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  • A Mexican Couple in California Plans to Self-Deport—and Leave Their Kids Behind

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    In 1995, after a couple of years in Mexico, her mother heard that one of Rosalinda’s brothers was getting into trouble in the States and decided that she needed to live closer to him. Rosalinda wanted to stay, but her mother ignored her pleas, saying, “Pack your bag, because tomorrow we’re leaving early.” It took them three attempts before they were able to sneak across the border, with the help of smugglers, who drove them to San Bernardino. During the ride, one of the men groped Rosalinda, who was fourteen. “There was nothing I could do—I couldn’t scream or anything,” Rosalinda said, wiping away tears. “I just had to stay silent. After that, I told my mother, ‘You do whatever you want, but I am _never_crossing again. That’s it, I’m finished.’ ” Two years later, as a high schooler in San Bernardino, she met Manuel and became pregnant with José.

    As a couple, Rosalinda and Manuel had sometimes contemplated returning to Mexico. But only once, more than fifteen years ago, did they come close, after a particularly humiliating experience of trying to sign up their young children for Medicaid. Rosalinda told me, “The woman who worked there made me feel so bad that I came back sobbing, and I said, ‘I don’t want to live in this country anymore.’ ” But when she and Manuel asked José, who was twelve at the time, if he wanted to move to Mexico, he begged them to keep the family in America. “And they respected my wishes,” José told me, recalling the conversation. “They listened.”

    About half of the Garcías’ extended family now lived in Southern California. The other half, in Mexico, Rosalinda knew largely by name only. Until recently, she and her husband had a vibrant social life in San Bernardino. For many years, she regularly attended an evangelical church, and she still went to exercise classes with friends she’d made there. Manuel, for all his shyness, had been a regular on a recreational baseball team.

    Rosalinda hadn’t forgotten her youthful promise to never cross the border again. It felt surreal to be returning to Mexico, which, after her three decades in America, seemed like a construction of her imagination. “We are afraid, because we’re moving to a place that we don’t remember,” she told me, sighing. “I guess that’s just how it goes.”

    On weekends, the family liked to unwind at a nearby R.V. park and private campground where they had been members for years. There were campsites for tents and trailers, rental cabins, barbecue grills, two lakes, and three swimming pools. It had long been Rosalinda’s favorite place, and now it had the additional appeal of being private property. “It’s all fenced in, so it’s one of the few places outdoors where ICE can’t just show up,” José explained. Last spring, when the raids in San Bernardino hit their peak, Rosalinda camped there for two weeks. “I slept in a tent close to the showers so that I would be more comfortable,” she said.

    One Saturday afternoon, Rosalinda, Ana, José, Irene, and I piled into their black Tahoe and drove to the campground. In the car, Rosalinda wanted me to listen to one of her favorite norteños—a type of Mexican folk song that heavily features the accordion. “It’s the one I’m going to listen to when I leave the United States,” she explained. The song was called “El Mojado Acaudalado,” or “The Wealthy Wetback,” reclaiming a slur that dates from the early twentieth century and refers to Mexican immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally by crossing the Rio Grande. The song’s narrator is a migrant who has saved up money while working in the U.S. and is finally returning to his homeland. Rosalinda sang along to every word:

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    Jordan Salama

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  • Peter Navarro, Trump’s Ultimate Yes-Man

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    That phrase is at the heart of the free-trade lexicon. Free trade in goods or services, unencumbered by tariffs or other barriers, is likely to lead to greater total output than if there had been no trade. Specialization makes economic sense: not every country should grow its own peppers. (Years ago, Navarro described this as “one of the deepest truths in all of economics.” He now refers to “so-called gains from trade.”)

    In Cambridge, Navarro needed to produce a dissertation about the economics of corporate charitable giving. Dubin needed to pay his rent. (“I was a poor student, and he was rehabbing a triplex in Central Square.”) Money changed hands. “He told me the direction he wanted to go, and I helped him get there, theoretically and empirically,” Dubin said. “I might have used his data to set up models and get him going. And then he took over at some point and it became his own.” Dubin, speaking half seriously, described this as “one of my first consulting experiences.” He observed that “most people, at that level, would not pay someone else to help them.” But Navarro saw nothing improper in the exchange, and neither did Dubin.

    The two men become close friends. “We went to the Cape together,” Dubin said. “We double-dated.” They also co-wrote several papers. Dubin remembers that Navarro, who was “very into his health, into his body,” was an enthusiast of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a gooey, unregulated byproduct of the paper industry that purportedly soothes muscle strains. According to Dubin, Navarro wasn’t immune to the substance’s notorious side effect: “He reeked of garlic because of it.” (Navarro told me that, today, he doesn’t “drink, smoke pot, use any hard drugs or even prescription medicines,” adding, “Just not my thing. Live clean or die.”)

    Navarro’s dissertation, submitted in 1986, doesn’t acknowledge Dubin’s contributions. According to every economist I asked, that omission constitutes an academic violation. Harry Holzer, a public-policy professor at Georgetown, told me that, if someone “is actually developing his models for him, I think it crosses a boundary.” Holzer, who served as the chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Clinton Administration, is a former Harvard acquaintance of Navarro’s. “At a minimum, a footnote acknowledging a person’s input is appropriate,” Holzer said.

    Lawrence Goulder, the sole surviving member of Navarro’s dissertation committee, agrees. If Navarro received substantial help, he told me, then some recognition of that would have been “expected,” and its absence was “inappropriate.” (Goulder, who’s now at Stanford, noted that, at Harvard, Navarro had taught him to windsurf.)

    Navarro, asked if he’d engaged in an academic deceit, said, of Dubin, “I don’t recall him providing any substantive assistance on my dissertation.” Navarro also pointed to other publications in which he had thanked Dubin for his help.

    Later in life, Peter Navarro introduced readers of his books to a friend named Ron Vara. According to “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks,” a 2001 book of financial advice that urged retail investors to be alert to world events, Vara had been the captain of a reserve unit at the time of the Gulf War. He now lived on a houseboat in Miami and was known as the Dark Prince of Disaster, for making “macroplays”—trades taking nimble advantage of sudden onsets of human misery. Vara had macroplayed Hurricane Andrew and a Taiwanese earthquake. In 1986, when Vara was a “struggling doctoral student in economics at Harvard,” he’d apparently been clairvoyant: two days before the Chernobyl disaster, he’d shorted companies invested in nuclear energy.

    Vara appears in several other Navarro books, including “Death by China,” where he’s quoted as saying, “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon, and a cell phone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.” Vara was also credited as the executive producer (and the musical director) of the videos that Navarro showed to his Rising China class at U.C. Irvine.

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    Ian Parker

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  • How Willie Nelson Sees America

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    “That’s his living room,” Nelson’s lighting director, Budrock Prewitt, told me on the road to Camden. He meant the stage—specifically, a twelve-by-thirty-two-foot maroon rug that Nelson’s crew rolls out at each venue before putting every instrument, amp, and monitor in the same spot as always. Whenever Nelson needs to replace the bus, a company that he’s been working with for decades re-creates the same interior in the next one, as precisely as possible. And Nelson keeps his buses leased year-round, whether they’re in use or not. “They park up and wait for us to come back,” his production manager, Alex Blagg, told me. “My bunk is my bunk.”

    “We only go skating because we’re too embarrassed to wear our Christmas sweaters on land.”

    Cartoon by Victoria Roberts

    Nelson’s band does not have its own name. On ticket stubs and marquees, they’re simply Family, as in “Willie Nelson and Family.” For fifty years, Nelson’s sister Bobbie anchored the group from behind a grand piano. She and Willie had a pact: they’d play to the end of the road. When Nelson’s drummer, Paul English, died, he was replaced by his brother, Billy. Jody Payne was Nelson’s longtime guitar player; now his son Waylon plays in the band. Bee Spears started on bass at nineteen and stayed until his death, at sixty-two. Mickey Raphael, who joined the band at twenty-one, is now seventy-four.

    Nelson’s road crew is family, too. His tour manager, John Selman, is the son of Wally Selman, who ran the Texas Opry House; he was hired twenty years ago, straight out of college. Prewitt and Larry Gorham, a Hells Angel who handles security, have been with Nelson since the seventies. So has Nelson’s manager, Mark Rothbaum. Rothbaum’s parents fled Poland in 1937; his mother died when he was thirteen. He stopped caring about school. “I was just fucking angry,” Rothbaum told me. He got a job with a business manager in Manhattan. One day, he saw Nelson behind a glass partition at his office, on West Fifty-seventh Street. “He looked like Jesus Christ,” Rothbaum recalled. “He was glowing.” Rothbaum worked his way into the circle. “I adopted them. But I had to do it. I had to become useful.” He and Nelson have never had a contract. “You couldn’t put a piece of paper between us,” he says.

