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THE NEW YORKER

AUGUST 17, 2026

4 GOINGS ON

7 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the politics of A.I.; Hannah Einbinder; surveilling Atlanta's surveillance; welcome to Queens; Dan Hoyle returns.

DISPATCHES

Alexandra Schwartz 12 End of Story Among the doulas who care for people as they die.

SHOUTS & MURMURS

Anthony Lane 19 Eat the Lotus!

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.

Jill Lepore 20 Bot or Not What does it take to prove you are human?

PROFILES

Margaret Talbot 26 The Delusions of John Roberts The Chief Justice still sees his Court as neutral ground.

A REPORTER AT LARGE

Joshua Yaffa 40 The New Gulag Where Russia disappears its prisoners.

FICTION

Emma Cline 50 "The Blight"

THE CRITICS

BOOKS

David Denby 57 Hannah Arendt's American education. Ian Buruma 63 MAGA and the unmaking of Europe. 65 Briefly Noted

THE ART WORLD

Zachary Fine 68 Pope.L's engrossing sendups.

POEMS

Henri Cole 32 "Cereus" Garous Abdolmalekian 52 "Horses"

COVER

Edward Steed "Midnight Bloom"

DRAWINGS Charlie Hankin, Harriet Burbeck, Dan Misdea, Edith Zimmerman, Farley Katz, Johnny DiNapoli, Asher Perlman, William Haefeli, Edward Steed, Roz Chast, Olivia Pecini, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Lonnie Millsap, Sofia Warren, Christopher Weyant, Steph Lawson, Seth Fleishman SPOTS Michael Parkin

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THE NEW YORKER

Conversations that change your world.

THE NEW YORKER

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Join The New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, for in-depth interviews and thought-provoking discussions about politics, culture, and the arts.

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To find all of The New Yorker's podcasts, visit newyorker.com/podcasts.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jill Lepore ("Bot or Not," p. 20), a staff writer, has contributed to the maga- zine since 2005. Her new book, "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," will be published this month.

Joshua Yaffa ("The New Gulag," p. 40), a contributing writer, is the author of "Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia."

Emma Cline (Fiction, p. 50) is the au- thor of "The Guest" and "The Girls," among other books. Her upcoming novel, "Switzy," is due out in September.

Garous Abdolmalekian (Poem, p. 52) is an award-winning poet from Tehran. His book "Lean Against This Late Hour" was published in English in 2020.

Edward Steed (Cover) has been con- tributing cartoons to The New Yorker since 2013. His new book, "Happy Hour," will be published in October.

David Denby (Books, p. 57), a staff writer, is the author of "Eminent Jews: Bern- stein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer."

Margaret Talbot ("The Delusions of John Roberts," p. 26) has been a staff writer since 2004. She is a co-author, with David Talbot, of "By the Light of Burning Dreams."

Alexandra Schwartz ("End of Story," p. 12) joined the magazine in 2013 and became a staff writer in 2016. She is a co-host of The New Yorker's culture podcast, Critics at Large.

Nathan Heller (The Talk of the Town, p. 11), a staff writer, has contributed to the magazine since 2011.

Ian Buruma (Books, p. 63), a professor at Bard, is the author of "Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945," among other books.

Henri Cole (Poem, p. 32) is a poet and an essayist. His poetry collections in- clude "The Other Love."

Erik Agard (Puzzles & Games Dept.) is a co-founder of the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory, a resource for aspiring puzzle-makers from under- represented groups.

ANNALS OF INQUIRY

G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost By Shayla Love

Read this digital-only story on the New Yorker app, the best place to find the latest issue, plus more news, commentary, criticism, and humor.

JACKSON GIBBS

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THE MAIL

CALL HER BY HER NAME

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was wrong. I was startled to find in Melanie Thernstrom's profile of the concierge gynecologist Sally Greenwald—which extolls the joys, and pricey maintenance, of female-oligarch orgasms—just how far we have not come ("Billionaires' Vagina Club," July 6th & 13th). Here, yet again, one of the few remaining publications of note reinforces, via repetition, the diminishment of female sexual anatomy by misidentifying it in both title and text.

The vagina is merely one of the many moving parts—mons pubis, labia majora and minora, clitoris, cervix, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, numerous glands, endless nerves, and, yes, the adjoining vagina—that compose the vulva and her internal sisters. How would it fly if we all, including social-media influencers and other cultural leaders, conspired to call the penis the perineum? Or maybe the prostate? Oops! Wrong landmark; right neighborhood. So how did "vagina," the nom du jour for decades now (with ten appearances in the piece, four of them incorrect, three of those introduced by the good doctor herself), come to represent the entire site? And, more interestingly, why?

When will we women stop our filial collaboration with Papa Freud in his denunciation of our sexual core—it is the wretched, much lost and found clitoris of which I speak—and refuse to repudiate our own central charge? We expect it of men, whose biology dictates their prime interest in the mostly insensate tube of the vagina, but when will we cease our complicity in the patriarchy and stop skirting ourselves? Toni Bentley Los Angeles, Calif.

REALITY CHECK

Nikhil Krishnan's review of "How to Kill a Language," by Sophia Smith Galer, errs in the same way that the book does, when it treats as literal the "death" of

language which, unlike that of the giant panda, is entirely metaphoric (Books, July 27th). The death of a language is like that of square dancing, or of doing algebra by pencil and paper, and mistaking metaphor for reality is one of the surest routes to woolly thinking.

Language, as Krishnan highlights at the top of the piece, is, first and foremost, a means of communication. So long as effective communication persists, the reflex to mourn the disuse of a language can be motivated only by something else—nostalgia or, perhaps, the loss of a group's ability to easily demarcate itself. Krishnan rightly points out that actively suppressing language ought to be condemned, but that suppression and obsolescence are wholly different. No reasonable person would forbid the speaking or learning of any language, but surely no reasonable person should compel it if the only use of a language is its further teaching or translation.

The Bible is widely read and loved in spite of the fact that most people don't speak any of the languages in which it was originally written. "The Odyssey" is one of the blockbusters of the year even though the language in which the story first appeared is long dead. The reanimation of Hebrew in Israel was less about preserving the language than about choosing a common tongue, one that wouldn't favor one group of Jewish people over another. If Smith Galer wants to speak Emilian, no one is standing in her way. But to refer to the fact that few people seem to want to speak it as "killing" it, well, that's killing language by misuse.

Kurt Tidmore Carrigaline, Ireland

PROFANE AND PROFOUND

Louis Menand, in his examination of Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," contends that the outrage the photograph elicited among American Christians in the nineteen-eighties was the opening salvo in the culture wars that rage to this day (Books, July 20th). I was not old enough to participate in the

early debates, but speaking today, as a Christian minister, I would like to convince my fellow-believers that this indignation misses something fundamental about the central symbol of our faith. Indeed, Serrano's image is, to me, comparable to an icon, worthy of sincere contemplation.

The cross represents the most sadistic and extreme form of mockery and humiliation, so if one considers dipping something in urine to be profane, doing this with the crucifix is actually redundant. The cross did much worse to the one whom Christians believe to be the human incarnation of God, yet Jesus' followers believed that his very crucifixion was the key to unlocking the revelation of God's grace. In the New Testament, Paul called the idea of a crucified Saviour "a scandal."

But centuries of casual display has domesticated the image of the cross. For this reason, Serrano's work, with its uncannily beatific admixture of the sacred and the profane, recovers something of the original impact of Paul's scandalous proclamation. Serrano's intentions, which he seems to wish to keep obscured, are beside the point. An understanding of the sacred in which the sacred collapses when it comes into contact with the profane is impoverished, falling short of the transcendence that is worthy of the word "God."

A foundational insight of Christianity is that the sacred has the power to sanctify the profane. The social implications are crucial: Jesus concretely identified himself with "the least of these," elevating as sacred the dignity of anyone whose humanity society wishes to piss on or flush away. This, rather than sanctimonious display, is what should motivate Christians. The Reverend Nathaniel Mahlberg Philadelphia, Pa.

Letters should be sent with the writer's name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 17, 2026

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GOINGS ON

AUGUST 12 – 18, 2026

What we're watching, listening to, and doing this week.

Since 2021, the British singer Olivia Dean (pictured) has enjoyed several viral breakthroughs—including a clip of a show at London's Jazz Café which exploded across socials—all while climbing the usual rungs of the industry ladder: signing with Virgin E.M.I., doing late-night shows, playing Glastonbury. Virality finally tipped over into ubiquity this year, with the hit single "Man I Need," from the record "The Art of Loving," making her a sensation on her way to a Grammy for Best New Artist. The LP, her second, finds its star growing into a warm vintage pop-R. & B. sound. At Madison Square Garden (Aug. 14-15 and 17-18), Dean is joined in concert by Baby Rose, a singer with a similarly old soul and timeless voice.—Sheldon Pearce

ABOUT TOWN

OFF BROADWAY | "I must admit, a stroke at thirty wasn't in my five-year plan . . . or my ten-year plan or fifty-year plan," the eponymous star of "Cat Cohen: Broad Strokes" deadpans in her new one-woman musical comedy, directed by Alex Timbers. The stroke, caused by a hole in her heart, is just one entry in the sprawling hypochondriacal catalogue raisonné that powers the show. Dressed, like a Renaissance duchess, in a sparkly lavender corset with puffy taffeta sleeves, the "young for my grade" raconteuse pinballs from topic to topic: her first migraine with a visual aura at twelve, the "stroke of unluck" that upended a summer trip to Europe, a parade of clinicians. Cohen's songs, co-written by David Dabbon, often play like impressions of impressions, but her physical comedy shines.—Rhoda Feng (Lucille Lortel; through Sept. 25.)

DANCE | In its forty-fifth iteration, the Battery Dance Festival holds on to its signature virtues: location (outdoors, with a backdrop of New York Harbor at sunset) and variety (a grab bag of local and international companies). It's like a neighborhood recital, with guests from around the world and the Statue of Liberty presiding. The varied programs, all free, include U.S. premières of work from Brazil, Romania, Spain, and Taiwan, and, per tradition, one evening is devoted to Indian dance. The host company, Battery Dance, turning fifty this year, presents new pieces by Sidra Bell and the former New York City Ballet star Jock Soto.—Brian Seibert (Robert F. Wagner, Jr., Park; Aug. 10-16.)

OFF BROADWAY | Benedict Lombe's two-hander romantic drama "Shifters" begins—if a show

this gleefully indifferent to chronology can be said to begin anywhere—at the wake for the beloved grandmother of Dre (Daniel Ezra), where he is blindsided by the arrival of Des (Heather Agyepong), a close friend who vanished from his life years earlier. Lombe then shuffles the chronology like a deck of tarot cards: at sixteen, the pair clock each other as the only Black students in their philosophy class; some time later, Des frantically searches for a missing painting she'd made; in their thirties, after the wake, they sift through Nana's belongings while circling the life they failed to build together. Not every philosophical detour lands, but Agyepong and Ezra negotiate the play's hairpin turns with the effortless accord of a pair of figure skaters.—R.F. (Cherry Lane; through Sept. 13.)

DANCE | In recent years, a small loft above a beauty-supply store in East Williamsburg has emerged as a hotbed of dance experimentation. This incubator is called Pageant, a community space run by young choreographers and artists, who present scrappy and adventurous work. A contemporary equivalent of SoHo lofts or East Village theatres in the eighties, it has now attracted the imprimatur of the Museum of Modern Art, which is hosting a daylong marathon of short pieces by many Pageant artists. Here's a chance to catch up on the scene in concentrated form, and without a trek to East Williamsburg.—B.S. (MOMA's Kravis Studio; Aug. 21 and 30.)

MOVIES | Matt Johnson's "Tony" is a charmingly superficial bildungsroman about how, in the summer of 1975, the brash and callow college student Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa), who went by the titular nickname, found his culinary calling. The dramatic recipe involves equal parts literary ambition, risk-taking, and chutzpah, with a dash of substance abuse, cooked on the high heat of adolescent lust that brings Tony to Provincetown in pursuit of a schoolmate named Nancy (Emilia Jones). Misadventure and misbehavior leave him stranded on the porch of a sympathetic chef and restaurateur (Antonio Banderas), whose kitchen offers a tumult of volatile personalities and whose soulful wisdom confers a sense of adult responsibilities. If the movie plays like a just-so story, it also movingly suggests the caprices of chance in every seeming destiny.—Richard Brody (In limited release; in wide release Aug. 21.)

JAZZ | The Jazz Generations Initiative is an organization set on bridging generational and disciplinary divides by emphasizing the ways in which jazz is informed by its in-person community. Its New York chapter "puts jazz in motion" around the city by arranging various events, and in conjunction with those efforts the drummer and composer Savannah Harris, as part of J.G.I.'s Continuum Fellowship, curated a show featuring the experimental soul artist KeiyaA, the saxophonist and bandleader Immanuel Wilkins, and the bassist and d.j. Onnigi. These musicians have different creative sensibilities, but, as the J.G.I. banner clearly understands, they exist along a shared artistic spectrum and are united in purpose.—Sheldon Pearce (Public Records; Aug. 12.)

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WHAT WE'RE READING

The writer Sheila Heti recommends three books.

1. "Two Serious Ladies," by Jane Bowles. It's so original, and completely follows its own rules and logic, and it is so funny. Bowles and Tennessee Williams were very good friends. He called her "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters," although I didn't know that when I first read her, in my early twenties, I would have been surprised: she seemed to have come out of no milieu, to have lived in nothing so literal as a city, or in something as ordinary as time. I'm sure I would have written completely differently if I had never read it.

2. I love Émile Zola's "The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames)," from 1883, which is as brilliant as any book could be about marketing, advertising, the rapacious swallowing up of smaller shops by larger ones, and the hard life of being a salesgirl from the provinces trying to earn a living in Paris. I love all the delicious details of the store's wares: enticing displays of umbrellas, lace, linen, and gloves. And how Zola works into his story all the inventive ways his capitalist visionary, Octave Mouret, fans the flames of his female customers' desire for new and beautiful things.

3. I read Vigdis Hjorth's "If Only" at the subway station, then on the subway, then in the airport, then on the plane across the ocean, then in the taxi after landing, then finally in the hotel. I can't separate the feeling of movement and travel from the feelings that book gave me: the vertigo of falling disastrously in love with exactly the wrong man, being shunned by him, taken up by him again, suffering from the love, and all the twists and turns of the relationship which the book depicts.

NEW YORKER.COM/NEWSLETTERS

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TABLES FOR TWO

Somssi

79 MacDougal St.

Every inch of Somssi is charming: the lace curtains, the vintage baking tins repurposed as wall sconces, the mismatched wooden tables and chairs. It's the kind of charm that could tip, in less careful hands, into hospitality kitsch—all warmth, no substance. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Somssi's appeal as mere superficial loveliness. The restaurant's managing partner, Ahris Kim, was for many years the director of operations for Na:Eun Hospitality, the group behind the ultra-high-end Korean-inspired tasting counter Atomix. At Somssi, in partnership with Na:Eun's impresarios, Ellia and Junghyun (J.P.) Park, Kim channels the group's high standards into her own deceptively casual concept. The restaurant's name, pronounced "somm-shi," means something like "time-honed skill" in Korean, and dining there put me in mind of what baseball old heads used to call easy power: a display of capability so practiced that it nearly looks like relaxation.

Few things on the bistro-style menu look especially novel, but every dish offers a twist, or a zing, or a moment of cloud-parting clarity. The sliced scallops in a crudo appetizer, for instance, are pressed to create ragged edges that wick up chilled rhubarb broth fragrant with makrut lime. The menu is less overtly Korean than the restaurant's name and affiliations might lead you to expect. Ko-

Korean flourishes appear here and there—a mustard-greens kimchi spiking a classic Bolognese; a fiercely peppercorn-y sauce, evocative of japchae, au-poivre-ing a picanha steak—but so do other influences. An enormous double mutton chop, rubbed with a sweet and aromatic spice blend, is inspired by Chinese cumin lamb. I loved a wedge of tender roasted caraflex cabbage under a custardy egg-and-crab sauce rich with white pepper: it's egg foo young, but silkified, sultrified (and now, tragically, no longer on the menu).

Plenty of buzz seems to be accumulating around the cutesily named "Potato, Potato, Potato, and Caviar," a pucklike croquette wrapped in fried ribbons of potato and topped with an inky tiara of roe. But I found the dish too much, an overwrought packet of luxury in a restaurant that otherwise seems to have no need for such clunky signifiers. It would make more sense outside Somssi—I mean literally outside, where this particular stretch of MacDougal is thronged with the TikTok-led, list-driven, clout-chasing hordes. Success in restaurants has always been a kind of curse, but these days every mediocre dessert shack commands a line, and every reservation is unattainable. One of the best things about Somssi is how far it feels from all of that, even if its own tables do move pretty briskly on Resy. Kim is working the floor every night, touching each party with a hello or a smile or a friendly retrieval of a fallen napkin. Her easy power is as exciting as all the hype beyond the doors. (Dishes $13–$42.)

—Helen Rosner

PHOTOGRAPH BY NADINE ZHAN FOR THE NEW YORKER (TOP), ILLUSTRATION BY GREG CLARKE (BOTTOM)

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THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT READING THE DATA

This summer, as the ideologically fractious Democratic primaries begin to recede and the politically pivotal mid-term elections edge nearer, candidates and voters alike have had their attention drawn by vast, humming edifices newly constructed on the outskirts of towns. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public-health official who finished a deft insurgent campaign by becoming Michigan's Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, sounded a theme that helped decide primaries in his state and in Kansas last week. "People really effing hate data centers," he said.

That kind of consensus is rare in politics right now. About seventy per cent of Americans, including sixty-three per cent of Republicans, oppose building the hyper-scale centers that power the A.I. boom in their area, according to Gallup, but more than four thousand centers have been built across the country, and about four thousand more are planned. Politicians, first from the left and then from the center and the right, have spent the past few months hastily distancing themselves from them. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a federal moratorium on new data centers in March, and the pragmatic governor Kathy Hochul enacted the first statewide one in New York in July. The rallying cries against A.I. can themselves sound a bit as if ChatGPT wrote them. "It's time to press control-alt-delete to put a stop to this A.I.-data-center crisis," a closing ad for Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist

who is the front-runner in this Tuesday's primary for Wisconsin governor, announced. Still, when something is this unpopular, blunt talk can work.

Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, always on high alert for political opportunity, set conditions on new data centers in his state in May. But the surprise in recent weeks has been a reversal on the issue by business conservatives who not long ago were touting A.I. projects as the cornerstone of a new prosperous age. Just eight months ago, Governor Greg Abbott, at a news conference with the Google C.E.O., Sundar Pichai, bragged, "Texas will be the centerpiece for A.I. data centers for Google in the entire world." Then, last week, Abbott abruptly announced that all such projects would be suspended, pending an "audit" of their costs and potential benefits. Even the brashest, most pro-tech Republicans are sounding defensive. Vivek Ramaswamy, the former Presidential can-

candidate and DOGE co-chair, who is now the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, insisted that "despite my opponent's claims, I'm not 'pro-data center.''

Part of the issue is simply that the facilities are so huge and tend not to provide many jobs once construction is complete. Microsoft's announcement of a new site in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, enumerated '46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable and 72.6 miles of mechanical piping." The tech journalist Jasmine Sun noted, about a center being built for OpenAI and Oracle in the same state, "Opponents time how long it takes to drive past one at highway speed (1 minute 42 seconds for the Port Washington site)." The resources required for such facilities—electricity for power and water for cooling—have sometimes stressed local systems: after two recent data-center-related electrical surges in northern Virginia, an expert from the Union of Concerned Scientists said that utility companies had fielded "complaints about flickering lights and strange noises coming from refrigerators." Protests spread, and, according to Data Center Watch, at least seventy-five data-center projects, whose costs totalled roughly a hundred and thirty billion dollars, were stopped in the first three months of 2026 alone.

But this summer some politicians have detected a deeper unease, and have begun asking more basic questions about whether A.I. infrastructure will benefit ordinary people, or just the billionaires behind the technology, and why it has taken mass protest to force public consideration of these issues. As El-Sayed

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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCERO: SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GETTY

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put it during a campaign stop at a data center in Saline, Michigan, “Unless and until we protect local communities from the power of corrupting money and politics, we’re going to continue to see projects like this get pushed onto local communities despite themselves.”

What makes data centers interesting not just as a local issue but as a national one is that they might allow Democrats to highlight the duplicity of Donald Trump’s politics of populism and his embrace of futuristic tech billionaires. Whereas the President’s 2016 run focussed on Rust Belt themes of economic decline, his 2024 campaign featured the presence of Elon Musk, who brought with him a roster of Silicon Valley allies—one of whom, David Sacks, became the President’s A.I. and crypto czar—and the promise of a transformed future. But, as the A.I. boom and the data-center build-out have accumulated momentum, the statements from the tech industry about widespread job dis-

displacement have grown increasingly dystopian. In May, Microsoft’s A.I. C.E.O., Mustafa Suleyman, said that the technology would be able to automate most white-collar tasks within twelve to eighteen months. Even if that’s an overstatement, or corporate hype—there’s little evidence of job loss so far, and Suleyman later walked back his remarks—it should have been obvious that the public might need some reassurance that the economy would still require human beings.

But Musk and Sacks have become less visible in Washington, and although A.I. has been the major business and social topic of the past year and a half, the President has barely addressed it. The White House’s most memorable foray into the A.I. debate is still the very weird press conference that Melania Trump held in March where she walked onstage side by side with a white-plated, faintly Stormtrooper-looking robot called Figure 03, which said in a mechanical female voice that it was grateful to play a

part in revolutionizing education. For the Trump Administration, the A.I. backlash is at once a source of political trouble and an expression of its second-term rudderlessness, in that the President has helped unleash a future that he does not seem to understand.

The moratoriums themselves may not be particularly consequential to the advance of artificial intelligence—many data centers have already been built, and others can be constructed in friendlier jurisdictions, or even overseas. In May, the Anthropic C.E.O., Dario Amodei, waved away the political challenges. He said, “We’re going to find that ideology will not survive the nature of this technology. It won’t survive reality.” The things he was talking about, he added, “are gonna become bipartisan and universal because everyone will recognize the necessity of it.” On the campaign trail, in Michigan and elsewhere, something like the opposite is happening.

—Benjamin Wallace-Wells

THE PICTURES SUMMER CAMP

If movies are to be believed, sleep-away camps provide the setting for one of two things: personal awakening in the form of new friendships or bloody murder by psychosexual slasher. Finally, there’s a film that combines both—Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.” In the movie, Hannah Einbinder (of “Hacks” fame), playing a filmmaker who’s been assigned to reboot a classic horror franchise, and Gillian Anderson (of “The X-Files” fame), as the reclusive actress who played the franchise’s original “final girl,” talk about their feelings and hook up before Einbinder is chased across the camp by a spear-wielding killer named Little Death.

The other day, Einbinder swung by Halloween Adventure, a year-round costume superstore in the East Village, and perused one of many walls of options: “70’s Blacklight Shirt,” “Metallic Foil Print Tiger Disco Shirt,” “Disco

Shirt—Purple Circles,” all modelled by the same man on their packaging.

“Talk about a beautiful subculture—the plastic-bagged-costume-model industry,” Einbinder mused. “In the waiting room of the casting office, everyone’s, like, ‘Fuck, Jerry’s here. You remember Jerry? From ‘Flower Power Disco Shirt’? He’s going to book it. I have no shot.’” Einbinder, who is thirty-one, wore a tailored gray suit and tinted glasses. For Halloween one year, she and the comedian Sandy Honig both dressed as Wayne, from the movie “Wayne’s World”—“because we both identify more with Wayne than Garth.” They’d made a pact that all their future costumes would be “strictly from the Mike Myers universe—so this coming year we will be fembots, and so on,” she said.

She admired the knockoff “Austin Powers” costumes, such as “60’s Mr. Mojo,” then strolled to the killer-clown section (separate from clean-cut clowns), where she tried to recall Halloweens of her youth. “I have to do a little bit of work to access my childhood in general—give me one second,” she said, tapping fingers against her face and arms. She explained, “I’m just doing a little E.M.D.R. to launch myself back.” (E.M.D.R. being eye-movement de-

sensitization and reprocessing, a psychotherapy trauma treatment.)

“My parents were sober when I was growing up,” she said. “And, oftentimes, when people don’t do drugs or alcohol anymore, they have to have something fun—in many cases that’s sugar. So they would do drug-addict behavior around my Halloween candy. They’d be, like, ‘O.K., guys, you can have nine pieces tonight and then we’ll talk tomorrow about how much. . . .’ And my candy would be

Hannah Einbinder

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gone in the morning." Einbinder's mother, Laraine Newman, was one of the original cast members of "Saturday Night Live"; Newman posed as a vampire for a 1978 issue of High Times, which described her as a "skinny spaced-out sex symbol."

In "Miasma," Einbinder and Anderson have sex on a fireside carpet of candy wrappers, which were not added in post. "Yeah, that's all practical—practical sex, practical candy, no extras there," Einbinder said. It turned out that she and Schoenbrun are both "total sugar-heads." Einbinder has a particular taste for sour. "I recently went to a 7-Eleven that had the new BUBS, which is a Swedish candy. They're like diamonds," she said, reverently. "They're flavored tutti-frutti, which is not really in the American palette. It's somewhere in a bubblegum sort of citrus-forward area."

She turned her attention to a "Pit Dweller" costume (one size fits most, up to six feet, two hundred pounds) that was basically a skin suit, with bulging ribs, long bloodied fingers, and a gaping fanged mouth for a face. It hung near a classic skeleton costume. "So, it's actually exciting, because you can look to the influence," Einbinder riffed. "Pit Dweller" was only made possible by "Skeleton Adult Costume," which we can clearly see as a response to the First World War.

She contemplated how comedy related to horror: "I think there's something similar in the body, this buildup of tension followed by a release of sorts." She set a crown on her head at a jaunty angle and described the petite mort she shares with Anderson toward the end of the movie, which involved a lot of fake blood spewed out of their mouths from edited-out tubes. This, to an outside observer, seemed like it might be funny to film. "Nobody broke," she said. "I was just, like, 'Oh, hell no. Let's get this in one. Let's fucking nail this.'"

"Miasma" was shot at two camps in British Columbia; Einbinder, who grew up in L.A., went to Buck's Rock summer camp in New Milford, Connecticut. "It was, like, no groups, no schedule, glassblowing, metal shop, loom," she recalled. "There was weaving, and animal-farm-clown theatre," which sounds scary but apparently wasn't. Did anything spooky happen there? She considered. "I got a tick."

—Emma Allen

DEPT. OF SURVEILLANCE SMILE!

Austin Kral and Ed Vogel stood in a downtown Atlanta park the other day, preparing to lead what they'd advertised on flyers as a "spy hunt." The spies were the surveillance cameras used by police and the government, "and the corporate vender ecosystem," Vogel said. He had on a black ball cap and a T-shirt that read "SILENCE = DEATH." According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, there are more surveillance cameras in Atlanta, per capita, than anywhere outside of China—more than sixty thousand of them. New York City has fewer per person but, Vogel said, "they do have some sort of Bluetooth technology thing for monitoring rats."

Kral wore glasses and athletic shorts, and both young men had on masks, but not to conceal their identities. "Your brow is actually enough for most facial-recognition systems," Kral said. Viruses.

Kral and Vogel are members of Southerners Against Surveillance Systems and Infrastructure (SASSI), an activist network opposed to what it calls "an ever-expanding surveillance appa-

apparatus" that offers "a mirage of 'public safety' that never materializes." SASSI's methods of opposition include conducting research and leading spy hunts around the country.

The first participant to arrive was a freshman at Georgia State University, who wore braces and said that he planned to study philosophy. His name was Gene. "I'm here for the hunt," Gene said. "And discussion of socialist politics, generally." Next came a tattooed geography professor named Carrie, and her four-year-old daughter.

"What do you think about the cops?" Carrie asked the child, who stuck out her tongue.

Time to tour the panopticon. Kral and Vogel pulled out their phones. Vogel's had only two apps: Signal and a multi-factor-authentication app. Kral had more apps, including one called DeFlock, which allows users to locate and document surveillance tech, like Flock Safety security cameras. The C.E.O. of Flock recently apologized for calling the growing DeFlock movement a "terroristic organization."

"He walked that one back a bit," Vogel said. He and Kral discussed other Flock-related headlines.

"I read one this morning!" Kral said. An officer charged with illegally tracking people with Flock had investigated a former officer who had used Flock

"Now use it! Use the belt!"

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for the same purpose. They laughed.

The hunters didn't need the DeFlock map in downtown Atlanta, where cameras seem to outnumber pigeons. "We're actually working on a birding-type guide to surveillance cameras," Kral said. "An illustrator is on board." Rounding a block, he motioned toward P.T.Z.s (pan, tilt, zoom), A.L.P.R.s (automatic license-plate readers), and what looked like ShotSpotters (acoustic sensors).

"One thing that would be interesting to do in Atlanta is to map the places where you're actually not within view of a camera," Vogel mused.

Pausing to look at a P.T.Z., Kral said, "They typically have a blind spot facing the pole." He stepped into it.

Gene pointed to a parking lot where he'd once seen a "robo-dog" patrolling for loiterers. He'd seen another one, "looking defeated, on its side, computers shattered," he said. "Kind of sad."

At the next crosswalk, at least seven cameras captured them, Vogel estimated, "including the police helicopter above us." They passed a police precinct, which had matching P.T.Z.s at the entrance. ("Gratuitous," Kral said.) A homeless man in a Jon Ossoff T-shirt introduced himself as Ronald and asked what the group was doing. Vogel explained.

"Cameras all over," Ronald said. "We being surveilled."

"Have you ever felt consequences of that?" Vogel asked.

"You go to midtown," Ronald said. "Robots taking a picture of your ass."

Kral gave him some money and the group continued, passing two students in hoodies. "Do you feel safer having a camera like this up?" Vogel asked, pointing to an A.L.P.R. overhead.

"It takes a photo of every car that clearly passes," Vogel went on. "All that data is uploaded to a database that thousands of police officers across the country can search. ICE can get it, too."

"If it's being used by ICE, it's not safe," the other student said.

They arrived at a surveillance trailer sitting in a parking lot. A pole with multiple cameras protruded from it. "Should we get it to talk?" Kral asked, noting that some setups are equipped with "live monitoring."

"Come on, say hi!" Vogel begged the machine, which blinked back silently.

They stopped in the shade of a tree to drink some water. "Trees," Vogel said. "They keep you safe."

—Charles Bethea

SIGN OF THE TIMES DEPT. FUTURAMA

Some municipal slogans are better than others. Fall River, Massachusetts (that's Faw Rivah, to some), induces anxiety with the words "We'll try" emblazoned on its police vehicles. "The city of brotherly love" sounds copacetic until you attend a Flyers or an Eagles game. "Trenton makes, the world takes"—not bad, if deflating. What happens in Vegas is, of course, so memorable that we can't discuss it.

The married artists Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel had no intention of launching a new branding campaign for the borough of Queens when they set out to paint a mural near their apartment, in 2007. They were living on Borden Avenue, near the Long Island Expressway, and noticed an underpass in want of tagging. "Then we thought, If we do it as graffiti, will someone change it?" Frankel recalled recently. They wound up getting permission to use a handball court outside a middle school in Jackson Heights, instead. They painted a subway escaping its tracks, accompanied by the phrase "Queens is the future"—an allusion to the borough's diversity, and perhaps its tradition of hosting forward-looking World's Fairs. Then the couple moved to Brooklyn, which was enjoying a trendier present.

Someone changed the mural anyway. In 2014, Sony had a new Spider-Man movie coming out and enlisted another artist to help add Queens's most famous superhero to the image, along with a misplaced Statue of Liberty. An outcry over the corporate co-opting of public art brought renewed attention to the mural and its optimism. Spidey eventually flaked off in the rain. Biddle and Frankel moved upstate but sold T-shirts with the original design, raising money for the victims of a fire and inspiring a restoration of the mural in 2022. Next

came the election of Mayor Mamdani, the first Queens resident to lead the city, and the need for new highway signs to replace all the references to Eric Adams.

"Queens is the future!" the borough president, Donovan Richards, said the other day, greeting the artists near a noisy tangle of aging urban infrastructure: the Midtown Tunnel, the Pulaski Bridge, the L.I.E. "There's just no getting around it."

"Are you ready to jaywalk?" Frankel asked.

They crossed several lanes and began ascending an on-ramp to the L.I.E., amid stray honking from trucks and taxis. "We get to choose the slogan as the borough president," Richards explained, noting that Marty Markowitz, the former Brooklyn beep, had added "Fuhged-daboudit" to "Leaving Brooklyn" signs on the Belt Parkway. "There was a little controversy," Richards went on, alluding to complaints about ethnic stereotyping. "And so, he had to come up with 'Oy vey,' too." Richards, for his part, had considered replacing "The world's borough," the long-standing but staid Queens tagline, with a favorite Nas lyric: "Queens get the money." It seemed fitting, both in terms of Realpolitik and considering the projects that Richards began enumerating, as if on a stump: affordable housing in Willets Point, a pair of casinos, the refurbishing of the airports. "But D.O.T. thought it was too ethnic," Richards said of the lyric. "They didn't say it, but they said it without saying."

The politician and the artists were standing now on a sloping grass median, facing a "Welcome to Queens" sign, one of a dozen scattered around the borough's parkways and expressways, the legacy of Robert Moses, an erstwhile futurist. More honking. "I was thinking about how these green-and-white signs on the highways are one of the only places where the people get to choose some of the words," Frankel said. He meant the names Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Donovan Richards, Jr., chosen via ballot box: a Muslim socialist and a Black beep. Above the names, in italics, was the new motto, from their mural: "Queens is the Future!" They took turns posing for selfies.

Was it true, though? A bystander found himself wondering, amid the whiplash of the past decade: the retrenching on immigration, the resurgence of

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nationalism, the Mets' losing streak. "I mean, it's unfortunate that our President comes from Queens," Richards said, referring to Donald Trump, before adding, "He's from a part of Queens that's really oriented towards Long Island."

They began descending the ramp, facing a Manhattan skyline of ever-taller towers that made the Empire State Building look like an afterthought. Richards mentioned a history book he'd been reading. Queens had been home to early color-TV demonstrations: ahead of its time. The vote to establish Israel had taken place in what is now the Queens Museum, in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. (Current events leave one unable to predict how that might be viewed in the decades to come.) "And also, Walt Disney is said to have originally looked at that park to be the first Disney World," Richards said. "But the weather—he needed warm weather year-round."

So-called unseasonable temperatures loomed in the forecast. In the future, one couldn't rule it out.

—Ben McGrath

THE BOARDS WITNESSING

Dan Hoyle is an actor of improbable parts. His first one-man show, a study of American industry abroad, required him to play sweatshop workers in Hanoi and protesters in Quito. When acting out Nigerian oil politics, he was both militants and rebels. Performing all the characters in a scene is hard, and Hoyle, who lives in Oakland, makes it harder by playing only people who really exist; his method is to interview strangers and channel them onstage, a practice he calls "journalistic theatre." "I feel my job is to connect people to people again," he said the other day, in advance of his latest one-man show, "Takes All Kinds," which returns to Joe's Pub on August 16th. "I work in front of a big mirror and, when I see somebody who doesn't look like me, that's a start."

Hoyle grew up in a performing family. His father, Geoff Hoyle, is a famous clown. Alongside Bill Irwin, Geoff was

a principal in the Pickle Family Circus, and he originated the role of Zazu in "The Lion King" on Broadway. At home, in San Francisco, the family spoke in an inversion dialect they called the Lang ("The Lion King" became "King of the Lies"), and they studied the world from park benches. "My dad would be, like, 'Now, look at how that guy is walking—is it a choice or an injury?'" Hoyle said. "San Francisco was a more affordable, more diverse city, and there was an openness, like, 'What's your story?'" When he started college, at Northwestern, he took trains to Chicago to chat up anyone he met. At school, he learned that this was called "performance ethnography."

