a steep hill with
few neighbors, and had an expansive
view of the valley.
He spent the week before the new job
started unpacking his meagre belongings

“ Your motivation is that you’re a dog and it’s food.”
• •
and chopping wood. Went for walks.
Nights, he fed logs to his stove and read.
Ted Kaczynski, Gordon learned, ate
mostly rabbits. Squirrels, Ted reported,
didn’t seem to like bad weather. His
diaries were mostly concerned with
how he lived and what he saw happen-
ing in the wilderness around him, and
Gordon acknowledged that compar-
ing him to Thoreau was not as crude
as he’d first thought. But Kaczynski
would never have written this: “Through
our own recovered innocence we dis-
cern the innocence of our neighbors.”
Gordon’s new neighbors were all
white, Christian, and conservative. Peo-
ple who tinkered with trucks and dirt
bikes and made assumptions about
Gordon that he did nothing to dispel,
because he knew that those assump-
tions would work in his favor if he
needed their help. It snowed up there.
Roads closed, cutting off access to sup-
plies. Trees fell and knocked down
power lines. Gordon did not enjoy the
grinding zing of dirt bikes’ two-stroke
motors, which echoed down the val-
ley on weekends, but that was the coun-
try: not a pure and untrammelled world
of native wildlife and songbird calls
but people who cleared the trees off
78 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
their property with chainsaws and cut
paths through the woods for moto-
cross courses and snowmobiling. Gor-
don withheld judgment. These people
knew much more than he did about
how to live in the mountains. How to
survive winter and forest fires and mud
flows from spring rains. How to prop-
erly stack wood, something Gordon’s
neighbor from down the hill had pa-
tiently showed him, after his two cords
of chunk wood were dumped in the
driveway by a guy named Beaver, who
was missing most of his fingers. Gor-
don learned to split logs. Part 1 of his
rustication.
• “What movie are they going to?”
ne morning, Sergeant McKinn-
O ley yelled through the door that
my G.E.D. prep session was that
afternoon.
“When staff come back here after
lunch I want no monkey business,
Hall.”
I had not signed up for the G.E.D.,
which was the only form of education
offered at Stanville. I had graduated
from high school. I was not a bad stu-
dent when I made the effort. But after
he walked away my cellmate, Sammy,
said, “Don’t correct, because you never
know. Their wrong might be your right.”
That afternoon, I was taken from
the cell. It felt like freedom to be
chained and hustled down a hallway
after weeks of confinement in admin-
istrative segregation. I was placed in a
birdcage in the program office and left
to wait, listening to the stutter and
clank from the sewing machines on
death row.
“You study real good, Hall. You prove
everybody wrong. Show the world you
ain’t all bad.”
McKinnley clomped down the hall
in his huge boots.
Ihavefguards
I’d understood, then, how much
hated civilian staff, I might
been nicer to G. Hauser, which
was the name on the I.D. pinned to
the G.E.D. instructor’s shirt. The guy
sat down in a chair next to my bird-
cage with a stack of worksheets. He
was about my age or a little older, with
a non-ironic mustache and ugly run-
ning shoes.
“Let’s start with something sim-
ple.” He read the first question on the
math worksheet. “Four plus three
equals (a) eight, (b) seven, (c) none
of the above.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Is that (a) eight, (b) seven, or (c)
none of the above? It sometimes helps
to use your fingers, if you need to count
it out.”
“It’s seven,” I said. “I think we can
move to something more challenging.”
He flipped pages. “All right, how
about a word problem? If there are
five children and two mothers and one
cousin going to the movies, how many
tickets do they need? (a) seven, (b)
eight, (c) none of the above.”
“That’s the wonderful thing about
math: it doesn’t matter. You can count
without knowing the details.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine these
people without seeing who they are,
and knowing what movie they’re
going to.”
He nodded, like my response was
reasonable, not at all a problem.
“Maybe we got a little ahead of our-
selves. How about we make up a ques-
tion?” he said. “Or, rather, we take the
question and simplify it.”
 This guy had the patience of a
genuine idiot.
“There are three adults and five
children: how many tickets do they
need?”
There was no sarcasm in his voice.
G. Hauser was so determined to work
with whoever he thought I was that I
could not play along.
“You didn’t say if they let kids in
free, so how can I know how many
tickets they need? And, depending
on what kind of people they are, what
theatre this is—are they ghetto or
are they squares like you? Because
maybe they let one of the adults,
like that cousin, in through an emer-
gency side door, after they pay for
two tickets.”
I saw the plush stained carpet of
the multiplex out by the Oakland air-
port, the one where a cousin would
sneak in through the emergency exit
instead of paying. It’s probably gone,
like all the other theatres I used to
know. The Strand on Market, where,
as kids, Eva and I drank Ripple wine
with grownups. The Serra, which
showed “Rocky Horror.” The Surf,
out by the beach, where I went with
my mother when I was young.
“They’re squares,” G. Hauser said.
“Like me.”
“The kids all have to have tickets?”
He nodded.
“The answer is eight.”
“Excellent,” he said.
“You just congratulated a twenty-
nine-year-old woman for adding three
and five.”
“I have to start somewhere.”
“What makes you think I can’t
count?”
“There are women here with innu-
meracy. Who have trouble with basic
addition. I can give you a G.E.D. prac-
tice test, and, if you’re confident you’ll
pass, I’ll schedule you to take it.”
“I don’t need a G.E.D.,” I said. “I’m
here because I was called out here by
mistake.”
“You might think you don’t need a
degree, but in the future, when you are
facing your release, you’ll be glad to
have it.”
“I’m not getting out,” I said.
He went into a calm and semi-
robotic spiel about people with life
sentences and the numerous long-
termer programs for which I’d be
eligible with a G.E.D. I said I’d think
about it and was taken back to the cell.
hen he was my boyfriend, Jimmy
W Darling used to do math with my
son, Jackson, for fun. It started with a les-
son about the history of counting. Jimmy
drew a circle on a piece of paper. “This is
a stable where a farmer keeps his ani-
mals,” Jimmy said. He drew three circles
for the animals. “What kind of animals?”
Jackson asked. I guess we both liked to
know the irrelevant information. “Sheep,
how about?” Jimmy said. “The farmer has
three sheep, and they each have a name:
Sally, Tim, and Joe. Every morning, the
farmer lets the sheep out to graze. In the
evening, he herds them back into the pen.
Since there are only three, he can easily
go over the list of their names and confirm
that Sally, Tim, and Joe are all safely back
in their enclosure for the night, where
they won’t be eaten by wolves. But let’s
say the farmer has ten sheep, instead of
three. If he names each one, he has to re-
member ten names when they return. He
has to recognize ten sheep. Each name
goes with a specific sheep. If Sally is the
pregnant sheep, then he can recognize
her by her broad belly and check her name
off when she comes back from grazing.
But let’s say the farmer has thirty sheep.
Too many to name, right? So he gets a
basket of rocks, exactly enough so that he
has one rock for each sheep. He takes a
rock out of the basket for every animal
that leaves the enclosure in the morning.
As each one returns in the evening, he
puts a rock in the basket. When all the
rocks have been put back into the basket,
he knows that all his sheep are safely home.
The sheep don’t need names anymore.
The farmer just has to know how many
there are.” He explained to Jackson that
numbers started with counting and count-
ing started with names. It was like prison—
from a name to a number. Except my
number was more like a name than the
rock that went with the sheep, because
the rock could go with any sheep, and my
number went only with me.
hen they escorted us out for the
W weekly yard time, we could see
down into the caged area of death row.
Sammy hollered from the catwalk,
“Candy Peña, I love you! Betty La-
France, I love you!”
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 79
Candy looked up. Her face dimpled
into a sad smile. They were down there
on their sewing machines, stitching a
seam on burlap, then moving the fab-
ric ninety degrees, another seam, turn-
ing the material again to run a third
seam. Each piece was then tossed on
a pile. I didn’t see Betty, who often re-
fused to work and lost her privileges.
They sewed sandbags on death row.
Nothing else. If you see a pile of sand-
bags along the side of a California road,
know that they have been touched by
the hands of our celebrities.
Payment is five cents an hour, minus
fifty-five per cent in restitution. The
work is repetitive and doesn’t offer even
the satisfaction of making a single
finished thing. The bags still have to
be filled. Who completes the bags? My
guess is men. Men fill them with sand
and close up the tops.
I spotted the G.E.D. teacher through
the razor wire around our concrete ad-
seg yard. He was on a path going into
the ad-seg housing block. I waved. He
called through the barbed coils. “Have
you given any more thought to whether
you want to work toward the G.E.D.?”
I said I had not.
“Let the administration know if you
want to take the test. The questions
were easy for you, and that’s a good in-
dicator. Though I didn’t give you a read-
ing assessment.”
“I know how to read,” I told him.
“And I graduated from high school.”
He nodded. “I didn’t realize. I’d be
happy to get you some reading mate-
rial, if you’d like.”
Months later, when I was finally out
of ad seg and mainlined to general pop-
ulation, I saw him again. I had got into
a scuffle in work exchange, where they
said I was setting off the metal detec-
tor and went through all my stuff. They
even tore apart the baloney sandwich
in the sack lunch they gave us outside
chow hall, to take to work. I had to
strip out in the little curtained area,
and I was boiling with anger by the
time I left. But, when I saw G. Hauser,
something flipped in me, a switch. I
called out a friendly hello. “Hey,” I said,
“I was wondering if I’d run into you.”
I had forgotten all about him. I had
not thought of him once.
“I’m on C yard,” I said, “and I’ve
been thinking about your offer to get
me some reading material. That would
be great.”
He was excited, like I was doing
him a favor by asking for one myself.
We chatted, and, in his growing ex-
citement, he said, “Why don’t you take
my class?”
“All they teach here is G.E.D. prep.
Which is the education level of our
guards.”
“Yeah.” He laughed quickly, covertly.
“But, since it’s the only thing offered,
I structure it around reading. We read
and talk about books. Try it out. I’d
love to have you join us.” He told me
how to sign up.
• of the grounds, but the housing units
Idonnthethesometimes
early morning, on his way down
mountain toward Stanville, Gor-
glimpsed gray foxes,
their lustrous tails trailing after them,
as he followed the curves of the wind-
ing road, passing huge drought-desic-
cated live oaks, their jagged little leaves
coated in dust, and banks of rust-red
buckeye and smoke-green manzanita.
On the straightaway toward the brown
basin, the scenery changed to oil pipe-
line and derricks, whose axles wound
and wound. After the derricks was a
shaggy orange grove, and one farm-
house with two palm trees in front,
where the road split. On the valley floor,
the temperature was twenty degrees
“Do you think seventy-eight per cent water is too juicy?”
hotter and the air heavy with the smell
of fertilizer. There were no more or-
anges, no oil derricks, just power lines
and almond groves in huge geometric
parcels all the way to the prison.
Gordon went through three elec-
tronic sally ports to get to his class-
room, which was in a windowless trailer
near the vocational workshops and the
central kitchen. From the kitchen
pumped a constant smell of rancid
grease, overpowered only by the drift
of solvents from the auto-body shop,
where trucks—guards’ private vehi-
cles—were lined up for super-discounted
paint jobs by prisoners.
He had clearance to enter this part
and the yards were off limits to him,
with the exception of one cell block on
A yard, 504, where he worked with peo-
ple from death row and administrative
segregation. Gordon had dreaded death
row but found that it didn’t quite con-
form to his nightmares. It was auto-
mated and modern, each tiny cell with
a white-painted steel door and a small
safety-glass window. There were twelve
women, one to a cell, and a cramped
alley with tables and sewing machines
surrounded by meshed cage. A guard
led Gordon in to meet with students
one-on-one, while others knitted or
made hook rugs at nearby tables. Betty
LaFrance, who was not one of Gor-
don’s students but always insisted on
speaking to him, brought a radio from
her cell and played elevator music as
she crafted. The women were allowed
to come and go from their cells, which
smelled of Renuzit air freshener and
were blanketed in handmade afghans,
for privacy and probably so as to make
use of these afghans, which they churned
out on the oily axle of time.
Administrative segregation, on the
floor above death row, had no common
area, and there was no interaction among
the women except yelling. Gordon waited
in a small office as a student clink-jangled
down the hall in her restraints and was
put in a cage for the lesson with him.
That was where he’d first met Romy
Hall, who was in his class now. What
he had noticed about her was that she
looked him in the eye. Many of the
women had a way of looking at his shoul-
der or past him. Their eyes rolled every
which way to avoid his. Also, she was
attractive, despite the conditions. Wide-
set greenish eyes. A mouth with a Cu-
pid’s bow—was that what it was called?—
an upper lip that swoop-de-swooped. A
pretty mouth that said, Trust this face.
She spelled well, read with good com-
prehension. He wasn’t looking for a good
speller. He wasn’t looking for anything
among the women in Stanville.
Gordon passed out photocopied sec-
tions of books—“Julie of the Wolves,”
Laura Ingalls Wilder. He didn’t say
they were children’s books; he kept it
simple, since many of the women had
only an elementary-school education.
They wrote in bubble letters, like ad-
olescent girls. Even London—whose
nickname was Conan and who looked
like a man—wrote in bubble letters.
London was clever, it was obvious.
Never did the reading but made the
others laugh, which was something.
“Is ‘bosom’ plural?” London asked.
“Depends on whose, maybe,” some-
one said.
“The bosom of Jones. Sounds like
an adventure film. Lieutenant Jones
and the Bosom of Doom.”
Geronima Campos, an old Native
American woman, drew in her sketch-
book all through class time. Gordon
wondered if maybe she couldn’t read
or write. He asked her what she drew.
Portraits, she told him. She opened
her sketchbook to show him. Each page
had an image and, under it, a name.
She could write. But the images were
not faces. They were wild streaks of
color. “This is you,” she said, and showed
him a scribble of black lines with a
staining splotch of blue ink.
When the class discussed a chapter
of “The Red Pony,” by John Stein-
beck—the third chapter, “The Prom-
ise,” about Nellie the pregnant mare—
one woman raised her hand and said
that, when she’d delivered, her womb