    Family members call this Willie World, and it, too, is elastic. When the steel player Jimmy Day drank his way out of it, Nelson didn’t replace him. The steel parts simply disappeared. When Spears went on tour with Guy Clark, Nelson brought in Chris Ethridge, of the Flying Burrito Brothers, to play bass—and, when Spears called and asked to come home, Nelson welcomed him back and kept Ethridge on. For a while, he toured with two bassists and two drummers: a full-tilt-boogie band captured on “Willie and Family Live,” from 1978. At around the same time, Leon Russell joined them on piano, bringing along his saxophone player and the great Nigerian percussionist Ambrose Campbell. When Grady Martin, the top session player in Nashville, retired from studio recording, he went on the road, too, upping the number of people onstage to eleven. “Willie ran a refugee camp, to some extent,” Steve Earle told me.

    Bee Spears died in 2011, Jody Payne in 2013, Paul English in 2020, and Bobbie Nelson in 2022. “The biggest change was Sister Bobbie,” Kevin Smith, who now plays bass, told me. Bobbie outlined the chord structure of every song. After her death, Smith was shocked at how little sound there was onstage. These days, Nelson and Raphael take all the solos. Sets are shorter. Lukas sits in when he’s not out touring on his own; his brother Micah, who plays guitar with Neil Young, joins when he can. But Nelson’s sound has been stripped to its essence. “It’s more like spoken word now,” Raphael said. “Like poetry with a rhythm section.”

    Nelson goes from number to number with almost no patter—an approach he learned from the great Texas bandleader Bob Wills, who kept audiences on the dance floor for hours. In Camden, he got through twenty-four songs in sixty-five minutes, pausing only to wipe his brow with a washcloth or to sip from a Willie’s Remedy mug full of warm tea. The set didn’t feel hurried—on “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Nelson gave the song’s ironies and regrets space to sink in—but the crew kept an eye on the clock. After Camden and Holmdel, Nelson was scheduled to play Maryland, Indiana, Wisconsin, and, finally, Farm Aid, at the University of Minnesota: six shows in eight days at the end of eight months on the road. “He just keeps going and going,” Annie said. “He’s Benjamin Buttoning me.”

    I ran into Annie in Camden, doing her laundry backstage by the catering station. She and Nelson met in the eighties, on the set of a remake of “Stagecoach.” Annie is two decades younger than Willie. She is sharp, protective, and unflappable, with a wide smile and long, curly hair that she has allowed to go gray. She told me that the build-out for Farm Aid was supposed to have started that day in Minneapolis. CNN was planning a live telecast. But Teamsters Local 320—made up of custodians, groundskeepers, and food-service workers at the university—had chosen that moment to go on strike. Members of IATSE, the stagehands’ union, would not cross the picket line, and neither would Nelson. Cancelling the concert, though, would break faith with the people Farm Aid was meant to serve. “It’s not great for us,” Annie said. “But who really suffers? The farmers. This year of all years.”

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    Alex Abramovich

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  • Why Millennials Love Prenups

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    All founders have an origin story involving some intractable problem that they simply could not accept. For Rodgers, it was paper. Her mother was a matrimonial attorney, and Rodgers, as part of her childhood chores, organized stacks and stacks of financial-disclosure documents, including for couples getting prenups. There had to be a better way, she would later say. While attending Suffolk University Law School, she took a class called Lawyers and Smart Machines, on how to automate certain legal processes. “They taught us coding, which I did not excel in,” she admitted. That’s where Jaffe, an engineer, later came in, though the two eventually had their own split. (Rodgers preferred not to go into detail.)

    Rodgers began developing her platform a few years after graduating from law school, just before her own wedding, to another lawyer. “We were the first couple to use HelloPrenup,” she said. “We were the test case.” She and her husband had met on Match.com—“old school,” she noted—and got married in 2019, in Newport, Rhode Island, at the picturesque Castle Hill Inn, overlooking Narragansett Bay. “Oh, my God, I had the best wedding. I had the best wedding,” she said.

    Surveying the scene at Sadelle’s, we guessed where Affleck and Lopez might have sat. “It’s so crowded,” Rodgers observed. “Maybe in the back somewhere.” We started discussing the end of her own marriage. She and her husband had a baby in 2020, and the onset of the pandemic left them without family help. “He’s a patent litigator. He was very busy. I was working as an attorney, plus trying to build this business,” she said. “It was just, like, pressure on pressure on pressure.” They divorced in 2022.

    But the COVID lockdown also primed HelloPrenup for success. No one wanted to visit a lawyer’s office. “Everything was becoming digitized in a really rapid way,” Rodgers said. By early 2021, roughly two and a half million women had left the labor force, in what became known as a she-cession. An article on HelloPrenup’s site sounded off: “Who was expected to stay home, watch the kids, become a pseudo-teacher, take care of household responsibilities and manage to still be at their work-from-home desk eight hours a day? Women.” Amid the ashes of girlboss feminism, Rodgers saw opportunity. “Prenups can solve for the motherhood penalty, because you can have an equalization clause,” she told me, explaining that a greater share of assets could compensate for a stay-at-home parent’s lost earning potential.

    Rodgers refers to prenups as “the modern vow,” as they can govern finances and other major life decisions during marriage. Couples today want those choices to be made in the spirit of equality and backed by a contract. “They ask, ‘Are our in-laws going to move in? Are we going to buy a house or do the FIRE method and travel the world?’ ” FIRE is a life style popular with millennials and Gen Z marked by extreme saving and aggressive investment; it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.” An elder millennial, I had to look it up.

    In February of 1990, it was reported that Donald and Ivana Trump were divorcing, after thirteen years of marriage. The news dominated the headlines. “They ran it before the story out of South Africa,” one outraged New Yorker told a local TV crew, referring to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison that week. People immediately began speculating about the spoils. “It’s not just a marriage on the line. It’s Donald Trump’s reputation as a dealmaker,” the journalist Richard Roth declared on CBS News. The couple had a prenup—and three “postnups”—allegedly granting Ivana around twenty million dollars, a fraction of Trump’s purported five-billion-dollar fortune. “IVANA BETTER DEAL,” read the cover of the Daily News. In a skit on “Saturday Night Live,” Jan Hooks, playing Ivana, balks at the prenup: “That contract is invalid. You have a mistress, Donald.” (There were rumors that Trump had been unfaithful with a Southern beauty queen named Marla Maples.) Phil Hartman, playing Trump, flips through the pages of the contract before saying, “According to Section 5, Paragraph 2, I’m allowed to have mistresses provided they are younger than you.”

    The prenup largely held. Ivana got a measly fourteen million, a mansion in Greenwich, an apartment in Trump Plaza, and the use of Mar-a-Lago for one month a year. But it was understandable that the public thought that Trump’s entire empire might be at stake. In the eighties, prenups were usually in the news for getting tossed out. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Steven Spielberg was ordered to pay his ex-wife, the actress Amy Irving, a hundred million dollars after a judge voided their prenup, which had allegedly been scrawled on a scrap of paper. (Irving conveyed through a representative that “there was no prenup ever even discussed.”)

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    Jennifer Wilson

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  • Dyslexia and the Reading Wars

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    Sometimes the axon highways almost seem to pave themselves. My daughter, Laura, began to read all of a sudden, the summer before kindergarten. (“It’s hard to believe that ‘knock’ starts with ‘k,’ ” she said, while following along as I read her a bedtime story about Amanda Pig.) But even she didn’t become a reader entirely on her own. All children have to learn the relationships between letters and meaningful sounds. For some it’s harder than for others. “Maybe instead of four lanes you have two,” Gaab said, “or instead of a smooth surface you have a bumpy one.” Caroline had a large vocabulary, and she was read to as often as Laura was, both at home and at school, and there were just as many colorful plastic alphabet magnets stuck to the refrigerator in her kitchen. But she needed teachers who understood that literacy doesn’t happen naturally, especially for children with dyslexia.

    A decade ago, Emily Hanford, a senior correspondent at American Public Media, was researching a story about college-level remedial-reading classes. She became interested in dyslexia and then in literacy generally, and in 2022 she produced an immensely influential podcast series, “Sold a Story,” about reading instruction in American schools. The central argument is that teachers all over the country employ instructional methods and materials that were proved, long ago, to be not just ineffective but counterproductive. Such methods, Hanford demonstrated, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how children learn to read. They direct beginning readers to look for hints in illustrations and to make deductions based on context, word length, plot, and other cues, with only incidental reliance on the sounds represented by letters. The idea is that, as children become adept at deduction, the mechanical side will, in effect, take care of itself.