In 2008, Hoyle went around the country talking with people in red districts. "The stuff that I was hearing is what became the Tea Party and then Trump," he said. He put it in a show. For "Takes All Kinds," Hoyle, now forty-six, went looking for people in purple America who weren't natural activists but who stumbled into efforts at reconciliation and change. He transforms himself into a Phish-head in Florida lobbying the school board on behalf of his lesbian daughter, and a pair of MAGA-supporting Latino barbers. "I'm listening for stories that complicate a surface-level understanding," he explained. "My friend always says, 'If you want to get close to somebody, stand next to them.' It's a joke—but also true."

On a recent Tuesday, Hoyle was in the South Bronx, looking for people to stand next to. He struck up a conversation at the Citi Bike rack at 167th Street. He texted a man known as Pop (Jahar Simmons); they had met when Hoyle lived nearby. Hoyle had never put Pop in a show. He walked in circles looking for him, then his phone buzzed. "I don't see you," he said, and squinted. "Oh, there you at." Pop, a guy in his mid-thirties with a white T-shirt and a mane of braids coiled atop his head, perched in the entrance to the Webster Houses project with two men, one lanky and dressed in Helmut Lang trackwear, the other built like a wrestler and wearing shades. "Son, D., what's going on?" Pop said. "You can't be white and lost in the hood."

Hoyle told Pop's friends that he acts out real people's stories.

"Ask him, did I get a story yet," Pop said.

"Did Pop get a story yet?" the tall man asked.

"Not fucking yet!" Pop bellowed.

Pop visited Hoyle whenever he went to the Bay Area. The first time he and a friend went to see one of Hoyle's shows, he felt out of place. ("We smelled like a pound of weed, like a pack," he said.) Then Hoyle gave him a shout-out onstage, and the weather changed. "All the people coming up to me: 'You from the Bronx? What's it like?'" He affected a grave look: "Walking over dead bodies every day. People getting shot."

His friends laughed. Pop worked days at the high school and nights at the hospital, and he used weekends to organize block parties. The guy with shades, Carlee Hopkins, was a counsellor for juveniles in detention; the other man, Ro Smith, worked in resale. This spring, he bought the entire stock of Knicks hats at Foot Locker and Dick's Sporting Goods, for forty-six dollars apiece, and, when the Knicks peaked and shops ran

Dan Hoyle

out, sold the hats for a hundred and fifty dollars each. Smith asked Hoyle whether his plays were on YouTube.

"Thing is, it really needs to be experienced live," Hoyle said.

"Motherfucker's doing voices," Pop explained. "Changing his face—"

"Pop, you ready to do my show?" Hoyle asked. "We'll give you an opener."

"Give me something!" Pop said. "Put me in the game, Coach—put me in the game."

—Nathan Heller

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DISPATCHES

END OF STORY

The doulas who help us die.

BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

Before meeting a client, Virginia Chang, an end-of-life doula, performs a ritual that she calls “becoming an empty vessel.” She closes her eyes, plants her feet on the ground, and holds her arms at her sides, palms up. She breathes deeply through her nose. To still her mind, she begins to quietly chant a Sanskrit mantra such as lokāh samastāh sukhino bhavantu—may all beings everywhere be happy and free. Then she starts to move, pushing her hands away from her body, raising them above her head, and lowering them again in a gesture of surrender. Because she does this on the streets of New York City, no one pays

her any attention. Delivery guys squeeze by with their handcarts; kids dodge and weave on their scooters; dogs sniff near her ankles and move on. Chang is a slight woman in her early sixties, with graying hair cut into a long, straight bob. She likes to wear lacquered red clogs, stretchy black pants, and a thin scarf of turquoise or coral pink, even in the heat of summer. To be of use to the dying, she believes that she must first set aside the buzzing miscellany of thoughts and cares that constitutes “her shit,” and that is what her ritual helps her do.

On a bright afternoon in May, Chang pressed her hands together at

her forehead, bowed slightly, and opened her eyes. Then she checked her watch. She was standing in front of an apartment building on East Fifty-second Street, where her client Eleanor Lennard had lived since the nineteen-sixties. Eleanor was a hundred and one. She had been widowed for more than two decades. Nearly all of her friends were dead. She had lost most of her sight to macular degeneration, so she could no longer attend meetings of her amateur photography club, but her mind was still sharp. Her daughter had recently managed to get her admitted to hospice—no small feat, considering that extreme old age does not in itself count as a terminal diagnosis—and she had round-the-clock care from home health aides. But Eleanor felt lonely, discarded. She wanted to have conversations, to discuss art and literature and the news. When her hospice learned this, they sent Chang.

The word “doula,” many doulas like to say, derives from the Greek for “woman who serves.” (Technically, the word means “slave,” but its Anglophone usage gives it a gentler cast.) There are many different ways that end-of-life doulas—or death doulas, a term that some favor—interpret this mandate. They might help clients articulate their preferences regarding medical treatment, or advocate for their wishes amid the competing demands of imperious doctors and anxious family members. They might offer Swedish death cleaning or shrouding services, or conduct funeral preparations and grief support. The role is nonmedical; at its core, it is an act of accompaniment toward the unknown.

Chang had been seeing Eleanor weekly since January, and looked forward to each meeting. At noon, though, when she had called to confirm her visit, an aide reported that Eleanor was disoriented and agitated. She had tried to get out of bed by herself and had to be restrained. Inside the apartment, the shades were drawn. Family portraits decorated the hallway: smiling children; a couple leaning toward each other in a private moment of happiness, the woman with short, dark hair. Two aides eased Eleanor from her bedroom to an armchair in the study. She

Virginia Chang, an end-of-life doula, with her client Eleanor, in New York.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY LAUREN LANCASTER

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wore a pink gauze dress; her hair was gray now, still cut close. On the air-conditioner behind her rested a folded American flag, of the kind presented to veterans' spouses at their funerals.

"It's your favorite girl," one aide said, brightly. "Woman, excuse me."

"We're all girls compared to her," Chang said.

"Is that Virginia?" Eleanor asked. "It's Virginia." Chang spoke loudly and slowly. "You know you can't say no to me!"

"It's the same way around, if you think about it," Eleanor said.

Chang knelt by Eleanor's feet. She took the old woman's left hand in both of hers, gently stroking Eleanor's fingers and gazing steadily up into her face.

"I never belonged to the faithful when it comes to belief," Eleanor said, as if she had been in the middle of discussing the subject. "I mean, I understand what they stand for, because the lessons are there. But religion, to me, is a kind of sport."

"Interesting. Eleanor, have you been turning to God more?"

"No."

Chang laughed. "O.K."

"What I was trying to say is, it isn't the God that some people imagine, but it is my God."

"Well, tell me what your God does for you."

"Frankly, now he just makes me angry."

"Why?"

"Because of brutality," Eleanor said. "The world is in an ugly sphere now. And my personality with my children, which was not good." Her speech began to wander. She reached for a word, couldn't find it, and laughed in defeat. "Why did you get here this early on a Sunday?"

"It's Friday at three, when I always come."

"It's Friday? Good! I thought I had lost a whole day. It came on so suddenly. I was fine. I could maneuver and walk around with a walker, and suddenly I was a different person." She had been furious when the aides told her that she couldn't get up, for fear of a fall. "They're busy assuming there's something really wrong with me. I know I'm not a good-mannered person. I want my rights."

"You always stay true to yourself," Chang said. "And that's what's most important."

Based on the aide's description, Chang had expected Eleanor to be terse and withdrawn, but she wanted to talk. Dark things were on her mind. She spoke angrily of a cruel, manipulative person she referred to only as "he," until Chang asked, "Eleanor, are you still watching the news?" She suspected that Eleanor might have started her final decline, but she kept that thought to herself. She would return early the next week. If anything changed in the meantime, the aides knew to call.

"Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies," Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote. By that definition, Chang's childhood lasted through adolescence and deep into her adult years. None of her relatives died. None of her peers died. She did lose a pet—a gerbil—and that was sad, but hardly tragic. "I really considered myself an ordinary, average person in America, which is to say, I never thought about death and dying," she told me recently.

Then, in September, 2016, when she was fifty-two, Chang's father died. That January, so did her mother-in-law, followed by her own mother, three months later. This suite of losses severed Chang from reality as she had known it. Her mother's death was relatively smooth—she had dementia, and her decline was swift—but the other two were brutal ordeals. Chang's mother-in-law, who suffered from a host of ailments, had been subjected, while unconscious, to an invasive emergency procedure that her husband tried to refuse; she died in recovery. Chang's father had a heart attack at his assisted-living facility; though he was immediately pronounced dead, a team of E.M.T.s performed CPR and defibrillation as Chang begged them over the phone to stop. "Don't look under the sheet," a nurse told her, referring to her father's battered body.

Chang's family was not naïve about the practice of medicine; her mother and sister were doctors, her mother-in-law a nurse. Chang saw herself as an independent, savvy New Yorker. Yet she had never experienced such pow-

erlessness or despondency. "To be so disregarded at the end of our lives—I thought it was a sad statement on our society," she said. "Is this what death is? Is this what we have to accept? I honestly didn't know."

About a decade earlier, a hospice social worker named Henry Fersko-Weiss had wondered the same thing. Hospice offers terminal patients an alternative to the chaotic, clinical environment of a hospital; the emphasis is on dignity and comfort rather than on curative treatment. Even so, at the large hospice in New York City where Fersko-Weiss worked, he saw too many deaths that he considered less than ideal, if not downright bad. A person who wanted to die at home might instead be rushed off to the hospital. A family member might insist that a loved one keep "fighting," couching denial as encouragement. An exhausted spouse might step away for a nap and miss her partner's final breaths because she hadn't known how to recognize the signs of death.

One root of these problems, Fersko-Weiss believed, was an inability to communicate frankly about what death and dying entailed. "Our collective fear of death is so strong, our defenses so well maintained, that when a person receives a terminal diagnosis, he or she is totally unprepared and often hides within a fragile bubble of hope," he later wrote.

Fersko-Weiss had a friend who'd recently become a birth doula, and the concept intrigued him. The doula role emerged in the United States during the nineteen-seventies, as a reaction to the concern that birth had become overly medicalized. Doulas sought to empower women by educating them about childbirth, and by providing physical and emotional support before, during, and after that transformative event.

Dying was a kind of labor, too. A birth plan, Fersko-Weiss thought, could be translated into a death plan. Where did a person want to die? Whom did he want to be present? What type of music should be playing? Instead of assisting in the birthing room or the nursery, end-of-life doulas could keep vigil over people during their last hours, providing

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comfort and companionship and helping a family find peace.

Fersko-Weiss began to formulate a doula-training program of his own. A devoted Zen Buddhist, he drew on spirituality—and on psychotherapy. He was particularly influenced by the mid-century developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, who believed that life consists of eight stages of development, each characterized by a central psychosocial conflict. Erikson called the final stage “ego integrity vs. despair.” As people at the end of their lives reflect on their experiences and relationships, they can either achieve a valuable sense of fulfillment and coherence—integrity—or become mired in bitterness, fixating on failures and unrealized dreams. Building on this notion, the gerontologist Robert Butler created the strategy of “life review,” in which a person is guided through an examination of the past in the hope of producing the happier of these outcomes. Fersko-Weiss, who trained his first group of doulas—seventeen of them, all volunteers at his hospice—in 2003, incorporated life review into his methodology. In 2015, he co-founded the International End-of-Life Doula Association (INELDA), to offer trainings around the country and beyond.

After the deaths of her parents, Chang was lost. She regularly went to meditate at the Bhakti Center, in the East Village, seeking to escape her grief. On a June day in 2017, she saw a flyer there advertising a talk called “Why Death Matters,” to be given by Fersko-Weiss. “Honestly, I don’t remember anything about the talk except for Henry talking about end-of-life doulas,” she said. “I just thought, Why wasn’t there someone like that there for me?”

Chang asked Fersko-Weiss out for coffee, and they struck up a friendship. In early 2018, she took an INELDA training: a few days of people discussing how to improve the experience of death and dying. Then she enrolled in an end-of-life-doula program at the University of Vermont: eight weeks of people discussing how to improve the experience of death and dying. Still, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to become a doula herself. “You’re jammed full of all this infor-

information, but you’re, like, ‘This is just information,’” she said.

Chang, who has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford, began her career in new-drug design, then worked as a chemical-contamination expert in the cleanup of the Pelham Bay Landfill, in the Bronx. She stopped working in her thirties to raise her children. Now she was an empty nester, with time on her hands. She decided to devise an experiment. She would spend a year volunteering at V.N.S. Health, a hospice in New York, and apply the doula methodology to the patients there, to see if the skills she had acquired actually worked. She practiced active listening—a kind of deep, compassionate attention meant to facilitate openness and connection—and “unconditional positive regard,” a technique, developed by the psychologist Carl Rogers, that entails demonstrating total acceptance of another person. She mirrored; she validated; she figured out how to ask exploratory, nonjudgmental questions, and how to hear the responses without adding her own two cents. If she was tempted to interrupt, she reminded herself to WAIT, an acronym she had learned in her training which stood for “Why am I talking?”

“Guess what?” Chang said. “It works.” She opened her private practice, Till the Last, in 2019. (She continues to volunteer with V.N.S.) As Chang sees it, her role is “not about telling

you that you can have a good death—it’s not about trying to make it beautiful or sacred or reverent.” She prefers to think of it as a reframing. “You’re creating environments where a person is telling you things that they haven’t said to anybody else,” she explained. “Once you’ve established that trust, you can go anywhere in the future with them. You can get them to look at difficult emotions. You can have hard

conversations. You can take them to places of dreaming big.” Death may be the end of life, but dying is still a part of living.

These days, as a recent headline in Town & Country announced, it can seem like “Suddenly Everyone Is a Death Doula.” INELDA estimates that it has trained more than ten thousand doulas globally in the past decade, and the University of Vermont program, where Chang now teaches, has trained more than five thousand since it began, in 2017. Some end-of-life doulas think that their field is forty years behind the birth-doula movement, but others say twenty, or only ten. “If people know about this service, they will take it—that’s a guarantee,” one doula told me.

End-of-life doulas attribute the rise of their field to the “silver tsunami”—nearly a fifth of Americans are sixty-five or older—or to the apparent spike in cancer rates among people under the age of fifty, or to the COVID pandemic, when it became blatantly clear what a bad death could look like. In a broader sense, though, the end-of-life-doula movement can be seen as the latest chapter in a societal reconsideration of death that has been under way for more than fifty years. In the 1978 book “The Craft of Dying,” the sociologist Lyn H. Lofland proposed that dramatic cultural and technological changes had led Americans—“especially affluent middle-class Americans”—to adopt new attitudes and approaches to death. Thanks to modern medicine, people were able to live longer, which paradoxically meant that the dying process, extended by treatment, took longer, too. Death had become bureaucratized—removed from the home and relegated to the hospital—and secularized, stripped of ritual and fixed meaning. Lofland was interested in what she called “the happy death movement,” a loose coalition of people who had set out to solve these problems. Some of their solutions seemed offbeat or marginal, but others have become commonplace. Hospice was itself a countercultural practice in the seventies, limited to a handful of cities around the country. By 2024, more than half of Americans

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on Medicare were on hospice when they died.

One goal of the happy-death movement was to puncture what its members considered to be a taboo around discussing death. Today, there is a growing sense that embracing mortality can be a component of wellness. “A lot of my clients now are people who aren’t in crisis and there is no threat of death,” Darnell Lamont Walker, a doula based in rural Georgia, told me. “They’ll say, ‘Can you help me plan that day—or the rest of this life?’” Virginia Chang told me that, as a result of her work, “I’m living a much more intentional life.” Recently, she was approached by the editors of the For Dummies guides to lend her expertise to the series. In “Preparing for End of Life for Dummies,” published earlier this year, she counsels even readers in good health to think about death daily, a practice that she calls taking a “mortality vitamin.”

In May, I went to Los Angeles to meet Jill Schock, who practices under the moniker Death Doula L.A. Schock is forty, with dark hair and cat-eye glasses; her arms are covered with delicate tattoos, including one of her late cat Reuben, whose ashes she wears in the form of a starburst-shaped ring on her left hand. Schock lives in the city’s Chinatown, in a former art gallery that she has remodelled into a studio dedicated to fostering the public’s understanding of grief and death. On the evening I visited, she was hosting a “grief yoga” class, advertised, on Facebook, as “a gentle way to move grief, sadness, anger, and other big emotions through the body instead of carrying them alone in the mind.” The previous week, she had organized an “eco death fair,” in collaboration with a local funeral home, to promote alternative corpse-disposal methods, such as human composting and burial at sea, that are environmentally preferable to traditional burial (coffins don’t typically biodegrade) and cremation (high emissions).

Schock’s studio is bright and inviting, with a polished concrete floor and double-height walls; a staircase leads to a small, closed-off loft—her private quarters, which she shares with Monty, her frenetically friendly dachshund-terrier mix. “Every month or so, we have an exhibit that’s mortality-adjacent,”

“This is the book I’m reading for my book club, this is the book I’m reading to put off reading the book for my book club, and this is my phone, which I’ve been reading for the past half hour.”

she said. The work on display, a group of textiles, was by an artist named Kate Saubestre. A suit of pinkish canvas skin, decorated with pepperoni-size areolae and an intricately furred mons pubis, hung from a hanger, as if waiting for its owner to return and slip it back on. In the center of the room, a shroud that had been molded to fit Saubestre’s body rested on top of a handsome black pedestal that proved to be a casket on wheels—what Schock called “a nice piece of utility furniture.”

Schock grew up in Santa Clarita, California, the daughter of two school-teachers. She first found her way into the death field as a chaplain, studying at Vanderbilt’s Divinity School and training in emergency rooms, though her interest in faith was more philosophical than spiritual. “I’m an existentialist,” she said. “Kierkegaard is big for me.” She went on to work in hospice, but lost her job, in a bitter twist, after taking a leave to attend to her father as he died. When she learned about end-of-life doulas, she said, “it

just clicked so hard. I was already qualified to do it.”

Schock opened her private practice in 2016. Initially, she said, “nobody liked my business name—‘Death,’ you know.” But she was adamant. “Everyone goes for the euphemisms, like ‘sacred transitions,’ ‘crossings,’ all of that kind of illusionary stuff,” she said. “I just wanted to work with people who fully knew they’re dying. I’m not going to disrespect them by using a different word.”

The next day, I accompanied Schock in her black Ford Edge—“MY OTHER RIDE IS A DETERIORATING BODY OF FLESH AND BONES,” the bumper sticker read—to visit her client Karyn Balzary, who was sixty-six and dying of ovarian cancer. Karyn was in bed, propped up on a pillow, very thin under her floral coverlet. Her eyes were piercingly blue. Next to her was a stuffed bilby, which her daughter, Lily, had owned since she was three years old. Lily was twenty-seven now.

Karyn was first diagnosed in 2019,

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and tried everything from heated intraperitoneal chemotherapy to sound baths. She stopped treatment last December. "I've kind of said goodbye to everyone I need to, except for Gavin"—her husband—"and Lily," she told Schock. Her brother, Michael, had come to visit before going on tour with his band; one of her best friends, Suzie, had come from Australia, where Karyn was born, and would be leaving soon. "Emotionally, I'm at the point where I wish that I could just turn out the light," she said.

"That's good, that you've done all your goodbyes," Schock said. She asked Karyn what she thought people should know about how it felt to die.

"I think the first thing that we all have to accept—and it's not that hard—is that death exists," Karyn said. "It's not scary. It just sucks. It sucks big fat donkey dicks."

On the latest season of the HBO hospital drama "The Pitt," Roxie, a mother with advanced lung cancer, is admitted to the emergency room. She is accompanied by her husband,

Paul, and her death doula, Lena. Roxie is depleted, in terrible pain. Though she is on hospice, Paul is her primary caretaker, and he is eager for her to return home. But Lena can see that Roxie is reluctant to leave the hospital. She is tired of putting on a brave face as her body fails; she feels that Paul and their two young sons are living with her ghost. Paul is baffled, distraught. If Roxie stays at the hospital, he will have to accept that she will never leave.

"From my perspective, the family is as important as the dying person," Virginia Chang told me. She estimates that she has assisted more than a hundred people through the dying process, and she includes her clients' family members in that number. Diane Lennard, Eleanor's daughter, said that Chang routinely pulled over while driving to take her calls. "This is so new to me," Diane said. Like many people with elderly parents, she finds it challenging to meet her mother's emotional needs, to say nothing of her physical ones. "I call Virginia, and I say, 'What do I do?'" she told me. "How do I handle this? What should I say?"

Recently, Chang told me, she'd helped engage with a hospital ethics panel on behalf of a family who wanted their loved one released to die at home. "I never do anything that's solely the dying person's wishes unless the family is completely on board," she said. "And if there is any disagreement—or not even disagreement but an emotional complication—I won't move forward until everybody is in a good place about it."

This surprised me. Some doulas I spoke with told me that they felt it was their responsibility to advocate for a client's desires, even—perhaps especially—in the face of familial pressure. On "The Pitt," Lena privately assures Roxie that the choice of where to die is hers, while tactfully nudging Paul to give Roxie the space to decide for herself. I wondered if there had been cases when Chang found it difficult to achieve consensus.

"I'm in a case like that right now," she said. A client whom I'll call Esther, an eighty-five-year-old with advanced Parkinson's, had spent the past few years living with her son, his wife, and their two young children in Manhattan. The family contacted Chang in April. Chang said, "The first thing out of her mouth was 'I want to die. Am I eligible for MAID?''—medical assistance in dying. But the requirements for MAID, which just became legal in New York, are stringent, and a person must generally have a diagnosis of six months or less to live; Esther wouldn't qualify.

Instead, Chang suggested that Esther let time and her disease take their inevitable toll. Meanwhile, Chang would focus on improving quality of life. She worked with Esther's children to help them develop what she called "a sustaining mind-set." "The situation had gotten so intense," she said. The caretakers needed to take care of themselves, too—"to not think of everything as an emergency." But, Chang said, "I think the biggest thing that I did for them was to reframe Esther's end-of-life experience as one of being, not doing." Esther felt useless. She couldn't leave the house, and even reading to her grandchildren was impossible. Chang advised her to consider her presence enough. Just being

"All this trouble just to make squid-ink pasta."

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in a room with her family was salutary; the kids could read to her instead of the other way around.

Then a mass was discovered on Esther's pancreas. Her opportunity to die had come. She declined a biopsy, and decided to start VSED, the voluntary stopping of eating and drinking, a legally protected way to speed up the dying process. At a family meeting, two of Esther's children told Chang that their sister was wary. Their mother's death had been abstract; now it could happen in a week or two. Chang suggested that Esther hold off on VSED, just for a bit, to give her daughter time to adjust.

Esther's son was concerned. Was Chang asking his mother to suffer longer? "You could view it like that," Chang recalled telling him. "But your mom is someone who has put her family at the core of her existence for such a long time, and loves each person so intensely. This is a small kindness that will save her daughter a lot of anguish and struggle." If Esther postponed VSED, her daughter would have a chance to understand what was happening to her, and why. When Chang turned to Esther for her opinion, she gave the thumbs-up.

"This is what we have lost in the dying experience, right?" Chang said. "This feeling of family and community. We don't all live together. We travel. We've developed very individualistic points of view. Maybe for some things in society that's O.K. But, in regard to the experience of death and dying, it's taken something away." She went on, "If this daughter gets a good end-of-life experience for her mom, it will change her whole point of view of what death and dying could be, and it will change what she wants for herself and what she wants for all of her loved ones. I can make her a ripple in the positive-death movement—in making it better for everyone."

Lately, the ripples have been getting bigger. Ironically, in Hollywood, the land of eternal youth, end-of-life-doula training has become newly fashionable in the way that studying Kabbalah once was. In January, while promoting "Hamnet," a film that centers on the grisly demise

of a sixteenth-century child, the director Chloé Zhao told an interviewer that she was becoming an end-of-life doula in order to confront her fear of dying. A few months later, Nicole Kidman announced that the death of her mother had inspired her to train as a doula, too. Kidman framed her interest as a matter of personal growth. "I am looking to expand myself," she said. This did not stop people from imagining what it might be like to shuffle off their mortal coils while being ministered to by a world-famous movie star. "If I am at my deathbed and she comes at me with a Russian accent and psilocybin, I am all for it," one Redditor commented.

The death-doula field is unregulated—you don't need to be certified to practice—and most doulas prefer it that way. "I love that we're a little bit of a rogue band of people," Kelly Briggs-Hayler, a New York-based doula, told me. Still, the lack of standardization can breed confusion, and some doulas have taken it upon themselves to do quality control. Every two months, a doula named Emma Acker hosts a meetup for her fellow-practitioners and apprentices at Sparrow, a self-described "contemporary" funeral home in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. On a recent evening, a circle of twenty chairs was arranged in a room outfitted with light pine floors and Edison-bulbed chandeliers. The doulas browsed a buffet table loaded with wine, seltzer, charcuterie, and pesto-dressed orecchiette, chatting until Acker called them to order.

"Wow, it's such a large group—that's awesome!" she said. Acker has a spray of graying corkscrew curls and, though she has lived in New York for more than thirty years, the accent of her native New Zealand. She started the meetup three years ago to serve as an ad-hoc professional network. "This space is truly gatekept, for lack of a better word, by me," she said. "We only allow people to come if they've done a death-doula training. Wherever you're at with it, it doesn't matter. But you're not shopping to see if you want to do that. You've done it, and now you're finding your way after."

The doulas were white, Black, Asian, young, and middle-aged; one

was old. All but two were women. Acker invited them to introduce themselves to the group. Robin had been working as a death doula and an ecopsychologist since 2022, and ran a group called the Dead Parents Club. Erika used text-to-speech software to say that she did art-based grief support. Simone trained in Sweden, and had just had her first client. Marianne was a licensed clinical social worker at a children's hospital, where she cared for dying kids. Alexa came from "a social-impact background in tech" and wrote a Substack called "Mourning People." Ryan found his way to the death world after his husband died of cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the bile ducts, and was volunteering as a doula at Mount Sinai's palliative-care program. Boshko confessed that he was not a doula—the room broke into hoots of laughter—but he did provide Reiki at memory-care facilities around the city.

Sula, a blond woman in her early forties, ran a doula service called Peacing Out. "Honestly, I'm bad at joining groups," she said. "I'm bad at social media. So I feel a little fucked in the ways that I'm connecting or not with community in this world, and one of the biggest questions I have is, like, how do we actually make a living doing this?" She had turned to doula work full time after being laid off from her job in communications, but the numbers weren't adding up. She went on, "While I'm very pleased that the field has expanded, I'm also, like, Let's get talking about our labor. I don't want to do anything else, and I also need to survive."

"I love this topic," Acker said. The question of making a living as an end-of-life doula can be touchy. Some doulas get more calls than they can handle, but they are in the minority. Others provide their service gratis, from the conviction that it should be accessible to all, or on a sliding scale. Jill Schock offers three packages, starting at $1,799 and going to $2,999, plus an assortment of à-la-carte options: funeral support and planning cost $225; helping a client who is dying by MAID is $1,600. Schock doesn't live off her client work alone—she supplements her income by teaching a

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virtual doula-training course—but she's optimistic. "I'm sorry, but, if Labubus can sell, we can sell this service," she told me.

Acker works on what she calls a "Toms Shoes model": the paying clients she sees allow her to take on others who can't afford her services. One afternoon in June, I went with her to visit a sixty-seven-year-old man, whom I'll call Lee, who falls into the latter category. Acker met Lee a few years ago, at All Angels' Church, on the Upper West Side, where she volunteers weekly, manning its coffee stand. Lee would swoop in dashingly on his bike to grab a cup; he himself spent time volunteering in the kitchen. But his health had been failing: chronic arthritis, mobility problems, a bike accident. Acker had started a project at All Angels' to help unhoused and other vulnerable people get health-care proxies, and she became Lee's. "He's very proud—he used to be the guy who helps everyone," she said. Now he was staying at a nursing home on the Upper West Side. "He really wants to get out," Acker said, but the chances of that were slim.

Lee was in a hospital bed, separated from a roommate by a yellow curtain. He was missing a number of teeth, and the fingers of his right hand were stiff and curled. Blue and orange "Happy Birthday" balloons dragged on the floor, out of air. Acker had brought two large deli coffees, and Lee sipped his from a straw. She sat on the corner of his bed and asked how he was.

"Listen, Emma," Lee said. His voice was very weak. "They don't take care of me here. I would feel better at home."

"You would feel better at home," Acker repeated.

"I've been thinking," he said, pointing to one bushy eyebrow.

"Thinking is a good thing to do," Acker said. They laughed.

Just what Lee was thinking was drowned out by a TV mounted in the corner, blaring the news of the day, but the gist was clear. After the visit, Acker said, "He wants me to sign him out." He had pleaded his case with great intensity, but Acker wouldn't do it. Lee's Section 8 apartment in the Bronx was up many flights of stairs that he could not walk. "Because you're here, I see myself from the outside, and I see how

hopeless it is," Acker told me. Lee wasn't actively dying, but he wasn't getting well, either. His former life had ended, and that was a sort of death, too, one to which he was not reconciled. Acker went on, "At the same time, I know the value of at least having somebody. I'm not fixing what's happening, at all. But I'm not turning away."

Eleanor didn't decline. In fact, she improved. The next week, when Chang returned, she was back to her lucid self. In her dark days of confusion, she had injured herself while fighting to get out of bed. White gauze bandages were wrapped around her ankles, and her elbows and left knee were bruised. "This kind of old age is unfair," she said. She felt like a member of "the living dead."

"Eleanor, you don't give yourself enough credit," Chang said. "You're pretty amazing for a one-hundred-and-one-year-old."

"It's just a number!" Eleanor said, but she smiled with pleasure.

"How old do you feel?"

"Two hundred—and fifty."

Chang fished through her bag and produced a copy of "The Brain: The Story of You," by the neuroscientist David Eagleman, which she had been reading aloud during their visits. "That's our special time together now," Eleanor said. She had become fascinated with the brain after Chang suggested that she donate hers to science as a legacy project—a contribution that a dying person can make to the future. Such projects usually consist of activities like writing letters to one's children or making a quilt, not organ donation, but Eleanor had been thrilled by the idea. An undemented brain of her vintage was a hot commodity in research circles. "I thank her for it all the time, because I finally found something I could do that's fruitful," Eleanor said.

Chang began to read. They had already been through the brain's development during childhood. Now they were in the teen-age years—the excruciating social awkwardness and emotional sensitivity owing to a still unfinished prefrontal cortex. "Next time, we'll talk about adulthood," Chang said. "There are some interest-

ing topics coming up, such as the fallibility of memory and the aging brain."

"I don't know if this science topic is going to focus on exactly what I'm hoping to find out, because that's too mysterious," Eleanor said. "But I'll give it a try, because it would be helpful for me to understand more about myself."

"I'm glad that you're still curious."

"I often wonder why I am. I keep saying that to myself—'Why are you caring so much about the political problem for the future? You're not going to be involved in it.'" What Eleanor wanted to find out, though, was personal. She was wondering about her children, who were in their seventies. She'd had a wonderful marriage, but motherhood was difficult. Why were her children not who she had thought they would be? Why did they have such different values than she did? "What I'm looking for is probably so technical that I maybe would never be able to understand it without any background in science," she said.

"But maybe your brain will contribute to an answer one day."

"Good. I have that hope. She's the one that builds up the hopes."

"Eleanor, I have some news to tell you," Chang said. "I'm actually going to be away for three weeks." She was off to complete her second book on facing death.

"Oh, really? Well, this is an eternity I'm serving here. Three weeks is nothing."

"So when I come back we'll finish the book. But—I understand that things can happen, as well. It has been such an honor to work with you."

"It's been a pleasure. You've added something to this end-of-life thing which wasn't there before. That's mighty useful. Mighty useful."

Chang leaned over the chair where Eleanor sat and embraced her. They both held on for a long time. Gently, Chang broke away. She kissed Eleanor on the cheek.

"O.K.?"

"O.K."

"As soon as I get back, I will call. O.K.? Three weeks." She stood up to go.

"And thank you for being there."

"O.K. All right, Eleanor," Chang said quietly, and left the room. ♦

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SHOUTS & MURMURS

EAT THE LOTUS!

BY ANTHONY LANE

Crisis and controversy have struck the New York Times on many occasions since its founding, in the eighteen-fifties. Few threats, however, have been as grave as the one that consumed the storied newspaper this summer, reportedly starting late July. It appears that editorial staff became aware that, unless emergency procedures were initiated, the following day's edition of the Times would contain not a single article on the subject of Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey."

"How the [expletive] did this [expletive] happen?" was the reaction of one source in senior management. "We've had since the [expletive] Bronze Age to prep for it," the source added. "There's no excuse." No current or former employees of the Times were willing to go on record to discuss the near-disaster, but several staff members agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.

Nolan's film was released on July 17th, but expectations had been high for more than a year. A succession of trailers, from July, 2025, onward, revealed further details of the movie. A Times article from February, 2026, bore the headline "Who Cares If Matt Damon's 'Odyssey' Helmet Is Historically Accurate?" The debate intensified after the entrepreneur Elon Musk criticized Nolan for casting Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy. In response, the Times ran a guest essay by Daniel Mendelsohn, a recent translator of Homer's epic poem. A source at the paper commented, "I

hate to say it, but thank God for Elon."

As the release date for "The Odyssey" approached, the paper increased its coverage accordingly. "Yeah, we had that big Nolan profile, saying how anxious he was and everything," a source said. "And getting Matt [Damon] and Tom [Holland] into the Times kitchen to make pizzas three days before the movie came out—genius."

Once the film was in theatres, according to a source in the Opinion department, "the gloves were off. Sharon [Waxman, a contributing writer] said the culture-war stuff was dead, which was a smart way of stoking it all over again. Michelle [Goldberg, a columnist] had another pop at Musk, which always goes down well. Then Maureen [Dowd, a columnist] said the movie wasn't sexy or weird enough, which of course sent the comments into a frenzy." At this point, the source was interrupted by the delivery of a large fruit basket from the marketing department of Universal Pictures, which the source was quick to decline.

Then the crisis hit.

In the words of the senior-management source, "It came out of nowhere. We had a piece on what's so great about eating a [expletive] lotus flower. We went gaga over that hot black outfit worn by Rob [Pattinson, who plays Antinous]. There was an interview with the woman who was the stunt double for Matt [Damon]. We did a story on the popcorn that you scoop into the belly of a [expletive] horse, like, a plastic Trojan horse. We

were on fire. Then, suddenly, nothing."

According to reports, a midmorning meeting was hastily scheduled. "We needed something that could be commissioned and filed in half a day," a source who was at the meeting confirmed. "Someone from Cooking suggested tips for re-creating the dish that Circe serves to Odysseus' men, but legal said that turning readers' families into pigs was a recipe for class-action lawsuits, so that was out. I was about to pitch a piece to Travel about going on vacation to Hades, like a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but then, hallelujah, the Wilson call came in."

The source was referring to Emily Wilson, whose translation of the Odyssey was praised by Nolan, but who has since written a scathing review of his film. "That totally saved us," the source at the meeting said. "Now we just call the other translators and see what they think. I'm already reaching out to Alexander Pope. Also, we ran this terrific article on August 3rd about people taking their babies to 'Odyssey' screenings in the morning. Which means we can follow up with a piece about therapists who are expecting a bonanza in, say, nine years' time. All these messed-up kids will be asking why they can't help thinking of their dads as giants with one eye who want to eat them."

