ReportWire

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  • Kash Patel’s Acts of Service

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    Patel had arrived in court wearing a borrowed, ill-fitting jacket, wrinkled khakis, and boat shoes. Hughes asked, “And where is your tie? Where is your suit?”

    The judge demanded to see Patel’s passport. “If you want to be a lawyer, dress like a lawyer,” he said. He then asked Patel what purpose there was “to me and to the people of America to have you fly down here at their expense, eat at their expense, and stay at their expense. . . . You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” The judge tossed Patel out of his chambers and sanctioned him with an obscure disciplinary measure known as an “order on ineptitude.”

    Hughes had a history of making inappropriate comments in court about minorities, including Indian Americans, and Patel believed that Hughes had singled him out for abuse. A Washington Post story that chronicled Patel’s humiliation—and the judge’s cruelty—was meant to be lighthearted, but Patel viewed the piece as a hit job. Years later, he was still stewing over the coverage. “They ran with it and dragged my name through the mud,” he wrote in his book. “It was far from the last time the media would slander me.”

    The tie incident “was very personal for Kash,” an attorney who worked at Main Justice at the time said. “It was the beginning of his turn.” In the years that followed, Patel would lash out at the D.O.J. for refusing to “stand up for me after being attacked by the unstable judge in Houston.” He also began to malign news organizations that “will do anything to stop you.” Since 2019, Patel has filed defamation lawsuits against the Times, CNN, and Politico, all of which he either later withdrew or saw thrown out by a judge. Patel has also proposed requiring federal workers to sign nondisclosure agreements and have their phones and laptops scanned monthly for any contacts with the press. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections,” he told Steve Bannon on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, in 2023. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

    A number of Patel’s colleagues told me that he is prone to viewing the government, the media, and career politicians as part of a larger cabal. Rogan joked with him about this tendency. “We love conspiracies, don’t we?” he said during their interview. “We love the craziest conspiracies. They’re exciting.”

    Patel chuckled and said, “They’re our thing.”

    After the 2016 election, Devin Nunes, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, approached Patel and offered him a position investigating allegations that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia. Patel turned it down, thinking that a job in the Capitol would be a bore. “I NEVER wanted to work on the Hill,” he wrote in his book. He was hungry to get to the White House, ideally to the National Security Council. But Nunes persisted, telling Patel that, if he accepted the job, the congressman would do everything he could to parlay the position into a White House gig. Patel took the deal, a decision that, he said, “would change my life—and change America—forever.”

    Patel’s methods quickly became controversial. Soon after joining the House-committee staff, in 2017, he pushed to subpoena the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the N.S.A., seeking evidence that the Obama Administration had tried to “unmask” the names of Trump campaign officials who were mentioned in intelligence intercepts. A couple of months later, Patel and another Republican staffer travelled to London, where they showed up at the law office that represented Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who had compiled a since-discredited report alleging strong ties between Trump and Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. Patel reportedly failed to inform either the American Embassy or Democrats on the Intelligence Committee about the visit. He wrote in his book that he and his colleague did not go to London to find Steele, but were there on an unrelated matter and decided, impromptu, “to stop by the office.” Patel wrote that he “left immediately after we were told that he was unavailable,” and “then enjoyed a full English breakfast, got on the plane, and headed home.”

    “It’s always been ‘the three little pigs’ this and ‘the three little pigs’ that. I’m here to announce I’m going solo.”

    Cartoon by Victoria Roberts

    That summer, Patel and Nunes went to Vicenza, Italy, on a congressional junket to, as Patel put it, “improve our intelligence community.” One night, the two men met in the town square for Negronis. It was a ritual that Nunes called “the final,” a chance to recap the day’s work. Patel had already learned that the F.B.I. had relied on the Steele dossier to obtain a wiretap on Carter Page. He now pressed Nunes to subpoena records from Fusion GPS, the research firm that had contracted with Steele to gather intelligence on Trump. Nunes was reluctant, but Patel told him that the records would reveal who had paid for the Steele dossier in the first place. “If I was wrong,” Patel said, “he could fire me right on the spot.”

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    Marc Fisher

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  • Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy

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    Landsvirkjun, which had paid for most of the I.D.D.P. work, decided that it needed financial support to drill more exploratory wells. “We said, ‘We’re just a small energy company in Iceland,’ ” Palsson told me. But it made its research available to the international scientific community, and there has been intermittent interest from the U.K., Germany, Canada, and New Zealand. “That’s where we are now, trying to fund it as a science project that can also benefit the energy industry,” Palsson said.