    Skilled reading has many elements. A popular metaphor is the “reading rope,” created by the psychologist Hollis Scarborough in 2001. It depicts eight “strands,” which readers weave together as they become proficient. The strands include not just an understanding of the sounds represented by letters and combinations of letters but also such elements of language comprehension as vocabulary, grammar, reasoning, and background knowledge. All the strands are necessary. In Hanford’s view, the ones related to word recognition, including phonological awareness and decoding, have often been neglected. That harms many students and is a disaster for children with dyslexia.

    Antipathy to phonetic decoding is sometimes traced to the nineteenth-century American educator Horace Mann, who described the letters of the alphabet as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” and argued in favor of teaching children to recognize words as discrete units. A later, more powerful influence was Marie Clay, a teacher and researcher in New Zealand, who studied schoolchildren learning to read and concluded, in the nineteen-sixties, that understanding the relationships between letters and sounds wasn’t essential. Hanford, in the second episode of “Sold a Story,” says, “Her basic idea was that good readers are good problem solvers. They’re like detectives, searching for clues.” The best clues, Clay reasoned, were things like context and sentence structure. Frank Smith, a British psycholinguist, came to the same conclusion. He argued that, to a good reader, a printed word was like an ideogram. “The worst readers are those who try to sound out unfamiliar words according to the rules of phonics,” he wrote, in 1992.

    There have always been opposing voices. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” a brutal indictment of “whole word” methods. “If they had their way, our teachers would never tell the children that there are letters and that each letter represents a sound,” Flesch writes. To illustrate the problem, he recounts a story, told by a literacy researcher, about a boy who could read the word “children” on a flash card but not in a book. (The boy explained that he recognized the flash card because someone had smudged it.) Flesch’s book spent months on best-seller lists, but teaching methods like the ones he had seemingly destroyed remained widely used.

    “We’re only walking to the other end of the cage.”

    Cartoon by Lynn Hsu

    Today, two of the most popular reading-instruction programs are Units of Study, whose principal author is Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Both are traceable to the work of people like Clay and Smith, and both are sold by the same educational publisher. They have remained entrenched in school systems even though scientific studies have shown that their theoretical foundations are flawed. Technology that allows researchers to track the eye movements of people as they read has demonstrated, for instance, that good readers actually do decode words by looking closely, if quickly, at letters and combinations of letters. Dehaene writes that “ ‘eight’ and ‘EIGHT,’ which are composed of distinct visual features, are initially encoded by different neurons in the primary visual area, but are progressively recoded until they become virtually indistinguishable.” If fluent readers are able to read familiar words in a way that makes it seem as though they’re recognizing ideograms, it’s because they analyzed them phonetically during earlier encounters, prompting their brains to create permanent neural pathways linking spelling, sound, and meaning.

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    David Owen

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  • What Zohran Mamdani Is Up Against

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    According to the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Zohran Mamdani will not actually be the city’s hundred-and-eleventh mayor, as many people have assumed. A historian named Paul Hortenstine recently came across references to a previously unrecorded mayoral term served in 1674, by one Matthias Nicolls. Consequently, on New Year’s Day, after Mamdani places his right hand on the Quran and is sworn in at City Hall, he will become our hundred-and-twelfth mayor—or possibly even our hundred-and-thirty-third, based on the department’s best estimates. “The numbering of New York City ‘Mayors’ has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent,” a department official disclosed in a blog post this month. “There may even be other missing Mayors.”

    New York City has already had youthful mayors (John Purroy Mitchel, a.k.a. the Boy Mayor), ideological mayors (Bill de Blasio), celebrity mayors (Jimmy Walker, a.k.a. Beau James), idealistic mayors (John Lindsay), hard-charging mayors (Fiorello LaGuardia), mayors with little to no prior experience in elected office (Michael Bloomberg), immigrant mayors (Abe Beame), and even one who supported the Democratic Socialists of America. (That would be David Dinkins.) Whether Mamdani turns out to be a good or a bad mayor, he will also not be alone in either respect. He will, however, be the city’s first Muslim mayor, and the first with family roots in Asia. He is as avowedly of the left as any mayor in city history. And the velocity of his rise to power is the fastest that anyone in town can recall.

    Since his general-election trouncing of the former governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has been preparing for the sober realities of governing—appointments, negotiations, coalition management, policy development. Trying to preserve the movement energy he tapped during the campaign, he has also made an effort to continue the inventive outreach practices that brought him to broad public attention. Just last Sunday, for instance, he sat in a room in the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria (a few blocks from the rent-stabilized apartment he’s giving up to move into Gracie Mansion), for twelve hours, meeting with New Yorkers for three minutes at a time. It was a gesture to show that he could look his constituents in the eye, and that he could listen to them.

    Mamdani ran a disciplined campaign, and he has run a disciplined transition. He didn’t take the bait when Mayor Eric Adams criticized him, told Jews to be afraid of him, and pulled other last-minute maneuvers seemingly designed to undermine him. Mamdani met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office—and they startled everyone by having an outwardly productive meeting. (Trump happily told Mamdani that it was O.K. to call him a “fascist.”) Mamdani discouraged a young D.S.A. city-council member, Chi Ossé, from staging a primary challenge next year to the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries—a magnanimous move, considering Jeffries’s ongoing chilliness toward Mamdani. In rooms full of wealthy business leaders and in others filled with donors, he has tried to win over skeptics among New York’s élite. (“They are finding themselves, unexpectedly, charmed,” the Times reported recently.) It was a relief to the city’s political establishment when he asked Jessica Tisch, the current police commissioner, whom Adams appointed, to stay in the job. Last week, when a top appointee’s old antisemitic tweets surfaced, Mamdani accepted her resignation within hours.

    Having rocketed, in a matter of months, from one per cent in the polls to mayor, Mamdani seems comfortable facing his doubters. But what he’s up against cannot be overstated. It’s been an open question for centuries as to whether New York is “governable” in a top-to-bottom, municipal, positive sense. For a long time, city government here was considered little more than a trough for Tammany Hall. In the past century, the city proved that it could (more or less) pick up its own garbage, get a handle on crime, and operate large school and hospital systems, even if sometimes just barely. It can do more than that, of course, but can it durably make life in New York better, and not just more tolerable, for the bulk of its residents? In his effort to answer affirmatively, Mamdani will have to navigate problems of management, budget, and bureaucracy inside City Hall, and also Trump (does anyone think their chumminess will last?), ICE raids, intransigent billionaires, public impatience with slips or inconsistencies, and twists of fate and nature. The billionaire exodus that was forecast during his campaign has shown no signs of materializing, but one bad blizzard in January could hamper Mamdani’s ambitious agenda for months.

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    Eric Lach

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  • Lawrence Wright on A. J. Liebling’s “The Great State”

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    During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, “went off his rocker,” as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, “The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum.”

    Liebling, who joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935, ten years after its founding, quickly made a reputation as a humorous and versatile observer of the human condition. “I am a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter,” he confessed. And Liebling once boasted to a friend, “I write better than anyone who writes faster, and faster than anyone who writes better.” Among sportswriters, he was esteemed for his boxing coverage. His unapologetic passion for food, evidenced by his waistline, was one of the great romances in literary journalism. As he saw it, dieting represented an absolute evil: “If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.”

    Liebling took over The Wayward Press, a column in the magazine, in which he prosecuted the sins and miscues of the Fourth Estate, which he labelled “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” Although he was terribly nearsighted, out of shape, and plagued by gout (his great friend and colleague Joseph Mitchell once observed him using a strip of bacon as a bookmark), his vigorous coverage of D Day and the liberation of Paris led the French government to award him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Untidy in his personal life, he was on his third wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, when he died, at the age of fifty-nine.

    Liebling’s foremost talent was bringing memorable characters roaring to life, so it’s not surprising that he fell in love with Earl Long. The New Yorker wisely allocated three issues to Liebling’s profile of Long, titled “The Great State”; the articles were later collected in a book with a superior title, “The Earl of Louisiana.”