was heart-shaped, “in two parts,” she
said, “just like a horse’s, and even the
doctor confirmed it.”
They read from the chapter out
loud. At the mention of pigs, a stu-
dent interjected that her cousin had
written to her from lockup in Ari-
zona, where they put a pig in the gas
chamber one Sunday a month, to test
the machine.
Gordon tried to steer the discussion
back to the book. What was the prom-
ise that Billy Buck had made?
Romy Hall raised her hand. She
said that Billy Buck had promised the
boy, Jody, a healthy foal. Earlier, Billy
Buck had said that he would look after
the red pony, and the pony had died.
This new promise was Billy Buck’s
chance to be a man of his word, by de-
livering the foal safely.
“Did he keep it?” Gordon asked.
She said that that was the trick of
the story. Technically, yes, but in order
to deliver the foal he had to kill the
mare. He smashed its skull with a ham-
mer, and that was a bullshit way to
keep a promise. The mare could have
had other foals that weren’t breach, but
she had to die because some cowboy
was hung up on himself as a man of
his word.
“It’s O.K. to make a promise,” London
said to Gordon, as if summarizing for the
teacher how life actually worked, “but it’s
not always a good idea to keep one.”
• and left without paying. It was differ-
ike one of the lucky women who
L have family or outside help, I got
called to receiving and release to pick
up a package. G. Hauser had got
me two books: “I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings” and “To Kill a
Mockingbird.”
“That’s what he got you?” Sammy
said, stifling a laugh. “Even I read
those already.” I felt sad and a little
protective of the teacher for not
knowing better. I planned on keep-
ing them, even if I didn’t especially
want to read them. They were a link
to the outside world. But a woman
in my unit offered me shampoo and
conditioner in exchange for both.
The state gives us indigents only
gritty powdered soap for body and
hair. Being able to properly wash and
condition my hair made
me feel happy, at least
for an evening, in a way
I hadn’t since I was ar-
rested, three years before.
I had been in Haus-
er’s class for a couple of
weeks when he stopped
me afterward and asked
if I’d enjoyed the books.
“I enjoyed reading
them,” I said, “when I was fourteen.”
“God, I’m sorry. That’s embarrassing.”
“It’s O.K. You just don’t know me.”
He got me more books. One, called
“Pick-Up,” was about two drunks in
San Francisco in the nineteen-fifties.
I started reading it and could not stop.
When I finished it, I read it again.
Scenes came into view for me, even
though the character in the book
doesn’t name many locations besides
Civic Center, and Powell and Market,
where the cable car turns around.
When I was a kid, there was a large
Woolworth’s at Powell and Market
that had a wig department. Eva and
I would go in and pretend we were
wig shopping. The old ladies who
worked there helped us pin our hair
up in special nets and fitted us with
grand and curly hairdos. We laughed
and played around in the mirrors,
sneaked makeup and hair products
into our purses, and took pictures in
the photo booth inside the store.
Sometimes we went to Zim’s on Van
Ness afterward, ordered a lot of food,
ent from dining and dashing at the
more familiar Zim’s, on Taraval. We
felt sophisticated downtown. The
whole long era of my childhood I ran
around like a street urchin, no more
rooted than the teen-agers on the post-
ers in the Greyhound station on Sixth
Street. Tall figures in silhouette, like
long shadows, and the words “Run-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 81
aways, Call for Help.” A hotline num-
ber. My childhood was the era of the
hotline. But we never called any, ex-
cept as a prank.
I told Hauser I’d read “Pick-Up.” He
asked what I thought.
“That it was good and bad at the
same time.”
“I know what you mean. The end
is a shock, right? But it makes you
want to reread the book,
to see if there were ear-
lier clues.”
I told him I’d done
that. And that it was good
to read a book about San
Francisco, that I was from
there.
“Oh, me, too,” he said.
He didn’t seem like it
to me, and I said so.
“I mean, near there. Just across the
Bay, Contra Costa County.” He named
the town, but I hadn’t heard of it.
“It’s an armpit behind an oil refinery.
It’s not glamorous, like the city.”
I said that I hated San Francisco,
that there was evil coming out of the
ground there, but that I liked “Pick-Up”
because it reminded me of things
about the city that I missed.
He had got me two other books,
“Factotum” and “Jesus’ Son.” I would
read those next, I told him.
I said that I knew about the Jesus
book because I’d seen the movie.
Which was good, except that the peo-
ple in it were supposed to be living
in the seventies. “The girl in it—she’s
got her midriff showing, and she wears
a leather jacket with a fur collar like
it’s San Francisco in the nineties.”
“But those people you’re describ-
ing—they’re all borrowing from the
seventies to begin with.”
It was true. I told him how Jimmy
Darling used to go to this bookstore
in the Tenderloin to buy seventies-era
copies of Playboy, which they had in
stacks on the floor in the back. An
old man once tapped Jimmy on the
shoulder and whispered, “Sonny, they
have the new ones up here,” nodding
in the direction of the plastic-sleeved
monthlies Busty and Barely Legal,
which were on display at the front
of the store.
“And Jimmy is—”
 “My fiancé. And a teacher at the
San Francisco Art Institute.”
“Are you . . . still engaged?”
“He’s dead,” I said.
• do favors for others, so that he wasn’t
ne evening, as class ended, Romy
O Hall hovered. Gordon started col-
lecting papers from an awkward posi-
tion, on the far side of his own desk, in
order to create more distance
between them.
She told him many
things about herself in the
span of about five minutes.
She spoke them in a con-
trolled voice. It seemed to
Gordon that she had been
saving it up. He kept step-
ping back, to be farther from
her, and she kept stepping
toward him, and he was not going to
be manipulated. One woman had tried
to bribe him to smuggle in cell phones
for her, another tobacco. Staff and guards
alike were involved in these schemes.
Gordon wanted no part.
She was a lifer, she told him, and the
mother of a young boy. She apologized
for troubling him. Said she woke up de-
pressed. Could feel the fog in her cell,
even without a window, and said the
dampness of it reminded her of home.
She wanted him to call a telephone
number to find out where her kid was.
She had it written down and this was
exactly the kind of thing he’d been
backing away from, as she moved to-
ward him. Just because he had bought
her books or found her pretty, just be-
cause he thought about her some-
times, that didn’t mean he was look-
ing for family dramas.
he assistance he gave on his own,
T and against the rules, had all
started with Candy Peña on death row,
where they were knitting baby blan-
kets that would go to a Christian char-
ity in Stanville. Candy had cried like
a child because she had no more yarn
and no money and so she couldn’t help
the babies.
He knew that he could bring in yarn.
They almost never looked in his bag,
C with the yarn Gordon had brought
her. The blankets were collected by a
and it would set off no alarm. When
he delivered it to Candy, she melted in
gratitude, which made him feel ob-
scene. Not because it was against the
82 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
rules but because it had been almost
no trouble and yet she cried and said
that no one had ever done anything so
nice for her, not once in her whole life.
The only remedy seemed to be to
Candy’s saint—to neutralize the act of
giving by giving more.
He bought seeds for a student in
his class who gardened. She had given
Gordon fresh mint as a
present, and when he
asked her where she’d
got it, she said it had rid-
den into the prison on
reclaimed lumber, four-
by-twelves they were
using for construction.
She’d replanted it, wa-
tered it. She told him she
watched the sky and
waited for birds to excrete seeds, and
germinated them secretly in wet paper
towels. The rules were that no plants
were to be grown in the yards. But the
captain on D yard, where the gardener
lived, let her have her plants. She was
a lifer. Gordon gave her a seed packet
of California poppies. She put her hands
to her face to hide her tears. “This is a
God shot,” she said. “Thank you for
this God shot.” Which started the cycle
over again, the discomfort, the outsized
gratitude. The packet of seeds had cost
him eighty-nine cents.
And so he had been sending books
to Romy Hall. You go on Amazon.
Click a button. What was twenty bucks
to him, if spending it meant several
weeks of freedom of thought for some-
one in prison? But looking into her
personal life in the outside world, call-
ing a number on her behalf: that was
different. It was honest-to-God med-
dling, not just in her life but in his
own, too.
He put the paper she had given him
on his coffee table. A phone number
and the name of her child. He did not
call and, to his relief, or his mixed re-
lief, she did not ask him about it.
andy Peña made baby blankets
unit officer and placed in the office of
receiving and release. Whenever Gor-
don passed the office he saw them there,
in a giant leaf bag, the colors of the
yarn that he had chosen peeking out,
garish and sad. One day, he asked the
officer in R. and R. about their status.
The officer was a scalded blonde with
a tight ponytail, brusque, ex-military.
She snorted. “These? Nobody wants
’em. I keep forgetting to tell the por-
ters to take them out to the trash.”
That same officer supervised fam-
ily visits, when inmates got thirty-six
hours in the prison’s version of an apart-
ment, with blood relatives.
Blood relatives. It sounded so vio-
lent. Or was Gordon losing perspec-
tive, everything warped by what was
around him?
Was it difficult to watch them say good-
bye? Gordon had asked the R. and R.
officer, before he knew better. He had
seen, on his way past, small children
clinging to their mothers and crying
hysterically. Someone had painted a
lavender hopscotch pattern on the
walkway outside the family units.
“You grow a thick skin,” the officer
said, her mouth pulled into a frown, as
if to demonstrate: this is thick skin.
“Especially when you know it’s the
mother’s own fault.”
It would have been better if the
baby blankets had gone into the trash.
Instead, one of the unit cops redis-
tributed them to the women on death
row who had made them. The next
time Gordon was there, Candy Peña
showed him how she’d patched to-
gether two baby blankets into a large
vest, a sort of poncho, in soft, gauzy
blue and yellow. She held it up. “I
hope it fits?”
“Knit” was the past tense of “knit.”
And no one wanted what Candy Peña
knit, not even Gordon, who put the
vest in a paper bag deep in the trunk
of his car and tried to forget about it.
•
auser had made it pretty obvious
H that he liked me. Everyone in class
knew. It became a joke, Conan hum-
ming “Here Comes the Bride” as I
walked into the classroom trailer, sweaty
and coated in wood-shop dust.
Sammy went into overdrive about
Hauser’s crush on me when I told her
I had given him a number to call.
Sammy was a walking historian of every
person who had faced every adversity
in prison, and could produce examples
of all the cases where staff, or even teacher,” Sammy said. “Most of them best rationalized in the context of a
guards, had stepped in and raised the don’t get involved with prisoners. Too beautiful autumn walk. Gordon walked
children of imprisoned women. Hauser jaded. But he is open.” whenever he could, up logging paths,
was going to adopt Jackson, she de- Hauser had a lost quality. He didn’t through grazing meadows that were
cided. She went on about it, and she seem to have much happening outside federal land and went on for miles. On
meant well, but it didn’t comfort me. work. Not that he discussed his life a cow trail above his cabin, he found a
I didn’t think she was reading things with us. At Stanville, he was an odd- paper-wasp nest. It looked like a half-
right. This was a normal and nice ball to the rest of the staff. The guards crushed helmet lying on the path. Gor-
college-educated guy who probably made fun of him, mostly as a way to don carried it inside and placed it on
separated bottles and cans from the make fun of us. Go teach those dumb his table, this grand and mysterious,
rest of his trash. He wasn’t going to bitches to read, Mr. Hauser. Teach those half-deflated, torn-open thing.
adopt my kid. He’d marry a nice girl cows two plus two. They thought what After walking, he’d fix dinner, a can
like him who also recycled, and they’d he spent his life doing was pointless, of soup, the staple of his one-room life,
have children together, their own. not a worthy endeavor like watching and then he’d go online, where he had
But, in truth, I had begun to live us on security monitors or masturbat- developed a bad habit. He had started
for his G.E.D. class, even if I didn’t ing in a guard tower. running their names, as the women
admit it. I was determined to work on Candy Peña bragged to whoever would call it. To run someone’s name
him for Jackson’s sake, but I also was on her air vent that Hauser was was to have a contact on the outside
worked on him for a less delusional her boyfriend, that he got her “a whole who could Google the person or ask
reason. He knew places I knew. When grip” of knitting supplies. Anything she around. What the women needed to
I talked to him, I became a person wanted, she said. She should have confirm, most often, was: Had their
from a place. I could roam neighbor- known you don’t brag about something cellmate, unit mate, work partner,
hoods, visit my apartment in the Ten- like that. You keep it to yourself and prayer-group associate, friend, fuck-
derloin with the Murphy bed, my you cultivate it. friend, or enemy, had that person hurt
happy yellow Formica table, and above a child or turned state’s evidence? Those
it, the movie poster of Steve McQueen • were the two types that needed to be
in “Bullitt.”
Hauser, too, knew the mechanical
museum at Ocean Beach. “ ‘See Susie
Ithatnofthey
his essay celebrating the wonder
wild apples, Thoreau concedes
taste good only out-of-doors.
verified, baby killers and snitches.
Gordon’s search was more open-
ended. He didn’t know what he was
Dance the Can-Can,’ ” he said, as Even a saunterer, Thoreau says, would searching for. He hoped that some equi-
proof. The Camera Obscura, where a not tolerate a saunterer’s apple at a librium could be established from the
large dish showed the froth of the kitchen table. Their bitter flavor was process of obtaining facts. He also
waves. A huge sign that announced
“Playland,” but no Playland around.
Only the sun-bleached sign next to a
fake cliff, man-made, which people
said had been put there to trick the
Japanese during the war.
“There’s a pizza place up Irving,”
Hauser said. “They spin the dough in
the windows.”
I saw everything. The stretching
floury disks that collapsed on the
hands of the dough-makers in their
chef ’s hats, fists working the disks
around, dough growing in girth, orbit,
then back up in the air. I saw the huge
wreath of flowers that hung from the
closed entrance one morning, an-
nouncing the death of the old man,
the pizza patriarch. I’d never seen a
wreath that large. I was eight or nine.
Not yet into trouble.
I saw the shining lid of the ocean
from Irving Street, the way it rose, on
a clear day, like something that
breathed, that was alive, down at the
end of the avenues.
“You’ve got something with that “Do you want to watch another episode or heal our relationship?”