Larger questions remain. How long should the paper's coverage of Nolan's film persist, and what of issues in the wider world, including the war in the Middle East? "You mean the forever war? Excuse me, but that's Troy all over," the source in senior management said. "I know that half of Europe is basically a barbecue, and the yen is in the toilet, and the Lincoln Memorial pool actually is a toilet, but we still don't know why Benny Safdie had, like, zero dialogue as Agamemnon before he got whacked by Clytemnestra, and what that tells us about men's inability to articulate their feelings in both Homer's time and ours. Or something. Anyway, if the Times won't explain it, who will?" The source added that, even as interest in Homer declines, the paper is preparing for the release of Mel Gibson's latest film, "The Resurrection of the Christ: Part One," currently scheduled for May, 2027. "Tell me that isn't news. The [expletive] Resurrection," the source said. "I hate to say it, but thank God for Mel." ♦

LUCI GUTIERREZ

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BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.

BOT OR NOT

How to tell if you're human.

BY JILL LEPORE

There are now more bots online than people, and knowing which is which is hard.

Three summers ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted on X a fifteen-second video of dozens of people—mostly young, veiled in face masks, and wearing super-hip, white-soled sneakers—waiting in a long, snaky line in the traffic-light-lit but otherwise dusky dark of an unnamed city that appears to have been Nagoya, Japan. “Crazy lines around the world,” Altman wrote. “One person getting verified every 8 seconds now.” In the video, the camera pans to the front of the line, where a woman is kneeling on the sidewalk as if in prayer, staring into a gleaming silver orb about the size of a volleyball that has been propped up on a stand about the height of an end table. It looks like the eyeball of a giant robot Cyclops. She

stares into its aperture, a void. You may wonder why. Here’s why. She is bowing before an artificially intelligent machine, seeking a certification that she is human.

That eyeball, which is known as the Orb, was developed by Tools for Humanity, a San Francisco- and Munich-based tech company that Altman founded in 2019 with a twenty-five-year-old German physicist named Alex Blania, who is now its C.E.O. At the time, Altman had just stepped down as president of Y Combinator to head OpenAI; Blania had dropped out of graduate school at Caltech. (Last year, Blania and Altman co-founded another startup, Merge Labs, funded by OpenAI, which, like Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, aims to hook your brain up to a computer. I guess this

is another tool for humanity.) If you get scanned by the Orb, which you can now do at sites on four continents, you get a credential called a Proof of Humanity—provided, that is, that you are not a robot.

Are you a robot? If you’re not, you’re going to be pretty sure you’re not. Still, online at least, you likely find it difficult to tell who else is and is not. Businesses find this difficult, too, and it’s getting harder all the time. If you were forced to guess, the odds would tell you to guess robot, because at this point there are more bots online than people. To deal with this problem, businesses retain bot-detection and bot-management firms, a specialty within the field of cybersecurity. Their task used to be to block bots, but, with the rise of agentic A.I., that has changed. Now the problem is how to let in the good bots (like the avatar you send to the Gap to buy you a new pair of pants) and keep out the bad bots (like the thief trying to scrape the data of every Gap customer). The rest of us have to be our own bot detectors. It’s been suggested to me that if you’re on the phone or in an online chat with a customer-service “person” and you aren’t sure whether you’re talking to a human or a chatbot, one good idea is to ask, “What color shoes are you wearing today?” Because chatbots don’t have feet. (Yet.) I once asked a customer-service representative calling herself Crystal S. if she could prove to me that she was human, and she told me that she lived in Texas and had three daughters and two French bulldogs named Benny and Smoltz. I forgot to ask her about her shoes.

This is not a drill. But it is a hassle, something between an inconvenience and a nightmare, depending on your degree of enthusiasm for the shiny, glimmering how-we-live-now Orb of it all. It is also a very long game of cat and mouse. We used to be the cats. Now we’re the mice.

A certificate verifying your humanity is in certain ways a newer version of some ancient technologies of identification used not for distinguishing between humans and machines but for sorting one group of people from another. Those technologies include tattooing, cutting, and branding—methods of identification that go back thousands of years. In Revelation (13:16–17), the Beast

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ILLUSTRATION BY BRATISLAV MILENKOVIC

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requires everyone “both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads.” The Greeks branded their slaves; the Romans tattooed their gladiators. In the twentieth century, the Nazis required Jews to wear badges, and then they tattooed them, “including newborn babies,” as Primo Levi once wrote. These techniques are still used for livestock, and for gang members.

Claiming to be a particular person has always been something of a performance, down to how you walk and talk and what clothes you wear. (Etymologically, the word “person” means “an actor’s mask”; that meaning was later expanded to describe “a character in a play” and, finally, simply, “a human.”) Imposture is a performance, too, as every con artist knows. A trickster named Arnaud du Tilh passed himself off as a peasant named Martin Guerre in sixteenth-century France by looking a fair bit like him and having a good memory for details. It was said in early modern England that you could pass yourself off as the king if only you could stop yourself from farting.

The more that populations grew, and the more that people moved around, the easier it was to pretend to be someone else. Hence, identity documents, beginning with travel papers. Medieval merchants and soldiers were often required to carry laissez-passers. “Where passports do not exist, nothing is easier than to change one’s name,” Tocqueville later observed. Proof of identity, and especially proof of citizenship, came to require written verification in the nineteenth century, when documents like birth certificates and passports became commonplace; they frequently required seals and stamps and signatures by representatives of the church and later of the state. Like money, these documents could also be faked. Signatures could be forged; photographs could be altered. Fingerprints proved more reliable.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of the social-welfare state meant that Britain, Germany, and France began keeping files on individual citizens for purposes of the provision of assistance. Personal identification numbers became common in the nineteen-thirties and forties. (Meanwhile, totalitarian regimes that assign people numbers instead of

allowing them names have been a hallmark of dystopian fiction at least since Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 novel, “We.”) Nazi Germany pursued a policy of Erfassung, total documentation of the population. “We are recording the individual characteristics of every single member of the nation onto a little card,” the head of an I.B.M. subsidiary in Germany explained in 1934. The United States introduced the nine-digit Social Security number in 1936, partly to solve what was called “the Fred Smith problem” (the fact that there are a lot of people with the same name). Critics charged F.D.R.’s federal government with despotism, and the head of the Republican Party warned, “If the Roosevelt administration is returned to power, we shall see two groups of citizens in this nation: those who are numbered and those who are not numbered.” But plenty of Americans carried their Social Security cards with pride, and even displayed their numbers on jewelry and as tattoos, believing the number to be, as the historian Sarah Igo has argued, “a symbol of a new kind of economic citizenship.”

Sweden assigned a personnummer to all citizens beginning in 1947; Icelanders were assigned an eight-digit number in the early nineteen-fifties, when each person in the country was given a punch card in the National Register. By that decade, governments were storing personal information on computers for purposes like keeping track of tax payments and providing benefits to veterans. (In the nineteen-sixties, a planned National Data Center in the U.S., merging all this information together, was scuppered because of privacy concerns.) Starting in the nineteen-eighties, forms of identification as proof of citizenship became more rigidly required. Today, most nation-states require citizens to register with a national database and have a national identity document. The technologies supporting them include R.F.I.D. chips and facial-recognition software. Malaysia introduced biometric passports in 1998. Mexico began issuing national I.D. cards incorporating iris-scan data in 2011. In 2010, the United Kingdom abandoned a plan to introduce national I.D. cards that would have included biometric data. India’s Aadhaar system, created in 2009, uses iris scans and fingerprints, and assigns a

unique twelve-digit number to all residents. As of 2026, when anyone from outside the E.U. enters nearly any E.U. country, no nice passport person says bienvenue or willkommen; instead, a machine scans your passport, your face, and your fingertips, to verify that you are you.

Online, though, you can be anyone. The opening of the internet to the public in the nineteen-nineties led to new forms of identification—including usernames and passwords and two-factor verification and Touch ID—and new kinds of fraud and, inevitably, new forms of imposture, as in: pretending to be made of flesh and bone when, really, you’re some blocky lines of machine code.

Science-fiction writers saw this coming long before it came. An Isaac Asimov story from 1946, set in the future, tells of an ambitious district attorney named Stephen Byerley who is suspected by political opponents of being a robot. (Decades later, some people said the same thing about Al Gore.) “He has never been seen to eat or drink,” a rival says. “Never!” That is insufficient proof, but in Asimov’s future world there’s another kind of test available: harming a human is a violation of one of the Three Laws of Robotics, so, if Byerley can be shown to be unable to harm a human, he must be a robot. At a campaign rally, a man approaches Byerley and says, “Hit me! You say you’re not a robot. Prove it.” Byerley smacks the schmuck in the face and wins the election. Nobody had considered the possibility that it was all a setup planned not by Byerley’s enemies but by Byerley himself, and that the schmuck was . . . a robot. In a later story, Byerley’s political career takes off and by 2044 he is elected essentially President of everything, the humans still not having worked out that their leader is probably a robot. Fortunately, this no longer much matters since, as a robot-psychologist reflects, “by that time it was the Machines that were running the world anyway.”

Cold War science fiction was consumed with the idea of robots pretending to be humans, the way Communists pretended to be Americans, everyone a suspected subversive. In a 1953 story by Philip K. Dick called “Impostor,” a defense-project official named Spence Olham is killed and replaced by a robot,

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who has a “U-bomb” inside him, but the poor robot thinks he’s the real Olham:

“I’m Olham. I know it. No transfer was made. I’m the same as I’ve always been.”

He touched himself, running his hands over his body. “There must be some way to prove it. . . .”

Neither Peters nor Nelson spoke. “I am Olham,” he said again. “I know I am. But I can’t prove it.”

(The proof, or disproof, comes when he explodes.)

Most of these stories involving tests are variations on the seventeenth-century philosophical meditations of René (“I think therefore I am”) Descartes. Seeking certainty about his own existence, Descartes concluded that the very act of thinking proved that he existed as a thinking being. As Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, will tell you, this proof is no longer sufficient and hasn’t been since Alan Turing proposed the Turing test, in 1950. That led to new tests. In 1968, in Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”—later adapted into the film “Blade Runner”—a character named Rick Deckard (an homage to Descartes) administers the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test to suspected androids. The test involves measuring a subject’s reactions to scenarios of cruelty to animals: humans react instantly, but it takes androids a fraction of a second longer to register that they are supposed to find these stories upsetting. The test works, the narrator muses, because “empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnids.”

It appears that a rosier view of humanity prevailed in the nineteen-sixties than prevails on Sam Altman’s planet Earth. These days, to find out if you are or are not a robot, no one is going to ask you if a photograph of beagles with their heads trapped in a vise being forced to smoke cigarettes disturbs you. They may, however, ask you to look into an Orb.

Online “I’m not a robot” tests date to the earliest forms of a protocol that came to be called a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), first imagined in 1996 by an Israeli cryptographer named Moni Naor and devel-

developed at Carnegie Mellon by Luis von Ahn, who started work on it when he was only a graduate student. (Von Ahn also came up with the name.) “How do we prevent computer programs from using systems designed for human use only?” Carnegie Mellon’s CAPTCHA Project wanted to know. By hand, this task is impossible, given the scale of the problem. “A better solution enlists computers to fight computers: write a program that can recognize, through a brief interaction over the web, whether a user is human or not.”

CAPTCHAs were developed to deter and detect spam, worms, and bots, and, later, to defend against disinformation campaigns, election interference, and acts of cyberterrorism. Most early CAPTCHA tests involved a computer asking you to prove that you are not a robot by deciphering a patch of blurry, crinkled, or otherwise difficult-to-decipher text. These tests soon began to pay a surprising dividend: they allowed Google to crowdsourced the optical-character-recognition work it needed to scan the world’s collection of printed books (without, it must be said, the permission of publishers or authors). In 2007, von Ahn, who had become a professor, launched recAPTCHA, with the slogan “STOP SPAM. READ BOOKS.” Google purchased recAPTCHA in 2009.

With recAPTCHA, every time a human resolved a blurry squiggle or a broken word or phrase, that human was advancing the Google Books Project. The same applied to the maddening visual tests—find the traffic lights, the crosswalks, the bicycles, and teach computers to see better. Von Ahn, who left academia and went on to found Duolingo, has expressed regret about the puzzle phase of proof of humanity, wondering whether he had created an apparatus for siphoning off human attention on a vast scale, a few seconds at a time. But, looked at another way, all that puzzle solving wasn’t a waste of our time if you consider how effective we were at teaching machines how to replace us.

The puzzles, in any event, became obsolete. The first chink in the armor came when (human) crooks started assembling CAPTCHA farms. They’d hire thousands of (real) people to staff their operation in, say, the Philippines, and, if a bot hit a CAPTCHA test, it’d call a

human to crack it and then: open sesame.

It was to defeat CAPTCHA farmers and other no-goodniks that, in 2012, Tamer Hassan and three friends started a bot-detection company that’s now called HUMAN, while hanging out in the back of Singularity&Co., a science-fiction bookstore in Brooklyn. (Singularity was less a bookstore than an archival philanthropy: with money from a Kickstarter campaign called Save the SciFi, they’d buy up rare, out-of-print twentieth-century pulp science fiction, scan it, and then sell the original books, by the pound.) Hassan was newly back from a tour in Iraq with the Air Force, flying helicopters and C-130s. He started HUMAN, he told me, because he and his co-founders wanted “to disrupt the economics of cybercrime.” Cybercrime comes in all shapes and sizes, but it does not require a great deal of capital to do it. “You get teen-age hackers in their pajamas,” Hassan says. “You get college kids trying to get extra money for drinks on the weekend and you get organized cybercrime and you get terrorist groups.” Law enforcement hadn’t worked especially well. And CAPTCHA was failing, too.

What began to replace asking humans to complete puzzles was asking computers to monitor internet traffic more closely. Beginning in 2014, Google launched a series of tests without puzzles (a class of tests that came to be known as “invisible recAPTCHA”). You see a box that you can click to certify “I’m not a robot”—as if anyone would take your word for it!—but the box is essentially a ruse, because, while you’re dragging your cursor over to click on it, the program is already determining whether or not you’re a robot by evaluating your past and present online behavior: where you click and have clicked, how long you pause, what cookies you’ve collected, your I.P. address, how you move your mouse, how you scroll. “In the early days, you could spot something that wasn’t real with basic algorithms,” Hassan says. “If somebody moves too fast through the pages, you can say that is nonhuman.” Humans are messy; bots are tidy.

This worked well for a long time because bots used to be stupider, and they also used to be more expensive. “Maybe ten years ago, it was pricey to build a really good bot, a really efficient bot,” Benjamin Barrier told me. Barrier co-founded

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an international bot-detection company called DataDome in 2015, in Paris. (The company now also has offices in New York and Singapore.) Bots got smarter and cheaper, and then you could buy what came to be called “packaged bots,” something akin to a full-service bot provider. These days, Barrier says, “you spend a few hundred bucks a month and you can rent out a perfect bot,” or, more likely, an army of bots. It’s the difference between one rat in your kitchen and a rat infestation in your basement.

Packaged bots are the precursor to today’s “A.I. agents,” which is just a name for bots that aren’t doing things that are illegal or socially or commercially undesirable. Some people keep rats as pets! So now the problem, for companies like HUMAN and DataDome, is figuring out a bot’s intent—is this one a pest or a pet?—which is quite a bit more difficult than just keeping them out. That requires analyzing behavior, assembling a library of all known bad bots, and using A.I. models and cryptography protocols to tell the bad bots from the good bots. “That time when bots were bad and humans were good, that was a much easier time,” Barrier says with a sigh.

DataDome promises to help clients “regain control of your traffic.” But the metaphors in the bot-management industry lean less toward air-traffic control than toward national defense. HUMAN has both a military and a public-service sensibility. Stu Solomon, HUMAN’s current C.E.O., is, like Hassan, an Air Force Academy graduate; he is also a brigadier general in the Air Na-

National Guard. Solomon and Hassan’s interest in cybersecurity comes from their commitment to the prevention of crime, counterfeiting, fraud, and terrorism. (Before joining HUMAN, Solomon was a cybersecurity executive at Bank of America.) If this is a war, it’s over, and the humans lost. It’s no longer possible to defend the internet against bots. Solomon says, “Now we need to think about this as coexistence.”

Solomon thinks the fact that there are now more bots than humans online was always inevitable. Hassan agrees, and he also thinks it would be best if, at this point, humans simply cede the internet to the robots—the good ones. “The internet was made for machines to talk to each other,” he says. “It’s a system of protocols for computers to interact and message each other. In the end, that’s what it will be. It will be an internet of A.I. agents, operating on our behalf. Probably in protocols and with languages that we don’t understand anymore.”

He’s O.K. with that. We still have the real world all to ourselves. Don’t we?

The Orb is not a bot-detection device. It’s a human-capturing device. Sam Altman and Alex Blania’s company Tools for Humanity has taken an entirely different approach to cybersecurity than companies like HUMAN and DataDome have. Tools for Humanity is interested in securing onetime, portable proof of your humanity and charging other companies for the use of that evidence. The Orb is different in other ways, too. Rather than having

origins in crime prevention or cybersecurity or national defense, the Orb has origins in cryptocurrency.

The first tool for humanity that was forged by Tools for Humanity, in 2019, was a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin. Actually, that was the purpose for which the company was founded, because the whole scheme started out as what Blania refers to as “the Bitcoin Project,” a universal-basic-income proposition. The original idea had been to hand out Worldcoin to every human on the planet as a hedge against the revolution otherwise inherent in the coming A.I.-driven jobpocalypse. Start handing out money, and you need to verify everyone so that no one double dips, and so that robots don’t dig around in the till with their grubby little robot paws. In a public announcement in 2021, the company described Worldcoin as a “new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many people as possible.” Get scanned, get verified, get paid. Revolution averted.

Both the Orb and the story that Tools for Humanity tells about its purpose have changed since then. An early version of the Orb, which looked like a miniature Death Star, spat out physical coins, like a slot machine, presumably to make the point about the quid pro quo to people who might not quite comprehend blockchain. Prior to the product’s launch, the field testing spanned thirty-four countries—many of them developing nations—and included such cities as Buenos Aires, Lisbon, Bangalore, and Nairobi. Worldcoin also gathered training data for its A.I.-driven Orb by sending Orbs to locations in Sudan, Chile, and Ghana. The MIT Technology Review reported that villagers in Gunungguru, Indonesia, lined up for hours to have their irises scanned, having been offered “everything from free cash (often local currency as well as Worldcoin tokens) to AirPods to promises of future wealth.” (A company spokesperson responded to the Review, saying that the Orb operators were “independent contractors, not Worldcoin employees,” and that the giveaways were “isolated efforts” on the part of these workers.) At the time, twenty-five tokens was a typical payment; today, that’s worth about eight dollars. The project’s ambitions swelled like a tick on a dog’s belly. When the token publicly launched,

“Everyone likes how it sparkles, but no one wants to talk about what it’s for.”

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in July of 2023—a time when OpenAI was doing a lot of posturing about saving democracy, currying favor with the we-are-saving-democracy Biden Administration, and only months before the board of OpenAI tried to oust Altman on the grounds that he was reckless and untrustworthy—Altman and Blania said, in a statement, “If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI (universal basic income).” A rollout that summer focussed on higher-income nations in Asia, especially Japan and South Korea, where people who queued at pop-up Orb stations, like the one Altman tweeted about, were paid in Worldcoin. Then the tick burst. Later that year, talk of universal basic income disappeared from Worldcoin’s website. Soon, Tools for Humanity dropped the “coin” from the Worldcoin name and, for the most part, stopped mentioning crypto.

The latest version of the Orb is meant to look less sinister, more like something made by Apple or, as Tiago Sada, Tools for Humanity’s chief product officer, told me, “like something out of Pixar.” That cute little gooseneck desk lamp, say, or EVE, the gleaming-white legless robot from “WALL-E.” That scarcely disguises its darker implications for human freedom.

One of the thornier political, legal, and moral concerns raised by companies like OpenAI and Tools for Humanity is the emergence of what I think of as the “artificial state”: for-profit, international corporations assuming powers once reserved for nation-states, without any democratic mandate. With the Orb, Tools for Humanity proposes to take over the historically governmental function of identification.

World wants everyone in the world to get scanned. When you get scanned, you verify your WorldID, and with the World App you buy gift cards and cryptocurrency. This hasn’t gone over very well. A sizable number of nation-states, including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, and Thailand, have either investigated or banned the Orb or fined Tools for

Humanity, citing privacy or consumer-protection violations, ethical misgivings, or regulatory concerns.

Nevertheless, the Orb may be coming soon to a coffee shop, sidewalk, or shopping mall near you. “We have about forty million people on the network with some level of verification and about half of those, eighteen million, at the highest level of verification—the Orb verification,” Sada told me. “But right now we are really focussed on the U.S.” During the Biden Administration, the S.E.C. wasn’t inclined to look favorably on people being paid in crypto for having their eyeballs scanned. That changed when Donald Trump returned to office, and since the spring of 2025 it has been possible to secure a Proof of Humanity from an Orb within the land of the free and the home of the brave.

During the past year’s P.R. push, people at Tools for Humanity and World have talked less about universal basic income, or democracy, and more about protecting humans from a world overrun by artificial intelligence, especially in the form of bots, scams, malware, deepfakes, and other assorted automated nuisances that are swarming all over the internet. Sada, who is from Mexico City, started building robots when he was thirteen. He met Altman when he was briefly an undergraduate at Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Y Combinator funded an app Sada invented, called Flinto, that is akin to Venmo but for Latin America. He joined Tools for Humanity in 2021, when he was twenty-four. Sada told me that Altman and Blania started Tools for Humanity because they were concerned that, one day, “trust on the internet would start to get eroded.”

Essentially, World, which has about two hundred and fifty million dollars in venture-capital funding, proposes an alternative internet—or at least an exclusive space within the existing internet, something like a first-class airport lounge—for humans only. Its motto is “Let’s make the internet more human.” (This, mind you, is coming from the people who brought you the bots in the first place.) But, to get into that lounge, you need to get scanned and verified by

the Orb. This strategy has achieved some success. WorldID is now integrated, as a human-verification mechanism, into apps that include Zoom, Tinder, Shopify, and DocuSign. Verifying more humans is Blania’s whole reason for living, he told Tools for Humanity’s employees last year: “That’s all I care about every day and all you should care about every day, and nothing else should matter.” Since then, given the growing number of countries questioning the Orb, the company has appeared to be struggling. I talked to Sada at the end of May. In early June, the day OpenAI filed paperwork for going public, Tools for Humanity, valued at $2.5 billion, announced that it was laying off staff because of a shifting “company strategy.”

None of this has quieted the hype, or the revisionist history. This spring, at a World event in San Francisco celebrating the launch of a new version of WorldID (“We think it’s a really special moment in human history,” one company representative said), Altman made no mention of World’s original plan—handing out money to people put out of work by A.I. Instead, he insisted that he and Blania had started on this path years ago because they knew advanced artificial intelligence was coming, and they wanted to preserve humanity in a world “where there’s going to be more stuff generated by A.I. than by humans.” A world overrun with bots is a wonderful world, in Altman’s view—so long as they are doing our bidding. There’s just this one hitch, he admitted: “I’m sure many of you have started to have an experience more and more where you’re, like, ‘Am I interacting with an A.I. or a person?’”

It’s not a speech that schoolchildren will one day memorize, like when Abraham Lincoln resolved “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” No, this wasn’t Lincoln at Gettysburg. This was Altman in the Valley. “We really wanted to make sure that the world continued to be about people, for people, that people were still the primary thing that we all care about,” Altman said. Are you reassured? ♦

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PROFILES

THE DELUSIONS OF JOHN ROBERTS

The Chief Justice insists that his Court isn't biased even as it keeps making dramatic leaps rightward.

BY MARGARET TALBOT

When President Donald Trump announced plans to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court on April 1st, the problem arose as to where to put him. The Court's oral arguments have precise protocols, but none of them governed where a President should sit in the courtroom, because no President had ever done such a thing. Tradition—and respect for judicial independence—had prevented it. The case that the President wanted to see argued was Trump v. Barbara, which was among the more consequential matters the Court was considering that term. Trump had tried, through an executive order, to overturn the guarantee of citizenship to all babies born on U.S. soil—a conception of what makes an American that had been enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898, and later reaffirmed by congressional statute.

Because none of the Justices had invited Trump, he couldn't be placed in the section reserved for their families and other guests. Since he loathes the press, it was hard to imagine him sitting among the journalists, most of whom perch on creaky bentwood chairs in crowded alcoves. Because Trump was a party in the case, Court officials felt that he shouldn't be given the seat Presidents occupy during swearing-in ceremonies for Justices—typically the only time they visit. In the end, the officials put him in the front row of the public section, where he glowered at the Justices, his signature red tie dangling, one hand on each knee.

It felt like a mafioso move. For months, he'd been denouncing the Justices—particularly two of his own three appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—when they didn't decide his way. In February, after the Court ruled that Trump couldn't invoke a national emergency in order to impose sweeping tariffs, he told reporters that Gorsuch and Barrett, who'd joined the 6-3 majority, were "an embarrassment

rassment to their families." At a White House Easter lunch later that day, Trump made it clear that he sees judicial appointments as quid pro quos, doing a mincing imitation of Justices who won't knuckle under: "I don't care if Trump appointed me, I don't care, it doesn't make any difference to me—I'm voting against him!" He added, "They want to show their independence, you know? Stupid people." (The White House posted, then took down, a video of the speech.)

Watching Supreme Court oral arguments can feel like watching a play—the Justices emerge from behind red velvet curtains to take their appointed seats at a long bench. As Clare Cushman, of the Supreme Court Historical Society, told me, "It's not entertainment, but it's entertainment-adjacent." On April 1st, Trump's presence generated dark comedy and cringly implausible encounters. He arrived at the Court with a posse: Howard Lutnick, the billionaire Commerce Secretary; David Warrington, the burly White House counsel; and Pam Bondi, the obedient Attorney General whose firing, for not being obedient enough, Trump announced the next day. (He reportedly gave her the news while they rode in a limousine to the Court.) In the guest section, apparently at the invitation of one of the liberal Justices, sat Robert De Niro, an inveterate Trump critic. A few rows behind the President was John Eastman, a former lawyer known for opposing birth-right citizenship; he'd been disbarred in California for his role in a scheme to return Trump to the White House after the 2020 election. On the plaza outside, the celebrity chef and activist José Andrés, wearing an "Immigrants Feed America" T-shirt, addressed protesters who carried signs saying "It's Literally in the Constitution" and "Born Here, Belong Here."

Peter Shane, a constitutional-law scholar at New York University, told me, "I wondered if Trump understood that he wouldn't be the center of attention.

The Chief Justice wouldn't be staring him in the eye, there'd be no television cameras on him. That is not usually his cup of tea." In the end, there were no disruptions, not even when Trump walked out after the government's lawyer made his presentation and before the opposing lawyer, from the A.C.L.U., had got very far into hers. The Justices seemed to avoid even glancing at the President.

Still, it was another profoundly strange moment in a profoundly strange time for the Court—especially for the seventy-one-year-old Chief Justice, John Roberts. Twenty-one years into his tenure, he keeps waking up, "Groundhog Day" style, to the same ironic scenario: he's a proponent of maximal Presidential authority who is compelled to deal with a President especially likely to abuse it. (Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee who is reflexively polite, with a self-deprecating sense of humor, probably wouldn't even enjoy a round of golf with Trump.) Roberts has leveraged his mild persona to defend the Court's political neutrality at a time when Americans increasingly see it as partisan; according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, more than half hold an unfavorable view of it—a near-historic low. Whereas Roberts likes to stress that the Court is fundamentally nonpartisan and frequently unanimous—the Justices agree around forty per cent of the time, though typically on minor issues—many Americans believe that he has presided over a rightward march in the Court's jurisprudence, on such issues as affirmative action, immigration and asylum, abortion, voting law, gun rights, and the separation of church and state. And, with a few high-profile exceptions, such as the tariffs case, his Supreme Court has overruled lower courts to permit much of Trump's second-term agenda to proceed. This has often happened without explanation, because the decisions have been issued on the emergency, or "shadow," docket—that

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SOURCE PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIN SCHAFF / GETTY

Today's Justices are openly fractious. All Roberts can say is "We're not as much at each other's throats as you might think."

ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL ROGERS

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is, decided without a full briefing, oral arguments, or detailed opinions. Of the thirty-five requests for emergency action made by the second Trump Administration—on everything from defunding scientific research to allowing people to be deported to “third countries” where they have no affiliations—the Court has ruled in the Administration’s favor, in part or in full, twenty-five times, generally with the three liberal Justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent. Among the fifty-six cases fully briefed and argued before the Court this past term, there were 6–3 splits between the Republican and Democratic appointees in thirteen rulings, compared with six last term.

To some observers, the fact that the Court ruled against the Trump Administration in a few major opinions—including, it turned out, the birthright-citizenship case—was a reassuring affirmation of Roberts’s view that it operates outside the realm of politics. Trump’s theatrics fuelled this impression: his clumsy attempts to tip the balance obviously failed. William Baude, a law professor at the University of Chicago, argued in the Times that the Roberts Court was “one of the most independent” he could “imagine at this stage of the second Trump administration.” Yet the term was overwhelmingly favorable to the President, and, though the final rulings certainly matter, of equal importance is the Court’s choice of which cases to take up in the first place.

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, pointed to the Court’s handling of Louisiana v. Callais, in which the conservative majority gutted portions of the Voting Rights Act. Vladeck noted that the Court could have treated the case—involving Louisiana’s creation of a majority-Black voting district—as a smaller dispute, but instead it ordered the parties involved to re-argue the case as a broad test of the constitutionality of weighing race when redistricting. Vladeck said, “A big theme of this term is all these times when the Court could have looked like it was above politics but chose to lean in. This is the one institution left in the country that had a chance to say, ‘We have long-term principles’—and instead it got swept up in the political moment.”

Roberts has offered the occasional courteous rebuke to the President’s public trashing of the judicial branch. In 2018, after Trump dismissed a district-court judge who’d rejected one of his asylum policies as an “Obama judge,” Roberts declared, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” Even those lofty, carefully considered remarks rankled Trump. At the Easter lunch that year, he said, “There is no Republican judge and there is no Democrat judge,” a certain person says. And I say you’ve lost all credibility when you say that.”

For a man like Roberts, to whom the label “institutionalist” attaches like an epithet in the Odyssey, perhaps the only thing worse than Trump’s excoriation of the Justices is his gratitude when they do what he wants. In March, 2025, Roberts was present when Trump gave the annual Presidential address to Congress; afterward, Trump patted the Chief Justice on the shoulder and said, “Thank you again—won’t forget.” To many people, this sounded like an acknowledgment of Trump v. United States, the remarkably capacious 2024 ruling that granted Presidents immunity from prosecution for official acts. More immediately, the opinion saved Trump from facing trial for interfering in the 2020 election. Roberts had written the opinion for a 6–3 majority. J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge and a conservative, was close to Roberts for many years—he was a groomsman at his wedding—but has since become sharply critical of him. Luttig told me that he regards the immunity decision as “one of the two or three worst cases in all of American history, if not the single worst, because of the structural damage that it did to the Constitution and the separation of powers.” On Truth Social, Trump blamed “sleazebag ‘journalists’” for suggesting that his comment to Roberts was related to the immunity decision. He said that he’d just been thanking Roberts for swearing him in at his second Inauguration. Nobody who knows Roberts thinks that he could have found the gesture anything other than embarrassing.

Roberts, with his country-club equanimity, can seem like a man out of time—maddeningly or reassuringly, depending on your perspective. Even as a septuagenarian who peers at lawyers over reading glasses, he projects boyishness. He has the same modest swoop of a forelock that he’s had since his confirmation hearings. (A longtime Supreme Court sketch artist told me that Roberts’s bland good looks and buttoned-down comportment make him challenging to draw.) Roberts has called himself a “dinosaur” when it comes to A.I., and he’s never stopped writing opinions by hand. He still likes to boast about how collegial the Court is, though lately he’s had to temper those claims: in a speech at Rice University this past March, the best he

“The things I do so you people feel less alone.”

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could muster was “We’re not as much at each other’s throats as you might think.” Back in the nineties, both Democrats and Republicans loved to praise the unlikely friendship of the (liberal, feminist) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the (conservative, originalist) Justice Antonin Scalia. If such a friendship exists on the Court today, there’s no evidence of it.

In oral arguments, Roberts is generally unruffled. He takes up less airtime than most other Justices and seems less aggravated and indignant than the most aggravated and indignant among them—Samuel Alito for the conservatives, Jackson for the liberals. (An analysis by The Hill found that Jackson had the highest spoken-word count this past term, at more than seventy-five thousand, whereas Roberts was at about twenty thousand, ahead only of Clarence Thomas, who until recent years barely spoke from the bench.) Robert’s harshest interjections—and they aren’t that harsh—come when he reminds a colleague not to interrupt a lawyer or another Justice.

Still, it must be confounding to have Roberts’s job these days. In one sense, he’s been getting so much of what he has long believed in: the weakening of the administrative state, the enlargement of Presidential power, and the rollback of affirmative action and of voting-rights protections for minorities, which he thinks our society no longer needs. (“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he famously wrote in 2007.) These are goals he’s sought since he worked in the Reagan White House. The string of conservative victories must be one reason that, as he deadpanned to an audience in Buffalo last year, he has no plans to retire: “I’m going out feet first.” This is one point on which the young Roberts and the current one do not concur—in a 1983 memo to Reagan’s White House counsel, Fred Fielding, Roberts noted that the Framers had adopted life tenure for federal judges, including those on the Supreme Court, “at a time when people simply did not live as long,” adding, “A judge insulated from the normal currents of life for twenty-five or thirty years was a rarity then, but is becoming commonplace.” Roberts, then twenty-seven, suggested term limits of about fifteen years for federal judges, to insure that they’d “not lose all touch with

reality.” In Buffalo, Roberts said that he’d entrusted two friends to tell him if it was “time to go,” but added that he felt “pretty healthy” and that it was “exciting to get up every morning and go into work.”

His workplace is trickier than it used to be, though. Although his conservative flank has a lock on power, Roberts himself has less sway than ever over an increasingly fractious Court. Notably, the Chief Justice has less room for the cagey maneuvering, including narrowing the scope of decisions, that he’s often used to build consensus, as with a 2012 opinion that brokered a compromise on the Affordable Care Act by characterizing its insurance mandate as a mere tax. In 2018, Roberts told an audience at the University of Minnesota that “you can try to get as many people on board as you can” by keeping decisions narrow, and by only deciding “what is absolutely necessary to be decided.” But today’s Court often divides along stark ideological lines, and the liberals often sound truly distraught in their dissents. Jackson, describing the majority’s decision in the Presidential-immunity case, invoked “a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance.” Kagan wrote an impassioned dissent to the Court’s 6–3 decision in the Louisiana-redistricting case. Opting to read passages of her opinion aloud from the bench, for impact, Kagan repeated “I dissent” like a chant as Roberts and Alito—whom Roberts had chosen to write the opinion—stared straight ahead. Kagan spoke of “the majority’s now completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” a law “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil-rights marchers.”