    Like other reporters who joined in the merriment, Liebling came to Louisiana to scoff at Long. “I had left New York thinking of him as a Peckerwood Caligula,” he confessed. But, when he watched news coverage of the legislative session, he listened closely to what the ranting governor was saying to the recalcitrant legislators. Long was attacking a law, passed around the time of Reconstruction, that allowed election registrars to disqualify voters on “educational” grounds, a measure designed to push Black people off the voter rolls. “It took me a minute or two to realize that the old ‘demagogue’ was actually making a civil-rights speech,” Liebling wrote. He began to recognize Long as something more important than another Southern political buffoon. Long was a skillful progressive politician operating in a conservative, racist environment. For all the droll humor in Liebling’s coverage, that insight is what made his report a classic.

    Liebling’s articles about Long caught my eye when they were published, in the spring of 1960. They influenced my decision to attend Tulane University, in New Orleans, the city that Liebling had painted so vibrantly; they also pointed me toward journalism, and they fixed in my mind The New Yorker as my ideal professional destination. For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth. Most of them, that is. Liebling displayed a New York City chauvinism by mercilessly skewering Chicago, the “second city.” In the evening, when the commuters fled, Chicago was a “vast, anonymous pulp,” he wrote, “plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit. Chicago after nightfall is a small city of the rich who have not yet migrated, visitors, and hoodlums, surrounded by a large expanse of juxtaposed dimnesses.”

    I have in my office a poster on which Liebling’s portrait is accompanied by his cautionary warning: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” ♦

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    Lawrence Wright

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  • The Entire New Yorker Archive Is Now Fully Digitized

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    In the introduction to “The New Yorker Index 1992,” a twenty-page catalogue of everything the magazine published that year, the staff writer John McPhee acknowledged a ritual familiar to many New Yorker readers: tackling a stack of unread issues. Instead of catching up at home, he’d schlep his copies up to New Hampshire and read in the middle of a lake, while lying in a canoe. With those issues dispatched, he’d call the New Yorker office and ask the librarian for help locating other stories he wanted to read: “Hello, Helen, in what issue did [the staff writer Thomas] Whiteside tee up the American latex tomato? Whose was the thing about the grass at Wimbledon?” (The thing was McPhee’s, of course.)

    Exploring past New Yorker pieces is now a lot easier (and more portable). As of this week, our full archive is available to read at newyorker.com. On top of what was previously accessible, we’ve added more than a hundred thousand articles from more than four thousand issues, a stack hefty enough to sink your canoe. Not only is everything from the 1992 index accounted for—Susan Orlean on the inner workings of a supermarket, Talk of the Town stories about “urinals (art)” and “urinals (not art)”—but also John Updike’s 1961 short story “A & P” and Calvin Tomkins’s Profile of Marcel Duchamp. There’s work by Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag, Ralph Ellison and Louise Glück. There are articles about Frank Sinatra and Michael Jordan, royals and rock stars, cowboys and clowns. All in all, there are more than thirty-one thousand Talk of the Town stories; twenty-four hundred Reporter at Large pieces; more than thirteen thousand works of fiction and fourteen thousand poems; three thousand Letters from everywhere, from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe; and fifteen hundred “Annals of” everything, from “haberdashery” to “veterinary medicine.”

    While the complete digital archive may not have the same charm as magazines piled on the nightstand, there is now a single home for every issue—a place to peruse covers, scan tables of contents, and choose what to read next. Better still, if you don’t happen to have the phone number of our librarian, upgraded search capabilities allow you to hunt down “Whiteside” or “Wimbledon,” “vaping” or “vampires,” and sort results by date of publication. We’ve also made use of A.I. to add short summaries where they didn’t previously appear, making it easier to discern what an article is about. (This is, after all, a magazine in which the headline “Measure for Measure” might lead to an essay not on Shakespeare’s comedy but on the rise of the metric system.)

    The magazine’s centenary celebrations, which kicked off in February, provide a wonderful occasion to get reacquainted with our rich history. Whether you are looking for something specific, going down a rabbit hole, or simply catching up, the newly expanded archive is designed to make a hundred years of writing more accessible than ever. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access; if you aren’t a subscriber yet, become one today.

    We’ll continue to highlight some of our past favorites in the Classics newsletter, on our home page, and elsewhere, but consider this an open invitation to dive into the archive on your own. If you do choose to read on the water, please be careful—an iPad dropped overboard won’t hold up quite as well as a copy of the print magazine. ♦

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    Nicholas Henriquez

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  • Roz Chast on Gahan Wilson

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    He had his own world: a place where the funny and the horrific crossed paths.

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    Roz Chast

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  • The Mischievous Ex-Bankers Behind “Industry”

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    The godmother of “Industry” is Jane Tranter, a powerful executive producer who has worked in both the U.K. and Hollywood. In the early twenty-tens, Tranter had the idea of making a show about newcomers to the City of London. “I could not work out why young people, after the whole credit crunch and everything that had happened with the banks, were still flocking in their hordes to go and work in the City,” she told me. “Wasn’t this the generation that was meant to be saving the world from the atrocious mistakes of my generation?” (One bleak data point in Tranter’s research file was the death of a young intern, in 2013, who worked at a bank in London; he suffered a seizure after working three nights in a row without sleep. In the pilot of “Industry,” a trainee expires under similar circumstances.) Tranter secured a modest budget from HBO to explore the idea, with the directive, she told me, to “just make it young and sexy somehow.” By chance, a colleague had met Down and Kay while discussing a different project, a psychological thriller, and steered them to Tranter. “They were so bright and so personable, and they had exactly what you want when you are tackling something like this,” Tranter told me. “They both had authenticity, and they had objectivity and clarity. But they also had scores to settle.”

    Cartoon by Roz Chast

    On set, the pair work together seamlessly—so much so that the cast and crew refer to them by the moniker M.K. The actor Ken Leung, who plays Eric Tao, a veteran trader, told me, “I almost never think of one without the other. You wouldn’t want to talk to one about something without the other knowing. It would feel wrong.” (One instance of score-settling: a scene in which Eric undresses in front of underlings is based on the behavior of a former senior colleague of Kay’s, who would summon him to his office on a Friday afternoon to talk about the week’s business, all the while stripping down to his underwear before putting on his weekend clothes.) When Down and Kay do interviews together, they regularly finish each other’s sentences. Tranter told me, “I often think, if they both get on their phones during a meeting, or on set, that they are texting each other.”

    The two men’s temperaments are very different. Down overflows with ebullient confidence, whereas Kay is more anxious and cerebral. Myha’la told me, “Mickey feels very like a superstar—kind of flashy, like an old-school director. I know for a fact that he really badly wants to be on the Director Fits Instagram account, where they say, ‘Look at this great director, and look at his awesome outfit.’ And then, with Konrad, I feel like I have seen his heart blossom in real time this season. He gets such a twinkle in his eye, and a chaotic excitement, when he is, like, ‘Let’s try this.’ ” She went on, “They’re no longer holding on to anything so tightly, and they are really eager to let us play with them, because of the trust that’s been built.” Their own ambitions are unabashedly large. “I like reading biographies of John Boorman and David Lean and all these great directors,” Kay told me. “Sometimes I think I won’t be satisfied until I can see Mickey on a hilltop overseeing, like, fifteen hundred extras, through a megaphone, directing a big, two-and-a-half-hour-long period epic.” He continued, “It’s, like, someone is detonating something, and Mickey is saying, ‘We missed that by thirty seconds,’ and the whole shot costs another hundred and twenty grand. That excites me.”

    Down and Kay met in 2007. Down had just arrived at Oxford for his first year, and Kay was a second-year student. Down recalled that Kay was playing foosball: “I sidled up to him, and he said, ‘Oh, you’re new—you’re going to fucking hate it here.’ ” They were both members of Regent’s Park College, which enrolls a high proportion of divinity students. Both had been bounced there after being rejected by older and more prestigious Oxford colleges. Kay blew his interview at his first choice by holding forth about Homeric allusions in “Ulysses,” despite never having read the book. “I fucked up so badly I cried afterward,” he told me. Both arrived at Oxford with the insouciance of privilege, having been privately educated at exclusive institutions, Down at Charterhouse School (Thackeray, Vaughan Williams) and Kay at King’s College School, Wimbledon (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Sickert). Down studied theology; he had applied for the subject because he knew it was statistically much easier to get into Oxford as a theologian than as a historian, his true interest. (Robert Spearing has leveraged a similar application tactic in “Industry.”) Kay studied English literature, favoring modules on sparse modernist poetry to ones on lengthy Victorian novels. Both did the minimum of academic work. Down tried his hand at acting, without great success. “One play was just a disaster—it was Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author,’ and on the first night I got the cue wrong, and we skipped about forty minutes of the play,” he told me. Mostly, the two went out.