“Granted, it would save countless lives—but to what end?”
• •
sensed that this thing about facts and
equilibrium was a lie he told himself
to justify going after squalid details
that were none of his business.
You were not supposed to ask what
people had been convicted of. Asking
was met with an opprobrium so deep
it seemed also to bar speculating, even
privately. You weren’t supposed to
wonder about the facts that had de-
termined people’s lives. He had in his
mind something that Nietzsche had
said about truth. That each man is
entitled to as much of it as he can
bear. Maybe Gordon was not seeking
truth but trying to learn his own lim-
its for tolerating it. There were some
names he did not type.
The first prisoner he looked up was
Sanchez—Flora Martina Sanchez—
whom the others called Button. Her
case was all over the Internet. Sanchez
and two other teen-agers had assaulted
a Chinese college student near the
U.S.C. campus, in an attempted rob-
bery. All three kids mentioned in their
confessions that the victim had cried
in a foreign language as they hit him
with a baseball bat.
When they tried to rob the stu-
dent, they did not know what they
were doing—Gordon was sure of this
84 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
as he read. When they killed the stu-
dent, they knew even less. When they
were picked up separately, the morn-
ing after, and brought in for question-
ing, and spoke freely, but each in
self-interest, to homicide detectives,
with no parents present and no law-
yers, they did not know what they
were doing. They all got life without
parole. Button was in prison and would
die there, a lost little girl who looked
twelve years old. Once, when Sanchez
smiled as Gordon praised her in class,
he’d seen her young essence. It was so
wanting and bright that he’d had to
look away.
Reading about Sanchez’s case, Gor-
don felt as if he were trying to cross
an eight-lane freeway on foot. He had
his argument almost worked out, about
why she was a victim, when he found
an article that quoted a Youth Author-
ity counsellor, who testified that he’d
overheard Sanchez talking about the
crime. “We didn’t even get anything
off the Nip,” Sanchez had said.
Those were the worst nights. In the
light of day, his mood improved. As he
drove the roads that wound down to
Stanville, the hillside grasses green-
tipped and mohair soft, heart-shaped
clots of mistletoe clustered in the
branches of the oak trees, he knew that
he could not judge. I cannot judge, be-
cause I do not know.
Gordon was familiar, from his time
at college and in graduate school, with
rich kids. If you grew up rich, you
played a musical instrument—violin
or piano. You were on the debate team.
Preferred a certain brand of jeans
cuffed just so. Maybe you puffed a
ciggie or smoked bowls with your
friends in your dad’s Lexus, then were
late to your SAT tutorial. But if you
were from Richmond, or East Oak-
land, or, like Sanchez, South L.A.,
you were probably trained practically
from birth to represent your neigh-
borhood, your gang, to have pride, to
be hard. Maybe you had a lot of sib-
lings to watch and possibly you knew
almost nobody who had finished
school or worked a stable job. People
from your family were in prison, whole
swaths of your community, and it was
part of life to eventually go there. So
you were born fucked. But, like the
rich kids, you, too, wanted to have fun
on Saturday night.
“No Tank Tops,” the sign at Youth
Guidance had said. Because it was pre-
sumed the parents didn’t know better
than to show up to court looking like
hell. The sign might as well have said
“Your Poverty Reeks.”
HHeenames.
kept looking, searched other
knew, at a certain point, that he
was doing it to forestall searching for
the person he was most curious about,
and most hesitant to betray.
“Did you ever see the green flash,”
she asked him after class, “down at
Ocean Beach?”
He had not, he told her. She ex-
plained that it was an optical effect at
sunset, when rays from the top of the
sinking sun turned green. She had never
seen it, either, she said.
“Are you sure it isn’t a story cooked
up by the Irish drunks who live out
there?”
She laughed. They were standing
outside the school trailer. It was a June
evening when the sun set late. The
light was gold, from haze, and slant-
ing into her eyes.
Looking at someone who is looking
at you is a drug as strong as any other.
 “Move it, Hall!” an officer yelled.
It was time for evening count. “Move
your ass now! ”
He researched the green flash of a
setting sun. It existed. There were Web
sites with lengthy explanations of the
physics of light. But he did not type
the three words of her name. Instead,
he kept on with the others.
Of Candy Peña, Gordon learned
that her mother had worked conces-
sions at Disneyland in Anaheim.
Candy Peña had worked at a Mc-
Donald’s. Her manager testified for
the defense that she had never given
him any problems. The mother of
Candy’s murder victim, a little girl,
had cheered in the courtroom when
the death-penalty verdict was an-
nounced. And then Gordon found
another quote from the same woman,
who said that she felt for Candy Peña’s
mother, knowing herself what it was
like to lose a child.
He found Betty LaFrance on a
prison pen-pal site.
“Single and ready to mingle, an
old-fashioned gal who likes cham-
pagne, yachts, gambling, fast cars,
VERY expensive thrills. Can you
afford me? Write to find out.”
There was a list of standard ques-
tions that Betty LaFrance was obliged
to answer on the site, for its users.
“Do you mind relocating?” (No).
“Are you serving a life sentence?”
(No).
But at the bottom, under “On death
row?,” she’d had to check (Yes).
his gallery of people. Every name
T he could think of, to avoid typing
her name.
Geronima Campos, who had
sketched Gordon’s portrait, had ap-
parently dropped her husband’s torso
off a bridge somewhere in the Inland
Empire.
Geronima was now involved with
a peer-counselling group and taught
human-rights law to any prisoner who
wanted to learn it. She had a flawless
disciplinary record. She had gone up
for parole eight times and been denied
every time, despite her record of ser-
vice and her support from people on
the outside. There was an Internet cam-
paign page, to advocate for Geronima’s
parole. Those who signed the petition
included their reasons for doing so:
Geronima has done her time.
She is no longer a threat to society.
Free Geronima.
She is a survivor of spousal abuse.
Geronima is an indigenous elder lesbian
 who is being unjustly held at Stanville
 Correctional Facility.
She is needed in her community.
She has served her time.
She had indeed served her time. She
had done the time the court had given
her. It was time for Geronima to go
home. But every time she went before
the parole board—which Gordon pic-
tured as a row of Phyllis Schlaflys, all
frowning, with stiff hair, industrial panty
hose, and little rippling American-flag
pins like the ones Republican candi-
dates wore for political debates—Geron-
ima told them that she was innocent.
Her supporters said she’d done her time
and was no longer a threat. But when
she faced the parole board she said, “I’m
innocent.” It made no sense. But Gor-
don understood why she said it.
Whatever space Geronima might have
needed to find a way to face what she had
done was not provided in prison. Prison
was a place where you had to be strong to
get through each day. If you thought about
some awful act you’d committed, every
day, in graphic detail, enough to prove to
a parole board that you had insight, the
proverbial insight they wanted, needed,
in order to let you go home, you might
lose your mind. To stay sane, that was the
thing. To stay sane, you formed a version
of yourself that you could believe in.
And if she did show insight, told them
what was on her mind the day she killed
her husband, why and how she did it and
what she felt afterward—excitement,
guilt, denial, fear, revulsion—if she showed
the board how honest and precise she
could be in her knowledge of her crime
and why she’d committed it, if she spoke
openly about the impact it had had on
her victim and on others, on society, if
she trotted out the whole horror of it, she
would, at the same time, freshly reacti-
vate for the parole board all the reasons
she’d been locked up in the first place.
“ I ’m sorry about your fiancé,” he said
one night as Romy Hall lingered
after class. He was stacking photocop-
ies in an unnecessarily fastidious way,
to draw out their few minutes together,
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 85
before a guard oversaw the students’
transfer through work exchange. “What
happened?”
It was easy, he found, to affect the
concerned tone of an adviser, when re-
ally he was fishing for information.
“He wasn’t my fiancé. And he’s not
dead. He moved on.”
She said that there were women
on her unit who got married to men
they met through the mail. “Jimmy
wasn’t a loser like that,” she said. “He
had a life. I’m sure he’s out there
living it.”
ordon’s cabin was mostly packed.
G He would be leaving Stanville
soon. He was going back to school,
to get a master’s in social work. It was
probably an improvident time to quit
a job, with the economy tanking, but
the rhythms of the world did not al-
ways coördinate with the rhythm of
the person. Two cartons of books,
some cook pots, a Melitta thing you
place over a cup, clothes in garbage
bags. He put a log in his stove, watched
the gold-blue liquid updraft, to be
sure it caught, and then he typed her
name. He had made rules, and this
was one, to look only now.
Romy Leslie Hall.
Nothing. No entries found.
Romy L Hall. Hall prison Stanville.
San Francisco life sentence Hall.
He looked and looked, as the wood
burned down, shifted softly, embers
making their mealy tick.
Jimmy San Francisco teach Art In-
stitute. Nothing. He spent hours look-
ing through the faculty lists. There was
a James Darling in the film depart-
ment. Googled James Darling. Film
festivals. Artist’s statement. But he
wasn’t even sure this was the guy.
He listened to a dog bark, some-
where down the mountain.
People in the area made nature do-
mestic, and also hostile, with their guard
dogs, their beware-of dogs. German
shepherds. Dobermans.
The dog barked and barked, down
the mountain, echoing up it. An exca-
vating 3 A.M. bark, digging and dig-
ging at nothing. ♦
THE WRITER’S VOICE
Listen to Rachel Kushner read “Stanville” on
this week’s episode.