    Driving back to the airport, we saw snow ptarmigans and cairns of black stones marking trails that stretched beyond view. Iceland’s transition into a country powered nearly completely by renewables can seem fantastical, and the landscape furthers this impression. Because Iceland is singular in so many ways—that lonely arctic-char species! those small horses with their tölt!—you can get the feeling that geothermal energy is a niche endeavor, as opposed to one that is technically and economically feasible in places where volcanic eruptions aren’t part of the daily forecast. But that feeling is outdated and misleading.

    Geothermal is underdeveloped, and its upfront costs can be high, but it’s always on and, once it’s set up, it is cheap and enduring. The dream of geothermal energy is to meet humanity’s energy demands affordably, without harnessing horses for horsepower, slaughtering whales for their oil, or burning fossil fuels. The planet’s heat could be used to pasteurize milk or heat dorm rooms or light up a baseball stadium for a night game.

    At more than five thousand degrees Celsius, the Earth’s core is roughly as hot as the surface of the sun. At the Earth’s surface, the temperature is about fourteen degrees. But in some places, like Iceland, the ground underfoot is much warmer. Hot springs, geysers, and volcanoes are surface-level signs of the Earth’s inferno. Dante’s description of Hell is said by some to have been inspired by the landscape of sulfurous steam plumes found in Devil’s Valley in Tuscany.

    Snow monkeys and humans have been using Earth-heated waters as baths for ages. In the Azores, a local dish, cozido de las furnas, is cooked by burying a clay pot in hot volcanic soil; in Iceland, bread is still sometimes baked this way. The first geothermal power generator was built in Devil’s Valley, in 1904, by Prince Piero Ginori Conti of Trevignano, who had been extracting borax from the area and thought to make use of the steam emerging from the mining borehole. The generator initially powered five light bulbs. Not long afterward, it powered central Italy’s railway system and a few villages. The geothermal complex is still in operation today, providing one to two per cent of Italy’s energy. In the United States, the first geothermal plant was built in 1921, in Northern California, in a geyser-filled area that a surveyor described as the gates of Hell. That plant powered a nearby resort hotel and is also still in use.

    “So, anyway, tell me something about yourself.”

    Cartoon by Avi Steinberg

    There aren’t gates of Hell just anywhere. A kilometre below ground in Kamchatka is considerably hotter than a kilometre below ground in Kansas. There is also readily accessible geothermal energy in Kenya (where it provides almost fifty per cent of the country’s energy), New Zealand (about twenty per cent), and the Philippines (about fifteen per cent)—all volcanic areas along tectonic rifts. But in less Hadean landscapes the costs and uncertainties of drilling deep in search of sufficient heat have curtailed development. This partly explains why, in the field of clean energy, geothermal is often either not on the list or mentioned under the rubric of “other.” For decades, both private and government investment in geothermal energy was all but negligible.

    That has now changed. In the past five years, in North America, more than a billion and a half dollars have gone into geothermal technologies. This is a small amount for the energy industry, but it’s also an exponential increase. In May, 2021, Google signed a contract with the Texas-based geothermal company Fervo to power its data centers and infrastructure in Nevada; Meta signed a similar deal with Texas-based Sage for a data center east of the Rocky Mountains, and with a company called XGS for one in New Mexico. Microsoft is co-developing a billion-dollar geothermal-powered data center in Kenya; Amazon installed geothermal heating at its newly built fulfillment center in Japan. (Geothermal energy enables companies to avoid the uncertainties of the electrical grid.) Under the Biden Administration, the geothermal industry finally received the same kind of tax credits given to wind and solar, and under the current Trump Administration it has received the same kind of fast-track permitting given to oil and gas. Donald Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, spoke at a geothermal conference and declared, in front of a MAGA-like sign that read “MAGMA (Making America Geothermal: Modern Advances),” that although geothermal hasn’t achieved “liftoff yet, it should and it can.” Depending on whom you speak with, either it’s weird that suddenly everyone is talking about geothermal or it’s weird that there is a cost-competitive energy source with bipartisan appeal that no one is talking about.