    Entering the television or film industry at the bottom rung, or trying to launch a career as a writer, wasn’t a realistic proposition for either man upon graduation. Down’s parents, who are partners in their own architectural practice, in North London, urged him to enter a steady profession such as the law. He had done a summer internship at the Home Office, and he was invited to apply for the intelligence services. Down, whose mother is Ghanaian and whose father is white British, said, “There was a diversity ‘fast stream.’ I got to the meeting and we were all Black or brown people. I thought, That’s interesting.” But he didn’t get the job. Not knowing what else to do, he successfully applied for a summer internship at Morgan Stanley, and after it ended he went to Rothschild. Élite financial institutions in the U.K. recruit from half a dozen similarly élite universities and, traditionally, have accepted a significant number of humanities grads, many of whom have never taken an economics class. Of course, not all jobs in finance require math skills: Anraj Rayat, a close friend of Kay’s, who works as a sales trader at Barclays and was an inspiration for the confrontational, scabrous character of Rishi Ramdani in “Industry,” told me, “There’s a job called prime brokerage, and I always say that their biggest skill set is asking clients ‘Red or white?’ and ‘Still or sparkling?,’ because that’s basically all you need to do.” Nevertheless, it was clear that there were other qualifications under consideration. Down said, “I didn’t get a single technical question at my interview—it was all questions about university, and literally talking about people that we both knew.”

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    Rebecca Mead

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  • Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?

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    As Sacks aged, he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new kind of affection for humans—“homo sap.” “They’re quite complex (little) creatures (I say to myself),” he wrote in his journal. “They suffer, authentically, a good deal. Gifted, too. Brave, resourceful, challenging.”

    Perhaps because love no longer appeared to be a realistic risk—he had now entered a “geriatric situation”—Sacks could finally confess that he craved it. “I keep being stabbed by love,” he wrote in his journal. “A look. A glance. An expression. A posture.” He guessed that he had at least five, possibly ten, more years to live. “I want to, I want to ••• I dare not say. At least not in writing.”

    In 2008, Sacks had lunch with Bill Hayes, a forty-seven-year-old writer from San Francisco who was visiting New York. Hayes had never considered Sacks’s sexuality, but, as soon as they began talking, he thought, “Oh, my God, he’s gay,” he told me. They lingered at the table for much of the afternoon, connecting over their insomnia, among other subjects. After the meal, Sacks wrote Hayes a letter (which he never sent) explaining that relationships had been “a ‘forbidden’ area for me—although I am entirely sympathetic to (indeed wistful and perhaps envious about) other people’s relationships.”

    A year later, Hayes, whose partner of seventeen years had died of a heart attack, moved to New York. He and Sacks began spending time together. At Sacks’s recommendation, Hayes started keeping a journal, too. He often wrote down his exchanges with Sacks, some of which he later published in a memoir, “Insomniac City.”

    “It’s really a question of mutuality, isn’t it?” Sacks asked him, two weeks after they had declared their feelings for each other.

    “Love?” Hayes responded. “Are you talking about love?”

    “Yes,” Sacks replied.

    Sacks began taking Hayes to dinner parties, although he introduced him as “my friend Billy.” He did not allow physical affection in public. “Sometimes this issue of not being out became very difficult,” Hayes told me. “We’d have arguments, and I’d say things like ‘Do you and Shengold ever talk about why you can’t come out? Or is all you ever talk about your dreams?’ ” Sacks wrote down stray phrases from his dreams on a whiteboard in his kitchen so that he could report on them at his sessions, but he didn’t share what happened in therapy.

    Kate Edgar, who worked for Sacks for three decades, had two brothers who were gay, and for years she had advocated for gay civil rights, organizing Pride marches for her son’s school. She intentionally found an office for Sacks in the West Village so that he would be surrounded by gay men living openly and could see how normal it had become. She tended to hire gay assistants for him, for the same reason. “So I was sort of plotting on that level for some years,” she told me.

    In 2013, after being in a relationship with Hayes for four years—they lived in separate apartments in the same building—Sacks began writing a memoir, “On the Move,” in which he divulged his sexuality for the first time. He recounts his mother’s curses upon learning that he was gay, and his decades of celibacy—a fact he mentions casually, without explanation. Edgar wondered why, after so many years of analysis, coming out took him so long, but, she said, “Oliver did not regard his relationship with Shengold as a failure of therapy.” She said that she’d guessed Shengold had thought, “This is something Oliver has to do in his own way, on his own time.” Shengold’s daughter, Nina, said that, “for my dad to have a patient he loved and respected finally find comfort in identifying who he’d been all his life—that’s growth for both of them.”

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    Rachel Aviv

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  • And Your Little Dog, Too, by David Sedaris

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    “He just bit me!” I said.

    The woman stood upright and pushed her hair away from her face. She was pretty except for her mouth, which was thin-lipped and hard-looking. “Huh?”

    “Your dog just bit me!” I repeated.

    “No, it didn’t,” one of the men said.

    I raised my pant leg and pointed to the broken skin. “Yes, it did,” I told him. “Look!”

    The group collectively shrugged and turned back to the business of smoking fentanyl.

    “How is this O.K.?” I asked.

    Blank expressions.

    “You should wash it,” the woman said, leaning again into the baby carriage with a lighter in her hand.

    “I should call the police is what I should do,” I told her.

    “Whatever,” one of the men said.

    If I had a dog and it bit a man who was just passing by, I’d freak out, and hard. After apologizing until he begged me to stop, I’d give the guy my phone number and e-mail address. I’d offer to take him to the hospital. I would execute the animal in front of his eyes—whatever he wanted. Here, though, the only one who cared was me.

    “The baby carriages are fairly new,” a pharmacist at the drugstore I went to afterward said. “People use them to get sympathy and to hide their drugs in.”

    She asked when I’d last had a tetanus shot, and suggested that I go to the emergency room. And I meant to, really. Then I recalled the people whose dog bit me. The thought that their day would proceed uninterrupted while mine would be spent in what I imagined would be a very sad and busy hospital was more than I could bear. And so I returned to my hotel room deciding I would rather die.

    That night, I had a show in the town of Salem, and, boy, did I talk about my afternoon, at least while I signed books beforehand.

    “You have to understand that these addicts, especially those with an opioid-use disorder, lead incredibly difficult lives,” the first person I spoke to, a woman with long, straight hair the color of spaghetti, said.

    “How is that an excuse?” I asked. “Her dog bit me.”

    “Well, you’re still better off than she and her friends are,” the woman continued.

    Unfortunately, I had already finished signing her book.

    “I was bitten by a dog today,” I said to another woman sometime later. “It was with these people who were smoking fentanyl and pushing a baby carriage.”

    “What kind of dog was it?” she asked.

    “Whatever Toto was in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” I told her.

    “Oh,” she moaned. “A cairn terrier. That poor thing.”

    “Did I leave out the part where it bit me?” I asked.

    “ ‘End feudalism’? Do I need to tap the sign?”

    Cartoon by Maddie Dai

    “People like that aren’t in any condition to take care of their animals,” the woman said. “That’s the really sad part.”

    “Is it?” I asked, pointing to the bandage on my leg. “Is that the really sad part?”

    The next person in line asked, “Did you get their names?”

    “I really don’t think they’d have given them to me,” I told him.

    “No,” he said. “The names of the dogs. It might have helped the authorities rescue them.”

    That was when I quit talking about it. I mean, how hard should it be to get a little sympathy when an unleashed dog bites you? What if I were a baby? I wondered. Would people side with me then? What if I were ninety or blind or Nelson Mandela? Why is everyone so afraid of saying that drug addicts shouldn’t let their dogs bite people? Actually, I know why. We’re afraid we’ll be mistaken for Republicans, when, really, isn’t this something we should all be able to agree on? How did allowing dogs to bite people become a Democratic point of principle? Or is it just certain people’s dogs? If a German shepherd jumped, growling, out of one of those Tesla trucks that look like an origami project and its owner, wearing a MAGA hat, yelled, “Trumper, no!!!,” then would the people in my audience be aghast?

    A few months before the incident in Portland, news broke of a Canadian tourist who was wading in the Atlantic when a shark she was trying to photograph bit off both her hands. I read about it on half a dozen websites, and on each of them the comments were brutal. How awful, I thought, to lose your hands and get no sympathy whatsoever, not even “I’m sorry you’re so stupid.” That’s what keeps me from feeding bears in national parks, or attempting to hug a baby hippo with its mother watching. In my case, though, all I did was walk down a street two blocks from an art museum.

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    David Sedaris

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  • The Airport-Lounge Wars

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    When you’re waiting for a flight, what’s the difference between out there and in here?