IT’S STILL ALIVE
ary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shel-
M ley began writing “Frankenstein;
or, the Modern Prometheus” when she
was eighteen years old, two years after
she’d become pregnant with her first
child, a baby she did not name. “Nurse
the baby, read,” she had written in her
diary, day after day, until the eleventh
day: “I awoke in the night to give it
suck it appeared to be sleeping so qui-
etly that I would not awake it,” and
then, in the morning, “Find my baby
dead.” With grief at that loss came a
fear of “a fever from the milk.” Her
breasts were swollen, inflamed, un-
sucked; her sleep, too, grew fevered.
“Dream that my little baby came to life
again; that it had only been cold, and
that we rubbed it before the fire, and
it lived,” she wrote in her diary. “Awake
and find no baby.”
Pregnant again only weeks later,
she was likely still nursing her second
baby when she started writing “Fran-
kenstein,” and pregnant with her third
by the time she finished. She didn’t put
her name on her book—she published
“Frankenstein” anonymously, in 1818,
not least out of a concern that she might
lose custody of her children—and she
didn’t give her monster a name, either.
“This anonymous androdaemon,” one
reviewer called it. For the first theat-
rical production of “Frankenstein,”
staged in London in 1823 (by which
time the author had given birth to four
children, buried three, and lost another
unnamed baby to a miscarriage so se-
vere that she nearly died of bleeding
that stopped only when her husband
86 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
THE CRITICS
LI FE AND LET T ERS
Two hundred years of “Frankenstein.”
BY JI LL LEPORE
had her sit on ice), the monster was
listed on the playbill as “––––––.”
“This nameless mode of naming the
unnameable is rather good,” Shelley
remarked about the creature’s theatri-
cal billing. She herself had no name of
her own. Like the creature pieced to-
gether from cadavers collected by Vic-
tor Frankenstein, her name was an as-
semblage of parts: the name of her
mother, the feminist Mary Wollstone-
craft, stitched to that of her father, the
philosopher William Godwin, grafted
onto that of her husband, the poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstone-
craft Godwin Shelley were the sum of
her relations, bone of their bone and
flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of
her mother’s milk, since her mother
had died eleven days after giving birth
to her, mainly too sick to give suck—
Awoke and found no mother.
“It was on a dreary night of Novem-
ber, that I beheld the accomplishment
of my toils,” Victor Frankenstein, a uni-
versity student, says, pouring out his
tale. The rain patters on the window-
pane; a bleak light flickers from a dying
candle. He looks at the “lifeless thing”
at his feet, come to life: “I saw the dull
yellow eye of the creature open; it
breathed hard, and a convulsive mo-
tion agitated its limbs.” Having labored
so long to bring the creature to life,
he finds himself disgusted and hor-
rified—“unable to endure the aspect
of the being I had created”—and flees,
abandoning his creation, unnamed. “I,
the miserable and the abandoned, am
an abortion,” the creature says, before,
in the book’s final scene, he disappears
on a raft of ice.
“Frankenstein” is four stories in one:
an allegory, a fable, an epistolary novel,
and an autobiography, a chaos of lit-
erary fertility that left its very young
author at pains to explain her “hideous
progeny.” In the introduction she wrote
for a revised edition in 1831, she took
up the humiliating question “How I,
then a young girl, came to think of,
and to dilate upon, so very hideous an
idea” and made up a story in which she
virtually erased herself as an author,
insisting that the story had come to
her in a dream (“I saw—with shut eyes,
but acute mental vision,—I saw the
pale student of unhallowed arts kneel-
ing beside the thing he had put to-
gether”) and that writing it consisted
of “making only a transcript” of that
dream. A century later, when a lurch-
ing, grunting Boris Karloff played the
creature in Universal Pictures’s bril-
liant 1931 production of “Frankenstein,”
directed by James Whale, the mon-
ster—prodigiously eloquent, learned,
and persuasive in the novel—was no
longer merely nameless but all but
speechless, too, as if what Mary Woll-
stonecraft Godwin Shelley had to say
was too radical to be heard, an agony
unutterable.
Every book is a baby, born, but
“Frankenstein” is often supposed to
have been more assembled than writ-
ABOVE: BRIAN REA
ten, an unnatural birth, as though all
that the author had done were to piece
together the writings of others, es-
pecially those of her father and her
Because Shelley was readily taken as a vessel for other people’s ideas, her novel has accreted wildly irreconcilable readings.
ILLUSTRATION BY HENNING WAGENBRETH THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 87
husband. “If Godwin’s daughter could
not help philosophising,” one mid-
twentieth-century critic wrote, “Shel-
ley’s wife knew also the eerie charms
of the morbid, the occult, the scien-
tifically bizarre.” This enduring con-
descension, the idea of the author as
a vessel for the ideas of other peo-
ple—a fiction in which the author
participated, so as to avoid the scan-
dal of her own brain—goes some way
to explaining why “Frankenstein” has
accreted so many wildly different and
irreconcilable readings and restagings
in the two centuries since its publi-
cation. For its bicentennial, the orig-
inal, 1818 edition has been reissued,
as a trim little paperback (Penguin
Classics), with an introduction by the
distinguished biographer Charlotte
Gordon, and as a beautifully illus-
trated hardcover keepsake, “The New
Annotated Frankenstein” (Liveright),
edited and annotated by Leslie S.
Klinger. Universal is developing a new
“Bride of Frankenstein” as part of a
series of remakes from its backlist of
horror movies. Filmography recapit-
ulating politico-chicanery, the age of
the superhero is about to yield to the
age of the monster. But what about
the baby?
“ F rankenstein,” the story of a crea-
ture who has no name, has for
two hundred years been made to mean
just about anything. Most lately, it has
been taken as a cautionary tale for Sil-
icon Valley technologists, an interpre-
tation that derives less from the 1818
novel than from later stage and film
versions, especially the 1931 film, and
that took its modern form in the af-
termath of Hiroshima. In that spirit,
M.I.T. Press has just published an edi-
tion of the original text “annotated for
scientists, engineers, and creators of
all kinds,” and prepared by the lead-
ers of the Frankenstein Bicentennial
Project, at Arizona State University,
with funding from the National Sci-
ence Foundation; they offer the book
as a catechism for designers of robots
and inventors of artificial intelligences.
“Remorse extinguished every hope,”
Victor says, in Volume II, Chapter 1,
by which time the creature has begun
murdering everyone Victor loves. “I
had been the author of unalterable
evils; and I lived in daily fear, lest the
monster whom I had created should
perpetrate some new wickedness.” The
M.I.T. edition appends, here, a foot-
note: “The remorse Victor expresses
is reminiscent of J. Robert Oppen-
heimer’s sentiments when he witnessed
the unspeakable power of the atomic
bomb. . . . Scientists’ responsibility
must be engaged before their creations
are unleashed.”
This is a way to make use of the
novel, but it involves stripping out
nearly all the sex and birth, everything
female—material first mined by Mu-
riel Spark, in a biography of Shelley
published in 1951, on the occasion of
the hundredth anniversary of her
death. Spark, working closely with
Shelley’s diaries and paying careful at-
tention to the author’s eight years of
near-constant pregnancy and loss, ar-
gued that “Frankenstein” was no minor
piece of genre fiction but a literary
work of striking originality. In the
nineteen-seventies, that interpretation
was taken up by feminist literary crit-
ics who wrote about “Frankenstein” as
establishing the origins of science fic-
tion by way of the “female gothic.”
What made Mary Shelley’s work so
original, Ellen Moers argued at the
time, was that she was a writer who
was a mother. Tolstoy had thirteen
children, born at home, Moers pointed
out, but the major female eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century writers, the
Austens and Dickinsons, tended to be
“spinsters and virgins.” Shelley was
an exception.
So was Mary Wollstonecraft, a
woman Shelley knew not as a mother
but as a writer who wrote about, among
other things, how to raise a baby. “I
conceive it to be the duty of every ra-
tional creature to attend to its offspring,”
Wollstonecraft wrote in “Thoughts on
the Education of Daughters,” in 1787,
ten years before giving birth to the au-
thor of “Frankenstein.” As Charlotte
Gordon notes in her dual biography
“Romantic Outlaws,” Wollstonecraft
first met her fellow political radical
William Godwin in 1791, at a London
dinner party hosted by the publisher
of Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.”
Wollstonecraft and Godwin were
“mutually displeased with each other,”
Godwin later wrote; they were the
smartest people in the room, and they
couldn’t help arguing all evening. Woll-
stonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights
of Woman” appeared in 1792, and, the
next year, Godwin published “Politi-
cal Justice.” In 1793, during an affair
with the American speculator and dip-
lomat Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft
became pregnant. (“I am nourishing a
creature,” she wrote Imlay.) Not long
after Wollstonecraft gave birth to a
daughter, whom she named Fanny,
Imlay abandoned her. She and God-
win became lovers in 1796, and when
she became pregnant they married, for
the sake of the baby, even though nei-
ther of them believed in marriage. In
1797, Wollstonecraft died of an infec-
tion contracted from the fingers of a
physician who reached into her uterus
to remove the afterbirth. Godwin’s
daughter bore the name of his dead
wife, as if she could be brought back
to life, another afterbirth.
ary Wollstonecraft Godwin was
M fifteen years old when she met
Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 1812. He was
twenty, and married, with a pregnant
wife. Having been thrown out of Ox-
ford for his atheism and disowned by
his father, Shelley had sought out Wil-
liam Godwin, his intellectual hero, as
a surrogate father. Shelley and God-
win fille spent their illicit courtship, as
much Romanticism as romance, pas-
sionately reading the works of her par-
ents while reclining on Wollstonecraft’s
grave, in the St. Pancras churchyard.
“Go to the tomb and read,” she wrote
in her diary. “Go with Shelley to the
churchyard.” Plainly, they were doing
more than reading, because she was
pregnant when she ran away with him,
fleeing her father’s house in the half-
light of night, along with her stepsis-
ter, Claire Clairmont, who wanted to
be ruined, too.
If any man served as an inspiration
for Victor Frankenstein, it was Lord
Byron, who followed his imagination,
indulged his passions, and abandoned
his children. He was “mad, bad, and
dangerous to know,” as one of his lov-
ers pronounced, mainly because of his
many affairs, which likely included
sleeping with his half sister, Augusta
Leigh. Byron married in January, 1815,
and a daughter, Ada, was born in De-
cember. But, when his wife left him,
a year into their marriage, Byron was
forced never to see his wife or daugh-
ter again, lest his wife reveal the scan-
dal of his affair with Leigh. (Ada was
about the age Mary Godwin’s first
baby would have been, had she lived.
Ada’s mother, fearing that the girl
might grow up to be-
come a poet, as mad and
bad as her father, raised
her, instead, to be a math-
ematician. Ada Lovelace,
a scientist as imaginative
as Victor Frankenstein,
would in 1843 provide
an influential theoret-
ic al description of a
general-purpose com-
puter, a century before one was built.)
In the spring of 1816, Byron, fleeing
scandal, left England for Geneva, and
it was there that he met up with Percy
Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire
Clairmont. Moralizers called them the
League of Incest. By summer, Clair-
mont was pregnant by Byron. Byron
was bored. One evening, he announced,
“We will each write a ghost story.” God-
win began the story that would become
“Frankenstein.” Byron later wrote,
“Methinks it is a wonderful book for
a girl of nineteen—not nineteen, in-
deed, at that time.”
During the months when Godwin
was turning her ghost story into a
novel, and nourishing yet another crea-
ture in her belly, Shelley’s wife, preg-
nant now with what would have been
their third child, killed herself; Clair-
mont gave birth to a girl—Byron’s,
though most people assumed it was
Shelley’s—and Shelley and Godwin
got married. For a time, they attempted
to adopt the girl, though Byron later
took her, having noticed that nearly
all of Godwin and Shelley’s children
had died. “I so totally disapprove of
the mode of Children’s treatment in
their family—that I should look upon
the Child as going into a hospital,” he
wrote, cruelly, about the Shelleys.
“Have they reared one?” (Byron, by
no means interested in rearing a child
himself, placed the girl in a convent,
where she died at the age of five.)
When “Frankenstein,” begun in the
summer of 1816, was published eigh-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 89
teen months later, it bore an unsigned
preface by Percy Shelley and a dedica-
tion to William Godwin. The book
became an immediate sensation. “It
seems to be universally known and
read,” a friend wrote to Percy Shelley.
Sir Walter Scott wrote, in an early re-
view, “The author seems to us to dis-
close uncommon powers of poetic
imagination.” Scott, like
many readers, assumed
that the author was Percy
Shelley. Reviewers less
enamored of the Roman-
tic poet damned the
book’s Godwinian radi-
calism and its Byronic
impieties. John Croker, a
conservative member of
Parliament, called “Fran-
kenstein” a “tissue of horrible and dis-
gusting absurdity”—radical, unhinged,
and immoral.
ut the politics of “Frankenstein” are
B as intricate as its structure of stories
nested like Russian dolls. The outer-
most doll is a set of letters from an En-
glish adventurer to his sister, recount-
ing his Arctic expedition and his
meeting with the strange, emaciated,
haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within
the adventurer’s account, Frankenstein
tells the story of his fateful experiment,
which has led him to pursue his crea-
ture to the ends of the earth. And within
Frankenstein’s story lies the tale told
by the creature himself, the littlest,
innermost Russian doll: the baby.
The novel’s structure meant that
those opposed to political radicalism
often found themselves baffled and be-
wildered by “Frankenstein,” as literary
critics such as Chris Baldick and Adri-
ana Craciun have pointed out. The
novel appears to be heretical and rev-
olutionary; it also appears to be counter-
revolutionary. It depends on which doll
is doing the talking.
If “Frankenstein” is a referendum on
the French Revolution, as some critics
have read it, Victor Frankenstein’s pol-
itics align nicely with those of Edmund
Burke, who described violent revolution
as “a species of political monster, which
has always ended by devouring those
who have produced it.” The creature’s
own politics, though, align not with
Burke’s but with those of two of Burke’s
keenest adversaries, Mary Wollstone-
craft and William Godwin. Victor Fran-
kenstein has made use of other men’s
bodies, like a lord over the peasantry or
a king over his subjects, in just the way
that Godwin denounced when he de-
scribed feudalism as a “ferocious mon-
ster.” (“How dare you sport thus with
life?” the creature asks his maker.) The
creature, born innocent, has been treated
so terribly that he has become a villain,
in just the way that Wollstonecraft pre-
dicted. “People are rendered ferocious
by misery,” she wrote, “and misanthropy
is ever the offspring of discontent.”
(“Make me happy,” the creature begs
Frankenstein, to no avail.)
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley
took pains that readers’ sympathies
would lie not only with Frankenstein,
whose suffering is dreadful, but also
with the creature, whose suffering is
worse. The art of the book lies in the
way Shelley nudges readers’ sympathy,
page by page, paragraph by paragraph,
even line by line, from Frankenstein
to the creature, even when it comes to
the creature’s vicious murders, first of
Frankenstein’s little brother, then of
his best friend, and, finally, of his bride.
Much evidence suggests that she suc-
ceeded. “The justice is indisputably on
his side,” one critic wrote in 1824, “and
his sufferings are, to me, touching to
the last degree.”
“Hear my tale,” the creature insists,
when he at last confronts his creator.
What follows is the autobiography of
an infant. He awoke, and all was con-
fusion. “I was a poor, help-
less, miserable wretch; I
knew, and could distin-
guish, nothing.” He was
cold and naked and hun-
gry and bereft of company,
and yet, having no lan-
guage, was unable even to
name these sensations.
“But, feeling pain invade
me on all sides, I sat down
and wept.” He learned to walk, and
began to wander, still unable to speak—
“the uncouth and inarticulate sounds
which broke from me frightened me
into silence again.” Eventually, he
found shelter in a lean-to adjacent to
a cottage alongside a wood, where, ob-
serving the cottagers talk, he learned
of the existence of language: “I dis-
90 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
covered the names that were given to
some of the most familiar objects of
discourse: I learned and applied the
words fire, milk, bread, and wood.”
Watching the cottagers read a book,
“Ruins of Empires,” by the eighteenth-
century French revolutionary the
Comte de Volney, he both learned how
to read and acquired “a cursory knowl-
edge of history”—a litany of injustice.
“I heard of the division of property, of
immense wealth and squalid poverty;
of rank, descent, and noble blood.” He
learned that the weak are everywhere
abused by the powerful, and the poor
despised.
Shelley kept careful records of the
books she read and translated, nam-
ing title after title and compiling a
list each year—Milton, Goethe, Rous-
seau, Ovid, Spenser, Coleridge, Gib-
bon, and hundreds more, from his-
tory to chemistry. “Babe is not well,”
she noted in her diary while writing
“Frankenstein.” “Write, draw and walk;
read Locke.” Or, “Walk; write; read
the ‘Rights of Women.’” The creature
keeps track of his reading, too, and,
unsurprisingly, he reads the books that
Shelley read and reread most often.
One day, wandering in the woods, he
stumbles upon a leather trunk, lying
on the ground, that contains three
books: Milton’s “Paradise Lost,”
Plutarch’s “Lives,” and Goethe’s “The
Sorrows of Young Werther”—the li-
brary that, along with Volney’s “Ruins,”
determines his political philosophy,
as reviewers readily understood. “His
code of ethics is formed
on this extraordinar y
stock of poetical theol-
ogy, pagan biography,
adulterous sentimental-
ity, and atheistical jaco-
binism,” according to the
review of “Frankenstein”
most widely read in the
United States, “yet, in
spite of all his enormities,
we think the monster, a very pitiable
and ill-used monster.”
Sir Walter Scott found this the most
preposterous part of “Frankenstein”:
“That he should have not only learned
to speak, but to read, and, for aught we
know, to write—that he should have
become acquainted with Werter, with
Plutarch’s Lives, and with Paradise Lost,
by listening through a hole in a wall,
seems as unlikely as that he should have
acquired, in the same way, the problems
of Euclid, or the art of book-keeping
by single and double entry.” But the
creature’s account of his education very
closely follows the conventions of a
genre of writing far distant from Scott’s
own: the slave narrative.
rederick Douglass, born into slav-
F ery the year “Frankenstein” was pub-
lished, was following those same con-
ventions when, in his autobiography,
he described learning to read by trad-
ing with white boys for lessons. Doug-
lass realized his political condition at
the age of twelve, while reading the
“Dialogue Between a Master and Slave,”
reprinted in “The Columbian Orator”
(a book for which he paid fifty cents,
and which was one of the only things
he brought with him when he escaped
from slavery). It was his coming of age.
“The more I read, the more I was led
to abhor and detest my enslavers,”
Douglass wrote, in a line that the crea-
ture himself might have written.
Likewise, the creature comes of age
when he finds Frankenstein’s note-
book, recounting his experiment, and
learns how he was created, and with
what injustice he has been treated. It’s
at this moment that the creature’s tale
is transformed from the autobiogra-
phy of an infant to the autobiography
of a slave. “I would at times feel that
learning to read had been a curse rather
than a blessing,” Douglass wrote. “It
had given me a view of my wretched
condition, without the remedy.” So,
too, the creature: “Increase of knowl-
edge only discovered to me more
clearly what a wretched outcast I was.”
Douglass: “I often found myself
regretting my own existence, and
wishing myself dead.” The creature:
“Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I
live?” Douglass seeks his escape; the
creature seeks his revenge.
Among the many moral and po-
litical ambiguities of Shelley’s novel
is the question of whether Victor Fran-
kenstein is to be blamed for creating
the monster—usurping the power of
God, and of women—or for failing
to love, care for, and educate him. The
Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model
considers only the former, which
makes for a weak reading of the novel.
Much of “Frankenstein” participates
in the debate over abolition, as sev-
eral critics have astutely observed, and
the revolution on which the novel
most plainly turns is not the one in
France but the one in Haiti. For ab-
olitionists in England, the Haitian
revolution, along with continued slave
rebellions in Jamaica and other West
Indian sugar islands, raised deeper
and harder questions about liberty
and equality than the revolution in
France had, since they involved an in-
quiry into the idea of racial difference.
Godwin and Wollstonecraft had been
abolitionists, as were both Percy and
Mary Shelley, who, for instance, re-
fused to eat sugar because of how it
was produced. Although Britain and
the United States enacted laws abol-
ishing the importation of slaves in
1807, the debate over slavery in Brit-
ain’s territories continued through the
decision in favor of emancipation, in
1833. Both Shelleys closely followed
this debate, and in the years before
and during the composition of “Fran-
kenstein” they together read several
books about Africa and the West In-
dies. Percy Shelley was among those
abolitionists who urged not immedi-
ate but gradual emancipation, fearing
that the enslaved, so long and so vio-
lently oppressed, and denied education,
would, if unconditionally freed, seek a
vengeance of blood. He asked, “Can he
who the day before was a trampled slave
suddenly become liberal-minded, for-
bearing, and independent?”
Given Mary Shelley’s reading of
books that stressed the physical dis-
tinctiveness of Africans, her depiction
of the creature is explicitly racial, figur-
ing him as African, as opposed to Eu-
ropean. “I was more agile than they,
and could subsist upon coarser diet,”
the creature says. “I bore the extremes
of heat and cold with less injury to
my frame; my stature far exceeded
theirs.” This characterization became,
onstage, a caricature. Beginning with
the 1823 stage production of “Fran-
kenstein,” the actor playing “–––––– ”
wore blue face paint, a color that iden-
tified him less as dead than as col-
ored. It was this production that
George Canning, abolitionist, For-
eign Secretary, and leader of the House
“I was about your age when I, too, started having security concerns.”
• •
of Commons, invoked in 1824, during
a parliamentary debate about eman-
cipation. Tellingly, Canning’s remarks
brought together the novel’s depic-
tion of the creature as a baby and the
culture’s figuring of Africans as chil-
dren. “In dealing with the negro, Sir,
we must remember that we are deal-
ing with a being possessing the form
and strength of a man, but the intel-
lect only of a child,” Canning told
Parliament. “To turn him loose in the
manhood of his physical strength, in
the maturity of his physical passions,
but in the infancy of his uninstructed
reason, would be to raise up a crea-
ture resembling the splendid fiction of
a recent romance.” In later nineteenth-
century stage productions, the crea-
ture was explicitly dressed as an Af-
rican. Even the 1931 James Whale film,
in which Karloff wore green face paint,
furthers this figuring of the creature
as black: he is, in the film’s climactic
scene, lynched.
Because the creature reads as a slave,
“Frankenstein” holds a unique place
in American culture, as the literary
scholar Elizabeth Young argued, a few
years ago, in “Black Frankenstein: The
Making of an American Metaphor.”
“What is the use of living, when in
fact I am dead,” the black abolitionist
David Walker asked from Boston in
1829, in his “Appeal to the Colored
Citizens of the World,” anticipating
Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” by a
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 91
century and a half. “Slavery is every-
where the pet monster of the Amer-
ican people,” Frederick Douglass de-
clared in New York, on the eve of the
American Civil War. Nat Turner was
called a monster; so was John Brown.
By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s
monster regularly appeared in Amer-
ican political cartoons as a nearly naked
black man, signifying slavery itself,
seeking his vengeance upon the na-
tion that created him.
ary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shel-
M ley was dead by then, her own
chaotic origins already forgotten.
Nearly everyone she loved died before
she did, most of them when she was
still very young. Her half sister, Fanny
Imlay, took her own life in 1816. Percy
Shelley drowned in 1822. Lord Byron
fell ill and died in Greece in 1824, leav-
ing Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shel-
ley, as she put it, “the last relic of a be-
loved race, my companions extinct
before me.”
She chose that as the theme behind
the novel she wrote eight years after
“Frankenstein.” Published in 1826, when
the author was twenty-eight, “The Last
Man” is set in the twenty-first century,
when only one man endures, the lone
survivor of a terrible plague, having
failed—for all his imagination, for all
his knowledge—to save the life of a
single person. Nurse the baby, read. Find
my baby dead. 
 new embankments of the Thames
changed life then, has been what the
N.Y.U. sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls
“the great crime decline.” The term,
which seems to have originated with
the influential Berkeley criminologist
Franklin E. Zimring, refers to the still
puzzling disappearance from our big-
city streets of violent crime, so long the
warping force of American life—driv-
ing white flight to the suburbs and fuel-
ling the rise of Richard Nixon and Ron-
ald Reagan, not to mention the career
of Martin Scorsese. (“Taxi Driver” is the
great poem of New York around the
height of high crime, with steam com-
ing out of the hellish manholes and vi-
olence recumbent in the back seat.) No
one saw it coming, and the still odder
thing is that, once it came, no one seemed
adequately equipped to praise it.
Sharkey, who came of age in that
safer era, intends to be its eulogist. He
begins his remarkable new book, “Un-
easy Peace: The Great Crime Decline,
the Renewal of City Life, and the Next
War on Violence” (Norton), in the South
Bronx, at a city block near Yankee Sta-
dium, and recalls a time in the nineteen-
seventies, whose climax was the fear-
some blackout riots of 1977, when even
the Stadium was sparsely attended. “In
BOOKS some years, night games drew ten thou-
sand fewer fans than day games,” he