During oral arguments, Sotomayor and Jackson, in particular, are seldom shy about articulating what they see as the existential stakes of the Court’s decisions. In a case this past term involving a policy that would allow the government to turn away asylum seekers at the Mexican border without first hearing their claims, Sotomayor twice cited the story of the M.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany which the U.S. refused to allow to dock in 1939. “The majority of those people were shipped back or had to go back from where they came and were killed,” Sotomayor told the lawyer arguing for the policy. “That’s what we’re doing here—

isn’t it?” In June, when the Court ruled, 6–3, in favor of the policy, Sotomayor read part of her dissent from the bench. Alito, who’d delivered the majority opinion, grew so annoyed that he offered a testy remonstrance. “There is much that I would have added to my bench statement, had I known there would be a dissent read,” he began. (A Court spokesperson later acknowledged “a misunderstanding on Justice Alito’s part”—he’d in fact been informed in advance of Sotomayor’s plan.) In 2024, Sotomayor told an audience at Harvard, “There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried.” When Kagan was asked, at a separate event, about Sotomayor’s admission, she said, “I’m not much of a crier, myself. . . . I’m more of a wall-slammer.” (At a more recent appearance, in July, Kagan sounded a conciliatory note, saying, “Is this Court the kind of puppet for the current Administration? I think definitely not.”)

Vladeck, the Georgetown law professor, said that the two-year period before Barrett replaced Ginsburg, firmly tipping the Court’s balance, was the high point of Roberts’s ability to work out compromises: “He will never be in more control than he was between 2018 and 2020, when he was the median on everything.” Ironically, the firmly conservative majority has watered down Roberts’s power. This became especially clear in 2022, when Roberts tried to find a middle way in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. When the Justices met for a final vote on whether they’d take the case, Roberts, Barrett, and the three liberals voted to turn it away, according to reporting by Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor, of the Times. But the Court requires only four Justices to grant a case, and Brett Kavanaugh, whom Roberts had hoped would back his strategy of prudent avoidance, wouldn’t go along. Roberts ended up writing a concurrence, arguing for a “more measured course” in which the Court would uphold a Mississippi ban on abortions after fifteen weeks and toss out the long-standing rule that abortion was legal until a fetus was viable, but stop short of discarding Roe v. Wade altogether. He was following, he wrote, “a simple yet fundamental principle of judicial restraint: If it is not necessary

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to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.” But the liberals were having none of it, and the conservatives wanted to end abortion immediately. “In the aftermath of Dobbs, he was the proverbial man without a country,” Luttig said.

During the first Trump Administration, Roberts’s position as tiebreaker sometimes allowed him to adopt a professorial tone, offering critical notes on the government’s legal strategies. In two 5–4 opinions invalidating Administration actions, he gave implicit advice on how the government might have pursued its aims differently. In one case, the Administration wanted to place a citizenship question on census forms, claiming that this would somehow help protect minorities’ voting rights. (Opponents said that the true intent was to scare immigrants away from filling out the form, and, thus, from being counted.) Roberts called the government’s explanation “contrived,” suggesting that it would have found success had it been more forthright. In a second case, Roberts rejected “post-hoc rationalizations” that the government had given for invalidating the DACA program, which allows some immigrants who came to the country illegally as children to avoid deportation. Benjamin Eidelson, a professor at Harvard Law School, told me that Roberts, to his credit, was trying to make the Administration more accountable for its controversial agenda. But it’s also possible that Roberts had found a clever way to deflect some explosive cases; if so, that leverage is gone—the current Administration is too emboldened to engage in pretenses. “When the Court struck down big policies in Trump’s first term, it was because the Administration had concealed or obscured from the public what was really going on,” Eidelson explained. “In both the census case and the DACA case, the Chief Justice’s theme was ‘You can do this if you want, but you have to own the choice and pay the political price.’ Now the Administration is just saying the quiet part out loud.”

It takes a determinedly selective eye not to see the increasingly open divisions among the Justices. Some of them have been speaking publicly about their chagrin with the Court, and with one another, in ways they rarely would have

earlier in Roberts’s tenure—even though that surely displeases him. “This is a very careful guy,” David Leebron, a friend of Roberts’s from their law-school days, at Harvard, told me. “He’s a person who is not going to say anything he shouldn’t say.” Days before Joe Biden’s Inauguration, an upside-down American flag—a symbol of the movement that falsely claims the election was stolen from Trump—was raised outside Alito’s home, in Alexandria, Virginia. (Alito blamed the display on his wife.) This past April, Thomas gave a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, in which he criticized American progressivism for, among other things, suggesting that rights could be granted by governments; in Thomas’s view, rights are bestowed by God. (He also said that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism.”) And if Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, minors in election conspiracies, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, majors in it, having explicitly urged lawmakers in two states to overturn Biden’s election.

In April, at the University of Kansas, Sotomayor sharply criticized an unnamed “colleague”—clearly Kavanaugh—for his concurrence in a September ruling that permitted ICE agents doing immigration-status checks to take into account what they presume to be a person’s ethnicity. “There are some people who can’t understand our experiences, even when you tell them,” Sotomayor said, during an onstage conversation with the appellate-court judge Mary H. Murguia and her twin sister, Janet, the head of a Latino

civil-rights organization. “I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, ‘These are only temporary stops.’ This is from a man whose parents were professionals and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” Sotomayor later apologized for making “inappropriate” comments. (She got along with nearly all her colleagues, she said at a different law school event that month,

in part because she strove not to “define them by their worst ideas.”)

Meanwhile, in a speech at Yale, Jackson delivered a frank critique of the Court’s dependence on the emergency docket. A President, in an emergency application to the Court, might argue that he was being irreparably harmed by a lower court’s ruling against one of his executive orders, but she found this hyperbolic—he might be “harmed in an abstract way, by not doing what he wants to do,” but that hardly mattered if “what he wants to do is illegal.” She likened some of the Court’s brief, unsigned opinions to mere “scratch-paper musings,” adding that certain ones came across as “utterly irrational.” To issue “important decisions in such a cursory manner disrespects not only the people whose lives are upended by the rulings but also the public,” she said. Whereas Kavanaugh and Alito have defended the Court’s use of the emergency docket as the only way to handle all the pressing cases before it—Kavanaugh prefers the bureaucratic term “interim docket”—Jackson said that she’d “adamantly reject” any attempt to “normalize” the docket.

Stephen Wermiel, who covered the Court for the Wall Street Journal and is a law professor emeritus at American University, told me that Jackson’s speech was highly unusual: “The Court does not have a tradition of airing its dirty linen in public.”

It’s true that, as Roberts has said over the years, the nine Justices are bonded by the singularity of their work: they are the only people in the world doing precisely what they do. And they have certain rituals to maintain comity. Before oral arguments, they shake one another’s hands, a tradition stretching back to the nineteenth century. “It’s a small thing, perhaps,” Roberts said in a 2018 speech, but an important reminder that “we do not serve one party or one interest.” They eat lunch together on each argument and conference day, and Roberts enforces a rule that they must not talk about work. Instead, they chat about baseball, movies, grandchildren. If it’s someone’s birthday, Roberts brings in a bottle of wine for a toast.

Still, given the two unprecedented leaks in the past four years—drafts of the Dobbs opinion and of the confidential memos behind a seminal 2016 emergency-

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docket opinion, which Kantor and Liptak reported on recently in the Times—the atmosphere must sometimes be tense. (An awkward internal investigation of the Dobbs leak reached no evident resolution.) Justin Driver, a Yale law professor who clerked for the former Justice Stephen Breyer, said, “These leaks are painful for anyone who cares about the reputation of the Court.” Driver remembered Roberts gathering the clerks in a room to talk about the importance of confidentiality: “It wasn’t a stern talking-to, but it was very, very clear—you do not talk about what is happening here.” On the right, commentators see the leaks as part of a campaign to delegitimize the Court, and Roberts in particular. Fox News’s main response to the Times’ shadow-docket scoop—which showed that Roberts had moved aggressively to quash President Barack Obama’s signature environmental initiative, the Clean Power Plan—was to run an online op-ed, by the conservative legal scholar John Yoo, titled “The Left’s War on the Supreme Court Just Hit a Terrifying New Low.” Wermiel found this framing highly selective. “We don’t know who leaked this material,” he said. “But, even if you assume that conservative critics are right—that a liberal-leaning clerk was trying to undermine Roberts’s credibility—I don’t think it even comes close to Trump’s efforts to humiliate and denigrate the Court and its Justices.”

People familiar with the Court’s inner workings told me that new ways of conducting business might also be fraying nerves. Until a decade ago, the shadow docket was used only occasionally, mainly for true emergency applications—such as capital cases in which individuals faced imminent execution. Now it’s the venue for all kinds of substantive statutory and even constitutional matters, from immigration to election law, in large part because the Trump Administration has made such aggressive use of it—constantly filing for “emergency” relief to vanquish lower-court rulings that impede its policies. A former clerk said, “More of those decisions are essentially battles of memos, rather than human processes where the clerks talk, and then the Justices talk, and there are multiple drafts of opinions. It’s much more impersonal, and it kind of crowds out any sense of compromise or engagement—

“What’s that, Lassie? They’re repainting the barn? And you wish they wouldn’t, because you kind of like the old color? Not everything you say is an emergency—sometimes you just want to talk about regular stuff?”

of mutual understanding.” Shadow-docket petitions now pour in year-round, including in July and August—months when the Justices once had little, if any, Court business to attend to, and could enjoy speaking gigs in Rome or London, or work on their memoirs or children’s books. Today, Driver said, the Justices feel compelled to keep “interacting with each other” during the lull.

Roberts himself probably laments this change. He likes to paraphrase a quip by Justice Louis Brandeis, who said that he could do twelve months’ worth of Court work in ten months, but not in twelve. “We work at very close quarters on very important issues, on very sensitive issues,” Roberts said at a public appearance last year. “And we do need a little break from each other.” Some Justices socialize with one another over the summer, he added, but, as for himself, “I’m a—I think I’ve got the group right—Four Seasons fan, and my approach is ‘See You in September.’” (He got the group wrong—the song was recorded by both the Tempos and the Happenings.)

In another drain on the Justices’ energy, oral arguments have become notably longer in recent years. During the pandemic, the Justices conducted sessions over the phone, and they adopted a system in which Roberts called on each of them to speak. When the Justices

returned to the courtroom, Roberts partially retained this format. A free-for-all period—in which any of the nine can jump in to ask questions of the lawyers arguing the case—is followed by Roberts calling on each Justice, in order of seniority, to ask any remaining questions. Arguments now stretch out to two hours or more; an hour had previously been the standard. (At an appearance in May, Alito complained that there was currently “too much speechifying” on the Court. Roberts has said that he’ll be looking into the matter this summer.) Michael Dorf, a constitutional-law scholar at Cornell, told me, “The new format is better, if for no other reason than that the old format just didn’t allocate enough time in complicated cases.” But, as the former clerk told me, it “probably also tests the Justices’ patience with one another, because they’re all sitting there for so long—it seems like kind of a miserable experience sometimes. Especially given that some of them really talk a lot. I can just imagine how much eye-rolling, actual or mental, the others must be doing.”

After Trump left the Court on April 1st, the oral arguments went on for about another hour. The Justices’ questioning was thorough, historically grounded, and fairly subdued—the President probably would have found it

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tough going had he stuck around. But he no doubt enjoyed seeing his Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, whaling on birth-right citizenship in his opening arguments. Sauer, a Harvard Law graduate who clerked for Scalia—and proved his worth to Trump by successfully arguing the Presidential-immunity case—speaks fast, in a distinctively raspy voice. As Trump looked on, Sauer ominously declared that America’s guarantee of citizenship to babies born here had “spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades.” This warning about “birth tourism” echoed one of Trump’s favored talking points, though there’s little data indicating that such births occur in significant numbers, and U.S. law already forbids obtaining a tourist visa specifically for the purpose of giving birth here.

Even before a conservative Court, Sauer faced a daunting challenge, because the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is extremely straightforward: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” (There are a few recognized exceptions to this rule, such as the children of diplomats.) You could dispute precisely what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant—and Sauer did. You could also stress—and Sauer did—that the purpose of the amendment had been to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children after the Civil War. But in an “originalist” reading of the language—the preferred mode of modern conservatives, in which the Constitution’s meaning is fixed by the people who wrote it—the “all persons” phrasing would seem to be unambiguous. That is certainly how the Court reasoned in 1898, when it famously upheld birthright citizenship; in that case, Wong Kim Ark, the son of Chinese immigrants who were living in San Francisco when he was born, brought suit when his citizenship was challenged after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Roberts, as is his wont, said little during the oral arguments, but an exchange he had with Sauer was the most memorable of the day. When Sauer noted, “We’re in a new world now . . .

CEREUS

After the box wine, the chicken thighs, and Nancy’s spice cake, we lounged around talking of poetry, manure, and flowers. The warm of summer lingered. And the smile of moonlight. Mosquitoes were on vacation. “Look!” Sylvia, our host, cried. On the half-dead night-blooming cereus, there was a large pale flower opening. All of us pressed our noses toward its sugary fragrance. Evidently, Johnny, a horticulturalist, had given it to Beth, who passed it on to the warden’s wife, and all of them are gone, so Sylvia adopted it. When she put it on a stool in bright lamplight, it was difficult not to touch. How idiotic our griefs seemed, how transient our sins. In the same way I am rewired by mineral traces in seawater, frivolous petals on a dry stem had given us our bodies back. By dawn it had withered up and was gone.

—Henri Cole

where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen,” Roberts shot back, “Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.” This was followed by the kind of nervous laughter you hear when someone unexpected delivers a zinger.

The Chief Justice’s brio seemed telling. “The Roberts Court loves cases like this,” Peter Shane, of N.Y.U., said. “By occasionally resisting the President’s agenda when the law really doesn’t allow any cogent alternative to his losing, it allows them to say, ‘See, we’re not ideologically driven.’”

Rogers Smith, a political scientist and a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania who co-authored a book about the citizenship clause, said, “Roberts is glad to rule against the Trump Administration when he can to help bolster the image of judicial impartiality. He will do it in cases where it does not threaten the efforts to restore what he thinks is a correct conservative understanding of the Constitution. In the birthright-citizenship case in particular, the Court benefits from the fact that the Trump Administration is probably less concerned about whether it wins the case than it is about the political benefits of bringing the case.” (The MAGA base cheers deportations, legal or not.)

In the end, Roberts wrote a strong opinion for the majority. He argued that the English common-law understanding of birthright citizenship—

originally known as jus soli, or “right of the soil”—had “crossed the Atlantic with the colonists” and been “adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution” for a “Nation of immigrants.” Not only was the “succinct language” of the Fourteenth Amendment unequivocal; so was the Court’s ruling in the Wong Kim Ark case.

The biggest shock was Roberts’s failure to bring more of the conservatives on board. Alito and Thomas had been expected to side with the Administration, but it had seemed possible for Roberts to forge an alliance with all the other Justices. In the end, the vote was 6–3, but with a major caveat. Barrett joined Roberts and the liberals in full. Gorsuch joined the conservatives in full—a surprise. Kavanaugh agreed that Trump’s executive order should be overturned but didn’t agree that it was unconstitutional. Instead, he concluded that Trump’s order had violated a 1952 congressional statute upholding the citizenship of all babies born on U.S. soil. In a separate opinion, Kavanaugh pointedly noted that Congress could amend or override that law. Samuel Erman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, told me, “It feels like this could have been an easy win—just convince a couple more of your conservative colleagues to uphold a very firmly established constitutional interpretation that is overwhelmingly consistent with text and history. That Roberts couldn’t—

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well, it doesn't seem like a Court that is marching to his drumbeat."

Several legal scholars I spoke to said conservatives should be pleased that a challenge to birthright citizenship had made it to the Supreme Court at all. Tellingly, some of the leading opponents of the citizenship guarantee weren't as let down by the result as they might have been. John Eastman told me later that he was "disappointed, of course," but added, "The fact that the ruling was 5-4 on the constitutional issue strongly put to rest any claim that this was not a serious constitutional argument." Vice-President J. D. Vance told Fox News that the division in the Court's ruling was a "big silver lining," noting, "A lot of legal experts expected this case to go the wrong direction by seven to two, or even eight to one." Birthright citizenship was now "hanging by a thread." On August 6th, Trump signed two executive orders aimed at blocking citizenship for certain people born here, such as those whose parents belong to a "Foreign Terrorist Organization."

Vladeck told me the case confirms that Roberts "can't build consensus" anymore. "From the perspective of being able to steer the Court out of a political thicket, this term is pretty emphatic proof that he can't, even if he wanted to," Vladeck said. "And I'm not sure that he wants to."

On May 6th, a week after the Court announced its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, triggering immediate efforts by Republicans in Southern states to break up majority-Black voting districts, Roberts gave a speech in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He took the opportunity to lament how misunderstood the Court is. "People think we're making policy decisions," Roberts said, with evident frustration. "I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don't think is an accurate understanding of what we do." He used to deliver this refrain in cheerier cadences. In 2005, when he was appointed to the Court by Bush, he immediately became Chief Justice. (The former Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, had just died, of thyroid cancer.) During the confirmation process, Roberts famously invoked a baseball metaphor: judges are like umpires, and their job is to call balls and strikes, not to

pitch or bat. Yet does Roberts truly not care who wins the games? He emerged from a specific political culture, with a set of conservative policy preferences that go back to his college days. As Chief Justice, he has found ways to align his legal reasoning with those policy preferences in many, many cases.

A former clerk for another Justice told me that, when he was at the Court, he never really got Roberts's "talk about balls and strikes." Although Roberts believed in decorum and was "always polite," he also "seemed pretty ideological—he has an agenda and knows how to move it forward."

There are exceptions—most notably, the 2012 Obamacare ruling, when Roberts angered conservatives by finding a convoluted way to determine that the individual insurance mandate was constitutional. But he has unquestionably helped realize many long-held conservative goals—and he has been far more effective at this than congressional Republicans. Nor is the Roberts Court merely reflecting the people's will: its jurisprudence is well to the right of the average American voter, according to a recent statistical analysis.

It may not be necessary to classify Roberts as either an ideologue or an institutionalist. Wermiel, the former American University law professor, told me, "I don't think there needs to be an overarching theory that explains everything about him and the Court. I think he has some very strong, ideological views, and they take precedence. If he

can try in a case to cool things off a bit and find consensus, and thinks that's in the best interest of the institution, I think he does that, and he's done it well on some occasions. But he certainly doesn't do that all the time."

In the eighties, Roberts spent several years in the Reagan Administration, first as a special assistant to the Attorney General, William French Smith, and

then as an associate counsel to the President. During this period, he seems to have crystallized his thinking on many issues that later came before him on the Court. The Justice Department was then almost a think tank within the Administration, generating new arguments and initiatives for downsizing government, dismantling affirmative action, overturning abortion rights, supercharging the office of the Presidency, and unleashing free markets. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a politics professor at Pomona College, has written that the Reagan Justice Department should be "described as revolutionary for the legacy it left behind in the form of ideas, and more importantly personnel, who were shaped by those ideas." Many staffers went on to federal judgeships and to influential positions in the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and other right-leaning organizations, forming what is now known as the conservative legal movement. Two staffers, Alito and Roberts, eventually joined the Supreme Court.

Roberts, at the appearance in Buffalo, was asked if he planned to write a memoir, as several Justices have. He told his interlocutor, "I think my life is very interesting," then paused for comic effect. "To me. I'm not sure it's terribly interesting to anyone else." (Of course, a Roberts memoir would be plenty interesting if he chronicled behind-the-scenes debates, but the Justices practice tomblike silence on those matters.) Roberts said that he'd found Clarence Thomas's autobiography "absolutely gripping." Thomas rose from rural poverty in Gullah-speaking Georgia to success at Yale Law School and beyond, with dramatic setbacks along the way—a drinking problem, Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harassment. By comparison, Roberts has had a quiet ascent, climbing steadily through largely homogeneous milieus.

He was born in Buffalo in 1955, the second of four children in a family headed by John G. Roberts, Sr., an electrical engineer who became an executive at the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and Rosemary Roberts, a homemaker active in charitable causes. (Roberts's dad stayed at Bethlehem until 1985, then became the president and C.E.O. of Copperweld Steel.) When Roberts was ten, the family moved to northern

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Indiana, where Bethlehem Steel had just opened a plant. The Robertses settled in Long Beach, an upper-middle-class enclave with a summer-home feel on the shores of Lake Michigan. Roberts's childhood and adolescence were serene. The Robertses were observant Catholics, and as a teen-ager John attended La Lumiere, a nearly all-white Catholic boys' school. He excelled academically, joined the football and wrestling teams, played Peppermint Patty in a production of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," and, as a junior, wrote a paper arguing against admitting girls to the school. ("I would prefer to discuss Shakespeare's double entendre and the latus rectum of conic sections without a Blonde giggling and blushing behind me.") Roberts's biographer Joan Biskupic writes, "His classmates were later hard pressed to think of any true setback he may have experienced. He did lose the election for student government president, which some classmates chalked up to lingering resentment that he was first in nearly everything else."

In 1973, the federal government ordered Bethlehem Steel, which had been the subject of an investigation that found entrenched racial bias at the company, to make substantial changes to the seniority system at one of its plants; the goal, the Times reported, was to "assure blacks better job opportunities." John Roberts, Jr., surely took notice: a lawyer for the Department of Labor told the Times that the agreement was "the most far-reaching affirmative action decision" ever made.

That year, Roberts left for Harvard, entering as a sophomore because he had so many A.P. credits. He graduated summa cum laude, with a degree in history, then proceeded to Harvard Law, where he became managing editor of the Law Review. Other students at the law school—most of whom considered themselves liberals—clocked Roberts's conservatism but found him smart, focussed, and amiable. Leebron, then the head of the Law Review (he later became president of Rice University), told me, "John and I had different political perspectives, but they certainly didn't interfere with any sense of friendship then, or respect now." He said that he related to Roberts because, "like me," he was not "an overly gregarious, glad-handing kind of person." Roberts was reliable,

outwardly modest, a standout writer, and so hardworking that he hardly ever ventured into Boston, even though it was just three subway stops from Harvard Square. After a long day of studying, Roberts liked to drop by the local Baskin-Robbins; he ordered the same chocolate-chip sundae every time.

Roberts wore his hair a little shaggy, like the singer in a soft-rock band, but that was his only obvious concession to the mores of the day. In 2005, a former undergraduate classmate recalled to the Times that when Roberts was considering law schools he took Stanford off his list because the Stanford interviewer wasn't wearing a tie.

After law school, Roberts landed two prestigious clerkships: the first with the appellate-court judge Henry Friendly, in New York, and the second with Rehnquist, who was on the Supreme Court but was not yet Chief Justice. Rehnquist, a staunch conservative, was known as the Lone Ranger for his habit of writing solitary dissents. "The two men offered Roberts two distinctive paths forward," Biskupic writes. "Friendly was a model of intellectualism known for his modest judicial approach and respect for precedent. Rehnquist was brilliant but ideologically driven to reinterpret Court precedents in accordance with his conservative views." Biskupic goes on, "When he became a judge himself, Roberts would identify in public statements with Judge Friendly's neutral legal approach even as his own opinions aligned more with Rehnquist's."

After Reagan won the 1980 election, Rehnquist called the Attorney General's office to say that a bright clerk of his wanted to work in government before entering private practice. Hearing the new President's Inaugural Address, Roberts felt "a call to action," he said in a speech years later. "I felt he was speaking directly to me."

After leaving the Reagan Administration, Roberts joined the Washington firm Hogan & Hartson, where he began arguing cases before the Supreme Court, prevailing in most of them. One of his colleagues, the late E. Barrett Prettyman, was a prominent liberal lawyer who grew fond of Roberts even though they disagreed on most issues. Roberts was known for his meticulous

preparation, which included visiting out-of-town courtrooms to gather intel on judges' quirks and preferences. "I've never seen someone become so sure of his position," Prettyman said, in a 1995 interview. "He psychs himself up and is really convinced of it, and he is able to get that feeling across to the judges so that they're almost embarrassed to question him." Prettyman noted in a 2012 interview that he and Roberts often joined a table in the firm's cafeteria where "the high Pooh-Bahs" talked politics. "I had heard him expound on virtually everything, and it was clear to me that he was exactly what the Republicans believed," Prettyman said.

For a few years, Roberts returned to government, serving as Principal Deputy Solicitor General in the George H. W. Bush Administration. Michael Astrue, then the general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services, remembers Roberts as "the classic smart kid in the class who is not arrogant about it." Astrue, who'd also been an associate counsel to Reagan and Bush, thinks it was formative for both him and Roberts that, "early in our careers, the client we represented day-to-day was the President of the United States. Coming out of that, I think, you probably have a stronger sense about what the prerogatives of the President are."

In 1992, Roberts experienced what seems to have been the only major hiccup in his career: Bush appointed him to the D.C. Circuit, but the Senate didn't get around to confirming him before the election of Bill Clinton that November. Roberts returned to private practice. In 2001, George W. Bush nominated him to the same position; within four years, he was Chief Justice. At his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, he had his opponents, including the civil-rights hero John Lewis, who said, "We cannot afford to elevate an individual to such a powerful lifetime position whose record demonstrates such a strong desire to reverse the hard-won civil-rights gains that so many of us sacrificed so much to achieve." Still, Roberts had a golden-boy aura of inevitability, burnished by those baseball metaphors and his references to the "endless fields of Indiana stretching to the horizon, punctuated only by an isolated silo or a barn." The confirmation vote was 78-22.

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In 1996, after a long run as a well-connected, well-dressed bachelor, Roberts married Jane Sullivan, a corporate lawyer from an Irish Catholic family. Both were in their forties, and they adopted two babies, a boy and a girl. As a couple, Roberts and Jane have taken lessons in cèil, a form of Irish dancing; according to Newsweek, onlookers report that Robert is surprisingly “raucous” and “moves with great intensity and verve.” Their daughter, Josephine, attended a Catholic girls’ school in the Maryland suburbs, and then, like her father, went to Harvard; their son, John, attended a boarding school in Connecticut, and then the University of Miami. In July, Roberts and Jane sold their longtime home, a gray brick Colonial in Chevy Chase, Maryland, for $3.4 million; they have not said where they live now. They also own two vacation homes in Maine and reportedly have a time-share in a cottage in Ireland, where Roberts likes to golf. For years when Roberts lived in Chevy Chase, he often stopped at a Connecticut Avenue Starbucks en route to the Court. A driver stayed in the car as he headed inside for coffee, giving his name as John to the barista and chatting with customers. He offered one regular advice on which varsity sport the man’s son should pursue.

In 2007, Jane left the firm where she was a partner to become a high-salaried recruiter for law firms. Thanks to this and to Roberts’s own years in private practice, he is by far the wealthiest member of the Court; according to a 2024 analysis by Forbes, he has a net worth of twenty-five million dollars. His family background in the steel industry and his immersion in business-oriented Reaganite Republicanism have endowed him with a clear affinity for corporate interests. According to the Times’Kantor and Liptak, Roberts “acted as a bulldozer” behind the scenes of the 2016 shadow-docket ruling that blocked the Clean Power Plan, which would have required U.S. electricity companies to reduce carbon emissions by a third within fifteen years. The Chief Justice’s urgent solicitude for the companies running coal-fired power plants—including about inconvenient costs they might bear while awaiting a decision from the Court—was striking. In an alarmed memo to other Justices, he cited the “on-going, cumulative, and irreversible harms that pri-

private parties are incurring each day under the rule.” Of the ongoing, cumulative, and irreversible harms to the environment, Roberts said nothing.

In a speech at his son’s ninth-grade graduation, in 2017, Roberts struck a note of noblesse oblige. He reminded the boys that they were privileged and urged them not to “act like it.” He explained, “When you get to your new school, walk up and introduce yourself to the person who is raking the leaves, shovelling the snow, or emptying the trash. Learn their name and call them by their name.” It was conventional, he noted, to wish new graduates luck. But he wished them some hardship, too: “From time to time, in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice.” Perhaps the idea occurred to Roberts because he’d experienced so little ill luck himself.

During Roberts’s confirmation process to become Chief Justice, the National Archives and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library made available many memos that he had written as William French Smith’s special assistant and as a White House associate counsel. When some senators pressed him on the memos’ content, Roberts bristled. “You keep referring to what I supported,” he told Senator Russ Feingold. “I was a twenty-six-year-old staff lawyer. . . . I was not shaping Administration policy.”

Perhaps not, but Administration policy was shaping him. And the memos are markedly consistent with opinions he’s written as Chief Justice—on affirmative action, on the Voting Rights Act, on Presidential power. Even in his twenties, Roberts was clear and forceful in his writing, and self-assured both in his political judgments and in his clean-cut social conformity. Asked to weigh in on a proposed White House award to Michael Jackson—the singer had been warning teen-agers about the dangers of drunk driving—Roberts advised against it. Jackson could be seen as a role model, he wrote in an April, 1984, memo, only if “one wants the youth of America and the world sashaying around in garish sequined costumes, hair dripping with pomade, body shot full of female hormones.” (Somebody apparently overruled Roberts; Reagan honored the pop star at a ceremony the next month, declaring the occasion a “thriller.”)

In the White House counsel’s office, staff lawyers reviewed everything from speeches Reagan gave to bills he signed. Roberts’s boss, Fred Fielding, had been deputy counsel to President Richard Nixon; he was retained by the Trump Organization as Trump prepared to take office in 2016. In a 1984 Washington Post article, Roberts described his work in the office as “heady stuff” for a recent law-school graduate. When I spoke to Fielding, who still enjoys regular reunions

“I could learn to be a better partner to you, but I’d rather use you to learn how to be a better partner to my next partner.”

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“The seating chart shows where other people will be sitting but not how annoying they’ll be.”

with his White House counsel staff, including Roberts, he recalled, “John was very bright, very quick-witted, very personable,” with a “strong conservative philosophy.”

In 1982, Congress was set to renew portions of the Voting Rights Act, and it was considering including language that addressed not just racially discriminatory intent but also discriminatory effects. Roberts wrote talking points, speeches, and op-eds arguing against such a change. In a draft of an op-ed, he wrote, “If an effects test were enacted . . . election systems across the nation and at every level of government would be subject to litigation. The end result could be massive restructuring to achieve proportional representation—essentially a quota system for electoral politics.” Congress did amend Section 2 of the act to include discriminatory effects; the legislation did not require racially proportional representation. As Ari Berman, a journalist who has written on this history, notes, “The Reagan administration lost the battle over Section 2,” but, once Roberts was on the Court, conservatives began winning “the larger war over reshaping the country’s civil rights laws.”

As Chief Justice, Roberts authored an opinion, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), that dismantled a crucial enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act. “Voting discrimination still exists,”

Roberts acknowledged. But the act required nine states and certain localities with histories of voter suppression to obtain “preclearance” from the federal government before changing their voting laws, and this, he wrote, violated those states “equal sovereignty”—a concept not enumerated in the constitution. (Shelby County is in Alabama, one of the nine states.) Besides, he argued, the Voting Rights Act itself had sufficiently redressed racial discrimination to the point that such “stringent” measures were no longer needed. This argument elicited one of Ginsburg’s most memorable ripostes: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

David Tatel, a retired federal judge whose ruling Shelby reversed, notes in a memoir that the Court could have ruled narrowly, saying Congress hadn’t shown that preclearance was necessary in Shelby County specifically, but, “instead of that scalpel,” it “used a machete.” The effects were immediate. States that had been subject to preclearance, Tatel writes, “redrew district lines, tightened voter-ID requirements, purged voter rolls, canceled same-day registration, restricted early voting, and closed polling places—all in ways that made voting more difficult

cult for minority voters than for others.”

This term, in Louisiana v. Callais, Roberts signed on to the majority opinion, written by Alito. Instead of holding that the voting district Louisiana legislators had generated, under court order, needed to be revised, the Court swept away the entire notion of discriminatory effects, just as Roberts had always wanted. The Voting Rights Act, Alito wrote, proscribed only “intentional racial discrimination.” Without smoking-gun evidence of racist intent, it will now be very hard to bring challenges under the act.

Roberts’s jurisprudence on race often reverts to a simplistic notion of color blindness, in which taking race into account—no matter the reason—is itself racial discrimination. “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Roberts wrote in 2006, dissenting from a majority opinion stating that part of a Texas redistricting plan had violated the Voting Rights Act. In a 2007 case, Roberts, writing for the majority, struck down a Seattle school district’s program of assigning pupils to classrooms with a goal of racial diversity. He repeatedly cited Brown v. Board of Education, a case famously argued before the Court by Thurgood Marshall. Seattle’s desegregation effort was comparable to Jim Crow-era school segregation, Roberts argued: “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again—even for very different reasons.”

Yet the “very different reasons” are the crux of the matter. Wermel, the American University law professor, considers the invocation of Brown to be the most offensive passage in Roberts’s body of opinions. “Marshall was fighting people who thought Black people weren’t deserving of equal treatment as human beings,” he explained. “Whatever you think of affirmative action, or of using race for pupil assignment, no one was attacking the human being—ness of white people! Nobody was treating them as second-class citizens, or suggesting that somehow they would feel stigmatized if race was a tie-breaker in pupil assignment. For somebody who’s such a history buff, that’s just so ahistorical.” Roberts’s writing about race suggests that America has fully trans-

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formed itself into a meritocracy that rewards all the strivers among us. It's almost as if we were all the sons of steel executives from Long Beach, Indiana.

During Roberts's time in the Reagan Administration, a new conception of government was firing up young conservative warriors in the Justice Department. It wasn't just the President's antipathy to the federal bureaucracy in general, and to independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board in particular. It was the notion that the power of the Presidency needed strengthening. In the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, this thinking went, Congress had gone too far in constraining the executive branch with presumptuous reforms that aimed to secure greater accountability and transparency from the White House. In a memoir, William French Smith, Reagan's Attorney General, listed many changes he despised, including "the so-called Ethics in Government Act," the legislative veto, the War Powers resolution, and "restrictions on the president's appointment and removal powers." Smith wanted the Reagan Administration to push harder for "the concept of presidential power." But the Justice Department, he wrote, "could at least take comfort in the fact that we constantly hammered away at this principle."

Roberts did some of the hammering. In an article that he ghostwrote for Reagan, he argued that the Presidency was endowed with a kind of authority that other government branches were not. "Other than the Vice President with whom he runs, the President is the only official in our government elected through a process involving all the voters," Roberts wrote. "Only the President can claim to speak for all the people." In a 1983 memo for Fielding, Roberts mused, "The time is ripe to reconsider the Constitutional anomaly of independent agencies" and "bring them back within the executive branch"—even if "more timid souls" see this as too "provocative."

In the fifties and sixties, conservatives had tended to be suspicious of an imperial Presidency. But that perspective shifted when they began to view expanded executive power as a means of curbing environmental and economic regulation, civil-rights enforcement, and

the federal bureaucracy. John Dearborn, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, told me that, by the seventies, "you have the Republicans starting to realize that they can win the Presidency at a time when they're not really competitive for winning Congress. So, somewhere along the line, they start to see that, in terms of their interest in changing regulation or controlling bureaucracy, the Presidency is a potentially useful vehicle."

The conservative argument for a strong Presidency became known as the unitary-executive theory. Promoted by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, and by Smith and his successor, Ed Meese, it held that the President had the sole power to appoint, direct, and fire high-level federal officials. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, the Pomona professor, thinks that the unitary-executive theory has roots in Cold War anxieties—"the idea that we need to empower a strong Presidency to protect free markets and counter godless Communism." Then, after Watergate, Hollis-Brusky said, "it's like the crown is shattered, and you have people like Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, who are besties, becoming figureheads who pick up the pieces and catalyze a movement to rebuild the Presidency." She went on, "What it becomes is an excuse for the executive branch to ignore and circumvent—to engage in wars and military conflicts without consulting Congress or even reporting to it. It becomes a way for the U.S. to effectively have a monarch."

Proponents of the unitary-executive theory also tend to be originalists, and

many claim that their robust view of Presidential power was shared by the Founders. They point to the opening of Article II of the Constitution—"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States"—and to the phrase, also in Article II, "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." They also cite a 1789 congressional

delicate during which James Madison said, "I think it absolutely necessary that the President should have the power of removing from office." (His reasoning was complicated and, in fact, sounds skeptical of an overweening executive: "It will make him, in a peculiar manner, responsible for their conduct, and subject him to impeachment himself, if he suffers them to perpetrate with impunity high crimes or misdemeanors against the United States, or neglects to superintend their conduct.")