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    Zach Helfand

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  • One of the Greatest Polar-Bear Hunters Confronts a Vanishing World

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    Five of them died during the first winter. But the hunting was plentiful, and the settlement soon flourished, spreading among six locations, including Ittoqqortoormiit and two satellite villages, Cape Tobin and Cape Hope, at strategic hunting points on either side of it. A confluence of ocean currents and winds at the entry to the fjord system creates a polynya, a patch of open water. The polynya attracts narwhals, whales, walruses, birds, and seals, which in turn attract polar bears.

    The practice of subsistence hunting continued for decades, little changed. The men went out onto the sea ice to feed themselves, their families, their dogs, and their neighbors; women cooked, raised children, and prepared seal and polar-bear skins. The person who first saw a bear kept the skin, no matter who fired the fatal shot. When there was ice, the hunting was done by dogsled; when there was open water, it was done by kayak. The weeks when the ice was too thin or rotten to walk on, and yet too present for the use of boats, were a time of patience, of comfort with uncertainty, of rest.

    The new settlement soon had its own municipal administration and regular wage-earning jobs. There was a school, a hospital, a police station, an old-people’s home, and a general store. But the Danish administrators imported people from western Greenland to occupy the highest positions after their own, and the Ammassalik Inuits, lacking any formal qualifications, were given menial, practically interchangeable roles. At school, children were forced to learn in the Danish and western-Greenlandic languages and were sometimes punished for speaking their own.

    By the mid-fifties, “the trend in Danish policy was to concentrate the Greenlandic population as much as possible around three services deemed essential: the hospital, the school, and the church,” the demographer Joëlle Robert-Lamblin wrote, in a study published by the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, in 1971. “This policy had disastrous economic and social effects.” Where there is a high concentration of people, there is too low a concentration of wild animals to feed them. “Food, becoming insufficient, is then supplemented with imported European products, poorly suited to the climate,” she noted. The diffuse world of Scoresby Sound collapsed into the administrative center. Everything was in Ittoqqortoormiit.

    By the late sixties, men under forty were killing fewer seals on average than their elders were. “They are increasingly losing interest in hunting,” Robert-Lamblin observed. “The new game sought by contemporary Greenlandic society is no longer an animal but purchasing power.” People had difficulty, however, adapting to the artificial daily rhythm of salaried work: “Many of them suddenly quit their jobs and return to hunting. Then, some time later, they take on another job and abandon it again.”

    Hjelmer Hammeken was born in 1957. His father, who worked as the schoolteacher in Cape Hope, hunted recreationally—as almost everyone did. But the family relied more on his salary than on what he shot.

    When Hjelmer was about seven years old, he threw a rock at an Arctic bird called a little auk. It was a clean hit—his first kill. In the years that followed, a hunter named Jakob took him deep into the fjord and taught him how to live and hunt on the ice. Jakob stored some of his meat, narwhal tusks, and seal and polar-bear skins and sold the rest, both privately and to the store. These goods were exported out of the village when the supply ship arrived from Denmark late in the summer. Hunting was a viable profession: hunters’ earnings easily met and usually surpassed those of unskilled workers.

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    Ben Taub

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  • In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended

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    “The natural assumption with a place like Brodgar is that it was made to last,” Edmonds went on. “If stones are missing from the circle, it must be because of later interference. In fact, chances are that a lot of stones actually came down in the Neolithic. Some have solid foundations, but others aren’t set very deep. If you were concerned about long-term stability, you wouldn’t have done it that way. Which tells us that a place like Brodgar is really a performative space. The making of it is what counts. New stones are added, others are taken away. There’s a fluidity to it all. That’s what we can never see but have to try to imagine.”

    I followed Edmonds down to the Ness, where the past was going back underground. An earthmover operator was filling in the excavation trenches and restoring Brodgar Farm to its former state. Structure 10, an imposing ceremonial building that I had earlier toured with Nick Card, was no longer visible.

    “The question of permanence comes up here, too,” Edmonds said. “After a couple of generations, Structure 10 was suffering from subsidence and had to be partly rebuilt. Over time, it fell out of use. Finally, around 2400 B.C., it was sealed up in a huge ceremony that involved that massive slaughter of cattle.” Such “decommissioning” festivals were common in the Neolithic: they involved the razing of roofs, the trampling of pottery, the breaking of gneiss mace heads. Now, in an epochal recurrence that would have pleased George Mackay Brown, Structure 10 had been sealed up again.

    The last redoubt was the masterly Structure 27. After greeting Card and Tam at Dig H.Q., Edmonds headed there to take some final soil samples. “Architecture with a capital ‘A,’ ” he said, as if still surprised by the sight. Less subsidence had occurred here. The megalithic slabs that anchor the building differ in level by only a few centimetres.

    “The orange-looking earth is ash from peat fires,” Edmonds said, scraping at the trench wall with a trowel. “There’s a layer of burnt bone. That’s a big slab of pottery, which is decaying back into clay, leaving dark bits of igneous stone that were used for the temper of the ceramic.”

    Becky Little, an artist who leads classes in traditional methods of working with clay, was visiting the Ness that day, and she came over to say hello. “We’re in our final days here,” Edmonds told her. “By the middle of next week, it will all be gone.” Little climbed into a trench and bent over a vertical stone that was incised with a web of typically Orcadian geometric patterns. “I hadn’t seen that when I was here before,” Little said.

    “The light’s just perfect for it now,” Edmonds replied. Orkney was having one of its rapt pastoral hours, the afternoon sun fashioning a world of pure green and blue.

    I stopped one last time at the Stones of Stenness, which have dwelled in my memory since I was seventeen. Despite the deluge of new data, the megaliths had given up none of their obdurate strangeness. They may not have been intended to last millennia, but, now that they have, they are stone doors through which the living try to touch the dead. I had the sense that my own life had been a couple of shadows flickering across the rock. Preoccupied with thoughts of time and death, and also worried about missing the ferry, I got into my car and disappeared. ♦

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    Alex Ross

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  • Disappeared to a Foreign Prison

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    In late summer, Yoon learned that ICE had moved Jim to its Alexandria Staging Facility, in central Louisiana, from which detainees tend to get deported. Yoon contacted ICE to find out where the agency was planning to send him. ICE never answered her e-mails. At that point, Yoon told me, “more alarm bells started going off.”

    Then, on the morning of September 8th, Jim called Yoon in a panic. “I’m in Ghana!” he cried out. Yoon scrambled to gather information on Jim and the other detainees who were being held with him. Four days later, she and her colleagues filed an urgent lawsuit, sketching the life-or-death fears of five of them. The next morning, I received the call from all eleven individuals held in Bundase Training Camp, who asked me to describe their plight. “They didn’t tell us where we were going,” Jim said that morning. “They just kidnapped us overnight and whisked us out.”

    For months, I had been trying to document the Trump Administration’s secretive third-country removals. At first, getting access to any information was daunting. Some of the deportees were held in far-off prisons or detention sites; others had gone into hiding. Friends and relatives in the U.S. often felt terrified of speaking out, fearing retaliation. “I don’t know that the piece you’re contemplating is necessarily writable right now,” a leading lawyer on the topic, Anwen Hughes, of the advocacy group Human Rights First, wrote to me in late July.

    Initially, I’d focussed on two groups of third-country deportees, known to human-rights lawyers as the South Sudan Eight and the Eswatini Five. The first group, from countries including Myanmar, Mexico, and Laos, had been deported, in early July, to South Sudan, a nation struggling to recover from a civil war. Days later, the second group—five men from Cuba, Jamaica, Laos, Vietnam, and Yemen, all of whom had lived in the U.S. for many years—had been deported to the southern African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. There, they were detained in a maximum-security prison, without clear justification.

    “And this is my room. My parents kept it the way it was when I was little.”

    Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

    These deportees appeared to have been handpicked by the Trump Administration to test a new approach to mass deportation. According to the Department of Homeland Security, all of them had been convicted of serious crimes, including murder. Announcing the flight to Eswatini, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for D.H.S., had called the five deportees “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” a claim that at least one of the countries disavowed. Arguably the most surprising part of these early removals was also the least understood. It wasn’t just that these men were being sent to nations where they had no ties, and to places that were not safe. It was also that, in many cases, men who had completed their sentences in the U.S. years ago were now being subjected to indefinite detention abroad.