AFTER THE FALL

writes; many New Yorkers were unwill-
ing to make their way into the Bronx
after dark. “Spaces that had been cre-
Drawing the right lessons from the decline in violent crime. ated to support public life, to be enjoyed
by all—those that define city life in
B Y A DA M G O P N I K America’s greatest metropolis—were
dominated by the threat of violence.”
Now, he says, “the calm of Franz Sigel
Park reflected the atmosphere of peace
ig events go by unseen while we “miasma” that had come to crisis con- through New York City. In the city where
B sweat the smaller stuff; things hap-
pen underground while we watch the
ditions that year. This underground sys-
tem, along with its visible embank-
more than 2,000 people used to be mur-
dered each year, 328 were killed in 2014,
boulevard parades. Truly underground, ments, would, both directly and by the lowest tally since the first half of the
sometimes: in 1858, the pundits and example, save countless lives in the de- twentieth century.” (Last year, the tally
politicians in Britain were obsessing veloped world during the next cen- was still lower.) It wasn’t just New York.
over the British government’s takeover tury—making cholera epidemics, for Violent crime fell in Atlanta, Dallas,
of India from the East India Company instance, a thing of the distant past. Los Angeles, and Washington, and not
and the intentions of Napoleon III, yet But it got built in relative invisibility. by a little but by a lot.
the really big thing was the construc- In the United States over the past More important, the quality of life
tion, with the supervisory genius of the three decades, while people argue about changed dramatically, particularly for
great engineer Joseph Bazalgette, of a tax cuts and terrorism, the wave of so- the most vulnerable. Sharkey, studying
sewer system to protect London from cial change that has most altered the the crime decline in six American cities,
its own waste, and so arrest the smelly shape of American life, as much as the concludes, “As the degree of violence
has fallen, the gap between the neigh-
Poor and vulnerable communities have benefitted the most from the drop in crime. borhoods of the poor and nonpoor has
92 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 ILLUSTRATION BY EIKO OJALA
narrowed.” In Cleveland in the eight-
ies, the level of violence in poor neigh-
borhoods was about seventy per cent
higher than in the rest of the city; by 2010,
that number had dropped to twenty-
four per cent. The reduction of fear al-
lowed much else to blossom: “Subway
cars, commuter lines, and buses in U.S.
cities filled up, as residents and com-
muters became more willing to leave
their cars behind and travel to and from
work together. . . . Fans came back to
Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and just
as many began to show up for night
games as for day games.” The big city
was revived. From Portland, Maine, to
Portland, Oregon, the transformation
of America’s inner cities from waste-
lands to self-conscious espresso zones
became the comedy of our time.
Yet little trace of this transformation
troubles our art, or even much of our
public discourse. Our pundits either take
the great crime decline for granted or
focus on the troubles it has helped cre-
ate, like high housing prices in San Fran-
cisco or Brooklyn. Even when we pay
attention to the comedy, we rarely look
at the cause. Some of our politicians
even pretend it hasn’t happened, with
Donald Trump continuing to campaign
against crime and carnage where it
scarcely exists. (If people really thought
that urban crime still flourished, of
course, he wouldn’t be able to sell con-
dos with his name on them on the far
West Side of Manhattan.) Attorney
General Jeff Sessions, meanwhile, feels
free to tell the outrageous lie that “for
the first time in a long time, Americans
can have hope for a safer future.”
This lack of appreciation is partly a
question of media attention-deficit dis-
order: if there is little news value in Dog
Bites Man, there is none whatever in
Dog Does Not Bite Man. It is part of
the neutral unseen background of events,
even if there had previously been an ep-
idemic of dog bites. But it’s hard for
those who didn’t live through the great
crime wave of the sixties, seventies, and
eighties to fully understand the scale or
the horror of it, or the improbability of
its end. Every set of blocks had its de-
tours; a new arrival in New York was
told always to carry a ten-dollar bill in
case of a mugging. Crime ruled Broad-
way comedies: Neil Simon’s “The Pris-
oner of Second Avenue” told the tale of
people barricaded in their apartments
for fear of muggings. My great-aunt and
great-uncle lived on 115th and Riverside
Drive; an address they boasted of in 1962
had become a neighborhood they were
frightened to have company visit by 1975.
For those trapped in true low-income,
high-crime communities, these circum-
stances were even worse, with, as Shar-
key shows, catastrophic effects not only
on life and limb and property but on the
fundamental human capacity for hope.
In every way, the crime wave had effects
far wider-reaching than its emergency-
ward casualties. Liberal urbanists, who
had been, perhaps mostly by chance, in
power when the crime wave began, were
discredited for a generation. The neo-
cons gained credibility on foreign pol-
icy because they once seemed right about
the Upper West Side.
Sharkey, unlike many of his peers on
the left, regards the great decline as an
unmediated good, benefitting everyone,
and, above all, the poorest and most vul-
nerable. Sharkey’s book, in fact, illus-
trates why social science, with all its un-
certainties—uncertainties built into a
field in which you are studying the ac-
tions of several million autonomous
agents who can alter their actions at a
whim, with several thousand outliers
guaranteed in advance to be bizarrely
atypical—still really is science. What
makes it science is what makes it social:
an insistence on paying attention to the
facts that other people have gathered
even when they conflict with the way
you want the world to be; a reluctance
to tailor the facts to one’s views, instead
of one’s views to the facts.
You might wonder that anyone would
dispute the notion that the crime de-
cline is a good thing for everyone, but
some do, either sentimentally—what
ever became of all the lively crack deal-
ers and Forty-second Street prosti-
tutes?—or sententiously: a “cleaned up”
city dismissed as merely sanitized, with
the social problems pushed to the pe-
riphery. Sharkey, a sympathizer with
progressive causes, sees the position in
which urban crime is taken to be a kind
of political violence—an as yet in-
sufficiently organized program of dis-
sent—for the academic indulgence that
it is. The view that violent crime is a
kind of instinctive form of political pro-
test is not a new one, or entirely out-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 93
landish. We take it for granted, think-
ing of the poverty-stricken thieves,
hanged for stealing handkerchiefs in
eighteenth-century London, that the
argument of the “The Beggar’s Opera”
is not wrong: even when not explicitly
political, crime can have an implicit pol-
itics. But though these arguments—like
the parallel ones about when terrorism
becomes patriotism and patriotism ter-
rorism—are easy to make, they are hard
to use as helpful guides to the real world.
Sharkey’s own research began with
a simple experiment by the neuroscien-
tist David Diamond, of the University
of South Florida. Diamond placed a cat
outside a cage of rats, and found that
rats raised in this condition did worse
on rat-friendly cognitive tests—running
complicated mazes and the like—than
did rats kept away from the sight of cats.
You might imagine that rats raised in
the presence of a predator learn to be
shrewder. But this seems not to be true
of rats raised in the presence of a pred-
ator whom they can do nothing to avoid
or outwit—rats that feel helpless in the
face of, so to speak, a cat wave. Brains
under stress get frozen.
Sharkey’s subsequent research showed
that children respond to the stress of
community violence in a similar way.
When children take a standardized test
shortly after a neighborhood murder,
their scores suffer. The price of crime is
paid, above all, by the trauma of kids
whose parents can’t buy their way out
of its presence. “Local violence does not
make children less intelligent,” Sharkey
says. “Rather, it occupies their minds.”
Thinking about a threat leaves you less
room to think about anything else. The
social cost of street crime, therefore, is
far higher than the price of lives lost
and bodies maimed; it can maim minds,
too. Conversely, Sharkey finds that, in
places where violence has declined the
most, kids do much better at school,
and minority kids lag least. Anyone who
says that the decline in crime is a white
person’s prerogative and pleasure hasn’t
been following the facts.
But what made the crime wave hap-
pen and what made it halt? As liberal-
minded people, we want the real cause
of the crime decline to be nice people
doing nice things, with no role for nasty
people doing nasty things to those still
nastier. And Sharkey does make heroes,