Many legal scholars regard these examples as slender reeds on which to build an entire theory of Presidential power. Andrea Katz, a law professor at Washington University, said, "To me, if we're being originalist, 'he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed' means a duty to follow Congress's orders, not a power to interpret the laws as the President decides." In a recent essay, Caleb Nelson, a law professor at the University of Virginia who is a former Thomas clerk and a leading originalist, wrote, "Article II vests the executive power in the President. But Congress is in charge of creating offices within the executive branch, and the Constitution does not give the President unilateral power to dictate who will fill those offices or what their authorities and duties will be."

For many veterans of the Reagan Justice Department, though, the unitary-executive theory is an article of faith. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor whose most recent book is about the separation of powers, worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during Reagan's first year, and remembers there being "overexcited clarity" about the truth of the theory. There was much discussion of two contradictory Supreme Court cases: Myers v. United States (1926) and Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935). In Myers, the Court ruled that the President had the authority to remove appointed officials without congressional approval. (The opinion was written by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the only Justice who had also been President. Roberts said recently that, though he'd once thought of Taft as "just sort of some fat plutocrat," he was "probably the most extraordinary public servant this country has ever had.") In Humphrey's Executor, the Court affirmed that Congress could create independent agencies,

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and that their independence was constitutionally protected.

In a recent Substack post, Sunstein recalled that he and many others at the Office of Legal Counsel believed “that Myers was right, a shining constitutional star, and that Humphrey’s Executor was wrong.” Sunstein, who no longer fully endorses the unitary-executive theory, wrote that he now sees a “classic process of group polarization,” explaining, “Our discussions with one another led us to be more unified, more confident, and more extreme in our commitment to a Unitary Executive.”

As Chief Justice, Roberts has given the theory teeth. Indeed, the Columbia University legal scholar Gillian Metzger has written that the Roberts Court has “an obsession” with executive power. In 2010, in one of several related opinions written by Roberts, the Court asserted the authority of Presidential appointees to remove lower-ranking agency officials at will. In 2020, it expanded the President’s reach even further, with Roberts writing that Trump could fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without cause. Roberts, echoing his remarks from the eighties, contended that “the Framers made the President the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government,” adding, “Only the President (along with the Vice President) is elected by the entire Nation.”

Then, in 2024, Roberts wrote a decision on executive power whose sweep surprised even people who had been

closely following his jurisprudence. In Trump v. United States, Roberts, writing for a 6–3 majority, concluded that former Presidents were entitled to “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for any actions taken during their Presidency which were within their core constitutional authority (including pardons)—and to “at least presumptive immunity” for any action that could be construed as official. Anything less would hobble the Presidency and risk making politically motivated prosecutions of former Presidents “routine.” Roberts wrote, “The enfeebling of the Presidency and our Government that would result from such a cycle of factional strife is exactly what the Framers intended to avoid.” The case in question, in which Trump was facing prosecution for allegedly interfering with the transfer of power after the 2020 election, was sent back to a lower court, which dismissed it, clearing the runway for Trump’s reelection in 2024. But the future implications of Trump v. United States were bigger, as the dissenting Justices argued. When a President, Sotomayor wrote, “uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, immune, immune.”

Roberts clearly thought that he’d written an opinion for the ages, and he may

have been disappointed when Trump v. United States was not widely regarded that way. For one thing, he assigned himself the opinion—he does so only a few times each term—and wrote at length. He chided the three dissenters for striking “a tone of chilling doom” that was “wholly disproportionate.” According to reporting for CNN by Biskupic, he didn’t even try to bring the liberals aboard through compromise—it was a “hard-and-fast 6–3 vote” from the day the Justices first met in private about the case. Instead, Biskupic revealed, Roberts tried to persuade his colleagues “not to think about” Trump and “to look toward the future.” In his opinion, he wrote, “Unlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies.” Barrett issued a partial concurrence that laid out important exceptions to blanket immunity. She wrote that, since “the Constitution, of course, does not authorize a President to seek or accept bribes,” the “Government may prosecute him if he does so,” and the prosecution would have to be allowed to look into his motives. Context mattered. Roberts didn’t incorporate such caveats. His opinion argues that courts, even when trying to determine whether a President’s act was official or unofficial, cannot inquire into motives.

Roberts did allow that a former President was prosecutable for private acts committed while he held office. The types of crimes weren’t spelled out, but imagine that a President, say, poisoned his estranged spouse and concealed the crime until after leaving the White House. Trump had argued that if a President wasn’t successfully impeached while in office there could be no criminal prosecution of him for anything. Roberts didn’t go that far, and some commentators hailed the opinion as a delicate compromise. In the National Review, the lawyer and conservative activist Carrie Campbell Severino praised Roberts for “balancing the commonsense notion that presidents are subject to liability for private actions with the constitutionally inescapable position that presidents must be able to exercise Article II power without fear of criminal liability.”

This assessment wasn’t universally shared among conservatives. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who

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served in the George W. Bush Administration, warned that the opinion's "maximalist" conception of executive power was a sword for future Presidents of both parties to wield against other branches of government. Stephen McAllister, a University of Kansas law professor and a former Thomas clerk who served as a U.S. Attorney in the first Trump Administration, told me, "There's not a single provision in the Constitution that suggests immunity, frankly, for anybody. If you're a true originalist, your only argument is 'Well, the Framers all understood this to be the case, even though nobody ever said it, and even though nobody thought to put it in the Constitution.'"

This past term, Roberts finally got the chance to overturn the ninety-year precedent of Humphrey's Executor. Trump v. Slaughter was brought by a Federal Trade Commissioner named Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, whom Trump had appointed to fill a Democratic seat on the Commission during his first stint in office and had fired without cause during his second. (By law, the F.T.C. must have both Democratic and Republican members, all of whom are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.) The Court, in a 6-3 opinion written by Roberts, ruled that the President could dismiss the Commission's appointees at will. Roberts's opinion took no heed of the current President's autocratic impulses. In a blog post, Eric Berger, a law professor at the University of Nebraska, argued that, although "consequentialist reasoning" should not "govern constitutional decision making," it is "notable that the Court would extend to the President nearly unlimited control over previously independent agencies without saying a word about what the decision might do to our democratic order at this particular moment." In another case this term, involving Trump's firing of the Federal Reserve Board commissioner Lisa Cook for allegedly committing fraud on mortgage documents—she denies this—the Court carved out a single exception. It would simply be too disruptive to financial markets to allow such firings at the Federal Reserve Board. (On August 5th, the White House initiated a fresh campaign against Cook, demanding that she an-

answer questions about the fraud accusations within three weeks.)

Trump was thrilled with the Slaughter decision. On Truth Social, he posted, "It is such an Honor to be the sitting President who won this Historic and Unprecedented Ruling, one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers." Although Roberts is presumably gratified, too, history's little joke is that the President currently enjoying this generous new interpretation of his powers is surely not the manner, norm-abiding Republican Roberts had in mind decades ago. Trump, a vengeful chaos agent, has taken the Court's rulings on executive power as a license to obliterate entire departments, gut the federal workforce, fire officials at independent agencies designed to be insulated from political pressure, and treat the D.O.J. as his personal law firm and police force.

Have these tumultuous real-world consequences unnerved Roberts? Perhaps not. Michael Luttig said, of the Presidential-immunity case, "There is no evidence whatsoever that the Chief Justice regrets that abhorrent decision." But Nelson, the originalist at the University of Virginia, wrote in his recent essay that "more than one member" of the First Congress had "warned against interpreting the Constitution in the expectation that all Presidents would have the sterling character of George Washington." One of Roberts's former government colleagues told me, "John and I came of age as lawyers in a time when you just couldn't imagine a lot of the stuff that happens today. He would never acknowledge it, but I think a lot of this stuff is painful for him."

But Michael Dorf, at Cornell, told me that, given how relentless Trump has been in exerting Presidential power, it's naive to focus on the occasional times when the Court has reined him in. "If an Administration is really pushing the edge," Dorf said, its record of wins and losses means something very different than it would for "a normal Administration."

In 2023, the Times reporter Linda Greenhouse pointed out how much of "the robust conservative wish list that greeted the new chief justice 18 years ago" had been fulfilled: "Overturn Roe v. Wade. Reinterpret the Second Amendment to make private gun ownership a constitutional right. Eliminate race-based affir-

mative action in university admissions. Elevate the place of religion across the legal landscape. Curb the regulatory power of federal agencies." In the three years since, the Court has delivered even more wins for the movement—rulings undercutting the rights of trans people and immigrants, vitiating the Voting Rights Act, and expanding Presidential power. At the July event where Kagan pushed back against the notion that the Court had been a rubber stamp for Trump, she also said, "Is this Court very conservative? Does it do a bunch of things that are out of the playbook of the conservative legal movement that I think are deeply wrong? Yes."

As it does for many people, the U.S. probably feels a little rougher around the edges for John Roberts than it used to—harsher, less content, more polarized. Armed National Guard troops remain stationed around Washington, D.C., a year after they were deployed. Some of Roberts's Chevy Chase neighbors were no doubt fired from the federal government. Since the storming of the U.S. Capitol, on January 6, 2021, and a 2022 incident in which an individual was arrested with a pistol and a knife outside Kavanaugh's home, D.C. residents don't spot the Justices around town as much, not even at Starbucks. When the Justices do venture out, though, they're more likely to be approached—and criticized. In May, 2025, Roberts said, "It's getting worse, though, in general, just because the work of the Court is getting a higher degree of publicity." At a recent public appearance, when a woman stood up to ask him to speak more loudly, he joked nervously that he'd thought it "was a protest."

Still, if you were Roberts, you might justifiably feel, in the summer of 2026, that, along with your intelligence and ambition, your consistency had paid off. You might feel that you'd turned back the clock to pretty much where you wanted it. Whatever might be happening on the streets of American cities—or whatever the current occupant of the Oval Office might be like—constitutional interpretation was in safe hands at the highest court in the land. America was celebrating a birthday milestone, the Happenings were singing "See You in September," and nothing could really go wrong. ♦

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A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE NEW GULAG

A group of Ukrainian women stuck inside the Russian prison system.

BY JOSHUA YAFFA

SIZO-1, the main pretrial detention facility in the southwestern Russian city of Rostov, traces its history to the reign of Catherine the Great. The jail is shaped like an “E,” with a long main corridor and three adjacent wings, each lined with cells. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, its forces began to capture and arrest Ukrainian soldiers and civilians alike. At SIZO-1, criminals from Russia were moved out of several cellblocks to create space for a new category of inmate: citizens of Ukraine waiting to be tried for alleged crimes against Russia.

Liliia Prutian had been at SIZO-1 for a year when, during lunchtime on September 10, 2024, a guard instructed her and about ten other women in her cell to follow him to the medical clinic. Before her capture, Prutian had served as a medic in the Aidar Battalion, a volunteer militia that had been absorbed into the Ukrainian armed forces. She is in her mid-fifties, a mother of three adult children, with a gentle bearing and fine dark-brown hair. Early in the war, she suffered a concussion and lost much of her hearing. The day that she was taken prisoner, on a battlefield near the village of Petrivske, she was raped by a Russian soldier. Three had initially approached her. “You have to understand,” one of them told her. “We’ve been in the field for three months.” Prutian, sobbing, told them, “Please let it be just one of you.” She later said, “You could say they met me halfway.”

Rostov is home to the Southern Military District, a key hub for Russian forces in Ukraine; Prutian had faced trial at the district’s military court. Previously, she had spent more than a year at a jail in Donetsk, an occupied region in eastern Ukraine, where she underwent a series of brutal interrogations. The jail in Rostov was less barbaric but no less stultifying. A Russian human-rights activist who has worked on behalf of Ukrainian in-

mates told me that conditions often improve for prisoners who are nearing their trial dates: “Defense attorneys are allowed to visit. Inmates receive and write letters. Once they are brought to court, it’s harder to keep outright torture hidden.”

That day, Prutian was led to the jail’s clinic with another former medic from the Aidar Battalion, who’d been captured alongside her. Most of the other women in the group had been cooks for the Azov Brigade, a Ukrainian military unit based in the city of Mariupol. The cooks had been arrested, in the spring of 2022, after Russia seized the Azovstal factory, a vast metallurgical complex that became the last stronghold of Ukrainian troops in the city. For Russian propagandists, the Azov Brigade, which began as a nationalist militia, was shorthand for the supposedly fascist influences from which Vladimir Putin claimed to be liberating Ukraine. Russia considered both Azov and Aidar to be terrorist organizations; the women were charged with, among other things, the illegal armed seizure of power. “Making borscht isn’t some kind of coup,” Natalia Golfiner, one of the Azov cooks, said in court.

At the jail’s clinic, a warren of rooms on the fourth floor, Prutian and the others were told to strip to their underwear. Medical personnel inspected them for bruises or other indications of abuse. If they discovered anything, the prisoner was handed a sheet of paper to sign—a declaration that she had no complaints about her treatment inside. For the women, the sudden interest in their well-being was a welcome sign. Obmin, Ukrainian for “exchange,” had been one of their main preoccupations from nearly the moment they had been captured. Prutian and the others knew that, in early 2024, prisoner swaps between Russia and Ukraine had resumed after a months-long pause. “We were on edge,” Prutian told me. “But also full of anticipation.”

After thirty minutes, guards took the

Liliia Prutian, a medic in Ukraine’s armed

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forces, spent more than two years in Russian jails. “Usually, I don’t want to remember,” she said. “It’s all very painful.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY MILA TESHAIEVA

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women back to their cell. They were afraid to say anything to their cellmates, a half-dozen other women with whom they had spent the past year in a cramped concrete room, and who now greeted them with nervous, expectant faces. There was Iryna Navalna, a twenty-six-year-old with tattoos covering her arms, gauges in her ears, and a shaved head, who had been arrested on terrorism and explosives charges in Mariupol. Valentina Zayarnaya, a sixty-four-year-old English teacher, was being tried on similar charges. Natalia Vlasova, who'd been arrested in 2019, in Donetsk, was especially fixated on the idea of an obmin. She was forty-three, and among the longest-held Ukrainian civilian prisoners in Russian custody. Her only child, a daughter, was four years old when Vlasova was detained for allegedly taking part in an assassination plot. In Rostov, she kept a bag of clean clothes at the ready. When guards asked what it was for, Vlasova replied, "Obmin."

The women from the Aidar Battalion and the Azov Brigade were enlisted members of the Ukrainian military, which meant that they had a chance of being included in exchanges as prisoners of war; the others, who were considered civilian criminals, likely did not. A

few hours after the guards returned Prutian and the others to the cell, they came back and read out a list of names: all the women from Azov and Aidar would be moved that evening. "That's when we knew," Maryna Tekin, an Azov cook in her mid-thirties, said.

They began to pack up their few belongings: clothes, toothbrushes, diaries. The little food they had in the cell—cookies and tea, a few sticks of salami—was left behind for the others. Prutian gave Zayarnaya a bottle of shampoo. Another Azov cook, Iryna Mohitych, who was in her early forties, told Navalna that it was a great joy to have met her, regardless of the circumstances. "I'll take your example with me," she said. Vlasova, who during her years in Russian detention had watched countless times as others were freed and she was left behind, wept. "Her heart was heavy and aching," Tekin said. She gave Vlasova a Ukrainian flag that she had drawn on a sheet of graph paper, telling her, "If I make it back to Ukraine, let this be a symbol that you, too, will soon return." Vlasova tried to smile.

At three in the morning, after the guards ordered, "S veschami"—"With your belongings"—the selected prisoners exited the cell. For a moment, the women faced each other through the

bars of the door. They had been a single group, bound by a shared reality; now a few inches separated those who were about to be free and those who were beginning another morning in captivity. Alyona Avramova, a fifty-one-year-old Azov cook, found it difficult to look the other women in the eye. "I walked out," she said. "And they stayed behind."

This spring, I travelled around Ukraine to meet with the women who'd been released from Rostov. I spoke with Tekin at a mall in Kyiv, where she now works at a flower shop; Avramova and I sipped tea at her apartment, in the Kyiv suburbs. In a small industrial city in eastern Ukraine, where a Russian ballistic missile had struck a hospital some months before, I took a long walk through a park with Prutian. She has rejoined the Aidar Battalion, but, owing to the trauma of her experience in prison, she no longer serves near the front line. "Usually, I don't want to remember," she told me of her time in jail. "It's all very painful. I keep having dreams where I end up back in captivity." Still, she and the others expressed hope that, by describing their time in prison, they could bring attention to the women who are still there. "For them, I'm ready," Prutian said.

SIZO-1 is a single point in a constellation of detention centers and prison camps across Russia, a new Gulag that extends from the border with Ukraine to the permafrost zone above the Arctic Circle. In more than four years of war, roughly fifteen thousand Ukrainian soldiers have been taken prisoner; about two-thirds of them have been released in periodic exchanges between Ukraine and Russia. But women like Navalna, Vlasova, and Zayarnaya represent something else: the unknowable number of civilians who have been detained or arrested in occupied territory and taken into Russian custody. In some places, they are held with Russian inmates; in others, they are kept isolated, hidden not just from the outside world but from the rest of the prison population. At least thirteen hundred Ukrainian civilians have been formally charged with specific crimes, according to researchers. A larger number, believed to be more than ten thousand, have effectively disappeared—that is, been detained without any legal process or acknowledgment

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of their status. As one report last year by a Ukrainian parliamentary commission noted, “Civilians are taken from their homes—without trial, without explanation, without the right to make a phone call.”

Legally speaking, the very idea of a civilian prisoner in wartime is a contradiction. The Geneva Conventions, a set of treaties governing the conduct of warring parties, which were ratified in the aftermath of the Second World War, forbid the arbitrary detention of civilians. “This category shouldn’t exist in the first place,” Bohdan Okhrimenko, the head of the secretariat of Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said. While in Kyiv, I visited the headquarters, a nineteenth-century brick building that has been refashioned into a nondescript suite of offices. Most days, the lobby is bustling with relatives of the imprisoned or vanished hoping for a meeting or some news of their loved ones. The official Ukrainian position on civilians held in Russia is clear. Okhrimenko told me, “They should not be exchanged but, rather, immediately released and returned home.”

According to Russia, civilians from Ukraine are not prisoners of armed conflict; they are individuals charged and tried for alleged crimes. “For Ukraine, these are illegally detained persons,” Andriy Yusov, the deputy head of the coordination headquarters, said. “But Russian officials cannot acknowledge the existence of such a category. Otherwise, they would be publicly admitting to their own war crime.” In other words, by processing such detainees through the judicial system, the Russian state has found a way to legalize the illegal. Ukrainian civilians have been tried in courtrooms in cities occupied and annexed by Russia—from Donetsk to Sevastopol—as well as those farther afield, in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Southern District Military Court, in Rostov.

I exchanged letters with several women from the Rostov cell who remain in Russian custody. Vlasova told me that her experience in Russian jails and detention centers has been so varied, “in terms of the conditions, the attitude of the staff, and the community of fellow-inmates,” that it belied easy description. “And I couldn’t share everything here”—in a letter—“anyway.”

Zayarnaya, the English teacher, called prison “a school of survival, a test of the humanity and decency in each of us.”

Iryna Kulish spent the better part of a year in Rostov. She is from a small village in the Zaporizhzhia region, where she used to sell vegetables at a local market. After the region was seized by Russian forces, she was reported to the occupation authorities for her pro-Ukrainian views. Russian prosecutors accused her of plotting a bomb attack. Kulish is in her mid-fifties and has Parkinson’s. In prison, her condition has deteriorated. The tremors in her hands are so intense that she has trouble sleeping. “Please don’t think they have broken me,” she wrote to me in a letter. “But I nonetheless want to share the particular pain in my soul.” Kulish has been shuttled nearly non-stop between more than twenty detention facilities. She wrote to me from a jail in Crimea. “When and where they will transfer me next I still don’t know,” she said. “For now, I am sitting here, waiting.”

Kateryna Korovina, twenty-nine, slight and soft-spoken, is from the town of Starobilsk, in the Luhansk region, which was occupied in the early weeks of the war. Two years later, she was arrested for making a series of small donations, totalling the equivalent of twelve U.S. dollars, to Ukrainian accounts. Korovina said that they were for humanitarian causes, to help civilians affected by the war. Russia’s main intelligence agency, the F.S.B., claimed that the money went to the military and charged her with “financing terrorism.” She arrived in Rostov in 2024, and was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison. “That is how they valued my love for my native country,” she wrote to me.

Korovina said that, in the Rostov jail, she and her cellmates had been “something like a slightly mad family.” They could be silly, funny, even joyous, singing folk songs and dancing around the cell. Over time, she said, “people here change, grow distant from civilization, and build their own little comfortable world as best they can.” She also started writing poetry; her verses reflected the bewildering situation in which she found herself. “Ideas for new poems were in the air all around me,” she said. “Lines poured out like music.” She shared one with me: “We are all orphans without

our Motherland, but we have one another, which means we will not be lost; after all, even flowers torn from the ground can be woven into garlands, and we will get through everything.”

Ukrainian civilians are arrested by the Russian military or security forces for any number of supposed offenses. A secret Presidential decree, signed by Putin soon after the war began, allows for the indefinite detention of anyone “resisting the ‘special military operation.’” Many are initially held in improvised settings—a garage, a cellar, an empty warehouse—then moved to a larger facility in occupied territory. Several of the women in Rostov first met one another at the jail in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, a proxy enclave that Russia formally annexed in 2022. The jail’s main structure was built in the waning years of the Russian Empire, with tall concrete-and-barbed-wire walls added during the Soviet era. In the early days of the war, the jail became so overcrowded with Ukrainian prisoners that many inmates had to sleep in shifts, or even take turns standing up. “A cruel, terrible place where helplessness and despair wear you down,” Tekin, one of the Azov cooks, told me.

After Russian forces seized Mariupol, Tekin voluntarily went to a so-called filtration center, a processing facility meant to root out those whom Russia considered dangerous, or merely pro-Ukrainian. Russian messaging encouraged Mariupol residents to “come and surrender and you’ll go home,” Tekin said. Instead, armed men—military or Russian intelligence, she didn’t know which—threatened to cut off her fingers if she didn’t confess to being a fascist. She was held in several detention centers in occupied Ukraine before she was brought to Donetsk.

There, guards forced her and the other Azov women onto the ground and told them to crawl across the concrete floor and into their cell, a basement smaller than a studio apartment, with a sliver of window just above ground level. The space was dark and squalid. On the floor were six cots and a couple of mattresses, stained and foul-smelling. More than ten other Ukrainian women were already being held there. They told the new arrivals to quickly memorize the words to

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the Russian national anthem. The guards would soon return and demand that everyone stand and sing. A single mistake, the cellmates warned, and the guards would strike the offender with steel-reinforced rubber batons. "It didn't matter if you had been there one hour or one month," Tekin told me.

Each day, the women were woken at six, with the sounds of stomping boots and barking dogs. Guards worked their way down the corridor, randomly striking prisoners. One morning, Tekin overheard a guard complain to his colleagues, "I'm fucking exhausted of beating so many of them." Another time, Tekin and the other women listened as guards bludgeoned a Ukrainian soldier in a cell across the hall. They couldn't see anything, but they heard hard rubber hitting flesh and the man's cries of pain. After the guards left, the man continued to moan; his cellmates called for a doctor. "Give a knock when he dies," one of the guards answered. The next day, Tekin looked through the peephole of her cell door and saw guards dragging out a corpse.

The basement cell had no sink or running water; the toilet was a drainpipe in the floor. "The stench was so acrid, it stung our eyes," Prutian, who arrived at the Donetsk jail shortly after Tekin, told me. The women learned to save some of the borscht that they were given for lunch so that they could pour the liquid down the soiled drainpipe. They fashioned menstrual pads by ripping up their own T-shirts, and passed one another shards of soap to share, though the guards rarely took the women for showers. After a week, many of them developed festering sores on their arms, legs, and hands. Mohitych, one of the Azov cooks, told me, "We were rotting alive." She begged for a doctor to visit the cell. A nurse on staff at the jail told her to forget about it. "Doctors aren't provided in a concentration camp," she said.

The female prisoners were overseen by a Donetsk local in her forties named Ludmila Valerievna. "She had a thing about smothering you with a bag over your head," Mohitych said. "And telling you over and over that you're about to be taken out and shot." The women were routinely marched to an interrogation room. Tekin recalled, "You so much as squirm in the chair and there's a man standing above you, waiting to pummel

you: kidneys, head, you never knew where the blows will land." Like Ludmila Valerievna, the guards were from Donetsk, and Tekin once asked them, "Why are you doing this to us? You're Ukrainians, too." They refused to answer.

After a few months, Navalna, the twenty-six-year-old from Mariupol, was brought into the cell with a bag over her head. Purple bruises covered her back and buttocks. "She was in a daze, frightened, shaking all over," Prutian said. The women tried to calm her. Navalna told them that the Russian state had labelled her a terrorist. That made the others laugh. "Us, too!" Mohitych told her. "You've landed among your own people."

In the spring of 2022, Navalna had fled Mariupol with her mother, Oleksandra, settling in Berdychiv, a midsize city a hundred miles west of Kyiv. Her grandmother, who was seventy, had opted to stay put. She lived on the seventh floor of a Soviet-era apartment block that had been without electricity since the start of the war. That summer, Navalna returned to Mariupol to help her. On the day that she was due to leave the city, according to Russian prosecutors, she planted a bomb at a municipal building where residents were voting in a staged referendum to pave the way for Russian annexation. Hours later, Russian state news agencies posted a clip of Navalna's confession, in which she said that she had accepted an explosive device from an unknown handler. Navalna later de-

scribed being beaten and shocked with a stun gun during the interrogation; her captors threatened to harm her mother and grandmother if she didn't cooperate. "In the end," she said, "I agreed to incriminate myself to save my life and the lives of my loved ones."

In Donetsk, Navalna became close to the other women. Tekin called her "talented, smart—brilliant, even—with a very sensitive nature." Avramova said that she was "full of spunk and attitude."

Occasionally, Navalna's grandmother, who was still living in Mariupol, came to drop off a care package, which sometimes contained hard candies. The women used small stones to carefully break apart each piece. "We passed them around," Prutian told me. "Just enough for everyone to have a taste."

One morning, guards came to the cell and told the women to line up and face the wall—standard protocol for when a new prisoner was being admitted. After they turned back around, they saw Zayarnaya, the English teacher, who was wearing eyeglasses and slippers. Out of a sense of respect, the other women came to address their new cellmate by her name and patronymic, Valentina Ivanovna. "She presented as a very intelligent person," Prutian said. "Someone who manages to find her way in every situation." In a letter to me, Zayarnaya described that first meeting: "The girls turned toward me and I saw young, pale, thin faces with lively, attentive eyes."

After fourteen months in the Donetsk basement, the Azov women got word that they were being moved. A transport vehicle drove them to Rostov, a hundred and seventy miles away. The bus pulled up to SIZO-1 late at night. The women were prodded into a small holding cell, known as a stakan, or "the cup," and told to line up against a wall. A phalanx of guards surrounded them. In Russian prison slang, priyomka, which means "intake" or "reception," refers to the rough welcome that prisoners often receive at a new facility. It usually involves verbal abuse, humiliation, and beatings.

The women tensed when the deputy warden of the Rostov jail, a curt, imperious man with a heavy-footed gait, walked in. "He came to scream at us, to call us names," Avramova said. "But then, when he saw our sorry state, he was speechless." The women looked terrible—bruised and sallow—and smelled even worse. The warden told guards to take them for a hot shower, and to give them a proper meal: soup with tinned fish and fresh bread. The smokers got cigarettes. "We hadn't seen anything like that in over a year," Avramova told me. "It was a shock." Tekin said of the warden, "In his mind, he probably saw this deed as a great act of chivalry. You do something noble for a woman, keep an eye on her—

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which is also a way of possessing her.” But, she added, “let’s not forget he is, after all, a total monster.”

The women’s new cell was also in a basement, but it had running water and a working toilet cordoned off by a plywood door. “After a year in a cellar, any jail cell will feel great,” the Russian human-rights activist said. Prutian, Zayarnaya, and Navalna soon arrived from Donetsk for their own trials. Wake-up was at seven, announced with a shout from the guard on duty: “Podyem!”—Russian for “Rise!” Prisoners had to quickly make their beds, tucking the corners tight. At eight, guards slid trays with breakfast into the cell. Around nine, the women did a daily exercise routine, a circuit of stretching and light calisthenics. Afterward, they cleared their one small table, and Zayarnaya led whoever was interested in English lessons. In a letter to me, she described a study guide that she had managed to get sent to her in jail. “We covered everyday topics,” she wrote. “About Myself, Family, My Home and City.” She still had the heart of a schoolteacher. “I have tried not to single anyone out,” she said. “They all deserve praise simply because they want to learn.”

Zayarnaya is from Amvrosiivka, a small city near Donetsk. Two months into the war, she received a call from an old acquaintance, a former Ukrainian border guard roughly her son’s age, whom she knew only as Dima. He said that his house had been destroyed and that he was stuck in Mariupol. “How could I leave him there?” Zayarnaya later told her cellmates. She drove ninety miles, through multiple Russian checkpoints, to pick him up. Dima was famished and weak, and Zayarnaya nursed him back to health. With time, he began doing odd jobs around her house and working in the garden. He ended up staying for a year.

One day, he asked Zayarnaya to pick up a package for him at an address in Donetsk. When she arrived, F.S.B. officers were waiting and quickly arrested her. Dima fled, only to be detained ten days later. Under questioning, Zayarnaya learned the full truth about him. His real name was Denys Storozhuk. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Ukrainian military, and he’d fought during the siege of Azovstal. Before Ukrainian forces surrendered, Storozhuk had managed to es-

“Sleeping on my back activates my sleep apnea, sleeping on my side hurts my shoulder, and sleeping on my stomach gives me neck pain.”

cape. That meant, as F.S.B. interrogators informed Zayarnaya, she had harbored an enemy soldier. They also alleged that the package Storozhuk was meant to pick up contained explosives. She was charged as an accomplice to terrorism.

Zayarnaya’s cellmates expressed frustration that Storozhuk had concealed his identity. But, Mohitych told me, “she always defended him.” Zayarnaya and Storozhuk were often brought to court together, and Zayarnaya tried to collect candies or other treats to give to him. Later, in a letter to me, she called Storozhuk “Dimochka,” an affectionate version of Dima, and referred to him as a second son, saying, “The most important thing is that my boys are alive and free.”

Afternoons in Rostov were for playing backgammon, reading books, and writing letters. The women were able to receive packages from the outside, and an informal network of volunteer activists in Russia sent them everything from toothpaste to crossword puzzles. Mohitych told me about a recipe that she

developed in prison for morkovcha, a marinated-carrot salad popularized by ethnic Koreans in the Soviet Union. Tekin passed the time inventing intricate plots for imaginary films and narrating them aloud: a historical thriller, a lesbian romance, a drama about a virus that wipes out much of humanity. Once a day for an hour, guards took the women to the exercise yard, which was essentially a jail cell with an open roof. Tekin and Navalna liked to sing pop ballads and theme songs from old movies, as loudly as they could. Some guards told them to knock it off; others ignored them. A few smiled.

Life in the cell created an unavoidable intimacy. Mohitych told me that she and Navalna spent hours lying on their bunks, telling stories, gossiping, and laughing. “We talked about all sorts of things,” she said. “Our families, plans, dreams, the past, the future.” Mohitych could sense when Navalna was struggling: she became quiet and withdrawn as she turned over a difficult or painful

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thought. “In those moments,” Mohitych told me, “I simply walked up to her and said, ‘Ira, let’s talk some more,’ and she opened up, letting out everything that was bottled up inside.” Mohitych said that Navalna did the same for her: when Mohitych was agonizing about being separated from her daughter, who was twenty-three, Navalna would offer a kind word or a hug. “She was just a young girl caught in this impossible situation,” Mohitych said. “But she displayed such bravery.”

Sometimes the mood turned bitter, with fights erupting over insignificant matters. One person might open the small window; another wanted it closed. Someone wanted to read a book that another thought belonged to her. “Every one of us lived inside our own sorrow,” Avramova said. “And each was convinced that her suffering was the most painful.”

For birthdays, the women would make an improvised cake, spreading thick ribbons of condensed milk over stacks of cookies. They poured tea and took turns making toasts. “It was touching,” Avramova said. On her fiftieth birthday, her cellmates handed her a card written by a fellow-prisoner, a Ukrainian woman in her late sixties, who had spent less than a week in the cell. The woman had been on etap, a word in the Russian prison lexicon which refers to the convoluted transfer process between detention centers. During etap, a prisoner can make half a dozen stops over as many weeks before reaching her destination. Avramova remembered only the woman’s first name, Alla, and that she was on her way to a prison colony, where she would serve a sentence of more than ten years. The card, Avramova said, had a hand-drawn picture of a horse, and a message inside read, “May you celebrate your next birthday in a place you love with all your heart.” Avramova asked a guard if he knew where Alla was headed. “She got a one-way ticket,” he answered. Avramova understood the implication: “Wherever she was going, she was unlikely to survive.”

Vlasova arrived at SIZO-1 in June, 2023. During her priyomka, guards confiscated a small photo album containing a few pictures of her daughter, who was then eight, which they never returned. “The ladies gave me a warm welcome,” she said in a letter. She had

overlapped with many of them in Donetsk, but she had been held in a different cell. Her transfer to Rostov, she told me, felt like a chance to exhale, “as if a plotline that had held me in its mercilessly tight grip finally loosened, and a ghostly hope that I might survive after all began to take shape.”

In Rostov, Vlasova treated every court hearing as a chance to dress up—it was an expression of pride and dignity, akin to “stepping out into society,” she said. “And I didn’t want to be seen always wearing the same thing.” The cellmates shared whatever basic cosmetics they had, and traded outfits, including any new items of clothing that had come in care packages. Vlasova would stage an “obligatory fitting and runway show” for the other women—her “fashion critics”—so that they could “deliver their verdict.” Once, a guard asked where she got her clothes from. Vlasova answered, deadpan, “From my collection.”

The trial itself was filled with all manner of inconsistencies and contradictions. Vlasova had been arrested at a Russian checkpoint, in Donetsk, in March of 2019. She said that she and a man named Viktor Shydlovsky were pretending to be a married couple and travelling with fake passports. They had instructions from the S.B.U., Ukraine’s security service, to determine whether one of the agency’s assets had flipped and was working as a double agent. Russian prosecutors claimed that Vlasova and Shydlovsky were on an assassination mission, intending to kill a high-ranking officer in the Donetsk militia forces. Vlasova had confessed as much during her interrogation, but in court she recanted her prior statements, saying that they were extracted under torture. According to Ukrainian activists and journalists, officials in the Donetsk People’s Republic often manufactured assassination plots to retroactively justify a person’s arrest or mistreatment. “Officially, the court follows the two-sided adversarial principle,” the Russian human-rights activist said. “We know perfectly well none of it matters.”

A year into Vlasova’s trial, she was given a chance to address the court. “You will have time,” one of three judges on a panel overseeing her case said. “Prepare.” Vlasova told her cellmates that she was ready to reveal, plainly and clearly,

the story of her imprisonment. Tekin said, “She told us directly: ‘I want to be heard, noticed—and I hope that helps get me out of here.’”