    The wider strategy of forced third-country transfers had clear policy roots. On January 20th, the first day of Donald Trump’s second term, Trump issued an executive order called “Securing Our Borders,” which, among other things, declared an intention to expand the use of third-country deportations. On February 18th, D.H.S. issued an internal guidance memo, instructing immigration officers to “review for removal” all cases “on the non-detained docket”—meaning anyone with an immigration case who was not in ICE custody. As part of this review, D.H.S. officials would “determine the viability of removal to a third country”—and, if they found that third-country removal was viable, attempt to detain the person. The first large-scale third-country removals occurred that month and targeted newly arrived asylum seekers. Between February 12th and 15th, the U.S. sent two hundred and ninety-nine people—from countries such as Afghanistan, Cameroon, Somalia, and Iran—to Panama. On February 20th and 25th, the U.S. sent an additional two hundred people, including eighty-one children, to Costa Rica. Soon afterward came third-country-deportation flights to Uzbekistan and El Salvador, where more than two hundred and fifty non-Salvadoran immigrants were detained in the brutal Terrorism Confinement Center, also known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT. Some of the men held at CECOT were transferred there as part of another third-country-removal experiment: the President declared that the U.S. had been “invaded” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, authorizing the removal of supposed gang members. (In June, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found that the government had violated the rights of those men by not giving them an opportunity to challenge their deportations.)

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    Sarah Stillman

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  • Can Trump’s Peace Initiative Stop the Congo’s Thirty-Year War?

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    “What kind of power?” I asked.

    “All kinds of power,” he said and smiled.

    In June, when Trump announced that he had brought peace to eastern Congo, he described it as “a glorious triumph.” But the M23 had not agreed to disband. A militia spokesman told the Associated Press, “We are in Goma with the population, and we are not going to get out.”

    A Western diplomat in the region told me that the M23 seemed to be attempting to set down permanent roots in North Kivu. They had upended the traditional system of justice, administered by tribal chiefs. After registries of property deeds were burned during the fighting, the M23 had simply handed out land to people it favored.

    Taking Goma had given the M23 control of a vast arsenal left behind by the defeated Congolese Army—as much as a third of the country’s military equipment, the diplomat said. The militia had also acquired an estimated twelve thousand new troops, many of them captured government soldiers who were either enticed or forced to serve. “The M23 have never enjoyed this level of control before,” the diplomat said. “The risk for them is they now have fallen into the same trap as the D.R.C. government—having to administer the territory they control.”

    If the M23’s stewardship of North Kivu is a test case for running the country, it is not encouraging. Patrick Muyaya, the D.R.C.’s minister of communication, told me that electricity and banking services had lapsed in Goma, while the “ethnic cleansing of Hutus” had continued. In July, according to the U.N., M23 fighters massacred more than three hundred civilians in a group of frontline villages about forty miles from town. “Every day, there is killing,” Muyaya said. “The people running that part of the country—the only thing they know is crime.”

    An hour’s drive northwest of Goma, across a vast moonscape of black lava, is a shambolic roadside community called Sake. For several years before the fall of Goma, it was a frontline town in the fight between the M23 and government forces. Displaced people’s tents, made from plastic sheeting supplied by N.G.O.s, are pitched alongside abandoned homesites, many of them burned to their foundations. The settlement is dug into jagged rock around a Catholic church, the Miséricorde Divine.

    The priest, a burly man with wary eyes, explained that he had been appointed to Sake in 2023, when the Wazalendo were entrenched there. As the M23 moved in, he said, it captured several hundred Hutu refugees and forcibly trucked them away. The church was looted and burned, and the town became “like bush,” he said, with almost no inhabitants remaining. “We had to start from zero again.”

    Gradually, people had returned, but they struggled to sustain themselves, and attacks continued. Some drivers for a relief agency had been kidnapped during a visit to the priest’s compound, so no one stayed overnight at the church anymore. When I asked if he slept there, he retorted, “How could I leave? I’m the priest.” But many of the civilians were packing up and heading to Goma. “They think it’s an oasis of peace,” he said wryly. Along with the threat of violence in Goma, there was a shortage of food, because the farmers who supplied the city had fled their land. The priest said that he was forty years old and had known nothing but conflict in his life. With a disgusted look, he said, “I’m very tired of fighting, and I call upon the leaders to end it.”

    The Presidents of Congo and Rwanda have spent much of the past year trading insults. Tshisekedi has likened Kagame to Hitler and declared, “One thing is responsible for this situation, and that is Rwandan aggression.” Kagame tends to be cutting, rather than blunt. When Tshisekedi threatened to send his air force to strike Rwanda, Kagame responded, “Tshisekedi is capable of everything except measuring the consequences of what he says.”

    The son of Tutsi exiles to Uganda, Kagame served as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan Army before returning to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As President, he has been the subject of both praise and condemnation abroad. He is a ruthless strategist capable of waging bloody wars, but he has also fostered a remarkable program to reintegrate tens of thousands of former génocidaires into Rwandan society. He has been accused of many authoritarian acts, including assassinating political opponents, but he has turned his country into a regional powerhouse, with a disciplined army that has been deployed to aid embattled allies. “Rwanda has made itself an amazingly efficient place to work and do business in—as long as you stay in your lane,” a former State Department official told me. “You want to root for them. But, on the other hand, they have been responsible for several decades of horrific actions inside D.R.C.”

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    Jon Lee Anderson

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  • The Justice Department Hits a New Low with the Epstein Files

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    On a Friday evening in October, 2021, the Justice Department launched into damage-control mode. The Attorney General, Merrick Garland, the Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, and other senior officials gathered on an emergency conference call to decide how to deal with what they considered out-of-line remarks from President Joe Biden.

    Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, had defied a subpoena from the House select committee investigating January 6th. Committee members were weighing whether to refer Bannon to the Justice Department for prosecution. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, had ducked commenting on a matter of such delicacy. “That would be up to the Department of Justice, and it would be their purview to determine,” she told reporters. “They’re independent.” But Biden, asked by the CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins whether he thought those who ignored subpoenas should face contempt charges, didn’t mince words. “I do, yes,” he said.

    As Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis report in their new book, “Injustice,” those three words so alarmed Garland and his team that they felt compelled to issue a statement effectively rebuking their boss. Just fifty-one minutes after Biden’s comments, the department’s chief spokesman, Anthony Coley, released this deliberately tart comment: “The Department of Justice will make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop.”

    Compare this with the reaction of another Department of Justice, on another fall Friday, four years later, to a Presidential directive that was far more pointed. “Now that the Democrats are using the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans, to try and deflect from their disastrous SHUTDOWN, and all of their other failures, I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “All arrows,” he wrote, are “pointing to the Democrats.”

    This time, the answer from the Attorney General was not full stop; it was full speed ahead. “Thank you, Mr. President,” Bondi replied on X, as if grateful for the assignment. Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, would “take the lead,” she assured Trump. William Barr, Bondi’s predecessor during Trump’s first term, was driven to complain publicly that the President’s frequent tweets about pending cases “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Bondi takes instant obedience to Trump’s social-media edicts as her job description.

    A challenge of covering Trump’s Washington is to guard against being worn down by the unceasing flow of aberrant behavior, one politically motivated and factually deficient investigation after another. But, until the announcement of Clayton’s probe, Trump’s Justice Department at least engaged in the flimsy pretense that it was investigating crimes—that there was some basis (“predication,” in the language of the D.O.J.) for F.B.I. agents and prosecutors to be rooting around in the actions of the President’s political enemies. Trump’s prosecution by social media, and Bondi’s eager compliance, cross yet another line once thought inviolable.

    Not only is this behavior not normal; it is also, as is becoming increasingly clear, self-defeating. Experienced, ethical prosecutors want to have nothing to do with political prosecutions. That leaves such cases in the inexperienced hands of attorneys like Lindsey Halligan, the insurance lawyer named by Trump to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, after his initial pick for that job, Erik Siebert, balked at bringing mortgage-fraud charges against New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. So it was that Halligan found herself appearing for the first time before a grand jury, racing against a statute-of-limitations deadline to file false-statements charges against the former F.B.I. director James Comey. Last Monday, a federal magistrate judge, citing a “disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps,” granted the “extraordinary remedy” of giving Comey access to grand-jury materials. These are ordinarily secret, but the judge said that Halligan had made “fundamental misstatements of the law that could compromise the integrity of the grand jury process.”