“The script isn’t funny, but maybe if we put some unfunny actors
in it and get an unfunny director it will be funny.”
• •
persuasively, of many nice people doing
nice things to stop crime. He is an en-
thusiast of the hypothesis that local
community organizing was a key fac-
tor in the crime drop: “It was hard work
by residents, organized into commu-
nity groups and block clubs, that trans-
formed urban neighborhoods.” He
thinks that technology—surveillance
cameras, LoJack systems—played a part.
But he also finds that incarceration ac-
counted for some of the crime decline,
and so did more aggressive policing.
“Federal funding paid for tens of thou-
sands of new police officers,” he writes.
“The tactics they used were sometimes
oppressive and sometimes brutal but
were also more effective, focusing re-
sources on the precise locations where
crime was most intense.”
Here some ambiguity arises. What’s
now called stop-and-frisk policing—
in which police aggressively sought out
suspected minor criminals on the streets,
most of them minority kids—was, he
suggests, a kind of schismatic variant
of what had originally been called, more
benignly, “broken windows” policing.
As Sharkey notes, broken-windows po-
licing was based on a theory that was
offered without any real evidentiary
basis, and published in The Atlantic,
not in a peer-reviewed journal. What
94 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
was easily missed was that the broken-
windows tactic, as first articulated by
the criminologists James Q. Wilson
and George L. Kelling in 1982, was not
an appeal to the power of policing.
It was an appeal to the power of self-
policing. At a time when policing had
been reduced, in many American cit-
ies, to having wary patrolmen drive
around in squad cars, waiting for a radio
call telling them that something bad
had already happened, the new theory
insisted on an aggressive pursuit of petty
crime, before it could get to be big crime.
If the cops led the way—and this was
the crucial idea—the community would
follow. Blocks left intact, windows re-
paired by conscientious landlords, would
produce the eyes on the street and the
small-scale intense local engagement
that had in the past assured the safety
of local neighborhoods. South Phila-
delphia or the Bronx’s Grand Con-
course in the nineteen-fifties had been
largely benign places not because the
police were present but because there
were so many engaged passersby that
the police didn’t need to be present.
This sane theory of self-policing
soon became its own opposite. A new,
noxious notion grew. It would be all
police, all the time. If enough police-
men frisked enough young minority
kids, they would find enough weed and
weaponry to send them away. Once
sent away, the potential criminals—
known to be so owing to their posses-
sion of weed and weaponry—could not
be street criminals, by dint of not being
on the street. By the time they were
back outside, the window of opportu-
nity for committing crimes would have
largely passed, crime, like gymnastics,
being an occupation of the young. It
was an extraordinarily crude reduction
of Wilson and Kelling’s view.
Liberal-minded people do not merely
want mass incarceration to be the moral
scandal it obviously is. We want it to
be a practical scandal as well—it won’t
and can’t do any good. But, Sharkey
reports, the facts suggest that, for some
period and to some measurable de-
gree, it did contribute to the crime
decline. It’s just the most expensive,
inefficient, and cruel of all ways to
combat the crime wave. And the moral
horror thereby incurred is intolerable
to a liberal democracy that does not
want to have millions of men under
permanent penal restraint. The social
cost of that mass incarceration is as
high, in its way, as the crime wave it
was meant to hamper. Sharkey’s cli-
mactic thesis is that the real challenge
for the decades to come is to take ad-
vantage of the decline in crime to en-
gineer a parallel decline in incarcera-
tion, sending noncareer criminals back
to safer streets.
harkey, as good as he is at explain-
Shelped,
ing what happened—whom it
what it permitted—isn’t as good
at explaining why it happened. The cu-
rious truth is that the decline in crime
happened across the entire Western
world, in East London just as it did in
the South Bronx. At the same time, the
relative decline in New York was signifi-
cantly bigger than elsewhere. Sharkey’s
guess that the crime decline can be at-
tributed to the uncomfortable but po-
tent intersection of community action
and coercive policing seems about as
good as any. Here, he echoes Zimring’s
earlier conclusion that many small walls
are a better barrier to crime than any
single big one. Still, the magnitude of
the shift remains mystifying. A good
comparison might be the contempora-
neous war on drunk driving: there, too,
the decline in deaths has been impres-
sive, and there, too, there was no one
solution but a host of them, ranging
from the Mothers Against Drunk Driv-
ing campaign to raised ages for legal
drinking.
With the crime wave, it would seem,
small measures that pushed the num-
bers down by some noticeable amount
engendered a virtuous circle that
brought the numbers further and fur-
ther down. You didn’t have to change
the incidence of crime a lot to make
people worry less about it. What ended
violent crime, in this scenario, was not
an edict but a feedback system—cre-
ated when less crime brought more eyes
onto the streets and subways, which in
turn reduced crime, leading to people
feeling safer, which in turn brought
more eyes out. The self-organized re-
sponse of society to crime was, in effect,
to outnumber the muggers on the street
before they mugged someone. One has
only to get on the New York City sub-
way at 3 a.m., and recall what 3 a.m.
on the New York City subway was like
thirty years ago, to sense the presence
of this circle.
One wonders if, among those eyes,
some important ones belonged, so to
speak, to George and Elaine (“Sein-
feld” having begun right as the sharp
slope of the crime ramp-down began).
They represented the kind of people
who, in the previous American dis-
pensation, would never have stayed
in the city seeking partners through
their twenties but would
instead have been mar-
ried and living out in New
Rochelle with Rob and
Laura Petrie. Sex, to put
it bluntly, might have had
some role in saving the
city. Not long after 9/11,
when New York, though
increasingly safe from
crime, was still on edge, a
real-estate tycoon told me that he had
made a fortune investing in Manhat-
tan properties since the seventies (when
the city seemed doomed), and was op-
timistic that New York would continue
to thrive, for a simple reason: the me-
dian age of first children kept going
up. It still is: the average age of a mother
with a first child is now twenty-eight,
and rising, and among women with
advanced degrees it is into the thirties.
The developer’s theory was that as long
as people were spending their twen-
ties looking for mates instead of set-
tling down, they would flock to New
York, and the city would continue to
flourish in the face of crime, plague,
or terrorism.
Anecdotal evidence is not to be taken
very seriously, but artistic evidence is
the best kind we ever get—Dickens saw
far more deeply into that Victorian mi-
asma and its causes than anyone else
did. And it is certainly the case that a
dominant mode of American entertain-
ment that paralleled the crime decline
was comedies about young people in
Manhattan looking for love: “Seinfeld”
and “Friends” and then the almost too
neatly named “Sex and the City.” The
people who are generally thought to
have merely profited from the new re-
ality may have had something to do
with making it happen. The pursuit of
small pleasures helps provoke social san-
ity. Improbable actors perform righteous
acts. This was Adam Smith’s actual in-
sight, this time put in motion in small
apartments and sofa beds.
The negative side of this change lies
in the supposed reduction of once di-
verse neighborhoods to monotone yup-
pie dormitories. Sharkey’s take on the
process, routinely called “gentrifica-
tion,” is surprising. He reports that in
New York there is “little evidence that
gentrification leads to any detectable
increase in displacement.” (The fear of
cultural displacement is,
he thinks, another story.)
Research by the sociolo-
gist Lance Freeman sug-
gests instead that much
good happens for resi-
dents when “neighbor-
hoods become more eco-
nomically diverse and
safer, attracting new re-
sources for schools, new
businesses and new attention from pub-
lic agencies.” Sharkey’s is a story with-
out the usual heroes, but also without
the usual villains.
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THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 95
rightly, intolerable, we ask if the crime
decline, with its unprecedented benefits
for the marginalized populations, can
survive. Sharkey emphatically thinks it
can, and so far there’s no evidence to
counter his view. The conservative ur-
banists at City Journal can point to this
or that bump or burp in the numbers,
but since the nineties New York has kept
lowering both its incarceration rate and
its crime rate. The plunge continues
under the supposedly soft-on-crime Bill
de Blasio as much as it did during
ironfisted Rudy Giuliani. Whatever is
happening out there seems immune to
local politics.
Effects that we don’t normally track
are surely related to the crime decline,
not least the rise of the Black Lives Mat-
ter movement itself. Without a general
understanding that crime was no lon-
ger the real problem but that the re-
sponse to crime might be, the move-
ment could not have caught a surprisingly
large, sympathetic audience. Sharkey
writes, “The videos of police violence
have resonated so powerfully because
they come at a time when there is no
crisis of crime in most of the country,
when every other form of violence in
society has subsided.” The acts may have
been constant, but the anger can only
arise in the new social field. (One ele-
ment that Sharkey perhaps does not
sufficiently underline is the American
abundance of guns: their existence both
frightens police officers and makes them
overreact in minor moments, turning
routine encounters potentially lethal.)
Ironically, though the urban crime
wave is over, it still persists as a kind
of zombified general terror, particularly
in places where it was never particu-
larly acute. Trump can continue to cam-
paign against crime largely in places
where crime never happened much but
where, having long been molded to
preëxisting bigotry, the spectre of vio-
lence still occupies a fetishistic role. He
has completely lost the power to
frighten New Yorkers with tales of
crime, but in rural districts in Wiscon-
sin and Pennsylvania the symbolic de-
piction of crime, crafted nationally as
the great wave rose, is still a bloody
shirt that can be effectively waved even
if the bloodstains on it are decades old.
Will they stay that way? An upturn
in crime in a very few cities is probably
96 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
a local bump on a bigger, encouraging
graph, but no one can know this for cer-
tain. Sharkey believes in police “hot-
spotting”: most violent crimes take place
in a small number of venues. They also,
Sharkey says, tend to involve a tiny num-
ber of people linked in a tight network.
When it comes to gangs in Chicago—
where gun violence afflicts a very small
percentage of the population, but in-
tensely—he likes the idea of trained “in-
terrupters,” who intervene with mem-
bers after a violent incident to prevent
retaliation. He writes, “The warning is
unflinching: If you continue to engage in
firearm violence, you will face serious, un-
compromising prosecution. But the offer
must be equally sincere: If you choose a
different path, you will be supported with
all resources and assistance that the com-
munity and the state can muster.”
At the intersection of politics and
policy, Sharkey imagines that the best
path forward lies in a somewhat below-
the-radar coalition that enlists right
and left in a movement to accept that
the end of the crime wave can lead to
the end of mass incarceration. He cites
a meeting at the right-wing Heritage
Foundation, where he found signifi-
cant agreement about dis-incarceration
among otherwise opposed types. Fol-
lowers of Michelle Alexander, the au-
thor of “The New Jim Crow” and the
most prominent advocate of the view
that mass incarceration is designed
to “reinforce a racialized caste system
in the United States,” found common
ground with Grover Norquist, the
government-hating founder of Amer-
icans for Tax Reform. Sharkey wants
to believe that a tacit truce has been
forged between these disparate types,
leading toward a new era where the
benefits of the crime decline will be
enjoyed without mass incarceration to
support them.
It seems just as likely, though, that
two kinds of illiberalism have joined in
an uneasy and unstable alliance. Those
in Alexander’s school are inclined to be-
lieve that the system can’t be reformed
short of revolutionary change—a revo-
lutionary change that is necessarily ill-
defined and, given the country’s politi-
cal demography, essentially impossible.
A revolutionary-minded racial politics
that produces a reactionary white racial
politics will always be frustrated. Mean-
while, the Norquistians don’t just want
to stop spending money locking men
up. They also want to stop spending
money educating kids and assisting
neighborhoods and helping communi-
ties rebuild. They want to stop spend-
ing money on anything. It is safe to say
that people who don’t want to spend
money on prisons also don’t want to
spend it on social programs, let alone
reparations. If pressed to a point, they
will spend it on clubs and bullets. The
leftists want the prisons opened because
the people in them shouldn’t be there;
the Norquistians want them opened be-
cause it costs too much to keep them
shut. The two groups have an opera-
tional end in common, but they do not
remotely share the same social picture,
as will become plain when the next, pre-
sumably smaller, crime wave hits.
harkey ends with a curious formula.
Slence,”
We must now fight a “war on vio-
he says, which seems to include
a war against police violence, but one
fought with a companion understand-
ing that the “police play a crucial role
in the effort to maintain social order”
and that the most vulnerable among us
are those most hurt by the loss of order.
“Peace and order” is effectively his plat-
form, as “law and order” was once that
of the Republican right that capitalized
on the crime wave.
He believes that peace and order—
and here his vision does have something
in common with that of the libertari-
ans he would like to welcome to the
cause—can only emerge from the ground
up. As ways of keeping a durable social
peace, he returns again and again to
small community works, like those com-
munity interrupters, or what he calls
“community quarterbacks,” or even sys-
tems of self-policing by Aboriginal Aus-
tralians. A paradox emerges here: crime,
if immune to party politics, seems enor-
mously sensitive to something as seem-
ingly anodyne as community policing.
One thing that the crime decline may
force us to do is look again at what we
mean by a city. At a time when cities
become ever-larger megalopolises, it
seems sentimental to insist on the pri-
macy of neighborhoods and communi-
ties as units, and yet some evidence sug-
gests that that is where this big change
began. Somewhat surprisingly, Sharkey
gives a significant and welcome nod to
the urban oracle Jane Jacobs, whose
rhapsodic evocation of New York streets
might, after so many wars, have seemed
as dated as the account of Jerusalem
before the fall of the Temple. But he
italicizes her essential lesson: politics
may not all be local—Trump is a refu-
tation of that, winning the allegiance
of localities that he can’t or won’t serve—
but city life is. “Social cohesion, trust
and shared commitment to the com-
munity,” Sharkey says, vary from neigh-
borhood to neighborhood. In ones
where they are strong, violence almost
vanishes. It isn’t that poor neighbor-
hoods produce violent crime. The prob-
lem is, rather, “that concentrated pov-
erty tends to slowly tear apart the social
fabric of neighborhoods.” Restore the
social fabric first, and the crime ends
not long after. The city was won back
block by block.
How to make the social fabric stron-
ger? Sharkey offers the immensely
cheering pictures of the possibility of
spending money to rebuild communi-
ties and replacing the noxious “warrior”
cop with those “community quarter-
backs.” It’s hard to imagine a more es-
sential career for a young urbanist, even
though such a cadre sounds at least
questionable as a source of crime-
stopping. But the lesson of wise pub-
lic works is not, truth be told, always
about the benefits of foundational anal-
ysis or fundamental change. An epi-
demic of violence was resolved with-
out addressing what were thought to
be its underlying disorders. We cured
the crime wave without fixing “the bro-
ken black family,” that neocon buga-
boo. For that matter, we cured it with-
out greater income equality or even
remotely solving the gun problem. The
story of the crime decline is about the
wisdom of single steps and small san-
ities. We could end cholera—in Lon-
don, they did—without really under-
standing how cholera bacteria work.
We have curbed crime without know-
ing how we did it, perhaps simply
by doing it in many ways at once. It is
possible to see this as a kind of human-
ist miracle, a lesson about the self-
organizing and, sometimes, self-healing
capacities of human communities that’s
as humbling, in its way, as any mystery
that faith can offer. 
BRIEFLY NOTED
Goddess of Anarchy, by Jacqueline Jones (Basic). Lucy Parsons,
a Chicago anarchist of the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries—and the wife of Albert Parsons, one of the men
hanged after the Haymarket Square bombing of 1886—emerges
in this biography as a rich, sometimes contradictory figure. A
black former slave who often tried to pass as Mexican or Na-
tive American, she criticized fellow-anarchists who champi-
oned complete sexual freedom for men and women, but she
also kept several lovers. Her dedication to the pursuit of equal-
ity for the masses was adamantine, however. “Within a pub-
lic arena of competing ideas and legislative initiatives,” Jones
writes, “she occupied a prominent niche—a revolutionary
cadre of one.”
Maestros and Their Music, by John Mauceri (Knopf ). By the
mid-nineteenth century, orchestral music had grown so com-
plex that a leader with an overview of a score’s structure be-
came, as Robert Schumann chided, “a necessary evil.” In this
approachable, gossipy study, Mauceri, a Leonard Bernstein
protégé, explains the “strange and lawless world” of the “in-
visible” art of conducting, which, like a medieval trade, is passed
on from masters to apprentices. He relates the difficulties of
leading a performance and describes behind-the-scenes tasks,
such as researching archival manuscripts. The job is not en-
tirely glamorous; it is physically arduous and requires an al-
ways packed suitcase. Gone are the days of demigods like Ar-
turo Toscanini, who, after assaulting a violinist mid-rehearsal,
was exonerated because he was acting “under the exaltation
of his genius.”
King Zeno, by Nathaniel Rich (MCD). This antic historical
novel conjures the New Orleans of 1918, beset by an axe mur-
derer and the Spanish flu. The vibrant setting outshines most
of the central characters, including a tenacious detective trau-
matized by his Army service, a jazz cornettist struggling to
make ends meet, and their beleaguered female companions.
The notable exception is a widowed Mafia matriarch, who
begins to fear that her oafish son may destroy everything her
family has built. The narrative comes to life in discrete, sear-
ing scenes of violence: a body unearthed at the Industrial Ca-
nal’s construction site, a dog shot in a courtroom, a battle reën-
actment turned all too real.
Elmet, by Fiona Mozley (Algonquin). Set in rural England and
told from the point of view of a fifteen-year-old boy, this
novel builds slowly to a ferocious climax. The boy, searching
for his sister, recounts how she came to be lost. They have
been in the care of their brutish but loving father, living off
the land, building their own home, and being schooled by a
neighbor. When the owner of the land, who has a history
with their absent mother, demands payment, he sets in mo-
tion a series of violent deaths. Mozley communicates the in-
tense bond shared by the family, whose existence on the mar-
gins of society involves a constant struggle against powerful
forces that punish those who choose to live differently.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 97
 those women overcome their passivity
and their willfulness—a jarring combi-
nation—in order to tell us what life can
feel like on that cliff of color and gender.
Kennedy’s most recent work for the
stage, “He Brought Her Heart Back in
a Box” (evocatively directed by Evan
Yionoulis, in a Theatre for a New Au-
dience production, at the Polonsky
Shakespeare Center), is smaller than
her previous plays but is shaped like the
shimmering and original scripts that
made Kennedy’s name in the nineteen-
sixties and have kept her in a place of
her own in the New York theatre scene
ever since. As I watched the two main
characters in “He Brought Her Heart
Back”—a well-off young white guy
named Chris (Tom Pecinka) and a light-
skinned black woman named Kay ( Ju-
liana Canfield), in the segregated Geor-
gia of the nineteen-forties—my mind
drifted to Kennedy’s other plays, the
majority of which are suffused with
memory and a child’s question: Why
can’t life work out, be the dream it should
be, like a song? Or, better yet, a movie?
Indeed, Kennedy is a kind of film
scenarist who is too literary for film
but whose strongest work renders the
stage more cinema-like, less intransi-
gent, more open to different ways of
moving. The stage directions for her
first professionally produced play, the
Obie Award-winning 1964 one-act
“Funnyhouse of a Negro,” read like a
script for a movie that’s about to be
T H E T H E AT R E shot. Kennedy is alive to every sound
and every image that her protagonist,

HOWL
Negro-Sarah, feels and projects. Sarah
lives in a room on the Upper West Side
with her various “selves,” including
A startling body of work about women, race, and dispossession. Queen Victoria and the Duchess of
Hapsburg. In her darkened “chamber,”
B Y H I LT O N A L S she has made a romance of European
and English empire and culture. Still,
no matter how much she identifies with
these historical figures, who are, per-
“ B lood” is one word that comes up.
Blood as poison, blood as might.
of her characters’ troubled, hope-filled,
and hopeless minds. Taken together,
force, isolated by their power, she can-
not fully enter into their stories or be
Other words—“help” and “cry”—are Kennedy’s twenty-odd plays form a long them, because she’s black—stained by
among the verbs most likely to be spo- and startling fugue, composed of language her dark-skinned father. In “Funny-
ken by the eighty-six-year-old playwright that is impactful and impacted but ever- house,” history, personal and otherwise,
Adrienne Kennedy’s characters. These moving, ever-shifting, as her protago- is accompanied by sound. Now it’s the
bitter, lovesick words—sharp bleats of nists, usually women of color, stand on sound of knocking on a door. Who’s
distress—rise and cling to the curtains the precipice of disaster, madness, or loss. knocking, and why?
and the walls in the ghastly showrooms For the course of the performance, at least, Victoria: It is my father. He is arriving
again for the night. He comes through the jun-
Adrienne Kennedy in Williamsburg, Virginia, in January, 2018. gle to find me. He never tires of his journey.