Whatever the true nature of Vlasova’s mission in Donetsk, she had soon found herself in the region’s most notorious detention center: Izolyatsia, a former factory built in the fifties to manufacture insulation materials which, after the Soviet collapse, became a center for contemporary art. Russian proxy forces had seized the complex in 2014 and turned it into a secret prison. A 2021 report by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights compiled dozens of instances of abuse inside Izolyatsia; one prisoner called it “the worst place on earth,” and described his captors wrapping wires around his fingers, toes, and genitals and then turning on an electric current. Once, they put a wire in his anus. According to the report, “The victim also described a mock execution in which he was forced to stay inside a closed coffin placed in a dugout grave for six hours.” Another man passed out after a wire with an electric current was fixed to his ear. His cellmate advised him to confess to anything, because “there was no other way” to stay alive.

In court, Vlasova called Izolyatsia “the death factory,” run by “merciless bandits” with “an obvious pathology.” “They were sadists in the strict clinical sense of the word,” she said. “They stripped me, bound me with tape, poured water over me, and gave me electric shocks. If I didn’t scream enough, they increased the electric current, and the blows became more frenzied.” The louder her screams, the more satisfied they seemed. “They needed a reaction,” she said. During many of these torture sessions, a doctor was present. When she lost consciousness, he revived her by shoving a cotton ball doused in ammonia up her nose. “Afterward,” she went on, “they chained me up overnight in a narrow standing cell with my arms raised.”

Before long, Vlasova lost any awareness of time and space. There was darkness, and then the sound of jangling keys, which induced terror. “That never meant anything good,” she said. One time, she was brought to a shower and was told that fifteen soldiers were getting ready to rape her; they changed their minds only when they discovered that she was

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menstruating. “As usual, they were drunk,” she said. “At some point, indifference sets in and you no longer care what is happening or what will happen next. My fate is not in my hands. My body does not belong to me.”

She identified a man named Vasily Yevdokimov, who had the call sign Lenin, as the overseer of Izolyatsia. (Yevdokimov was also the supposed target of Vlasova’s alleged assassination attempt.) In court, she recounted her own grim run-ins with him: “He personally filed my teeth with a metal file, twisted my nipples, and tried to force a bottle into my vagina.” At a certain point, when the torture became unbearable, she begged her captors to stage an escape attempt and to shoot her in the process. They refused, because, she recalled, “Yevdokimov said I had to suffer.”

The trial was open to the public, and a few journalists and activists attended. One of them recalled being surprised that the judges never interrupted Vlasova’s speech to declare that it didn’t pertain to the narrow matter under consideration. Instead, they mostly listened in silence. When Vlasova was finished, a judge asked if she wanted to enter her written notes into the court record. “We were in shock,” the person in court that day said. The judge’s reaction seemed to be a quiet signal. “It was a gesture on the scale he was allowed,” the person said.

Tekin told me that, after the court hearing, the women greeted Vlasova with applause. “We were proud of her,” she said. In a letter, I told Vlasova that I imagined her testimony required great courage. “I’m pleased that I come across as courageous and strong, but that’s not how I view myself,” she wrote. “It’s just that, in a place like this, there aren’t many chances to show weakness—though I’d like to.” Five months later, the panel of judges found Vlasova guilty, and sentenced her to eighteen years in prison.

Most months, a procession of buses, vans, and ambulances from Russia make their way across Belarusian territory, delivering the latest round of freed prisoners to the Ukrainian border. Depending on the exchange, anywhere from a dozen to more than a hundred Ukrainian prisoners get out, and board a different set of buses. The next stop is often a regional hospital in Chernihiv, a Ukrainian

city thirty-five miles from the border with Belarus, where they are given check-ups and medical care. A crowd of relatives typically gathers outside—eager to see their loved ones, or, just as often, to show returnees a picture of a husband or a son and ask whether they had encountered him in captivity.

To date, more than nine thousand Ukrainian soldiers have been released in nearly eighty separate exchanges. “We have found a mechanism, a channel of dialogue, to talk about combatants who took part in armed conflict,” Okhrimenko, the head of the secretariat of coordination headquarters, told me. Since 2022, a much smaller number of civilians—around four hundred and thirty—have been freed from Russia. At least a quarter of them were not war-related hostages but, rather, Ukrainian citizens who had committed criminal offenses in Russia and were already awaiting deportation. In some cases, Ukraine didn’t know whom Russia was handing over until after the exchange. “Of course, it’s difficult to carry out negotiations with the Russian side,” Okhrimenko said. But, he went on, “we have to keep up this communication, so I don’t want to say anything negative.”

International law and Ukraine’s own policies forbid trading P.O.W.s for ci-

civilians. “That would make us the rule-breakers,” Okhrimenko said. When he has raised the question of civilian prisoners with his counterparts in Russia—representatives from the country’s Ministry of Defense—the conversation has generally gone nowhere. “They tell us they are responsible only for military detainees, not civilians,” he said. “We’ve come to the conclusion that, on the Russian side, there simply isn’t anyone able to deal with civilian prisoners.” Oleg Orlov, a founder of Memorial, a Russian human-rights organization, which is now based abroad, told me that Russia considers civilians who resist or subvert Russian authority more culpable than traditional P.O.W.s. The country’s position, he said, is that “this is not a soldier in uniform who was ordered into battle. This is a person who made a deliberate choice to harm us. So screw them. Let them rot away.”

In occupied territories, many Ukrainian civilians have obtained Russian passports—accessing much of daily life, such as banking and housing, is nearly impossible without one. “The Russian state considers such people their own citizens, whom they are under no obligation to hand over or repatriate to a third country,” Viktoria Petruk, an analyst at the prisoner-coordination

“It’s like, ever since you got into peekaboo, I never see you anymore.”

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“It’s not so bad when they drink from you. It’s the emptiness afterward that bothers me.”

headquarters, told me. Over time, Russian prosecutors have begun to charge more of these Ukrainians with treason—for the crime of betraying Russia—rather than with harming the interests of a foreign state.

In negotiations, the Ukrainian side doesn’t present specific people to be included in exchanges but instead proposes freeing certain categories of prisoners. “We regularly tell them, for example, ‘Look, you’re still holding our women captive—let’s resolve this,’” Okhrimenko said. Oftentimes, there’s no response. In the case of the Azov and Aidar women, Russian negotiators were willing to consider their release, given that none of them had taken part in any direct fighting and that Russian investigators had finished interrogating them. But, when Ukrainian negotiators push for more detainees, their Russian counterparts tend

to respond coolly. “We aren’t ready to discuss the others right now,” Okhrimenko said, recounting the common Russian response. “If you don’t like it, we won’t exchange these ones, either.”

The coördination headquarters routinely holds meetings with the families of civilian prisoners. Navalna’s mother, Oleksandra, has attended many of them. “But, frankly, I don’t really see the point,” she told me. “All you hear are empty platitudes.” The usual refrain, she said, was a promise that representatives were “working on developing a mechanism, but for now it doesn’t exist.” Yusov, the deputy head of the coördination headquarters, said that he understood these family members’ anguish. “They are a very emotionally vulnerable group of people,” he said. But, he went on, Ukraine wasn’t responsible for the impasse. “This is not a question for us, about whether

we are willing to release this person or to try and get back that person,” he said. “This is Russia’s responsibility. They effectively kidnapped these people and refuse to hand them over.”

Ukraine is working on a few creative solutions to help free more civilians in Russian prisons. A project called Hochuk Svoim, or I Want to Join My Own Kind, allows Ukrainians who were convicted of collaborating with Russian military forces or occupation authorities to volunteer to be transferred to Russia; Russia, in turn, sends back an equal number of Ukrainian civilian prisoners. This is considered not a prisoner exchange but, as Yusov put it, a “mutual return of civilians.” According to officials in Ukraine, several hundred Ukrainian citizens serving sentences for collaboration and similar offenses have expressed willingness to be sent to Russia. But only seventy have made the trip, with a commensurate number of detained Ukrainian civilians freed in the process. Russia has so far refused to accept the rest. “We can release these people, take them to the border, and tell them, ‘Go on,’” Okhrimenko said. “But there’s nothing we can do if Russia doesn’t let them in.”

Orlov, the Memorial co-founder, spent nearly half a year in Russian prison—for the crime of having “discredited” the Russian military—before he was freed in an exchange, in 2024. “I have a feeling I was granted a chance to try and do something,” he told me. Last year, he helped launch People First, a lobbying effort to get Western officials and diplomats to include the topic of civilian prisoners in any peace negotiations. The idea is that these third-party powers will have the best chance of insuring that Russia and Ukraine agree on a so-called all-for-all exchange, which would free all remaining prisoners—military and civilian—as part of the war’s end. “If we don’t speak about civilian prisoners now, they risk being left behind later,” Orlov told me. “And then simply falling through the cracks forever.”

One afternoon in Kyiv, I met up with Vlasova’s husband, Oleksii, and their daughter, Yulia, who is now eleven years old. By then, Vlasova had been detained for more than seven years. Yulia was mostly silent during the couple of hours that I spent with her and her father. (An

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acquaintance of the family had prepared me for this. “She has withdrawn into herself,” the acquaintance said. “And it’s not clear how to get her out.” Oleksii, who is forty-nine, gentle and warm, turned to Yulia, who had just finished school for the day, and explained, “He’s here to write about Mom.” Yulia picked quietly at a plate of French fries. My only exchange with her was brief. “What would you like to do with your mom when she comes home?” I asked. “Go on walks,” she said, so quietly that I had to lean in to hear. “Hug.”

Oleksii and other family members had tried to keep Yulia from seeing news of her mother’s torture. But, within days of Vlasova’s testimony, Yulia had read the coverage of it. She had only one question: “What are nipples?” Last year, Yulia took part in an action, held in Kyiv’s Independence Square, to call attention to Ukrainian women held prisoner in Russia. She brought a sign that referred to one of her last memories of Vlasova: “Mom, remember you promised me a kitten?”

Oleksii expressed disbelief that Vlasova hadn’t been included in an exchange long ago. “Given that by this point she’s been locked up longer than anyone, we figured the chance of her being freed was that much higher,” he said. He and Vlasova’s supporters write appeals—to the Administrations of Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump, to the Vatican—advocating for her release. The prisoner-coordination headquarters routinely asks Oleksii to verify Vlasova’s info on file. “And each year,” he said, “they confirm that she’s eligible to be exchanged—and that’s it.” There’s also a password, known only to him and Vlasova’s sister, that he can use to access the limited information that Ukrainian authorities have about her whereabouts. This spring, she was sent to a prison colony in Kemerovo, a coal-mining region in Siberia.

The trial of Navalna, who was accused of planting a bomb at the municipal building in Mariupol, had concluded two months before Vlasova’s. I spoke with her lawyer, Ivan Bondarenko, who told me about a number of inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case. For example, a police witness had initially claimed that he saw Navalna throw a bag on the ground at the municipal building; in court, the witness said that he didn’t see

anything himself and had merely heard these details later. In October, 2024, Navalna was found guilty, but of a lesser category of terrorist plotting, and sentenced to eight years in prison, rather than the fifteen that the prosecution had requested. Bondarenko called the ruling a “small victory.” The judge, he said, “made clear that our words had reached him. But, in these circumstances, he couldn’t do anything more.” Navalna is now in a prison camp in a village near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.

Zayarnaya’s trial ended in December, 2025. Prosecutors had argued that she and Denys Storozhuk, the man she knew as Dima, were accomplices in an assassination plot. Zayarnaya had confessed but told the court that she did so under duress. F.S.B. officers had beaten Zayarnaya’s son and threatened to send him to a mental hospital if she didn’t provide the testimony they needed. After she signed the confession, she tried to kill herself by swallowing a handful of pills for high blood pressure. She survived, and was sent to the Rostov cell. In closing arguments, prosecutors asked for a twenty-year sentence. Zayarnaya called the request “godless,” telling the Russian lawyers, “It will be on your conscience.” The judge gave her twelve years. “I won’t lie: it is very hard for me here,” she wrote in one of her letters to me. But, she added, “I refuse to give up, nor will I play by the rules of the morally dishonest.”

One of the darker ironies of Zayarnaya’s case is that Storozhuk was freed

in the same exchange as the Aidar and Azov women. Prutian saw him on the bus that delivered the prisoners, via Belarus, to Ukrainian territory. “Here we are, being driven to the exchange point,” she told me, “and sitting right behind me is Dima—the person who Valentina Ivanovna was constantly talking about.”

I met Storozhuk this spring in Kyiv. He is thirty-eight, affable and charming, and has a military build. He told me that,

in May, 2022, as Russian forces were bearing down on the Azovstal plant, he collected supplies—weapons, food, water, a phone—and descended into a utility shaft deep within the factory complex, where he remained hidden for the next three weeks. Eventually, he fashioned an improvised raft from the tube of a car tire and donned a wrestling singlet that he’d coated in silicone sealant. His plan was to launch into the Sea of Azov, under the cover of night, and swim to a village behind enemy lines. “Nothing better came to mind,” he said. He swam several hundred feet from shore, heard gunshots, and ended up at a fishing dock on the outskirts of Mariupol. He called Zayarnaya. She had a “distinct sense of loneliness,” he said, and lacked an “object for her maternal care.”

After a month at Zayarnaya’s house, Storozhuk got in touch with an officer in Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, whom he called Severny. Storozhuk told Zayarnaya nothing. “I figured that she’d be in danger only if she helped me knowingly,” Storozhuk said. “So you could call it deception on my part, but she had no idea. I judged that she’d be safer that way.”

One day, in March, 2023, Severny sent Storozhuk a package containing a false passport, which he could use to travel freely within Russian-controlled territory. But Storozhuk would have to go to Donetsk to pick it up, an hour-long drive that required passing through several checkpoints. Instead, he asked Zayarnaya if she’d do it for him. “I played the fool,” he told me. “Acting like I initially wanted to go with her, but then something came up—I couldn’t make the trip. Could she manage on her own?” Zayarnaya agreed. The next place the two saw each other was at an F.S.B. regional headquarters, in Donetsk. Storozhuk recalled that Zayarnaya, who was clearly terrified, had asked how he was holding up. Storozhuk told me, “Obviously, this is all because of me that our paths crossed at some point.”

Not long ago, I got a letter from Zayarnaya, who is now in Novocherkassk, near the Black Sea. She described watching the seasons change in jail. “It is very warm, and green trees and grass are already visible from my cell window,” she wrote. “This makes it all that much harder to bear.” ♦

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FICTION

50

ILLUSTRATION BY DADU SHIN

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And here was a town house, five stories high. The car idled in front. David looked out the window of the back seat, up at the stone façade. There was a guard, installed on the front steps, and a rash of flags mounted over the door, as if it were an embassy. The façade was lighted from below by the exterior lights that specified the building, separated it from the other night buildings.

It was the flags that threw him, there over the big door. Scrambled his thinking.

Then David had a flash of understanding. They were already in Zurich: this was an official building, the appointed time upon him at last.

There was a hitch in his breath. Too soon, wasn't it? He wasn't ready!

His eyes caught his assistant's with visible alarm.

Instantly, the boy's hand was on David's arm. Cody calmly took out the itinerary, read it aloud: Rebecca. Dinner. London.

This was the club. Seven P.M. reservation, under Larkin. Restaurant upstairs, check-in downstairs.

I'm coming in with you, the boy said.

Squeeze, squeeze, went the boy's hand, signalling that everything was correct.

Cody would wait in the car during dinner, but the handoff was important, these interstitials, and Cody would be here when it was time for pickup. Time to ferry him to the hotel.

I'll be waiting, Cody said soothingly.

An entryway, a stone floor. Polished to lawsuit-slickness. The walls were seamless sheets of wood that wavered in candlelight. David hung back, letting Cody be the one to approach the woman sitting at the front desk, crowded out by a floral arrangement. So big, the arrangement. Were those actual tree branches?

She was a ghoul, this woman, with her many requirements. She needed to see identification. Needed the full names of both parties. The boy supplied the correct answers, had any number of important David documents on his person, ready for the woman's perusal.

She wrote something on her paper and checked a tablet. Ms. Larkin is in the restaurant, she told David, Cody apparently already dismissed. Fourth floor.

Just the named guest, she said, when Cody took his arm.

I'm his assistant, Cody said. It's medical. For medical reasons. I'll be down as soon as he's with his daughter.

Only the named guest, the woman said.

I'll get lost, David said. He smiled. I really will.

You can see, Cody told the woman, on your little video screen. I'll take him up and come right back down.

All right, the woman said finally.

And you can send him after me, Cody said, nodding at the security guard, if I'm not right back down.

The woman frowned. The guard didn't react.

Cody stayed at David's side, his arm through David's, helping him navigate the elevator, the hallways hung with heavy velvet curtains. The carpeting was so thick that it seemed to eat up their footsteps.

The people they encountered seemed like children, dressed up in party wear, traipsing around the rooms of this doll house. Their faces were done up and their hair shone.

Good for you, David thought, as a woman pushed past in a short dress and high heels.

Now that he did not want to expend any effort, he saw nothing but effort all around him.

Too many levels—Cody steadied him through each transition, a turn down a hallway and then three shallow steps. A dip and another set of steps.

They passed through a dim bar area, wall lights dialled to a golden glow. Then they arrived at another bar, the correct bar.

A lull. Cody pointed out the woman who had taken up an uncomfortable perch on a barstool.

There we are, Cody supplied helpfully. Rebecca.

David nodded. Of course. I'll check in with her later, Cody

said. But Rebecca knows to text whenever you're ready. I'll just be around the corner.

David started toward his daughter. Dressed in the prim British style, or so he decided, without any real knowledge of what that might be—a narrow skirt, tall boots whose tops were hidden by the skirt, a Peter Pan blouse. Gold jewelry that flashed its minor dazzle, its subtle good taste.

She appeared to have finished most of the glass of white wine on the bar in front of her. She said something to the bartender, but the bartender glanced in David's direction, which made her turn, too.

Rebecca stood up nervously, her eyes taking him in with diagnostic intensity. What was she noticing, or trying to notice? She closed the distance between them, put an arm through his, and led him back to her barstool.

Dad, she said, and at least that was familiar, not some British affection.

Something something about the place. She was chattering a bit.

When it's sunny out, there's a nice roof terrace, she said. They open it up—it's nice. Not now, of course.

Yeah. It's a bit frustrating, she said, looking around. Table's not ready. It's not even so busy. They're good about that stuff, she said, usually.

Right. She squinted at him. Dad, she said, you've got— She tapped her cheek.

He stared at her dumbly. Here, she said, and reached out. He felt a tiny tug of his skin, and then she held up a scrap of toilet paper, browned with blood. He tried not to look confused. She rolled the paper into a little ball that she rested on her cocktail napkin. He touched his face and checked his finger—no blood.

A mystery. Your table is ready, the waiter said, and Rebecca drained her glass and stood.

Shall we? What did she know? Only that David had decided to slow down a bit, as of late. Step back from work. Retirement, or some euphemistic

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version of retirement. That information alone had been enough to send her into a spiral. If she had known that there was actually something wrong, that a genuine diagnosis existed and David was keeping it from her—hard to imagine the fallout.

She had e-mailed Cody a string of articles to print and pass along to David. Retirement often marked a bad turn was the general gist; it was when people started their slow decline. That had to be actively avoided. When you retired, you actually had to work overtime in order to keep the brain and body stimulated. It was a job in itself, really!

Creatine research, peptides, the correct sauna temperature to best replicate the resilience of some Norwegians in a clinical study. These congenial, sweaty Norwegians scolded him—why had he not developed a lifelong habit of weekly saunas with a group of close-knit friends? That seemed to protect against any misfortune.

What was the correct sauna temperature? He didn't know, because the article had reported the temperature in Celsius and, according to his mental calculations, it came out to three hundred and ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit, which he knew was . . . probably . . . not correct.

A kitchen drawer had been taken over by bottles of vitamins, tipped on their side, labels up, and there had been a stretch of weeks in which he had bothered to force them down.

DO NOT AGE, one supplement brand was called.

DONUT AGE, his eyes saw.

Was it truly possible for salvation to be purchased on Amazon.com or wherever Rebecca went to find these dim and stinky gelcaps? Was the brain just waiting for unregulated supplements to slough off the plaque before it would emerge, spanky and pink?

Her protocol had intersected somewhat with his own desperate push. His brief sobriety. The red-light hat on the skull, another line clipped up the nose: a laser pointer, really, shoved up a nostril. So how could it hurt, throwing her regimen into the mix? It was all folk medicine. Offerings. The capsules tanged on his tongue as he washed them down: the green-tea-extract pill,

HORSES

A few of us had sat down at a café, our hair singed, our chests crowded with the streets of Tehran—our skins of daylight having turned dark here and there.

We were a few horses having no wings, no manes, no meadows. We were all about running, and with casual, soiled horseshoes would sprint out of the streets' choked throats.

Trees had turned into truncheons, and we were so full of tears that could cry for real amid all the smoke and fire.

We were about to break and at last pounded down on the table the fists we had been waving in the air.

the fat amino-acid vitamin that nudged its awkward way down the throat.

This is the body of Christ, amen—David back in grade school, Friday-morning Mass. He opened his mouth for the bland Communion host. The wafer dissolved almost instantly; his tongue roved around, trying to coax the soggy body of Christ from his molars. Even so, he'd made a real effort to summon some solemn holy feeling, as he did when he took these pills, a gesture for the far-off daughter. The lost years, the brief birthday calls, dates for visits discussed but flights never booked—swallow, swallow, do this in memory of me.

Similarly disappointing, similarly unmiraculous.

Unmiraculous—like it had been to swallow the body of Christ. More like gumming the wet sock of Christ.

Do this in memory of me, ding-a-ling-a-ling.

This was the way of things, this desperate religious surge, Mecca in a gelcap. Maybe it would all work. Maybe it would!

For David, it had probably been a month, all told—that this surge of hope had lasted. Maybe he was a special case.

Why should I hire you, his first boss

had asked, and David said, I graduated with honors—

So you think you're special? Mark said. His tone wasn't unkind. A special guy?

David sensed that the right answer was the one he had given.

Not at all, David said. But I work hard. I'm a hard worker.

Why me/why not me? That was how some people dealt with bad news. Accepting that they weren't special, after all.

Rebecca hadn't learned yet. He sort of had.

The blight had come for him; it was too late. The vitamins stayed in the drawer. He let his brain blank out on words without trying to chase them down.

The quick brown fox, the lazy dog. The lazy—

What did you call them, the little half curtains on the windows? Strung neatly along silver curtain rods. These booths with partitions that closed you off from the nearby tables. So you felt even more important.

Who did Rebecca come here with? People were members of such places so that they could take other people there.

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And we hid our fists under the tables. And we hid our fists in bed. And we hid our fists in the kitchen drawer. And we hid our fists inside our pockets . . .

Open my fist!

Whatever part of Tehran I place a hand on, it is aching. Whatever part of the day I sit on, it is nighttime. Wherever on the soil . . . I didn't have the stomach to finish my sentence!

This poem was gunned down in its opening lines or else it would never have come to an end.

—Garous Abdolmalekian

(Translated, from the Persian, by Siavash Saadlou.)

He didn't know the contours of her life well enough to imagine who those others might be. People she wanted to impress. She didn't work, hadn't worked for years—he was fairly certain of this. He had an automatic transfer set up, guilt money still on its biweekly distribution schedule.

Rebecca shook out her napkin, then checked her phone. He's really on top of things, she said, with a slight eye roll.

David waited to understand what she was talking about.

I don't like him, she said. When I call? He doesn't always tell you. I know it, too, his voice does this weird cutoff thing, and I just know he doesn't even mention it to you.

Cody—she was talking about Cody.

He's a nice. Pause. A nice boy.

I wish you would answer your phone. Or your e-mails. It's just hard, she said. Always going through him.

You can call me, David said.

He says he tells you but I know he doesn't.

You can call me anytime, David said.

Somewhere in the restaurant, a champagne cork popped.

David forced himself to return his attention to Rebecca. She was peering

at him. He smiled, this strange new habit—but it worked, in its way. It seemed to calm her.

Have you talked to Mom? he said.

Her face showed her surprise.

Annabel, he corrected himself.

Yeah. She's good. I mean, seems like it.

David had stayed polite, unfailingly so, with Annabel—it had been easier when she remarried and gave up alimony. So he was no longer aware, every month, of just how polite he was being. A doctor, the new husband—wasn't he? David had been relieved. Hadn't she ended up ahead? Wouldn't her anger finally lose its urgency, every conversation no longer a fresh report from the scene of her woundedness? Time for the farewell tour, Annabel, darling.

Though he couldn't remember when they had last talked. Where was she, in this world? Panic, a quick hit of it—surely he should know.

He hurried past this blank spot.

We came here on our honeymoon, David said. Did you know that?

Yeah, she said. I guess I did.

She paused, like he might offer some amusing story from the past, polished for her enjoyment, but he didn't.

The past, where he lived now. Rebecca was obviously, insistently, a citizen of this planet. With its clubs. With their many levels. The ego churn in the room was almost a visible thing. What's next, what's next, what's next—that was the hungry hum under everything.

The waiter's interruption was helpful. David took a slice of the dark bread, spread it with a thick layer of butter.

She made an apologetic face at the waiter. For what, he didn't catch, but he assumed it had to do with him, some lag or error. He showed his teeth in a half smile, half grimace.

It's been cold here, she said, but it'll be much worse in Zurich. You know Geoff wanted us to go to Switzerland for Rainer's break. He's big into that, skiing, real treks, the National Geographic excursions. I wouldn't go now, she said. Not in the dead of winter. So gloomy. What's the project?

She waited for him to respond. He waited, too, for another nudge in the right direction.

Switzerland? she added.

Oh, you know.

She studied him. She took another drink.

Lag time, enough for a creep of unease. Fill the silence, David.

It's for Stearns, he said. I do little things, here and there. The invocation of Stearns was calming, he could tell. A familiar signpost from a familiar life. And that was enough—didn't we just want the people we knew to stay in their familiar realms? Knock around inside the boundaries of their familiar selves, hit their familiar marks? Remain pretty much approximate.

When they'd set up this visit, he had made mention to Rebecca of a business thing, the outlines of some consulting project that awaited him in Zurich. Had Cody smoothed over any jarring gaps? Probably. Hopefully.

The prospect of actual business now seemed to brighten her tone.

It's wonderful to get back into things, she said in a high, unnatural voice. One less thing for her to worry about, if David kept himself busy.

Busy-ness, which used to be his life. A busy-ness man.

David had worked so frantically. Needless, his frantic work. And yet—they were all like him. Stearns and the

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others. Why did any of them fill their lives in this way? He had not needed to work as much as he had, not nearly as much, and not with a feeling of such terror.

He took a drink of his wine. His eyes fluttered a bit. The start of a his-tamine itch. But what could he be allergic to? He blinked rapidly.

So much frantic work. But they had all seemed forlorn in times of leisure. Vacation sent him into strange moods: he was unkind to his family, he drank more. A dissatisfaction, like a sickness. How everything seemed unfortunate, meagre. This was his portion? This was his slice of happiness? His family stared balefully at him, waiting for some alchemy to be performed by his hand, like those trips when he was somehow expected to navigate them through an unknown city.

It's probably time for lunch, his wife would say, as if he weren't hungry, too, as if he had failed to notice that they were all sweating and sunburned and lost, the unhappy little unit of his family there on the foreign sidewalk? If I see a place I'll stop, he said curtly, and returned to the thankless task of leading them along the strange streets, every restaurant shuttered, every passerby seeming to sneer at David.

We'll just head back to the main road, he said. I'm sure something is open.

They looked at him, his wife and child, as if they'd found him on the bottom of their shoe.

It had always been a relief to return to work. Back to the universe that required his wholesale belief and, in turn, gave him the assurance that he, too, was real, that his life was something to believe in.

Rebecca did not know how things had ended with the board, only that they had. She knew none of the unpleasantness.

He welcomed his own forgetting on that subject.

Just really great to hear, Rebecca said. That you're back at it.

It's pretty straightforward, he said. The project.

Had he done his particular monologue already? No way to know.

For Stearns, he added.

He was saying Stearns's name too often, he gathered.

I do little things here and there, he said.

She gave him a look. But didn't ask any follow-up questions.

They were served slivers of pale fish in sauce, barely-there disks of orange citrus that dotted the flesh.

This is to share, she said.

The waiter had said that when he put the plate down: This is to share.

A slackness between them. A smile, again, his big smile.

You can eat those, she said, when he started to pick off the citrus rounds. The skin, she said, is quite thin.

He chewed them obediently. You could eat them, yes. This seemed—chew, chew—technically true.

Oh, Dad. She looked sad.

He was silent. The pork chop came with an unfamiliar vegetable, shreds of a green stalk. He shifted the mass to the side with his knife. He scraped the plate audibly. Kept at it until the shreds were all in a knife-neatened square, cordoned off from the cutlet.

Aren't you hungry?

She reached across the table to take possession of his silverware. She used his knife and fork to cut up little pieces of the pork chop. It looks good, she said.

Don't do that. Perhaps he grabbed the knife and fork back with too much force.

She raised her hands, glanced around at no one. Well, I'm sorry, she said, her face red. She finished her glass.

He took up a piece of the cut meat with his fingers and put it in his mouth. Pork was very sweet. He forgot this every time until he was eating it again. Strangely sweet. He swallowed.

If Rebecca knew what was planned in Zurich, she'd stop him.

She'd figure out the legal avenue. Go straight for the cutoff switch.

What was the formal term—mentally unfit? Incompetent?

She'd make it official. Punitive in her way, Rebecca. She didn't seem to believe that anyone should escape their allotted pain in this lifetime. Stations of the Cross, Marylebone edition. Would she wear a hair shirt, if it were on offer in a nice navy?

As a girl, she would sometimes cry

when David smoked cigarettes. Big, fakey tears that gusted in and out of genuine distress. It wasn't even so bad, then, smoking, but she was ahead of her time. Had a suspicious nose for her parents' pleasure, identified it as a destabilizing force. The time she'd refused to acknowledge Annabel when she'd cut her hair in the short style. Perhaps the girl had been right. It was a threat, wasn't it? Other people's desires, a mother taken by a new vision of herself. A father's insistence on the private pleasure of a cigarette.

Well, honey, this is like one big cigarette that Dad is going to smoke. A really big one.

The people in Switzerland had strongly suggested that he inform his loved ones about his plans. If you "sneak away into the beyond"—their words—you could hurt their feelings and make them angry.

Sneak away into the beyond—maybe this was a clumsy translation. Shouldn't their terminology be more medical than that? Sneaking away into the beyond—like how you might describe a teenager dropping acid in the back yard. Groovy and loose.

And, anyway, hurt feelings, anger—that was exactly what would not matter to him, there in the groovy beyond. You made calculations, you weighed the future anger of others against the present trouble, and then you pretty much said, O.K. Kick the can down the road.

What would the alternative be, if Rebecca had her way?

A forced march through the brutal next decade. Whatever gruesome care scenario awaited him. His brain would short out completely, oh, sometime in the next year or so. He'd perhaps have the occasional flare of lucidity, though whatever scraps of reality he'd manage would be pierced with terror.

There would be the dutiful once-a-year visit from Rebecca and the child. Neither of them would want to be there. Wind would blow the trees against the windows and the humidifier would puff and David would deteriorate in his little slice of existence, running out the clock there on the very edge of other people's real lives.

It was not—David picked at a shred of citrus peel caught between his

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teeth—a pleasant thought. Not pleasant at all.

So he was doing the right thing. His calculations were correct. Leave at five minutes to midnight.

It was a great party—thanks a ton! He smiled at Rebecca.

Rainer is looking forward to seeing you, she said.

David kept smiling.

Rainer, in his notebook, age nine. Rainer, age nine.

He's nine, David said. An inane offering.

Almost ten. He's got loads of friends—he's really doing so well. We're so pleased.

That's good.

It was a little, you know, touch and go, right after last year, but the new school has been just so professional. Really a total shift—it's like night and day. He's thriving.

Wonderful, he said.

New school, O.K., some incident, but he had lost the context, so he just kept the child's name in his brain. Rainer, a solid name. Rainer, who was thriving, and he chewed dutifully on the chop, and, in this way, the dinner passed.

Many opportunities to extend the meal. Coffee? Dessert?

To not choose these offered extensions seemed sad, an acknowledgment that the night had been only O.K., that no spark of familial magic had overcome them. And they were as they had always been, stiff with each other, missing the mark.

Like those holiday outings, post-divorce, with itineraries planned out by Annabel. Even at the peak of her anger, she'd remained the wholly capable stage director of everyone's emotions. Take the girl here, look at these lights, these window displays, there's a holiday village in the children's department, get an early dinner reservation at the restaurant on the highest floor—she'll like the glass elevator.

He'd been grateful. Enormously so.

Shirley Temple for madam, David had said. Rebecca's legs in their white tights swung from the restaurant chair.

Extra cherries? His voice had a festive strain.

Oh, no, the serious girl said. Thank you.

She opened her presents without fuss. Thank you, she said, in a neutral tone. She was often thanking him back then, but it seemed to mean something else, her affect oddly listless.

The time he called to let them know that she had left the new little coat behind, the wooden chess set.

We'll get them next visit, Annabel said.

Had they? Had Rebecca ever brought the chess set home? Quite expensive, he remembered. The chess set. A smooth wooden box with a felt-lined drawer where the pieces were kept.

Quite expensive.

No dessert—was Rebecca sure?

I'm really O.K., Rebecca said, but David waved a hand. We need something sweet. You love sweets. He studied the dessert menu. It seemed bizarrely coded. So many of the words were capitalized, confusingly, and he scanned gamely for a bit, then put it down.

You choose, he said.

One yuzu cheesecake, two forks.

You, zoo. You, zoo.

They took polite bites, Rebecca needlessly covering her mouth as she chewed.

He tried to think, I love you, to see what it scraped up in him. He tried to gather himself to match the serious-

ness of the occasion—the last time he would be alone with his only child.

His child. All the illnesses and treachery—hadn't she survived? His child, who had once vomited silently in the bathtub, then gone on playing happily with her bath toys. Who had once walked with mummy stiffness down the night hallway, her poxed limbs pink with dried calamine lotion. Who had broken a wrist on the back-yard flagstones, drooled cherry medicine down her sleeping face on the car ride back from the hospital.

The reel was playing too quickly; it was difficult to hold on to.

I'll have to show you the plaster, she chattered. It's an interesting technique. They basically picked up the entire kitchen and moved it to the sunroom. Where it used to be. A bigger footprint, though. It'll be totally different than when you saw it last—when was that?

He pretended to try to recall. Pinball eyes, looking up, looking down.

Gosh. I mean, maybe we hadn't even moved in. She smiled. Well, I guess it's been a long time.

Too long, he said. He surprised himself.

She kept smiling, surprised, too. Even this minor display of sentiment made them both awkward.

It was a crumb, compared to what he was supposed to say. He was supposed

"Lay off, Doug. I don't hook up with roommates."

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to invoke something, speak to the strangeness of passing from one world to another. Burnish this evening with dramatic color, emotions vivified like in those old hand-painted photographs.

Maybe he had prepared some sentiments in his notebook? Some . . . remarks?

He wasn't that person, and neither was Rebecca. This universe was bounded, meagre—they had only their usual roles, their approximate dialogue.

No more tears.

Mmm, Rebecca said aloud, to indicate that she liked the dessert.

There was an e-mail that Cody would send out, after it was over, composed, mostly, by David. Certain additions had been made by Cody, reasonable enough, meant to forestall any liabilities. David understood the need to pay this kind of attention, and he was grateful.

A few different versions, for the different audiences. But hers had taken the most effort to compose.

Dear Rebecca, [sub recipient]

By the time you are reading this, I will have passed, peacefully and legally, in Switzerland. It was entirely my own decision, blah blah, signed off by these doctors, blah. My unfortunate diagnosis left no other choice. Dr. Blah has been authorized to share the details and an overview of my medical history with you, if so desired. I hope you can understand the many elements that went into this difficult decision.