    The judge’s order is partially redacted, but Halligan appears to have misled the grand jurors about Comey’s constitutional right not to testify. The judge also found that, as grand jurors wrestled with whether there was adequate evidence against Comey, Halligan “clearly suggested” that “they did not have to rely only on the record before them to determine probable cause but could be assured the government had more evidence—perhaps better evidence—that would be presented at trial.” This is not how prosecutions work. Grand juries aren’t instructed to issue indictments in the hope that the government produces more proof down the road. Halligan filed an emergency appeal, but her seeming incompetence could doom the case against Comey. On Wednesday, the district judge hearing the case, Michael Nachmanoff, questioned Halligan about whether the indictment was valid if all the grand jurors had not approved the final version—something that she acknowledged, but then later denied.

    In the end, it took just two days for Trump to shift from decrying the “Epstein Hoax” to backing a House move to order the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. No matter that he had just gone to extreme lengths to pressure lawmakers to vote against the measure. No matter that he didn’t need to wait for congressional action; he could order the release on his own. This was a humiliating about-face of the sort we’re not used to seeing from the President, but it reflected Trump’s bowing to the inexorable political arithmetic: a single Republican House member, Clay Higgins, of Louisiana, voted against the bill, and the Senate passed it with unanimous consent and sent it to Trump, who signed it. Despite that lopsided vote, the documents may not be so quickly forthcoming; the Justice Department could seek to invoke the investigation that Trump ordered up to avoid releasing the files. The Republican-controlled Congress may be showing stirrings of independence, however belated. But the President can take solace in the knowledge that he still has the subservient Attorney General of his dreams. ♦

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    Ruth Marcus

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  • Ariel Levy on Emily Hahn’s “The Big Smoke”

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    “Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.” Thus begins “The Big Smoke,” Emily Hahn’s account of her journey from peppy globe-trotter to sallow lotus-eater (and back again) in nineteen-thirties Shanghai. This insouciant kickoff leaves you curious why Hahn went to China, of course, and why she was so keen on becoming an opium addict. More pressingly, it makes you wonder: Who is this lady? What else will this droll, naughty adventurer get up to?

    Plenty. Along with fifty-two books, Hahn wrote more than two hundred articles for The New Yorker, over eight decades, about goings on in places as unalike as Rajasthan, Dar es Salaam, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro. Her colleague Roger Angell described her, in an obituary from 1997, as “this magazine’s roving heroine” and “a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world.” (Angell’s mother, Katharine White, was Hahn’s editor, and when he was a twelve-year-old “boy naturalist” on East Ninety-third Street Hahn gave him a macaque. “Don’t let her bite you,” she advised. “If she does, bite her right back.”)

    There was never an emergency when Hahn was at the wheel. (She was beautiful, which never hurts, and came from a well-to-do family of German Jews in St. Louis.) Her writing made great use of offhandedness. She was on her way to Congo in 1935 “to forget that my heart was broken; it was the proper thing to do in the circumstances.” In a “Letter from Brazil” from 1960, she casually mentions that her host “woke up one morning to find his pajamas spotted with blood; he had been bitten by a vampire bat.” She roamed the world, seemingly without fetter. “It had become clear to me on the first day in China that I was going to stay forever, so I had plenty of time,” she writes in “The Big Smoke.”

    Initially, she wandered Shanghai, “pausing here and there to let a rickshaw or a cart trundle by,” vaguely aware of a scent “something like burning caramel,” which announced the use of opium, the way the stench of marijuana now tells of toking up in New York. Hahn became personally acquainted with the substance at the home of a man she calls Pan Heh-ven, who was later revealed to be her paramour, the married Chinese artist and poet Zau Sinmay. Time floated away as their circle of opium smokers talked and talked about art and literature and Chinese politics. (“That I knew nothing about politics didn’t put me off in the least,” Hahn recalls.)

    With no sense of alarm, Hahn descends into dependence: her eyes leak, her skin turns jaundiced, and she stops going to the “night clubs, the cocktail and dinner parties beloved of foreign residents in Shanghai.” Inevitably, she finds herself reciting the addict’s creed: “I can stop any time.” But she doesn’t wish to stop, because “behind my drooping eyes, my mind seethed with exciting thoughts.”

    The problem arises when opium starts interfering with Hahn’s wayfaring: it has become a mooring. “I couldn’t stay away from my opium tray, or Heh-ven’s, without beginning to feel homesick,” she writes—an unfamiliar, unwelcome feeling. She kicks the stuff with the help of a friend, who hypnotizes her and then keeps her away from her druggie boyfriend. Hahn’s description of detoxing: “I felt very guilty about everything in the world, but it was not agony. It was supportable.”

    A child is another kind of anchor, and Hahn eventually had two of them, with the British officer Charles Boxer, who remained in Japanese internment in occupied Hong Kong when Hahn fled the island, in 1943. Motherhood seems not to have slowed her down much. After she returned to the United States with her two-year-old daughter—who spoke only Cantonese—Hahn discussed childhood anxiety with her pediatrician, a young doctor named Benjamin Spock. He asked if her daughter was ever happy. “When we go to Chinese restaurants,” Hahn replied, “where the waiters gather around to watch her eat with chopsticks. They talk to her, and she talks to them. Oh, she’s fine in Chinese restaurants.” Spock suggested that the girl might be reflecting the mother’s mood. Hahn dismissed him: “I’m perfectly all right. I’m just waiting for the war to finish, that’s all. Her father’s in prison camp.” ♦

    Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.

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    Ariel Levy

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  • Edwidge Danticat on Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”

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    As girls, we may find it difficult to picture our mothers—especially if they are stern Caribbean mothers—as anything other than the poised ladies they’re so determined to mold us into. We struggle to imagine that they were ever little girls themselves, flying kites, climbing trees, playing hopscotch and marbles with their siblings. As mothers, some of us are so fearful for our daughters that we issue long lists of instructions that we hope will shield them from a hostile and menacing world. For mothers of Black girls, warnings about promiscuity are at the top of the list, to keep them from being considered “fast” and hypersexualized.

    These tensions are brilliantly captured in Jamaica Kincaid’s breathless, single-sentence short story “Girl,” first published in the June 26, 1978, issue of The New Yorker. It was Kincaid’s first piece of fiction in the magazine, to which she already regularly contributed nonfiction, including many unsigned Talk of the Town pieces. In tight-knit communities like the one in Antigua where Kincaid—and, we assume, the mother and daughter in this story—grew up, reputation carries more weight than personal freedom, particularly for girls. The daughter, to whom a litany of instructions, or, rather, orders, are addressed, may yearn to sing benna, traditional Antiguan folk songs, in Sunday school, but she is likely better off, in her mother’s and the community’s perception, singing the traditional hymns of the Anglican Church. During my girlhood in Brooklyn, it was my father—who was a deacon in the Pentecostal church—who once told me that, of the four-hundred-plus members of the church we attended, there would always be at least one who was watching me. This was proved true when someone reported to my parents that I’d been seen eating sugarcane in the middle of Flatbush Avenue on a hot summer day. “Don’t eat fruits on the street,” the mother in “Girl” warns. “Flies will follow you.” Flies did not follow me, but someone’s gaze did, leading to a lengthy scolding from my mother.

    “Girl,” as Kincaid acknowledged in a 2008 interview, is her most anthologized piece of writing. I first read it as a senior at Barnard College, not in this magazine but in an anthology of contemporary women writers. The story was taught both as a piece of “flash fiction” and, because of its refrain-like style, as a prose poem. I was not yet a mother then, and I read “Girl” as a daughter. I was grateful for the two moments in the story where the daughter speaks up to defend herself (“but I don’t sing benna on Sundays”), interruptions that allow her to be defiantly present in the way that daughters are in Kincaid’s later works, including her novels “Annie John,” “Lucy,” and “The Autobiography of My Mother.” In these books and others, the daughter never stops speaking, making one wonder what kinds of instructions, if any, she will pass on to her own children.

    The mother, though, is not only trying to tame a shrew (“the slut you are so bent on becoming”); she is offering a template for survival. When I was fifteen, my mother sent me to take cooking and etiquette classes from a Haitian neighbor in our building. That same woman taught embroidery to twentysomethings who were working on their trousseaux—frilly tablecloths and bedsheets for their future homes with their husbands. When I first read “Girl,” I thought of it as a trousseau of words. The mother’s advice addresses everything from personal grooming to cleaning house and gardening to how to behave with friends and strangers and how to make medicine both for a cold and “to throw away a child.” The daughter indicates with her rebuttals that she will pick and choose what to keep and what to ignore. The mother’s parting words concern “how to make ends meet,” which is, after all, one of life’s defining challenges, and how to choose bread, a kind of nourishment that someone else still controls: “always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh.” “But what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?” the daughter wonders. To the mother, this is a rejection of all that came before. “You mean to say,” she exclaims, “that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” ♦

    “This is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways.”

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    Edwidge Danticat

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