98 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN WORSHAM
 Duchess: How dare he enter the castle,
he who is the darkest of them all, the darkest
one? My mother looked like a white woman,
hair as straight as any white woman’s. And at
least I am yellow, but he is black, the blackest
one of them all. I hoped he was dead. Yet he
still comes through the jungle to find me.
Victoria: He never tires of the journey,
does he, Duchess?
Duchess: How dare he enter the castle of
Queen Victoria Regina, Monarch of England?
It is because of him that my mother died. The
wild black beast put his hands on her. She died.
Other “selves” show up in the
play—including Jesus and Patrice Lu-
mumba—but none can save Sarah from
the feeling that her race is doomed and
her life loveless. Eventually, she hangs
herself, killing off that yellow body, as
well as all the confused and vivid his-
tory that was tearing it apart.
The protagonist of “The Owl An-
swers,” a one-act from 1965, is a light-
skinned (“pallid”) black woman named
Clara. As Clara sits in a clanging, rum-
bling New York City subway train,
Shakespeare, William the Conqueror,
Chaucer, and Anne Boleyn enter the
car. Clara wants to see her father. She
is being held captive in the Tower of
London. For what crime? Her black-
ness? Clara pleads with Anne Boleyn:
Clara: Anne, Anne Boleyn. Anne, you
know so much of love, won’t you help me?
They took my father away and will not let me
see him. They locked me in this tower and I
can see them taking his body across to the
Chapel to be buried and see his white hair
hanging down. Let me into the Chapel. He
is my blood father. I am almost white, am I
not? Let me into St. Paul’s Chapel. Let me
please go down to St. Paul’s Chapel. I am his
daughter.
But Clara’s being “almost” white
means nothing here; her blackness is
what keeps her outside of British his-
tory. She’s a cultural orphan, split by
her parents’ racial shame and recrimi-
nations. As the play ends, Clara tries
to kill her black lover, a symbol of so
much anguish, but she fails, and what
alternative does she have except to be-
come an owl, a raceless non-human
who sees so well in the dark?
In Kennedy’s 1976 one-act “A Movie
Star Has to Star in Black and White”—
the title plays on the idea of the Ne-
gress as star—a black woman named
Clara (Kennedy often reuses names in
several works) tells her story through
characters from the black-and-white
movies she loved, and projected her-
self onto, as a child: Bette Davis in
“Now, Voyager,” Jean Peters in “Viva
Zapata!,” and Shelley Winters in “A
Place in the Sun.” When Clara was
growing up, there were no black film
actors who could express her panic, her
high theatrical self-engagement, or her
sense of grief. Saddened by her dark-
skinned father’s abandonment and preg-
nant with her first child, Clara expresses
her anxiety, through “Bette Davis,” in
one of the greatest monologues of the
twentieth century:  Cleveland, Ohio, in such multiethnic
Bette Davis: When I have the baby I won-
der will I turn into a river of blood and die?
My mother almost died when I was born. I’ve
always felt sad that I couldn’t have been an
angel of mercy to my father and mother and
saved them from their torment. I used to hope
when I was a little girl that one day I would
rise above them, an angel with glowing wings
and cover them with peace. But I failed. When
I came among them it seems to me I did not
bring them peace . . . but made them more dis-
consolate. The crosses they bore always made
me sad. The one reality I wanted never came
true . . . to be their angel of mercy to unite
them. I keep remembering the time my mother
threatened to kill my father with the shotgun.
I keep remembering my father’s going away
to marry a girl who talked to willow trees.
The play, an underproduced mas-
terpiece, is a mosaic of women’s pic-
tures, in every sense of the word—pic-
tures that Kennedy crafts by marrying
poetry to action. At the end of “A Movie
Star,” as in “A Place in the Sun,” Shel-
ley Winters drowns, a latter-day Ophe-
lia sinking into a watery grave, while
her killer, her once and always love,
looks on, dispassionate.
eath, maimed spirits, racial and
D cultural self-hatred, the joy of the
imagination, of finding real-life met-
aphors to describe who you are, the
propulsive force of anger, nightmares,
humorous imaginings—where do all
these hobgoblins and fancies come
from? At the start of her original and
groundbreaking memoir, “People Who
Led to My Plays” (1987), Kennedy her-
self poses that question: “More and
more often as my plays are performed
in colleges and taught in universities,
people ask me why I write as I do. . . .
Who influenced you to write in such
a nonlinear way? Who are your favor-
ite playwrights? After I attempt to an-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 99
swer, naming this playwright or that
one, as time progresses I realize I never
go back far enough to the beginning.”
The memoir is an attempt to go back
to the beginning. Wonderfully, Ken-
nedy doesn’t offer a straightforward bi-
ographical self-portrait, but “People
Who Led to My Plays” brings into
focus all that mattered to her as a girl,
as a young woman, and as an artist,
from paper dolls to Joe Louis to Gin-
ger Rogers and Fred Astaire.
Kennedy was born Adrienne Lita
Hawkins in Pittsburgh, but grew up in
neighborhoods as Mount Pleasant and
Glenville. Her dark-skinned father,
C. W. Hawkins, was a social worker,
and her mother, Etta—who had a white
father—was a schoolteacher. “It’s im-
portant to remember that I grew up in
an immigrant neighborhood but was
also a product of black middle-class
culture,” Kennedy said in one inter-
view. “I always tried to make sense of
that. Tried to balance that. To under-
stand where I fit into that world.” In
school, she learned Latin. (Her aston-
ishing 1968 play “A Lesson in Dead
Language” takes place in a classroom,
where the students’ menstrual blood
stains the backs of their white dresses
and the Latin teacher is a white dog.)
Kennedy loved the mornings she
spent listening to her mother recount
her dreams, which she sometimes be-
lieved were true, and she loved, too, the
wildness of Emily Brontë’s prose and
her story of unquenchable love. Ken-
nedy and her brother, Cornell, spent
summers visiting relatives in Monte-
zuma, Georgia, their parents’ home
town. (According to Kennedy, her
mother was the illegitimate daughter
of a powerful married white man.) The
train journey to Georgia in the Jim
Crow car was one that Kennedy never
got over; trains figure prominently in
her plays. In Montezuma, she saw “Col-
ored” and “White” drinking fountains.
Segregation was as real as her mother’s
dreams. At the same time, Hitler was
rolling through Europe. A lookout tower
went up in Kennedy’s Ohio neighbor-
hood. (In her play “A Rat’s Mass,” from
1966, two children have rat tails and
worship at a Catholic altar, while shout-
ing about Nazis as an imminent threat.)
Nazis, Lena Horne visiting Kennedy’s
neighbors, the superb order of her
mother’s house, her mother’s mixed-
race background: all these things spoke
to Kennedy’s imagination, just as
Thomas Hardy’s grim and theatrical
novels did when she discovered his
work, as a student at Ohio State Uni-
versity, where she enrolled in 1949. (She
was blown away by “Tess of the d’Ur-
bervilles.”) It was in Columbus that
she experienced racial hatred first hand;
there were only a few black female stu-
dents there, and Kennedy felt ostra-
cized by her white classmates. The bit-
ter lives of pastoral women that Hardy
portrayed in his work were as signifi-
cant to Kennedy as the characters in
Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Me-
nagerie.” From these authors she un-
derstood that one could write what one
knew about family and the desire to
wrench oneself away from it, and that
women could speak at the speed of
their own logic, if they chose to.
Kennedy’s degree in elementary ed-
ucation—one of the few fields open to
black women, who were dissuaded from
majoring in English—had little im-
pact on her career. Shortly after her
graduation, in 1953, she married a
fellow-student, Joseph Kennedy. The
couple eventually moved to New York,
where they went to the theatre and im-
mersed themselves in bohemian cul-
“ Your munchkins are always welcome to play in my garden.”
ture, while he worked on a Ph.D. in
social psychology. Kennedy has said
that her former husband—they were
married for thirteen years—helped re-
lease her from “this image of myself as
simply somebody who might teach sec-
ond grade.”
In 1960, Joe Kennedy received a grant
from the African Research Founda-
tion. Off the couple went to Ghana, by
way of Europe and North Africa. It
was Kennedy’s first trip to England,
Spain, Morocco—the places she had
read about or seen in movies. The jour-
ney made her thoughts more fluid; frag-
ments of her past came back to her,
fragments that she wanted not to make
whole but to shape. “The imagery in
‘Funnyhouse of a Negro’ was born by
seeing those places,” Kennedy noted in
an essay about the play. After several
months in Accra, her husband trav-
elled on to Nigeria and Kennedy moved
to Rome, where she finished writing
“Funnyhouse” the week before her sec-
ond son was born. “I was twenty-nine,”
she wrote. “And I believed if I didn’t
complete this play before my child’s
birth and before my thirtieth birthday
I would never finish it.”
In the same essay, Kennedy noted
that in Ghana, and for the rest of the
trip, she had stopped straightening her
hair. (Hair is central in “Funnyhouse.”)
By refusing to allow her hair to be “pro-
cessed,” Kennedy was turning her back
on how a colored girl was supposed to
look, let alone be, while grappling with
the question that all black American
intellectuals struggle with eventually,
especially when living abroad: How
did the African become a Negro? As
a Negro, she was many things—black
and white, a bastard child of cultures
that were not her own, though she was
part of them, a product both of Eu-
rope’s cultural schisms and of Ameri-
can racism. Dismantling her roman-
ticism, in her plays she could curse
England and Europe in their own lan-
guage, while wondering what her yel-
low body would look like without them.
Who would she have been without her
dark-skinned father and the violations
associated with his skin color? In an
interview included in Paul K. Bryant-
Jackson and Lois More Overbeck’s
“Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre
of Adrienne Kennedy” (1992), Kenne-
dy’s first director, Michael Kahn, talks
about working on “Funnyhouse of a
Negro”:
When I first met Adrienne, instead of ex-
plaining the play to me, she brought me loads
and loads of photographs and reproductions
of paintings. From that I really understood
what the power of the images were for her.
And for some reason, even though I was a
white boy from Brooklyn, I shared a lot of
those understandings of the same images.
Billie Allen, the actress who played
Negro-Sarah when “Funnyhouse”
premièred, remembered how angry the
play made both whites and blacks—
particularly blacks, who felt that it den-
igrated the race. Allen said that the
work was clearly about “the depth of
the damage of institutionalized racism.”
But while that ever-present wound was
a pressure point in a number of more
traditionally crafted, narrative dramas
and comedies by such brilliant black
playwrights as Lorraine Hansberry and
Alice Childress, Kennedy struck a nerve
by failing to offer an explanation for
it: the madness of being a Negro in
America was . . . mad. Why filter it? In
“Funnyhouse of a Negro,” Kennedy’s
characters don’t so much talk to one
another—there is no real connection
through her dialogue—as hold up a
mirror to the forces that are pulling
their minds and bodies apart, leaving
all that unique, pulsating language on
the stage floor.
Unlike her black male contempo­
raries—Douglas Turner Ward, Amiri
Baraka, the powerful and underrated
Ed Bullins, and others—Kennedy did
not make her politics central to the
drama of being that her characters
wrestle with. Although she may have
agreed with the Baraka­founded Black
Arts Movement and its
credo—black stories for
black audiences—race was
just one of the front lines
in her characters’ battle
with the self. (Her beau­
tiful 1969 monologue “Sun:
A Poem for Malcolm X
Inspired by His Murder”
says more about the lead­
er’s psychological reso­
nance than a zillion now forgotten get­
whitey plays.) In a 1995 interview,
Kennedy spoke about how “Funny­
house of a Negro,” closed after fewer
than fifty performances, in the wake of
what she recalled as hostile or uncom­
prehending reviews. Still, the black and
white artists who loved the play—Mike
Nichols, James Earl Jones, and Jerome
Robbins all went to see it; it was enthusi­
astically supported by Edward Albee
and his Playwrights Unit—recognized
something new in Kennedy’s language
of heartbreak and revenge.
n a sense, Kay, in “He Brought Her
Imother.
Heart Back in a Box,” is Negro­Sarah’s
To say that the story is auto­
biographical is to state the obvious. But,
as usual in Kennedy’s plays, the auto­
biographical strain is not direct. Also,
“He Brought Her Heart Back,” which
runs for just over forty minutes, isn’t ex­
actly a play; it’s a lyric populated by
characters who feel familiar to Kenne­
dy’s longtime readers and audiences.
Kay is a mixed­race seventeen­
year­old student at a boarding school
in the lightly fictionalized town of
Montefiore, Georgia. Her grandmother
lives in the black part of town. Her
mother committed suicide when Kay
was an infant; her father writes histo­
ries and mysteries. Beautiful but prim,
Kay loves Chris, whose wealthy father
oversees the boarding school. Chris,
who is forward­thinking, wants to es­
cape his father’s control and become an
actor in New York. But the young as­
pirants are burdened by a history they
cannot shake. When they talk to each
other, they are usually divided by space.
(Kay recites her first lines from a bal­
cony, while Chris emerges from a cel­
lar where he does work for his father.)
As in Kennedy’s other plays, conversa­
tion doesn’t necessarily involve com­
munication or catharsis. Often, it is
an excuse for recounting
dreams and nightmares.
Chris describes his moth­
er’s horror of her husband’s
illegitimate black children;
Kay talks about her moth­ WINTER SALE
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a freedom that she will never know.
The set designer, Christopher Bar­
reca, has done an extraordinary job of
realizing Kennedy’s cinematic approach
to stage pictures, and when I saw the
production I was reminded of “A Movie
Star Has to Star in Black and White,”
in which Kennedy most directly ex­
plores how screen images can inhabit
the mind. It would have been terrific
if Yionoulis had paired “He Brought New Yorker
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The new work is too short and thin Cartoon Prints
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 third, Simeon and Levi, “for in their
anger they killed men,” and very well
indeed in those of Judah, from whom
the “sceptre shall not depart,” and—
of course—Joseph, “a fruitful bough”
once sold into slavery by his brothers
and subsequently their benefactor as
the overlord of Egypt. (No, I haven’t
read Thomas Mann’s tetralogy, “Jo-
seph and His Brothers”—to my acute
and, on deadline, irremediable regret.
Note to friends: please stop telling
me how wonderful it is!) The show
enthralls in numerous ways.
Start with a mysterious provenance.
There is no record of the suite’s ex-
istence before 1722, when it turns up
among the assets of an English mer-
chant and director of the then lately
collapsed South Sea Company. The
paintings were surely made in Seville,
a former center of Muslim power that
had become the economic hub and
most cosmopolitan city of the Span-
ish Empire, in or near which Zur-
barán spent most of his life, and likely
were destined for the Spanish Amer-
icas, at the time a market hungry for
art from the mother country. The pop-
ularity of the theme in the colonies
owed something to a speculation that
the New World’s indigenous natives
T H E ART WORLD were descendants of the ten Lost
Tribes, which had vanished from his-

BROTHERHOOD
tory. (Related works, including cop-
ies from Zurbarán’s series, reside in
Puebla, Mexico, and in Lima, Peru.)