I apologize if this causes you pain. Please respect my blah, know that I will always love you. My lawyer can be reached at blah. He is expecting your call and is prepared to answer any questions or concerns you might have. Thank you for being my daughter. I'm sorry for any ways in which I have disappointed you, or any failings. In particular, I wish that I had been more present, and communicated more often my considerable pride in you. Know that I have loved you as much as I could.

Your loving father, David Hastings

(Was the last name really necessary?)

Not ideal. To ambush her with an e-mail. But it seemed the only real way to handle it.

The slice of You Zoo steadily disappeared from the plate. The two of them alternated with their forks until there was nothing left.

He wiped half-heartedly at his mouth and thought, Rebecca is full grown, she is a full-grown woman. Her constellation of self, her preferences

and complexes and aversions, her taste for sweetness—he would only ever know a fraction of Rebecca. A shadow moving in another room, spied through a keyhole. A girl who had once loved a ratty doll, a doll now lost to the black mouth of the indifferent universe. This nervous woman with her nervous clothes and how her tone went up an octave as she spoke to the waiter—she was of his flesh but not of his flesh.

This was a promising line of thought, and emotion stirred in his chest. My child.

Like little Rebecca with her fake/real tears—the sentiment was real, this love for her, and swelled through him convincingly, totally, but he couldn't hold on to it.

The feeling receded. He tried to get it back, but the music was too loud, there was a distracting after-dinner surge for the bar.

This whole place, how odd, the look of a real restaurant, filled with people, but still it seemed so airless. It was sealed off in some essential way, and, no matter how much they dedicated themselves to appearing otherwise, they were false, actual life kept at too much of a remove.

Still, he raised the cup of espresso to his lips and it tasted real, like the real thing, and wasn't it pleasant enough? This real cup of espresso, the daughter who had his DNA twisting through her, and what would it even look like to break it all open, his life, break himself open, like a Christmas cracker: here was his birthday lunch, David a little boy, an hour that passed in near-silence, Don't you speak to your father that way; here were the years at school; here was Annabel on their wedding night, trying to hold in a fart unsuccessfully and bursting into sobs when she couldn't.

A being entrusted to his care—that was how he'd felt about Annabel, and then about Rebecca. The baby with wrinkled hands that flickered and twitched around her face, her eyes black before they were blue. She grumbled in her sleep, with each breath, a wheezy ancient in the house.

Annabel's bones had shifted during pregnancy, her pelvis spread outward. Another time when the animal was ascendant. There was one person, then

there were two. The sudden creature in the hospital room. Then the second labor: the placenta, marbled with fat blue veins. No one had prepared him. It had seemed horrifyingly solid, as if they might be expected to take it home. Another mouth to feed.

Annabel had to sit on a little inflatable pillow for a month. She retreated to an animal privacy, bent over her child. Whatever she and David had had between them was revealed as flimsy. It didn't matter so much for Annabel—she had found herself in a new country, with its absorbing new customs. But David was forlorn, redundant. The man in the suit who lumbered around in the background of their lives. Coming in and out of focus like a clumsy stagehand.

His doing, certainly. Still.

They'd divorced when Rebecca was ten.

David tried to get the check—awkward, the fumble to accept the little leather folder, David peering at the receipt. He groped for a pen but it was all swimming. Impossible. He handed the whole mess to Rebecca.

My eyes, he said vaguely.

She took over with her usual briskness. They just charge me directly, she said.

Take my card, at least.

They just need a signature, Dad—it's all on file here, she said. My account.

Tot up all the money he had spent on her—hundreds of thousands, private school and college and one year of business school, the help with the house purchase—and this evening would be a drop. But it was good, to nourish one's offspring.

The daughter looked at him with concern. Yes? he said.

Ready? she said.

He blinked.

To go?

The table in front of him was empty, wiped clean, even the candle blown out. When had that happened?

They took the bill?

Dad?

Ready, he said, his hands braced on the cleared surface, for support. Up we go. ♦

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THE CRITICS

BOOKS

THE USES OF EXILE

How Hannah Arendt remade herself in America and diagnosed the politics of unreality.

BY DAVID DENBY

Hannah Arendt arrived in New York in May, 1941, stateless, broke, and far from fluent in English. A German Jew exiled first from Germany and then from France, she had crossed the Atlantic on a Portuguese refugee ship with her husband, Heinrich Blücher, a working-class former Communist street fighter and largely self-taught intellectual. She

was thirty-four and he was forty-two. They had individually fled Germany after the Nazi seizure of power; they met in France in 1936, married four years later, and were soon interned in separate French camps. Both got out, and, with American help, obtained visas and made their way to Lisbon, where they waited for some months to set sail. Among Arendt's

few possessions was a manuscript Walter Benjamin had given her of his "Theses on the Philosophy of History."

Arendt, Blücher, and Arendt's mother—who joined them a month later—initially occupied two small rooms off Riverside Drive, on West Ninety-fifth Street, in what amounted to a wartime boarding house. They had no kitchen

By all accounts, Arendt was formidable, witty, sociable, and even flirtatious. People were drawn to her.

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of their own. For the next thirty-four years, apart from a period on Morningside Drive, Arendt lived in apartments between Ninety-fifth and 110th Streets, on the Upper West Side. Broadway, the neighborhood's grand boulevard, was lined with beauty salons, dry cleaners, shoe-repair stalls, and single-room-occupancy hotels. She travelled regularly but always returned to this patch of Manhattan. It was a good place to work. There was nothing else to do there.

Blücher, who eventually became a popular philosophy lecturer at Bard College, got a job shovelling chemicals in a New Jersey factory. His wife found her footing more swiftly. Within six months, she was writing a political column for the German-language Jewish weekly Aufbau ("Reconstruction"); her first installment endorsed the idea of an international Jewish army that could fight the Nazis. After the war, she spent two years as a senior editor at Schocken, where she prepared an edition of Kafka's diaries. Her decisive American experience, however, was social. She befriended some of New York's most literate people: Alfred Kazin, who knew his way around publishing and journalism and became devoted to her; the irrepressibly witty Randall Jarrell, who loved literature as a naturalist loves trees and read poetry to her for hours; and the hard-drinking, hard-arguing circle around Partisan Review, including Dwight Macdonald, with whom she later worked on plans for a new political journal. By all accounts, she was formidable, yet funny, sociable, even flirtatious. Men were drawn to her. Mary McCarthy later became her closest American friend.

As a young woman, Arendt had received the most advanced philosophical training then available in Germany. The writing of her twenties was exalted and often unfathomable to nonspecialists: heavy clouds drifting in ether, though capable of flashes of lightning. In New York, she increasingly wrote in English, relying on friends such as Jarrell to polish her prose; she also wrote some pieces in German and sometimes translated them herself. She was the real thing, a product of the classical humanism of German Bildung, with a sardonic sense of humor and a streak of defiance and perversity. She had little use for orga-

organized religion and disdained psychoanalysis. Among the New York intellectuals, she became a moral center, a Cassandra who was believed, at least about the dangers of modern politics. On her side, the gain was incalculable. Her American friends and editors enabled her transformation from a displaced intellectual to a world-famous writer.

Arendt's obsession in New York was the destruction of the European world she had left. National Socialism had murdered the Jews and laid waste to German civilization; Stalinism had regimented Soviet life through purges and camps. Several extraordinary Jewish writers had killed themselves during the war, among them Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig. In Menorah Journal, Arendt reviewed Zweig's fluently nostalgic memoir, "The World of Yesterday," with a mixture of sympathy and contempt: he had been blind to the reality around him and then victimized by it.

She did not publicly mourn her exile; self-dramatization could slip into bathos. The pressing matter was what she could do. The wartime mood among European and American intellectuals was hopeless, or, rather, in her estimation, helpless. "To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of 'historical necessity,' but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal." She would inject life, blood, and meaning into the discussion. In 1946, recalling Benjamin's death in the terrible year of 1940, she wrote to a friend, "In our time you have to hate murder a lot to escape the seductive power of suicide."

By the mid-nineteen-forties, she had begun analyzing the catastrophes that overtook Germany and the Soviet Union. Totalitarianism, she believed, broke completely with the political orders of the past. Traditional morality, the "rights of man," and the classical categories of democracy and autocracy—all this was beside the point for regimes whose leaders recognized no limits. The revolutions created by Nazi and Stalinist ideology, and enforced by terror, aimed to change reality itself.

Arendt wrote her book in pieces, much of it at a tiny desk wedged into a corner of her cramped West Ninety-fifth Street

apartment. She published portions in magazines, including Partisan Review, and then assembled the work into three sections—on antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. "The Origins of Totalitarianism," as it was finally called, was thrillingly difficult, wide-ranging, and allusive—an amalgam of history, cultural criticism, and political theory. In writing it, Arendt had learned a great deal about the rhythm and weight of the English periodic sentence, and she used it to devastating effect. The final pages offered a physical and philosophical account of the concentration camps that was as disturbing in its implications as the news-reels shown in theatres at the war's end. The camps destroyed the bodies and spirits of their inmates before murdering them; entire populations could be rendered superfluous through bureaucratized terror. "Origins" was completed in 1949, published in 1951, and soon regarded as a modern classic of political theory. It left readers with an uneasy question: Could a healthy politics flourish in an age suffused with mass propaganda and the adoration of dictators?

Kazin visited Arendt and Blücher in their second New York apartment, a "dark shadowy" place overlooking Morningside Park. A boarder was living with them. (Kazin heard the toilet flush.) In a memoir, he recalled Arendt entertaining friends in European style, serving "candies, candied fruits, cookies, 'porto.'" Husband, wife, and guests plunged into furious arguments about the great thinkers. "Marx-Plato-Hegel-Heidegger-Kant-Kafka-Jaspers!" was Kazin's wry encapsulation. More or less intact, Arendt and Blücher had landed. Her European mind was refined and eased into English. She benefitted from the American hunger for European culture. After "The Origins of Totalitarianism" got her on the cover of The Saturday Review of Literature, in 1951, she sent a letter to a German friend: "Did I write to you that a week ago I became a 'cover girl' and had to look at myself on all the newsstands?"

Beginning in 1949, Arendt returned repeatedly to Germany, but, in an extraordinary 1964 interview on German TV, she said that she thought of herself not as a German but as a Jew. The young interviewer, Günter Gaus,

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asked what remained of Europe for her, and she answered, “What remains is the language. . . . It is not the German language that went mad.” She could not be exiled from the poetry and prose of Goethe and Lessing, or from modern writers like Brecht, Benjamin, and Hermann Broch.

The not so hidden intent of a new German biography, Thomas Meyer’s “Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind” (Penguin Press; translated by Shelley Frisch), is to reclaim her as a German woman, writer, thinker, and publishing and academic phenomenon, not just an American one. Meyer, who teaches philosophy at the University of Munich and is a widely published writer, has assembled an enormous amount of information about Arendt’s family, education, German publishing career, and postwar celebrity. Arendt comes most fully alive, though, when Meyer lets her own extravagant, commanding voice carry the story forward.

“For me the question was somehow: Either I study philosophy or I drown myself,” Arendt said once, recalling herself at fourteen. The claim is believable. Growing up in Königsberg, the city of Kant, she always feared failing to understand something. Kant’s works stood in the library at home, and she read them in search of relief. At Königin-Luise-Schule, she studied Latin, Greek, and French but left before graduating. She later said that after a teacher had offended her—was it an antisemitic remark?—she led her classmates in boycotting the teacher’s classes, and was expelled. Still, in 1924 she enrolled at the University of Marburg, where students were flocking to Martin Heidegger’s lectures.

Heidegger was building on, and breaking with, his teacher Edmund Husserl, in an audacious attempt to push aside the customary problems of academic philosophy and return to “things themselves,” to existence as it is actually lived. Heidegger described human existence as Dasein, literally “being there.” We find ourselves thrust into a world already under way, surrounded by objects and people, carried irreversibly through time toward death. The danger was surrendering to convention and commonplace opinion, becoming what others expected. “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself,” Heidegger wrote.

“They say the test of a true chef is to make the perfect omelette and charge twenty-eight dollars for it.”

Authentic existence required confronting one’s own death without evasion. Arendt, evidently depressed and convinced of life’s meaninglessness, found his teaching electrifying. He dug into Plato and other classical texts and pulled out vital new meanings. As she later wrote, “Heidegger never thinks ‘about’ something; he thinks something.”

He was thirty-five, married, and the father of two sons, a handsome man with a trim, slightly curled mustache and a piercing stare. Arendt was eighteen, with a gently molded chin and beautiful, yearning eyes. They began an affair. His letters to her were moony in a traditional German style. “The demonic has seized me,” he wrote. “The still, prayerlike folding of your loving hands and your gleaming forehead guarded it through womanly transfiguration.” (Heidegger could have written librettos for Wagner.) In a confessional sketch that she had written for Heidegger, she expressed an “unbending devotion to a single one.” Nevertheless, with Heidegger’s tender encouragement—had his wife become suspi-

cious?—Arendt left Marburg for Heidelberg, where she wrote a dissertation on St. Augustine under Karl Jaspers. She continued meeting Heidegger during trips he made for another two years.

After completing her dissertation, she married a man she had met in one of Heidegger’s seminars in Marburg, Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders. Her life had moved on, but her estimate of Heidegger had not: she never denied his intellectual power. In 1933, however, when Heidegger became rector of the University of Freiburg, he delivered a preposterous speech celebrating the new regime. Arendt was appalled by his embrace of the Hitler movement. When she later recalled the Nazi seizure of power, she said that the behavior of ordinary Germans had surprised her less than the “fantastische” ideas with which intellectuals greeted Hitler. Heidegger, the philosopher of authenticity and independent thought, had become one of them, surrendering to vicious political cant.

Arendt left intellectual life to work directly for endangered Jews. Asked by

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a Zionist organization to document antisemitism in the records of clubs, professional associations, and the like, she began gathering evidence in the Prussian State Library. The police arrested her and held her for perhaps a week, after which she was mysteriously released. Decades later, she told Gaus that she had trusted the officer because “he had such an open, decent face.” A fiction? The playwright Jenny Lyn Bader accepts the challenge in her “Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library,” which is being revived Off Broadway on September 12th. She creates an Arendt who flirts and reasons her way to the officer’s better nature. Whatever happened, Arendt didn’t linger. By October, 1933, she was in Paris.

There, she rejoined Stern, though their marriage had ended in all but name; they finally separated when he left for New York, in 1936. Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah, which sent Jewish refugee teen-agers, largely unemployable in France, to kibbutzim in Palestine. Many were in poor health. Arendt helped organize a camp outside Paris where the teen-agers were fed, restored to health, and taught agricultural and language skills. It was the closest she came to parenthood. According to Meyer, she helped

save a hundred and twenty young people but did not speak publicly about the work until her conversation with Gaus decades later. Meyer reconstructs the bureaucratic and financial machinery behind the rescues, one of his book’s genuinely valuable contributions.

Meyer takes pains to recover the German continuities in Arendt’s life. He follows her to postwar Germany, where, as part of her work with Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, she tracked down “heirless” Jewish property, including books whose owners had been murdered; the volumes would be distributed chiefly among libraries and Jewish institutions in Israel, the United States, and other countries. On one of those trips, in 1950, she sought out Heidegger in Freiburg, after nearly two decades of silence, and, though he was not terribly repentant, she more or less forgave him; a difficult friendship resumed.

Meyer’s archival diligence enlarges the record of Arendt’s life, but the letters and institutional records he draws on yield little of Arendt’s volatile temperament, the intertwining of idea and action; nor does he offer more than minimal physical evocation of Arendt at the different stages of her life. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s 1982 biography,

“Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World,” remains indispensable as a commanding exposition of Arendt’s ideas and a detailed, sensitive rendering of her emotional life. In Meyer’s hands, the adventuress sometimes recedes into a functionary.

In the mid-nineteen-fifties, Arendt turned from the origins of political catastrophe to the conditions of political health. She had begun exploring how Marxism had yielded totalitarianism; the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, before Soviet troops crushed it, presented a striking example of people creating a political life for themselves. She abandoned the project, but some of its concerns entered “The Human Condition” (1958), a far-reaching inquiry into what she called the vita activa, the active life.

Arendt divided human activity into labor, the biological processes that sustain life; work, which creates objects and builds a durable human world; and action, the unpredictable business of people speaking and doing things together. Action interested her most. In the Greek city-state, citizens appeared before one another as equals, taking part in a common world and beginning things whose outcomes they could never entirely control. “Plurality,” she wrote, “is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”

Modern society, she believed, had elevated labor and consumption while letting the public realm wither. With the rise of what she called “the social,” public life increasingly became about the administration of an enlarged household, managing production, welfare, and collective necessity. Yet freedom, in Arendt’s view, was something more demanding. It required people to act together in a public realm where each had a voice.

The United States, in its formative years, had briefly demonstrated how such action might survive beyond the ancient polis. According to the blunt John Adams, the American Revolution began before the war with Britain, in the people’s minds and hearts, and Arendt situated those shifts in American town councils where citizens had de-

“I wonder what drugs we’re on.”

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bated local affairs. The Revolution created spaces of public freedom, and the Constitution gave durable form to power, which Arendt understood as something generated when people acted in concert. In “On Revolution” (1963), she preferred the Americans, with their unglamorous work of founding institutions and distributing power, to the French, whose fiction of a single “general will” devolved into righteous cliques attempting to murder one another.

She fell in love with the Founding Fathers, the Federalist Papers, and constitutionalism. Yet her account of the American triumph also conveyed disappointment. Thomas Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” retained an older sense of “public happiness,” the pleasure of participating in town meetings, councils, and congresses. That meaning faded, however, and “the pursuit of happiness” had become the pursuit of riches and, eventually, consumerism as a way of life.

It wasn’t much to hold on to, but she continued to praise small, self-organized bodies: the citizens’ councils of the Hungarian Revolution; the organizing councils of the sixties’ civil-rights and anti-war movements in the U.S. In such bodies, citizens at least escaped the domination of mass media, which she feared and loathed. She had an instinctive appreciation for order, civility, public debate. But, unlike many postwar conservatives, she did not seek a return to religion or traditional values. The world that sustained them had been shattered. Instead, she searched the wreckage for sources of personal and political integrity. “Since man contains within himself a partner from whom he can never win release,” she wrote, “he will be better off not to live in company with a murderer or a liar.”

Arendt’s political ideal had a temperamental counterpart: she liked thought and friendship at close quarters, among people who could answer one another directly. In 1959, Arendt and Blücher bought a good apartment at West 109th Street and Riverside Drive. She had a river view and, for the first time, ample space to entertain her American and émigré circle. Norman Podhoretz, always concerned with “making it,” considered an invitation to her New Year’s Eve parties a definite score. Kazin, ever faithful, saw something al-

almost needy in her friendships, which may have been tied to the losses she carried. In one of Arendt’s unpublished poems, she wrote, “Survival./But how does one live with the dead? Say,/where is the sound of their company,/where are the gestures they once made?”

Those of us who want a direct sense of her physicality—and it’s hard not to as you read her—can’t do better than the video of the Gaus interview. In her late fifties, she’s very grand indeed, but at times almost friendly, with a ready, then readily withdrawn, smile. In her gruff, cigarette-scarred voice, she speaks slowly but implacably, rocking back and forth like a ship in treacherous seas. Emotion bursts out. “When one is attacked as a Jew,” she says, thumping the arm of her chair, “one must defend oneself as a Jew—not as a German, a world citizen, or a champion of human rights.” Gaus adroitly coaxes out personal recollections and moments of self-assessment, but she mocks as impossible the idea of confessing what’s “going on in my heart.”

Fiction could enter where Arendt refused, publicly, to go. In the extraordinary novel “An Admirable Woman,” first published four decades ago, the American author, theologian, and editor Arthur A. Cohen created an Arendt-like character who holds back nothing. The novel, reissued this fall, by McNally Editions, takes the form of a memoir by a German Jewish intellectual historian, exiled to New York. Erika Hertz, the Arendt character, describes her life in wild Berlin in the twenties and then in the early Nazi period and finally on the Upper West Side. She evokes an émigré’s painful social adjustments and shares her feelings about everything, especially about herself. Assessing her body, she praises her “glorious hair, full, rich, an immense head of hair, a whole field of auburn hair, reddish-brown like the trees of the Hudson Valley.” The prose is abundantly physical and sensual, which God knows Arendt’s was not. Cohen created a counter-text, a luscious version of Arendt’s unknown sentimental education.

Sometimes we get as much from just

a trace. In one of the funniest of all American books, the 1954 novel “Pictures from an Institution,” Arendt’s great friend Randall Jarrell satirized a progressive college (basically Sarah Lawrence). After untold adventures, the Rosenbaums, an avant-garde Viennese composer and his opera-star wife, have arrived, with relief, at “Benton College.” When the subject of travel comes up,

The gentry rueful Rosenbaums spring from Jarrell’s transforming affection for his friends. A stormier version of the couple appears in Margarethe

von Trotta’s intellectually alert film “Hannah Arendt” (2012), starring the great German actress Barbara Sukowa as Arendt and Axel Milberg as Blücher. Von Trotta’s portrait at first resembles Kazin’s—a sociable woman, in love with her husband, happy in America. Then all hell breaks loose, and Sukowa, eyes blazing, concludes the picture with a seven-minute defense of intellectual freedom assembled from Arendt’s words. It’s one of cinema’s great pieces of extended rhetoric.

What broke loose, of course, was the Eichmann controversy. At Arendt’s request, this magazine sent her to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of the S.S. lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann, who had played a central role in organizing the mass murder of the Jews. Her account ran in five consecutive issues in February and March, 1963, then almost immediately was republished as a book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” She was widely attacked. Some of the attacks, both by organized Jewish groups and by individual writers, were more like hazing than criticism—vicious, personal, encompassing. Arendt, they insisted, was a self-hating Jew who blamed the Jews for their own destruction; she laundered Eichmann’s guilt with the phrase “the banality of evil.”

The actual text, which chronicles not just the trial but the workings of

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Eichmann's operation in country after country, is animated by a freezing decision of the man and obvious anguish, held in check, over what the S.S. accomplished. Eichmann was not, in conventional terms, stupid, but, as Arendt argues, he was incapable of thinking—that is, of allowing into consciousness any reality or viewpoint inconsistent with his loyalty to his job and to his superiors. A "terrifyingly normal" product of personal ambition and totalitarian organization, he scarcely had a self to violate. In that sense, his evil was banal. Arendt concluded that he should hang.

The sorest point in her reporting was the ten or so pages on the Judgement, the councils (bad ones, this time) that the Nazis set up with Jewish community leaders, many of whom, according to Raul Hilberg's authoritative history "The Destruction of the European Jews" (1961), provided the Nazis with Jewish addresses, even property lists. The leaders were in an impossible position and perhaps thought that by cooperating they could save ten out of a hundred, or a thousand out of ten thousand. None of us know how we would have behaved in the same situation. Arendt criticizes these men but never says that the Jews were responsible for their own destruction. She does claim that, without the councils' compliance, more would have survived.

"Eichmann in Jerusalem" is a brilliant book, hard-driving and factually rich, but written with an undisguised intellectual contempt that many found heartless. In Commentary, Podhoretz ended his review with anguished protest: "The Nazis destroyed a third of the Jewish people. In the name of all that is humane, will the remnant never let up on itself?" Like an Ibsen character, Arendt was too proud to simplify her ideas for easier understanding. She also rejected the melodramatic style that was becoming popular in discussions of the Holocaust, along with what she sensed was developing in Israel: a desire to turn the Holocaust into a kind of state religion that could justify aggression.

For a while, friends and colleagues walked away, including some of the New York group that had revered her; a few friendships never recovered. Mary McCarthy, who held fast, declared that the campaign against Arendt was "assum-

ing the proportions of a pogrom," and told her that they could "enjoy guilt by association together."

Heinrich Blücher died in 1970, at seventy-one. "Between two people, sometimes, how rarely, a world grows," Arendt wrote to Heidegger of her and Blücher's love. "It is then one's homeland." She was bereft but surrounded by the friends who remained. Two of them proposed marriage—the political scientist and fellow German Jewish exile Hans J. Morgenthau, and W. H. Auden, who suggested that they could take care of each other. She refused a collaboration in misery. For the rest of her life, she continued to speak and write copiously about public affairs, not least the official mendacity that the Pentagon Papers and Watergate revealed.

By then, the question of whether Arendt belonged chiefly to German or American intellectual life mattered less than the interplay in her soul between the two. Her ways of thinking, her metaphysical longings, were mostly German, but her preoccupations after "Origins" were mostly American. Meyer understandably emphasizes that the German editions of "Origins" and "The Human Condition" differ from the English ones, though he never quite makes clear how extensive or significant the differences are. The career that had made her famous was unmistakably American. Her major books were commissioned, edited, and first published in the United States, often after taking shape in American magazines.

In her last years, she turned increasingly to the nature of thinking, willing, and judging; she wanted to write a book that would map the activities of the mind. She completed the sections on thinking and willing; the projected third section, on judgment, remained unwritten. On December 4, 1975, Hannah Arendt died in her apartment. She was sixty-nine years old. She had a heart attack while entertaining friends. ("Thinking" appeared posthumously in three installments in this magazine.)

More than three decades later, in March, 2007, the philosopher Jeremy Waldron published a piece in The New York Review of Books titled "What Would Hannah Say?" Waldron, who admired Arendt, was nevertheless skeptical of the "portentous and stricken tone" of

her writings, and of her followers' rote acquiescence. He deplored the common habit of summoning words from Arendt's work to illuminate current crises. (In 2007, the current crisis was "the war on terror.") Every circumstance is special, Waldron wrote, and we should make up our own minds, rather than rely on Arendt. Of course, he's right, but the texts keep catching up to history, muscling into current events, more participant than ghost.

In "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Arendt observes that bureaucratic despotism hollows out legislatures: parliaments cease making laws, and executives rule by decree. She describes how inflation, unemployment, and the breakdown of stable classes leave masses uprooted, isolated, and possessed by a pervasive hatred of the existing world. A movement—not a party—organizes their discontent, offering fictitious total explanations for real and unresolved problems. At its center stands an infallible leader: his words cannot be questioned, and his lies are turned into a functioning reality. Members must accommodate themselves to its fictions, with varying mixtures of gullibility and cynicism; followers shown proof that the leader has lied may admire him all the more for his tactical cleverness. He and his cadre insult and dehumanize outsiders, who are then stripped of their rights, rendered stateless, and herded into internment camps.

The ultimate object of these fictions is disorientation, more than belief. By continually altering reality, a government can disable the faculties of judgment and action on which political freedom depends. In her last known interview, recorded for French television in 1973, Arendt returned to the subject of public lying. According to a transcript published after her death, here is what she said:

If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore—and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, to be "re-lied," so to speak. So a lying government which pursues different goals at different times has constantly to rewrite its own history. That means that the people are deprived not only of their capacity to act, but also of their capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. ♦

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BOOKS

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

The U.S. helped create modern Europe. Can it break it?

BY IAN BURUMA

After the end of the Second World War, every major city in the U.S.-occupied zone of Germany had an Amerika Haus. People who might be lucky to have a roof over their heads gathered there to read American books and periodicals, watch American movies, listen to lectures about America, tap their toes to jazz from America. This enterprise, funded at first by the U.S. Office of Military Government, and later by the U.S. Information Agency, was obviously meant to present America in a positive light to men and women who had been fed Nazi propaganda for more than a decade. It was another propaganda exercise, then, but not a heavy-handed one, propaganda under

the mantle of liberty and democracy. Unlike in the aftermath of the First World War, when the Allies decided that the defeated enemy had to be punished for its sins, the goal this time was to educate the former Axis powers on how to be good democrats who would learn to embrace such vaunted American values as individual freedom and free enterprise. Much store was set on culture. This was not without its absurdities. A zealous young U.S. Army education officer in Japan believed that teaching locals the art of square dancing would contribute to their democratization. In the same spirit, the American occupation government instructed movie studios in

Japan to show a Japanese couple kissing onscreen, as a public display of affection, American style. The resulting sensation was such that May 23, 1946, the premiere date of this film, “Twenty-Year-Old Youth,” came to be celebrated as Kiss Day.

Europeans who had lived under Nazi occupation did not have to learn how to kiss in the movies. But America’s effort to create a global alliance of democracies under U.S. tutelage and military protection involved a great deal of cultural and political education, or reeducation, and the endeavor became even more pressing once the Cold War began. There was concern that demoralized and impoverished Europeans—artists and intellectuals especially—would be drawn to the blandishments of the Soviet Union. So the C.I.A. financed reliably pro-American political parties for decades, along with arts festivals, exhibitions, concerts, and literary magazines such as Der Monat, in Berlin, and Encounter, in London. Much of this was done with an American mixture of political self-interest and idealism. (Intent on countering “Reds” in the C.I.A. and other U.S. foreign-policy institutions, Senator Joseph McCarthy sent his trusted lawyer, Roy Cohn, to Germany at the height of the Red Scare to weed out subversive books from Amerika Haus libraries.)

One of the great creations of Pax Americana was what the political scientist Glyn Morgan calls the American Europe. (He shares his discipline’s fondness for denoting concepts with italicized phrases.) In his short and punchy new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Europe” (Polity), he argues that American Europe was a new order imposed by the United States. British, Dutch, French, Belgian, and Italian empires had to be dissolved, the thinking went, to make way for an integrated, democratic Europe. This would also address the perennial German problem: embedded in a federal Europe, Germany would become a country its neighbors could safely live with.

To bring all this about, and to counter the allure of Communism, European economies first had to emerge from the rubble of war and regain their strength as quickly as possible. Hence the Marshall Plan, which was designed to encourage European integration. The diplomat and foreign-policy thinker George Kennan wrote, “We considered that one

If NATO hollows out, Europe as an entity might not survive populist nationalism.

ILLUSTRATION BY RICARDO TOMÁS

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of the long-term deficiencies of the European economy as a whole was its excessive fragmentation . . . the lack, in particular, of a large consumer's market." But Kennan's vision for Europe wasn't merely economic. To overcome the nationalist rivalries that had caused two devastating wars, he urged the United States to help depressed Europeans recover their "spiritual vigor" as a self-confident collective entity. As Morgan explains, this meant that "U.S. support would force the British, the French, and other nations to think of themselves as Europeans rather than as nationalists inhabiting separate nation-states."

The originality of Morgan's book lies in its claim that European unification—first the European Coal and Steel Community, in 1951, then the European Economic Community, in 1957, and finally the European Union, in 1993—was more an American creation than a European one. Postwar Europe, he argues, was made in America's image.

The conventional view holds that the main architects of European integration were the Frenchmen Jean Monnet, a mild-mannered, mustachioed Cognac merchant and banker, and Robert Schuman, an austere, devoutly Catholic statesman from Lorraine. The Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950, which proposed placing French and German coal and steel production under a common authority, is still commemorated by the E.U. as Europe Day. The Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Konrad Adenauer, the Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, and the Belgian Socialist statesman Paul-Henri Spaak are likewise counted among the European founding fathers.

Winston Churchill himself favored some form of European unification, though without Britain, which, like the United States, was to remain outside it, as a benevolent and, naturally, superior power. This became a sticking point in the much hyped (especially in Britain) "special relationship." From Churchill onward, many British leaders clung to fantasies of global power and splendid isolation from Europe, fantasies that culminated in the disaster of Brexit. By contrast, most American Presidents, the current incumbent aside, preferred Britain snugly embedded in Europe, where it

could serve as a dependable American ally. Morgan sets out to revise this familiar genealogy of European integration. In his telling, Monnet and Schuman did not originate the idea. Franklin D. Roosevelt had long opposed European imperialism, much to the chagrin of his wartime ally Churchill, and Morgan maintains that members of the Roosevelt and Truman foreign-policy establishments were devising plans for a unified Europe well before European leaders embraced the project. In 1943, William C. Bullitt, a senior U.S. diplomat, argued in a letter to Roosevelt that the United States would "be obliged . . . in setting up administrations in occupied and liberated countries, not only to set up democratic administrations but also to lay the groundwork for a combination of democratic governments in Europe strong enough to preserve democracy in Europe and keep the Bolsheviks from replacing the Nazis as masters of Europe."

Walt Rostow, who became Lyndon B. Johnson's national-security adviser during the Vietnam War, had also been working on postwar plans to incorporate Germany into the rest of Western Europe by means of economic coöperation. Morgan believes that Rostow came to that idea first, before Monnet, and, indeed, that Rostow passed his views on to the Frenchman, who spent much of the war in Washington, D.C.

Morgan is right that Americans played a hugely important role in shaping postwar Europe, but he underestimates the European contributions, not least when he casts Monnet as Rostow's pupil. The idea of pooling natural resources to prevent another war between major European powers, especially Germany and France, had been championed at the end of the First World War by a French politician named Étienne Clémentel. He called for a "new economic order" based on interdependence. His assistant was Monnet, who had suggested combining the British and French economies to defeat Germany in the Great War. In 1940, when France was invaded once again, Monnet went further and suggested a Franco-British union. None of this came to pass, but it's clear that Monnet didn't need Rostow to fire his pan-European imagination. Nor were the Frenchmen alone. One of

the more interesting and eccentric unifiers was the half Japanese Austro-Hungarian Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. His book "Pan-Europa," published in 1923, sparked the "Pan-Europa movement." In his dream of pan-European leadership, those in charge would not necessarily be men of high birth but gentlemen imbued with an "aristocracy of the spirit"—an idea that was perhaps not so very far removed from Kennan's notion of "spiritual vigor." Coudenhove-Kalergi's movement, too, came to little. But his proposal that Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" serve as the European anthem endured; it is still played on official E.U. occasions.

In 1941, Italian antifascists produced the Ventotene Manifesto (named for a small island where they were interned), calling for a federal socialist Europe. German dissidents inside Hitler's Reich, such as the Kreisau Circle, associated with Helmuth James von Moltke, who was executed by the Nazis, in 1945, for "treason," also drew up plans for a postwar European union. Many members of his circle were fellow-aristocrats, some of them kindred spirits of Coudenhove-Kalergi. And the Nazis themselves had pan-European ideals, albeit under the firm rule of the Herrenvolk.

There's another side of postwar pan-Europeanism that is hard to associate with the twentieth-century American establishment: the deep Roman Catholic background of most of the founders, which made them receptive to a supranational order. Adenauer, De Gasperi, and Schuman were all devout Catholics, and Monnet, though not a religious man, was born into a pious Catholic family. Adenauer was also a Rhinelander who loathed the largely Protestant and Prussian eastern part of Germany. He is said to have muttered "Asia again" whenever his train crossed the Elbe on the way to Berlin. For him, the West ended at the old borders of the Roman Empire, which had cut through the Teutonic territories. Ancient Rome was not his only model. John McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner in Germany from 1949 to 1952, recalled that Adenauer spoke of the Holy Roman Empire as if it were recent history. This Catholic genealogy helped arouse British suspicions of European integration. The journalist Hugo Young, himself brought up Catholic, observed in his book "This Blessed Plot" that such "feel-

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ings were not limited to superstition. They acquired a strong political formulation among people who saw in the Schuman Plan the beginnings of a Vatican conspiracy, or even more luridly, an attempt to recreate the Holy Roman Empire.”

In Germany, however, the strongest opposition to Adenauer’s efforts to anchor the Federal Republic in an American-led Western alliance, through European integration and NATO, came from the left rather than the revanchist right. The Social Democrats, led by Kurt Schumacher, a prickly figure who had suffered horribly for resisting the Nazis, were mistrustful of the United States and hoped to reunify Germany as a neutral state at the center of Europe. A defense pact with America was anathema to Schumacher, since it threatened to make permanent the country’s division into two hostile states. Adenauer reached the opposite conclusion. Membership in NATO, he believed, offered the surest route to restoring West German sovereignty and the right to rearm. That it also cemented the division of Germany suited him fine.