COURTESY THE AUCKLAND PROJECT AND ZURBARÁN TRUST; PHOTOGRAPH: ROBERT LAPRELLE
Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Jacob and His Twelve Sons.” An old tale holds that the paintings
were seized in the mid-Atlantic from
B Y P E T ER S C H J ELDA H L a Spanish ship by English pirates, but
with no evidence on that account. The
ultimate buyer, in 1756, of all but one
of them, Richard Trevor, the Angli-
he Frick Collection has a sur- their day. All the characters—each a can Bishop of Durham, particularly
T prise for us: a room-filling loan
show of “Jacob and His Twelve Sons”
distinct personality uniquely posed,
costumed, and accessorized, and tow-
prized their exalting of Old Testa-
ment Scripture. He was a passionate
(circa 1640-45), thirteen full-length, ering against a bright, clouded sky promoter of Jewish civil rights who,
life-size imagined portraits, all but and a low swath of sylvan scenery— in the House of Lords, in 1753, had
unknown in the United States until appear to be approximately as old as helped pass an act of Parliament nat-
now, by the Spanish master Francisco they are in the forty-ninth chapter of uralizing Jews as citizens, though the
de Zurbarán. Twelve are from the din- Genesis. There the dying Jacob proph- measure was soon repealed, in the face
ing room of Auckland Castle, in the esies, in gorgeous verse, the fates of of anti-Semitic popular outrage. The
small northeastern English town of the founders-to-be of the Twelve clergyman’s sense of the works seems
Bishop Auckland, and one, reuniting Tribes of Israel. Some will fare bet- not to have been limited to a com-
the suite, is from another English col- ter than others: poorly, in the case of mon Christian interpretation of Jacob
lection. They constitute a terrific feat the eldest, Reuben, “unstable as water,” and his sons as coded premonitions
of Baroque storytelling: movies of and in the cases of the second and of Jesus and his dozen disciples.
It is interesting to note, as a side-
A detail from “Joseph,” Zurbarán’s magisterial depiction of Jacob’s eleventh son. light, the single canvas that got away
102 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
from Trevor to a higher bidder: “Ben-
jamin,” depicting the father’s adored
youngest boy. It is the liveliest, though
not nearly the best, painting of the
bunch. The subject, “a ravenous wolf ”
in Jacob’s approving view, is portrayed
from the side, twisting cutely to glance
at the viewer while leading a rather
doggy wolf on a chain. (Zurbarán
wasn’t always a dab hand with ani-
mals, as witness, too, the tutelary lion,
resembling less the king of beasts
than Bert Lahr, in “Judah.”) Benja-
min’s voguish, faux-rustic garments
include a red suit tied up with yel-
low ribbon bows. The background
features stately ruins. In stylistic flavor,
“Benjamin” most closely approaches
the eighteenth-century English taste
for portraits of fetching individuals
in fancy dress.
urbarán was the second-best
Z painter in seventeenth-century
Spain, no disgrace when the cham-
pion, his Seville-born near-exact con-
temporary, happened to be Diego
Velázquez, who arguably remains bet-
ter than anybody, ever. Velázquez
landed the country’s one plum job
for an artist, as chief painter to King
Philip IV, in Madrid, where he could
bring to peak refinement his aston-
ishing naturalism, with secular sub-
jects in sophisticated company. Zur-
barán had to subsist ad hoc, often on
commissions from religious orders
that tethered him to pious subjects.
But an independent and even a lib-
eral spirit seethes in his art, which
took form, like that of Velázquez,
amid a convergence of innovations
from Italy and from Spanish-ruled
Flanders. Thought to be largely self-
taught, with a shaky grasp of perspec-
tive that made him wisely avoid try-
ing to render deep space, Zurbarán
came to be called the Spanish Cara-
vaggio, for his theatrical manipula-
tions of light and shadow, although
his knowledge of the revolutionary
Italian may not have extended to see-
ing any original paintings by him.
He poeticized the stern predilec-
tions of the Counter-Reformation,
which sparked both glories in art and
terrors in life—in particular, the In-
quisition, which especially targeted
“crypto” remnants of the Jewish pop-
ulation that had been expelled from
Spain in 1492. Epitomizing the mo-
ment are Zurbarán’s darkling por-
trayals of saints and monks in ec-
static prayer. His art lost clerical
patronage, late in his life, to the soft-
ened, high-fructose manner of Bar-
tolomé Esteban Murillo. (By hap-
penstance, the Frick has a concurrent
show of pretty good portraits by Mu-
rillo in its basement galleries.) Zur-
barán was almost forgotten until
French aesthetes rediscovered him,
along with other neglected Old Mas-
ters, including Vermeer, in the nine-
teenth century.
The “Jacob” paintings are un-
signed—indicating a substantial role
in their execution by Zurbarán’s as-
sistants, who, incidentally, may well
be immortalized in the realistic faces
of the figures—and uneven in qual-
ity. In addition, after nearly four cen-
turies, the canvases sorely need clean-
ing. The brilliance of their colors has
dimmed, notably in passages of bro-
cade and other sumptuous fabrics—a
forte of Zurbarán, whose father was
a haberdasher. (At least one hue is
defunct: that of the pigment smalt
blue, which blackens with age.) But
most of the pictures retain power
aplenty. Spend time with them, half
an hour minimum. Their glories
bloom slowly, as you register the for-
mal decisions that practically spring
the figures from their surfaces into
the room with you, and as you pon-
der, if you will, the stories that they
plumb. Near-masterpieces include
the regally attired “Asher,” who in Ja-
cob’s words “shall provide royal del-
icacies,” carrying a basket of bread
loaves that display Zurbarán’s subtle
mastery of still-life, and “Dan,” who
“shall be a snake by the roadside” (ap-
parently, a good thing for a man
associated with judges) and who
gestures blithely, as if speaking to
someone out of frame, while wield-
ing a live serpent on a stick. Finest
of all is “Joseph,” as profound a paint-
ing as its subject is a foundational
personage in the world’s religious
heritage.
Joseph was Jacob’s eleventh son.
He infuriated his brothers by being
their father’s pet and by guilelessly
telling them dreams that suggested
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018 103
that he would come to dominate them.
While they debated killing him, a
caravan of foreign traders happened
by, so they sold him, instead, and
stained his cloak with goat’s blood,
as evidence that a wild animal had
eaten him. His adventures in Egypt—
he was the household manager for
the palace-guard captain Potiphar, an
object of unrequited lust and of ven-
geance by Potiphar’s wife, and a pris-
oner, before being promoted to the
Pharaoh’s right hand for interpreting
the ruler’s dreams that foretold a
seven-year famine—led to a frater-
nal drama. His brothers (except Ben-
jamin, at home because Jacob was
loath to ever part from him) came to
Egypt in quest of food and were at
his mercy. They didn’t recognize him.
Joseph put them to hard tests before
revealing his identity. Redeemed in
his eyes by their proven loyalty to
Benjamin, they and the entire fam-
ily were granted choice land by the
Pharaoh. (For how that arrangement
turned out eventually—no spoilers
here—skip ahead to Exodus.) What
must Joseph have been like?
As envisioned by Zurbarán, he is
properly magisterial, wearing fantas-
tic raiment trimmed in fur and gold.
His face appears between a medal-
lioned, lustrous blue scarf and a mas-
sive red-and-blue turban that casts a
shadow across his eyes. He is still
young but has an air of seasoned ma-
turity. His expression is watchful—
unillusioned—but he doesn’t seem
temperamentally so: there is a linger-
ing sweetness about him. He is a man
of extraordinary intelligence and heart,
disciplined by experience. To meet his
gaze is to feel his strict justice and his
reserve of compassion. I believe that
only Zurbarán himself could have
imagined, much less painted, that face.
The Counter-Reformation didn’t
fancy tolerance. (As a boy of ten, the
artist would have been aware of the
mass expulsion from Spain, in 1609,
of the descendants of Moors, like that
of the Jews before them—actions
self-destructive for the nation’s cul-
tural fertility.) But Zurbarán’s human-
ized righteousness, like Velázquez’s
crystalline acumen, catches a fleeting
glint of civil grace in history’s dusky
promenade. 
 hillside nearby, where others stroll and
T HE CURRENT CINEMA play, but he sits in his room and watches
through the window, which weeps with

TIES THAT BREAK

“Loveless” and “Permission.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
n retrospect, was it wise to invite
Ito “New
Andrey Zvyagintsev to contribute
York, I Love You” (2008)? It’s
a clumsy portmanteau of short films,
with directors ranging from Natalie
Portman to Brett Ratner, designed to
send a collective valentine to the city.
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film revolves around the disappearance of a neglected child.
Zvyagintsev’s nine-minute segment,
“Apocrypha,” begins in a dark alley,
where a teen-ager is greeted by his fa-
ther, who lends him a video camera
and asks, “How’s Mom?” We realize,
without being told, that the parents
are separated. The kid then uses the
camera to film a woman—his mother,
perhaps?—breaking up with another
man, in a scene of public grief. “Apoc-
rypha” did not make the final cut of
“New York, I Love You,” winding up
as an extra on the DVD. Big surprise.
If you seek romance, Zvyagintsev is
not your man.
His latest movie is entitled “Love-
less.” That’s more like it. The setting is
modern Moscow and its environs, and
much of the action takes place in the
104 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 12 & 19, 2018
scrubby, unpretty half-world, neither
town nor country, that Zvyagintsev has
staked out as his patch. In “Elena” (2011),
the middle-aged heroine travels out of
the city to see her son, walking down a
rough track that might feel rustic were
it not for the concrete cooling towers
of the power plant beside it. Likewise,
in “Loveless,” a bunch of people fan out
through ranks of conifers, the pastoral
mood eroded by a giant radar dish that
stares through the boughs, as if it were
an artificial sun. Another scene unfolds
in an abandoned hotel, dripping like a
grotto, its luxury fittings reduced to bro-
ken junk. Nature is reasserting control,
as it once did in the Roman forum, but
this ruin is only a few years old, and it’s
decaying as fast as a corpse.
Twelve-year-old Alyosha (Matvey
Novikov) is a creature of these twilit
zones. He walks back unaccompanied
from school through the leafless woods.
His home is in one of the apartment
blocks that wall in the landscape like
the backdrop of a stage. There is a grassy
rain. He is “constantly crying,” his mother,
Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), says, in a
tone not of pity but of tetchy complaint,
as if his tears had nothing to do with
her. His father, Boris (Aleksey Rozin),
is no more sympathetic, and you would
hesitate to call them a family. The par-
ents are on the brink of selling the apart-
ment and splitting up, and Alyosha is
in danger of disappearing down the
crack. One evening, as they argue about
who will get custody, we glimpse Aly-
osha, listening behind the bathroom
door, his young face twisted into a sound-
less howl. Somehow his silence makes
it even more shattering. We could be
watching Eisenstein.
What Alyosha doesn’t know is that
his parents have new lives up and run-
ning elsewhere. His mother is involved
with a rich older man, whose apartment
is more spacious than hers, and who
takes her out to fancy dinners, where
she rubs her foot against his crotch. As
for Boris, his girlfriend is carrying his
child; pushing a cart around the super-
market, they seem like a married cou-
ple already. We see both Boris and
Zhenya enjoying voracious sex away
from home, as if their roaming appe-
tites cried out to be fed, and, when an
exhausted Zhenya creeps back in the
small hours, she doesn’t even bother to
check that her son is O.K. Only when
his school calls to report that he is ab-
sent does she notice anything awry, and
Boris, at first, is not too concerned. In
truth, Alyosha was lost to them long
ago. How can he be missing when he
was barely there?
This theme, of the unwanted or un-
acknowledged child, burns fiercely in
Zvyagintsev’s work. Nobody who saw
his début feature, “The Return” (2003),
will forget the opening minutes, in
which a boy is left stranded and shiv-
ering on a tall platform above the sea;
the rest of that movie tells of his van-
ished father, who turns up as a near-
stranger and struggles to reconnect with
his sons. The plot of “The Banishment”
(2007) centers on a woman who is pres-
sured by her husband to abort a baby,
which he wrongly believes was fathered
by somebody else, and “Loveless” is, if
anything, bleaker still. The domestic
ILLUSTRATION BY DADU SHIN
drama of the first half makes way for a
kind of procedural thriller, viscous in
pace but relentless in its dread, as Boris
and Zhenya, with the aid of volunteers,
institute a hunt for Alyosha—quizzing
his teachers, his schoolmate, and his
terrifying grandmother, and even nerv-
ing themselves to inspect an uniden-
tified body. If you’re hoping that they
might, in the crucible of this crisis, join
together and defy the title of the movie,
rediscovering their love for each other,
you don’t know Zvyagintsev. Get ready
for a fight in a morgue.
Why is it, then, that “Loveless,” which
has been nominated for Best Foreign
Film at this year’s Academy Awards,
should be so much more gripping than
grim? One reason is that, for all the
deadened souls who throng the tale, the
telling could not be more alive. The
characters may be stuck; the camera is
on the move. Watch it stir and glide,
never wild or abrupt but as stealthy as
a sleuth. A school principal cleans a
blackboard and leaves the room, where-
upon we advance to the window, as if
to check for predators in the snow out-
side, and, when Alyosha trudges home,
we pause to approach the roots of a tree,
and the earthy shadow-space that gapes
between them. Is someone hiding in
the hole? Could the boy find refuge
there? If the mystery of this film is never
satisfactorily solved, it’s not for want of
clues. Everything we see can be taken
down in evidence and used.
As for the guilty party, blame Rus-
sia. The indictment that Zvyagintsev is-
sued to his native land in his previous
film, “Leviathan” (2014), was blistering
enough, but “Loveless” is equally un-
sparing in its diagnosis of spiritual rot.
There are shades of Solzhenitsyn in the
way that Zvyagintsev condemns both
the repressive machinery of the social
order and the trappings that are proffered
by the free market; Boris works for a
company whose policy, loyal to the Or-
thodox bent of Putin’s regime, demands
that the employees be married, happily
or otherwise, while Zhenya’s primary
object of worship is not her paramour
but her shining cell phone. Call it an
iCon. “To love and selfies!” young women
exclaim, toasting one another at a restau-
rant, and there are times when the movie
feels almost too punitive for its own
good—as though the parents, in their
moral fecklessness, deserved to be
stripped of their offspring. Now and
then, we hear people on TV predicting
apocalypse, but, where Tarkovsky, in
“The Sacrifice” (1986), hinted at nuclear
catastrophe, Zvyagintsev seems to fore-
tell a less fiery climax: a gradual eating
away of our human skills. “Do you think
the world is about to end?” Boris asks
a colleague, over lunch. The man chews
and swallows, then replies, “Definitely.”
nother country, another town, an-
A other couple on the slide. In “Per-
mission,” two lively British actors, Re-
becca Hall and Dan Stevens, play two
American lovers, Anna and Will. She
is completing her Ph.D. in music at
N.Y.U. He runs a bespoke furniture
business, while fixing up a house where
the two of them will beautifully dwell.
(It’s in Park Slope, but you guessed that
already.) They are happy, healthy, and
handsome, and there’s the rub: life is
just perfect. It’s a nightmare.
One problem is that Anna and Will
met when they were young and have
slept only with each other. Unless they
have Amish pals we never see, this fact
surely makes them unique among their
contemporaries, and Anna is starting to
wonder whether she should, before set-
tling down to the prix fixe, sample some-
thing else on the menu. Will goes along
with the idea, which is weird, though
not half as weird as his decision to hang
around in a bar while she gets picked
up by another guy. For a moment, I
thought that Will was going to follow
them home, stand by the bed with a
clipboard, and take notes.
In case one agonizing impasse of the
bourgeoisie is not enough, Anna’s
brother Hale (David Joseph Craig) has
a conundrum of his own. He is getting
broody, and ponders adopting a child,
but his partner, the glowering Reece
(Morgan Spector), is unconvinced. (In
the real world, Spector is married to
Hall, and Craig is married to the film’s
director, Brian Crano. They should mar-
ket this movie with a special edition of
Twister.) Almost everything about “Per-
mission” feels flighty and parochial when
laid beside the fateful mire of “Love-
less,” yet Hall, in particular, lends a sober
grace to the erotic roundelay. When, at
last, her character receives a proposal
of marriage, she blushes with perplex-
ity, not joy, and the frown that furrows
her brow tells of a deep dissatisfaction
with the romantic norms. Who wants
a happy ending when you can try a
fresh start? 
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three
finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Mick Stevens,
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THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“It’s a miracle that you survived.

Your house was totally devoured.”
David Rosania, Rye Beach, N.H.
“Results are still preliminary, but all
“Have you tried icing it?” indications suggest that he is a good boy.”
Xiwen Wang, Williamstown, Mass. Nathan Bragg, Chicago, Ill.

“We’d like to keep you here for further tasting.”

Gary Borislow, Johns Creek, Ga.
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