German rearmament remained alarming to the French, and for a time a European Army seemed to offer a solution. In 1950, Monnet helped devise the Pleven Plan, which would place West German troops within a supranational European Defense Community. The project foundered in 1954, when the French parliament, still haunted by German militarism, refused to ratify it. West Germany joined NATO the following year.

NATO thus became one of the main pillars of American Europe. Formally separate from the European Economic Community and, later, from the European Union, it strengthened European cooperation while securing American leadership. The Marshall Plan and European integration helped produce three decades of rapid growth and rising prosperity, the period the French call les trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years. This achievement rested on an American security guarantee. In Asia, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, signed in 1951, established a comparable arrangement for Japan.

Whether Morgan is right to see postwar Western Europe as largely an American creation, or whether Europeans played a more important role than he allows, American Europe was

BRIEFLY NOTED

The Savage Landscape, by Cal Flynn (Viking). What does it mean for something to be considered “wilderness” in a world saturated by human intervention? Searching for answers, Flynn travels to various remote sites—including the Transylvanian Alps; the Niassa Special Reserve, in Mozambique; and the Southern Ocean, near Antarctica—journeys that lead her to conclude that wilderness is “a negative definition, an absence.” For one thing, wild places are increasingly threatened by the trophy-hunting industry, scientific study, and corporate exploitation. But, for another, Flynn argues, wilderness is about being able to “open oneself to the immensity of all existence, all creation, all of everything.”

Presence, by Erin Maglaque (Astra). This “hidden history of the female body” reveals the ways that natural processes, such as giving birth, have been shaped by changing medical beliefs and social arrangements. Drawing on physicians’ casebooks, midwifery manuals, household recipe collections, court testimonies, private letters, and more, Maglaque constructs a kind of organic catalogue raisonné, indexing women’s experiences of their bodies from the fifteen-hundreds to the eighteen-hundreds. Her account is assembled from sharp examples. The “supposedly simple and natural gesture” of breastfeeding, for instance, came to be ruled by a “coarse moralism” in the eighteenth century, when the act “became the primary scene of sentimental motherhood: done out of a strictly defined maternal love” rather than as paid work.

It’s All River, by Carla Madeira, translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin (Liveright). This sultry, tortured tale follows Lucy, a sex worker, as she insinuates herself into the lives of a married couple. Lucy’s obsession begins when she meets the husband at her brothel and he turns her down (a first—Lucy is in high demand). From that point on, she takes increasingly extreme measures to seduce him. Meanwhile, the secrets of the couple’s marriage—including the husband’s violent jealousy—unfurl. Though Madeira’s writing is sometimes unnecessarily florid, she manages to weave together the perspectives of three compelling characters and, given the novel’s relative brevity, summon an impressive breadth of emotion.

The Shampoo Effect, by Jenny Jackson (Pamela Dorman). At the outset of this chatty novel, the protagonist, Caroline, who was recently ghosted by a thoughtless man, has had a story published in this magazine. In an uncharacteristically impulsive move, she decides to quit her job and write full time. Because her mother is a successful writer—and likely a narcissist—the decision is a complicated one. But soon Caroline finds herself at a seaside residency in Massachusetts, where she falls in love with a local. As she gets to know his childhood friends, whom Jackson renders vividly, further complications mount; one of the group, it emerges, is pregnant with his child. The novel is ultimately a study of the season in life when friendships are tested by growing families and by the realization of ambition.

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clearly an élite project. Monnet, Kennan, Schuman, Rostow, and McCloy were the opposite of populists. Some may even have thought of themselves, in Coudenhove-Kalergi's term, as "aristocrats of the spirit": highly educated internationalists, accustomed to believing that they knew what was best, who took it upon themselves to design a new world order. American Europe came from the top, and that is why populists in the United States, led by President Donald Trump, and many right-wing politicians in Europe can't stand the E.U.

Trump has described the E.U. as a "decaying" group of nations, many of which "will not be viable countries any longer." He has warned that "both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe," and his National Security Strategy darkly evokes "civilizational erasure." In a speech commemorating the D Day landings, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, proclaimed, "Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late?" He was speaking,

ing, of course, not of Nazis or Russians but of desperate refugees.

Some of Trump's chief backers among the tech oligarchs have joined MAGA's campaign against the E.U. Elon Musk proclaimed on X that "the EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries." He has also called the far-right Alternative für Deutschland Party "the last spark of hope" for Germany. The AfD, like other far-right parties in Europe, shares MAGA's hostility toward the E.U., and its rationale that an élite supranational project is destroying national identities.

The U.S. President's disdain for NATO matches his views on America's European allies. In 2024, Trump quoted an unnamed European leader who had, he said, asked him whether the U.S. would help to protect a NATO ally if it were invaded by the Russians, something the North Atlantic Treaty obliges every member to do. "No, I would not protect you," Trump had replied. "In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills." This amounted to more than disdain; it was a repudiation, from Washington, of a central premise of American Europe. Morgan identifies various reasons for

this turn of events. Elements of the American right have long had a soft spot for Russia. He mentions Pat Buchanan, who approvingly quoted Putin's claim that Russia was defending "traditional values" against a "so-called tolerance" that was "genderless and infertile." Then, there is the rise of China, which has shifted Washington's strategic focus away from Europe and diminished NATO's centrality to American concerns. But the main reason, according to Morgan, for the current Administration's war on American Europe lies in the domestic culture war. What's happening in the U.S. today, he argues, "is an intra-elite struggle waged by populist nationalists and technological accelerationists against a Brahmin Left that they seek to topple."

The principal targets, then, are less European institutions and NATO than the American élites associated with them. "Europe" serves as a shorthand for immigration, welfare states, and free-speech laws that seek to limit the power of new-media moguls to spread disinformation. Morgan calls the emerging MAGA ideology Civilizational America (again, his italics) and argues that it is poised to supplant American Europe. The "social-liberal values of American Europe," he writes, "will be jettisoned in a new Civilizational America." It's an odd phrase; "civilization" usually suggests a broad and pluriform cultural inheritance, whereas Morgan's Civilizational America combines Christian zeal, economic libertarianism, and ethnic chauvinism. Still, one can see what he means.

The visceral class resentment directed at highly educated élites, whether liberal or classically conservative, especially those who built the institutions of Pax Americana, is real. It also extends well beyond the United States. Right-wing populist parties in Europe—including the AfD, in Germany, the Party for Freedom, in the Netherlands, the National Rally, in France, and Reform U.K.—draw on much the same resentment. This affinity helps explain why J. D. Vance used the Munich Security Conference to lecture Europe's political establishment on the twin dangers of immigration and the "threat from within," then met privately with Alice Weidel, a leader of the AfD.

American culture wars are clearly part of the story. European right-wing populism, however, was gaining strength long

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before MAGA appeared. Since the nineteen-seventies, far-right parties have exploited anxieties about the arrival of former colonial subjects and migrant workers in countries such as France, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Richard Bessel, in his useful little book “Postwar Europe: A Very Short Introduction,” writes of Belgium’s most extreme Flemish-nationalist party: “By focusing during the late 1980s on immigration, the Vlaams Blok more than trebled its popular vote between the general elections of 1987 and 1991.” In Britain, as Bessel also reminds us, a Labour M.P. was unseated in 1964 by a right-wing Conservative amid a campaign notorious for the slogan “If you want a n—for a neighbor, vote Labour.”

The nationalist, anti-immigrant, blood-and-soil right returned to the mainstream of postwar European politics only in recent decades, as rabble-rousers on both sides of the Atlantic began spreading panic about a Muslim threat to what they like to call “Judeo-Christian civilization,” and about white Christians being “replaced” by sinister aliens whom liberal élites supposedly coddle to win votes.

Yet this conflict long predates Civilizational America or American Europe. Since the nineteenth century, the Western world has been divided between two rival conceptions of nationhood: the nation as a community of blood and faith, and the nation as a democratic state of citizens with equal rights. Liberals, from Thomas Jefferson to Aristide Briand, championed the separation of church and state. Right-wing nationalists, stronger in some countries than in others, detested liberalism, secularism, and racial equality. In France, the Dreyfus Affair, in the eighteen-nineties, brought the conflict into especially sharp relief. After Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Army officer, was falsely convicted of treason, the so-called Dreyfusards, secular republicans defending the civil rights of a French Jew, faced anti-Dreyfusards, who rallied around church and soil.

This schism cut right across the West. Indeed, many German nationalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries didn’t even consider themselves to be part of the West, which they associated with French republicanism, British liberalism, and American capitalism. Thomas Mann—who later changed his mind on such matters—believed that Germany in

the First World War was fighting for its unique national soul against a shallow materialist Western civilization corrupted by rationalism. The country that German and other European reactionaries associated most with that idea of the West was the United States. Germans have Kultur, the French have civilisation, and the rootless Americans have only cash. America’s relative openness to immigrants looked like decadence; cosmopolitanism and internationalism were objects of contempt. Now the roles have reversed. America First ideologues, backed by the government in Washington, condemn Europe in pretty much the same terms that European reactionaries once used against the United States. And the U.S. State Department is sponsoring European right-wingers who hate European integration with the largesse it once directed toward Europeans who were in favor of it.

So who represents the West today? Morgan’s Civilizational America? President Emmanuel Macron and others who regard Europe as the last bastion of liberal Western values? Or the right-wing populists in Europe and the U.S. who claim to be defending Judeo-Christian civilization against Islam and other alien creeds? Which vision is most likely to prevail? Morgan’s sympathies are clear. He is a liberal who despises MAGA. But his prognosis for Europe is bleak. “American Europe is over,” he writes. “If Europe is to flourish, it must come to terms with Civilizational America.”

Yes, but how? The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, spoke in Davos

in January about the end of Pax Americana, without once mentioning Donald Trump. His answer was that “middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” What this togetherness would entail was left unclear. Europe is already trying to reduce its dependence on the United States for its security. German arms-makers are expanding production, and defense bud-

begets are rising across the Continent, if unevenly. Yet Germany’s military buildup has stirred anxiety in France, while industrial rivalries have repeatedly frustrated joint projects. And, as Morgan observes, the United States remains so far ahead of Europe financially, militarily, and technologically that “any significant degree of strategic autonomy is clearly a distant and multigenerational goal.” The question is: How is Europe to protect its liberal institutions in the meantime?

If Civilizational America leaves NATO a hollow shell, the E.U., too, might not survive as a viable entity in an age of populist nationalism. Europe could revert to a collection of nation-states ruled by illiberal nationalist governments content to accommodate Civilizational America. Morgan describes this as the “Japanification” of Europe—“single party domination led by corrupted politicians” who will do whatever the U.S. wants in exchange for American protection.

This assumes, of course, that MAGA will continue to dominate American politics and that right-wing populists will gain power across much of Europe. But, even if MAGA does not outlast Trump, future Presidents are unlikely simply to restore the status quo ante and revive Pax Americana under the stewardship of a liberal élite. Nor would such a restoration be desirable. Europeans, and the Japanese, have good reason to reduce their dependence on the United States: the kind of subordination Morgan calls Japanification is humiliating in itself and, by relieving political leaders of responsibility for their own security, corrosive of liberal democracy.

Perhaps all is not lost. The Trump era may yet provoke a backlash like the one produced by Brexit. In 2016, Brexiteers imagined that other European countries would follow their example and cheerily recover absolute sovereignty as liberated nation-states. None did. Brexit instead became a warning against taking the same path. The spectacle of Trump’s America might do something similar. Even some of Trump’s European admirers, including the right-wing Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, have begun to distance themselves from him. Trump, in his bellicose and blundering way, may yet end up doing what liberals in the U.S. government once tried so hard to achieve—make Europeans think of themselves as Europeans first. ♦

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THE ART WORLD

CRAZY TALK

Pope.L's pleasing refusal to be interpreted.

BY ZACHARY FINE

We're familiar with the idea that art is a sublimated form of madness, but the artist William Pope.L liked to hint it was the other way around. His major works include "ATM Piece" (1997), in which he attached himself to the door of a Chase bank with a chain of sausage links while wearing only Timberland boots and a skirt made of dollar bills, and "Eating the Wall Street Journal" (2000), which involved him sitting on a raised toilet, eating the newspaper for multiple hours a day, for multiple days, with a garnish of ketchup and milk. Commentary on his work often describes it as a critique of race or capitalism but gingerly avoids the

more superficial observation that these behaviors have a resemblance to certain presentations of psychosis. Seeing Pope.L in the late seventies in his "Crawl" series, wearing a wool pinstriped suit, commuting on his hands and knees through the streets of Manhattan, most pedestrians likely didn't think, This is art, or This is social criticism, or This is an argument against bipedalism. They probably thought he'd lost his mind.

But was the performance deranged or were the circumstances? With city blocks burned to the ground, a shrinkage of affordable housing, and a spike in homelessness, the New York of the

late seventies was a city in distress. Pope.L saw many of his closest relations—including his aunt, his brother, and his father—reduced to living on the street. "When you have that many people in your family suffering from this thing, maybe you think it will happen to you. Like a disease," he said. In 1978, the year Pope.L started his "Crawl" performances, Ed Koch was sworn in as mayor, heralding an era of fiscal austerity. The slashing of public programs coincided with a rise in public performance art—Mierle Laderman Ukeles's "Touch Sanitation" (1979-80), Christy Rupp's "Rat Patrol" (1979), Jenny Holzer's "Inflammatory Essays" (1979-82)—but Pope.L struck a nerve. In a photograph from one of his crawls, in Times Square, a police officer reaches down and tries to get him to stand up. The officer, whose silver-and-gold watch flashes in the light, doesn't seem intent on helping Pope.L. He looks eager to protect other people from the sight of him.

A new exhibition at the Drawing Center, "Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L," shows how the artist extended his practice of principled unreason—or what his grandmother once described lovingly as his tendency for "foolishness" and "devilment"—into objects of two and three dimensions. There are many ways for an artist to double as a social critic; Pope.L's preferred mode was absurd jokes with elusive punch lines. Across more than fifty years of art-making, before his death, in 2023, he worked in familiar forms—drawing, painting, sculpture, video—but also made ample use of peanut butter, mayonnaise, hot dogs, ice cream, Spam, and Pop-Tarts. He studied with the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks at Rutgers, and because of that lineage he's often placed in the traditions of conceptual and performance art. But, if you look at the actual data on offer at the Drawing Center, you'll see that Pope.L's graphic work has a deep filiation with the art brut of Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet, who in nineteen-forties France collected graffiti, the work of children, and the art of psychiatric patients, wanted an art that was crude and "raw," untarnished by culture. The less skilled or tutored the style appeared, the better.

In Pope.L's "Harriet Tubman Spins

"White People Are Prawns at Sunset" (2010), part of the "Skin Set" series.

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POPE.L / COURTESY ESTATE OF POPE.L / GLADSTONE

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the Universe” (1998–2017), he puts the abolitionist on a plank of Sheetrock in the middle of a swirl of peanut butter. The piece feels like an update of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” if it were spun in a gyroscope and sprayed with acrylic paint. Tubman is all but indecipherable, roughly limned with white paint and covered by red, black, and yellow smudges and drips. The personal filaments of meaning for Pope.L here include the peanut butter itself—a cheap, calorie-dense food that was a staple of his upbringing—and the organizing force of Black women in his life, particularly his grandmother, Desma Lancaster. She is said to have shown quilts at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the nineteen-sixties, and was the first person to open Pope.L’s mind to art.

Successful artists are often excellent brand managers. They have coherent “periods” of activity, when one material or idea predominates, and provide neatly packaged interpretive frameworks for the reception (and collection) of their art. Part of what makes Pope.L so great, in my book, is that he couldn’t care less about crafting an image or a brand. His work thrives on the incoherence of his own restless curiosity.

You’ll see this across Pope.L’s corpus, but also within a given series, such as the “Skin Set” drawings, which he started in the nineties. Each drawing issues a sort of proclamation—sometimes using a combo of ballpoint pens, Wite-Out, Magic Markers, and coffee stains—that seems authored by a child or a wigged-out racist: “WHITE PEOPLE ARE PRAWNS AT SUNSET”; “RED PEOPLE FUCK THE OYSTERS OF AU-

THORS”; “BLACK PEOPLE ARE WHAT BLACK PEOPLE LACK”; “BLUE PEOPLE CANNOT CONCEIVE OF THEMSELVES.” “Nonsense” can mean language in which diction and syntax don’t conform to familiar patterns, but it’s also a term we use dismissively to establish that we know what sense is, to put ourselves high and dry on a plot of reason. “Oh, so you know what white people really are, if they’re not prawns?” the drawings taunt. “What are they?” Each one functions like a coarse grain of sand, eroding the certainties and stereotypes that harden racial discourse.

The most spectacular piece in the show is a multimedia environment called “Relational Painting a.k.a. If Black Is Beautiful . . .” (2003–22). There is a black tarpaulin on the wall that’s been assaulted with paint and more than a dozen lamps suspended above it, blasting the painting with light as if to interrogate it about the circumstances of its creation. Static plays through guitar amps on the ground, books are splayed open, images are tacked up on the wall, and bottles of fluid—water, Powerade, vague painterly liquids labelled “clear” or “gloss”—are scattered around. It’s a work that looks as though it’s vomited out its entire process. But unlike the preserved wreckage of, say, Francis Bacon’s studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery, in Dublin, the scene here doesn’t read as a re-creation of any real artistic procedure. There are no brushes, for instance, though there are traces of brushwork. The title is an allusion to Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics” (1998)—his famous idea being that art is a socially generative “state of encounter”—but the piece doesn’t allow

for any utopian socializing, either. What’s spilled out into the gallery is Pope.L’s sendup of what we expect from artists, a carefully managed depiction of the fantasy of creative mania.

I noticed that a few visitors missed the staircase down to the basement gallery of the Drawing Center, which has not only Pope.L’s “Pop Tart Frieze” (1998)—substituting marble or plaster with mass-produced pastry—but also a video work that’s a kind of manifesto in disguise: “Egg Eating Contest (Basement version)” (1990). Wearing a tattered black tunic and combat boots, Pope.L struts across a stage like a rooster and delivers a monologue as his alter ego Mr. Poots, talking like a child prophet who’s cracked under the pressure of history. The “problem”—he clicks his tongue—“with the white man is he’s not very nice. At nap time, he takes all the blankie. And at snack time he takes all the treats. And at recess he chases all the Black people and knocks them down. . . . And when the Black people get upset he says, ‘Shut up! Shut up! I am your salvation!’” The artist adopts a schizoid persona, with multiple voices flowing out of him, and swerves between lucid social criticism—about the history of slavery or of higher education—and total gibberish. Like Pope.L, who called himself “the friendliest Black artist in America,” Mr. Poots can seem harmless or scatterbrained, but he has a strict agenda that loops between tragedy and farce. Next to Mr. Poots is a colossal drawing of a penis. In the middle of the performance, he marches over and pulls it down, only to reveal another drawing of a penis underneath. This one is wearing a bow tie. ♦

THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2026 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

VOLUME CII, NO. 24, August 17, 2026. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for five planned combined issues, as indicated on the issue’s cover, and other combined or extra issues) by Condé Nast, a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Doug Grinspan, chief business officer; Beth Lasko, chief business officer; Lauren Kamen Macri, vice-president of sales; Westcott Rochette, senior vice-president of finance; Fabio B. Bertoni, general counsel. Condé Nast Global: Roger Lynch, chief executive officer; Elizabeth Herbst-Brady, chief revenue officer; Anna Wintour, chief content officer; Nick Hotchkis, chief financial officer; Stan Duncan, chief people officer; Danielle Carrig, chief corporate affairs and communications officer; Yasanth Williams, chief product and technology officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001.

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THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 17, 2026 69

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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 Benjamin Schwartz, must be received by Sunday, August 16th. The finalists in the August 3rd contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week's contest, in the September 7th issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK'S CONTEST

THE FINALISTS

"Let's take them all except one and make up a story." William Sarokin, Sandia Park, N.M.

"Now this is the full Excalibur set, with chef, carving, bread, fillet, paring, and steak knives." Simon Rakoff, Toronto, Ont.

"Best case, you get a kingdom. Worst case, you get a free sword." Etan Berkowitz, Seattle, Wash.

THE WINNING CAPTION

"To be fair, you don't like anything." Ryan Ulrich, North Arlington, N.J.

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THE NEW YORKER

Intelligent political conversation.

(For once.)

Tune in three times a week as The New Yorker's writers and editors unpack the latest news from Washington—and what it means for the country.

Scan to listen.

To find all of The New Yorker's podcasts, visit newyorker.com/podcasts.

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PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

THE CROSSWORD

A moderately challenging puzzle.

BY ERIK AGARD

ACROSS

• 1 Royals' headwear?
• 5 Hindu goddess of prosperity
• 12 "Giving You the Best That I Got" singer Baker
• 14 Narrow margin in a basketball game
• 16 Nascar driver Reddick
• 17 Accept
• 18 Domain for the Olivier Awards
• 20 "Sure, no ___!"
• 22 "Well, ___ here!"
• 23 Name that's one letter short of a direction
• 26 Friction reducer
• 27 Billion-year period
• 28 July 7th observance in Tanzania and Kenya that's named for "seven seven" in Swahili
• 31 Puritanical
• 32 Sides of an aside?
• 33 Participated in a court-accompaniment program, say
• 34 Weapon of choice for Katniss Everdeen
• 35 "Incidentally . . ." for short
• 38 Got older
• 39 Palindromic texting format
• 40 "Pick me! Pick me!"
• 42 Rein in
• 43 Music medium
• 44 Stew whose name is French for "smothered"
• 49 Tool with bits
• 50 Take a file off site?
• 51 Bladesmith's material
• 52 "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely ___": "As You Like It"
• 53 Circular current

DOWN

• 1 Ranch grazers
• 2 "Moving right along . . ."
• 3 Add insult to injury
• 4 T-bone or porterhouse
• 5 Be vanquished
• 6 Santa ___ winds
• 7 Critically important
• 8 Act like a mole?
• 9 Tool for digging furrows
• 10 Like glasses or trust, at times
• 11 Meddles
• 13 Like a coöperative gallery
• 15 "Deal with it!"
• 19 Butts
• 21 "Irreplaceable" singer, to fans
• 23 Posters on the subreddit r/TalesFromYourServer
• 24 Purim heroine
• 25 Spot for action at Sotheby's or Christie's
• 29 Type of chicken in the name of a boxing weight class
• 30 Etymological units to which prefixes and suffixes are attached
• 31 Place to toss things

• 32 Dominant type in the bedroom

• 33 Did a ballroom dance

• 34 Stat estimated by a Breathalyzer: Abbr.
• 35 Full ___ (description from a sommelier)
• 36 Worked hard
• 37 A hundred per cent
• 41 Short-story author Bret
• 43 Government officers, for short
• 45 "Te debo ___" ("I owe you one")
• 46 Wing it?
• 47 Opponent
• 48 Place for a catchy "worm"

Solution to the previous puzzle:

Find more puzzles and this week's solution at newyorker.com/crossword

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THE NEW YORKER

The fiction and poetry

of the century.

Celebrate the magazine's first hundred years with two anthologies of remarkable short stories and verse, selected by the fiction and poetry editors, including works by J. D. Salinger, Shirley Jackson, Vladimir Nabokov, Jamaica Kincaid, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, W. S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Sandra Cisneros, and more.

Scan to order.

store.newyorker.com

Alfred A. Knopf

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Three Figures (Sailboat), 2026, 40 x 30 inches, oil on canvas. © 2026 Mitchell Johnson.

Mitchell Johnson

Twenty-One Years in Truro

Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Cape Cod / September 8–20, 2026 Private preview by appointment on September 6 and 7

Digital catalog by request: mitchell.catalog@gmail.com

Follow on Instagram: @mitchell_johnson_artist

Exhibition info: www.mitchelljohnson.com

Notecards available at Amazon.

制度与权力批判深度研判：The New Yorker (2026-08-17)

▌ 本日全报思想与文化深思雷达 (Intellectual & Cultural Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的报道后，以下 3 个具体议题在思想史、文化政治与制度伦理层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 司法中立性的修辞掩护与权力博弈 [F1_9, F1_26]

   • 事件简述：玛格丽特·塔尔博特探讨了首席大法官罗伯茨的“幻想”，分析其在维持法院中立形象的同时，如何处理极化政治下的司法裁决。
   • 思想文化深思切入点：法治（Rule of Law）作为一种形式正义如何被用作掩盖实质权力转移的修辞工具；司法中立性在极化政治中的“表演性”特征。

2. 战争状态下个体的制度性“抹除” [F1_21 🔍]

   • 事件简述：约书亚·亚法在《新古拉格》中记录了乌克兰医护人员在俄罗斯监狱（如SIZO-1）中遭受虐待及被判重刑的惨状。
   • 思想文化深思切入点：例外状态（State of Exception）下法律的失效与生物政治（Biopolitics）的极端形式——将人类还原为可随意处置的“裸命”（Bare Life）。

3. 女性生殖解剖术语的误用与权力共谋 [F2_34-F2_37]

   • 事件简述：读者来信批评杂志在报道中将“阴道”误用为整个女性生殖区域的统称，认为这种语言上的不精确是对女性身体核心地带的轻视与父权制共谋。
   • 思想文化深思切入点：语言作为权力结构的微观映射；命名权如何决定认知边界，以及医学话语如何通过“简化”实现对身体的客体化。

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▌ 精选核心专题深度思想论证 (In-Depth Dialectical Monograph)

专题一：司法中立性的修辞掩护与制度合法性危机

在玛格丽特·塔尔博特对罗伯茨法院的剖析中 [F1_9 🔍]，我们触及了现代法治国家最核心的张力：司法机关如何在其宣称的“中立”与实际的“意识形态倾向”之间维持一种脆弱的平衡。首席大法官罗伯茨坚称法院是中立之地，但这种中立在现实中被质疑为一种精巧的掩护——通过在具体程序上表现出谨慎，来掩盖法院整体向右倾斜的结构性位移 [F1_9, F1_26]。

这种权力运作机制实际上是一种“修辞性的中立”。在法律话语中，通过对程序细节的微操，法院将政治斗争转化为程序争议。这种去政治化的处理方式，恰恰是权力最高明的掩盖手段。它让观察者误以为司法是在进行纯粹的法律推演，而忽略了裁决背后的价值预设已经发生了偏移。

这种现象与阿甘本（Giorgio Agamben）关于“例外状态”的论述形成了互文。在俄罗斯SIZO-1监狱中，乌克兰个体的遭遇 [F1_21 🔍] 是法律被彻底废除的极端状态；而在最高法院的博弈中，法律并未消失，而是被转化为一种“选择性执行”的工具。两者在本质上具有某种同构性：前者是通过暴力直接将人还原为“裸命”，后者则是通过法律程序的精细化操作，将公民的权利置于一种随时可被撤销的、不确定的法律悬置状态中。

当代极化政治给古典法哲学带来了严峻挑战：当司法机构不再被视为超越党派的仲裁者，而成为权力博弈的最后一道防线时，“中立”本身就成了一种意识形态。罗伯茨的“幻想”在于他认为可以通过维持形式上的中立来拯救制度的合法性，但现实证明，当实质正义被程序正义彻底替代，司法中立将沦为一种掩护权力转移的精致面具。

专题二：语言的微观权力与身体的客体化

在关于女性生殖解剖术语误用的读者来信中 [F2_34-F2_37]，一个看似简单的词汇错误被提升到了权力批判的高度。作者指出，将“阴道”这一具体部件误用为整个生殖区域的统称，并非单纯的医学常识缺失，而是一种深层的文化轻视。这种语言上的“简化”实际上是在重复一种父权制的认知逻辑：将女性身体还原为满足男性功能需求的“管道”，而抹除了阴蒂等核心感官地带的存在 [F2_36, F2_37]。

从认识论角度看，这揭示了语言如何作为权力结构的微观映射。命名权决定了认知边界。当主流出版物（即使是如《纽约客》般具有影响力的媒体）在标题和正文中重复这种误称时，它实际上在强化一种制度性的忽视。这种忽视将女性身体客体化，使其在医学和文化话语中变得“不可见”或“被误认”。

这种现象体现了福柯（Michel Foucault）所论述的“权力-知识”网络。医学话语通过定义什么是“正确的”或“通用的”术语，实现了对身体的微观治理。当女性被要求在“弗洛伊德父亲”的谴责中扮演协作角色，拒绝否认自身核心地带时 [F2_37 🔍]，这种语言上的反抗实际上是对身体主权的重新夺回。

因此，这场关于“正确名称”的争论，本质上是一场关于认知正义的斗争。它提醒我们，任何形式的“简化”或“概括”在涉及权力不对等的关系时，都可能成为一种隐形的压迫工具。语言的精确性在此不再仅仅是学术要求，而是一种政治要求——要求将被抹除的身体经验重新纳入可见的知识体系之中。

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▌ 面向学者的开放性思想追问与研究路标 (Open Horizons for Scholarly Inquiry)

1. 【关于司法合法性的追问】：在极化政治环境下，司法机构是否还可能存在一种“非表演性”的中立？如果中立被证明是不可行的，那么一种公开承认其价值立场但保持程序透明的“坦诚司法”是否能成为替代方案？
2. 【关于语言与身体认知的追问】：从对女性生殖术语误用的批判 [F2_34 🔍] 出发，我们可以探讨：在医学与法律话语中，哪些“习惯性的简化”实际上在潜移默化地执行着权力对身体的客体化？这种微观语言权力如何与宏观的制度压迫形成共振？
3. 【关于例外状态的比较研究】：对比俄罗斯监狱中的物理性抹除 [F1_21 🔍] 与西方司法体系中的程序性悬置，探讨现代国家在不同政治光谱下如何通过“法律的失效”或“法律的滥用”来实现对个体的控制。

理性与情感辩证深度研判：The New Yorker (2026-08-17)

▌ 本日全报生活世界痛感与情感政治深思雷达 (Lifeworld & Affective Significance Radar)

在系统通盘梳理本期报纸所涉及的报道后，以下 3 个具体事件在生活世界痛感、情感政治动员与制度理性冲突层面最值得学者进一步深思：

1. 【俄罗斯监狱体系中的人权危机】 [F1_21 🔍]

   • 事件简述：约书亚·亚法在《新古拉格》中记录了俄罗斯监狱（如 SIZO-1）中的生存实相，涉及囚犯的处境与地缘政治背景下的囚犯交换逻辑。
   • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：国家机器将个体简化为“交换筹码”的制度理性，与个体在极端禁锢中承受肉体痛感与人格剥夺的生存实相之间的残酷对立。

2. 【女性生殖解剖术语的权力话语争夺】 [F2_34-F2_37]

   • 事件简述：读者在信件中批评媒体与医生误用“阴道”指代整个外阴区域，认为这种术语上的模糊强化了对女性性核心（如阴蒂）的轻视。
   • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：医学命名权的制度惯性如何通过“词语的错误”在潜意识中完成对女性身体的去中心化，以及个体通过精准命名夺回身体主权的认知觉醒。

3. 【语言死亡的隐喻与现实之辨】 [F2_39 🔍]

   • 事件简述：针对《如何杀死一种语言》的评论，指出将语言的“死亡”误认为字面意义上的生物学死亡，而非隐喻性的消亡。
   • 情感政治与伦理深思切入点：认知层面对“死亡”这一强情感词汇的误读，如何导致思维混乱，以及在文化研究中区分“隐喻现实”与“物理现实”的认识论必要性。

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▌ 精选核心专题理性与情感辩证论证 (The Dialectic of Logos and Pathos Monograph)

专题一：【从“筹码”到“肉身”：俄罗斯监狱体系中制度冷漠与个体尊严的辩证撕裂】

在俄罗斯 SIZO-1 监狱的运作机制中，存在着一套极其冰冷的制度理性（Institutional Logos）。在这种逻辑下，囚犯在某种程度上被重新定义为一种地缘政治的“资产”或“筹码” [F1_21 🔍]。监狱的管理、审判以及最终通过巴士进行的囚犯交换流程，本质上是一场关于人口数量与政治交换比的精密计算。在这种技术官僚式的治理中，个体的痛苦与绝望被过滤掉，只剩下“交换名单”上的一个名字。

然而，生活世界的真实痛感（Living Lifeworld Pathos）在这样的禁锢中依然倔强地存在。约书亚·亚法在《新古拉格》中记录的真实处境 [F1_21 🔍]，将这种被制度抹除的“肉身性”重新推向了前台。这种痛感不仅是生理上的折磨，更是一种深层的、被国家机器彻底客体化的绝望感。在这种极端环境下，个体的生存状态不再仅仅是法律上的被告，而是一种通过肉身承受来揭示制度暴力的伦理实相。

这里存在着一个残酷的辩证摩擦：制度理性试图通过“禁锢”和“程序化”来消灭个体的能动性，但正是这种极端的压制，反而凸显了人类尊严在绝境中的脆弱与光辉。对比报纸中的话语温度，我们可以发现一种极端的反差：官方的交换流程是典型的“去情感化冷色调”，强调的是结果的达成；而记录者捕捉的是“热色调”的血泪与绝望。这种温度差揭示了当代地缘政治冲突中一种深刻的异化：当人类被简化为交换筹码时，制度理性在走向极端时，已然演变为一种缺乏伦理底线的技术暴力。

专题二：【命名权的政治学：医学术语误用与女性身体主权的认知觉醒】

在医学与大众传媒的话语体系中，存在着一种基于习惯的制度理性（Institutional Logos）。在这种逻辑下，将“阴道”这一具体器官的名称泛化为指代整个女性生殖区域 [F2_35, F2_36]，被视为一种无需质疑的语言惯例。然而，这种看似中性的“术语简化”，在实际操作中却产生了一种认知上的抹除效应。

读者在信件中尖锐地指出，这种误称并非简单的语言失误，而是一种权力话语的体现 [F2_34-F2_37]。当阴蒂等核心地带在语言中被“丢失”或被“阴道”这一管道概念所覆盖时，女性身体的性核心在认知层面被去中心化了。这种“词语的错误”实际上在潜意识中强化了对女性身体的轻视，使女性在面对自身生物学特性时，不得不扮演一种“孝顺的协作角色”，认同那种由父权制医学定义的、不完整的身体图景 [F2_37 🔍]。

这里发生的是一次从 Pathos（身体的真实感受）向 Logos（精准的语言定义）的夺回战争。个体通过要求“称呼她的正确名称” [F2_34 🔍]，试图将身体的真实结构从模糊的制度话语中剥离出来。这种对精准命名的追求，本质上是对身体主权的认知觉醒。它揭示了语言如何作为一种微观权力工具，在不经意间完成对个体的定义与限制。当个体拒绝接受错误的命名时，他们实际上是在挑战医学霸权的认知惯性，试图重建一套基于真实肉身经验而非制度习惯的身体叙事。

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▌ 面向学者的伦理与社会心理开放性追问与研究路标 (Open Horizons for Ethical & Sociological Inquiry)

1. 【关于“命名权”与身体政治的追问】：探讨在专业话语（医学、法律）的霸权下，个体如何通过“精准命名”来对抗制度性的认知抹除，以及这种语言层面的觉醒如何转化为实际的身体主权夺回？
2. 【关于“筹码化”个体的伦理研究】：在现代地缘政治的“囚犯交换”逻辑中，当个体被制度化地定义为“资产”时，国际人权法如何重新定义“人的尊严”以对抗这种技术官僚式的交换理性？
3. 【关于隐喻与现实的认知边界研究】：从对“语言死亡”的误读 [F2_39 🔍] 出发，研究在当代公共讨论中，强情感隐喻如何被误认为物理现实，以及这种认知偏差如何影响社会对文化消亡的危机感构建？