    Scientific work that has been discarded or forgotten can return—sometimes through unknowing repetition, at other times through deliberate recovery. In the early nineteen-seventies, the U.S. government funded a program at Los Alamos that looked into developing geothermal energy systems that didn’t require proximity to geysers or volcanoes. Two connected wells were built: in one, water was sent down into fractured hot, dry rock; from the other, the steam that resulted from the water meeting the rock emerged. In 1973, Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, which aimed to develop energy sources outside of fossil fuels. “But when Reagan came into office, he changed things,” Jefferson Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell University, who was involved in the Los Alamos project, told me. The price of oil had come down, and support for geothermal dissipated. “People got this impression that it was a failure,” Tester said. “I think if they looked a little closer, they would see that a lot of the knowledge gained in those first years could have been used to leverage what is happening now.”

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    Rivka Galchen

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  • Stephen Fry Is Wilde at Heart

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    In “More Fool Me,” Fry speculates that, had he entered Cambridge fifty years earlier, he might have been tapped as a spy. During that era, he writes, “an old fashioned classical English education” was often “given to a certain kind of person equipped with charm, intelligence, duplicity, guile . . . who had an almost pathological need to prove himself, to belong.” He adds, however, that he thinks it unlikely that the intelligence services would have taken him, because of his Jewish heritage: his maternal grandparents were Hungarian Jews, and Fry has been outspoken about antisemitism in Britain.

    In the late seventies, however, another Cambridge tradition called—comedy. “I’d always had this nagging feeling that I liked trotting about on a stage,” Fry said. Emma Thompson told me, “Stephen could basically extemporize Shakespeare.” Fry began appearing in numerous productions, and he even wrote a play, “Latin!,” which drew on his experiences at preparatory school. “I’m sure it would be pretty eye-watering now, because it’s a satirical comedy about pederastic schoolteachers,” he told me. He was recruited to join the Cambridge Footlights comedy group by its then president, Hugh Laurie, who had seen Fry in a production of “Volpone.” In an e-mail, Laurie told me, “I was looking to cast a revue for the Cambridge Footlights, and desperately wanted adult roosters in a field of squeaky, prancing cockerels. Stephen walked onstage, and it all fell into place. I remember nothing of the play except this mesmerising giant who stood at the centre.” Fry had, Laurie went on, “such gravity, such authority. Also an odd melancholy that just grabbed me from the first.”

    By the mid-eighties, Fry and Laurie had become fixtures of light entertainment on British television. They appeared in their own sketch show and, later, in “Jeeves and Wooster,” an adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse novels, in which Fry plays an omnicompetent butler. “Over the years, from the first day to this, Stephen and I have laughed more with each other than anyone else I can think of,” Laurie said. “Unless he has other, secret laughing partners, which is possible. Because he keeps secrets, by God he does.”

    In the early nineties, Fry’s financial situation received a boost when he helped revise the book of the 1937 British musical “Me and My Girl,” which went on to a three-year run on Broadway, with Fry reportedly earning three per cent of its box-office revenue. But, in an interview from this period, Fry explained that he was hopeless with money: “If I have a bone, I eat it; I don’t bury it in the garden. I can’t hoard anything, and that includes thoughts. I spend—thoughts, money, myself. I can’t save and conserve anything.”

    Fry’s polymathic talents spilled forth. In 1991, he published the first of four novels, “The Liar,” a semi-autobiographical account of a brilliant and mendacious schoolboy. A best-seller, it includes long fictional extracts from a pornographic manuscript about child prostitution, supposedly written by Charles Dickens. “That you should stand exposed as an amuser of children, nought but a corrector of youth, a pedestal!” a malapropism-prone housekeeper cries. As Fry’s star rose, so did attempts to knock him off his own pedestal. Some were grotesquely literal. Anti-gay insults, and fists, were thrown at a school-reunion dinner at which Fry was the speaker, leading to the levying of fines against Fry’s detractors. In a degraded opinion piece, a Daily Mail columnist wrote, “Why is it that Stephen Fry is so eminently whackable, smackable, kickable, flickable? The answer is that he is simply the most irritating man in the country.” The paper even offered a “blow-up-and-biff” Stephen Fry doll to readers. Jokes about harming celebrities have aged about as well as jokes about pederasty, and perhaps it’s not surprising that such threats left Fry in a state of distress. Things reached a head in 1995, when he co-starred in a new play, “Cell Mates,” in the West End; three shows into the run, which had received mixed reviews, he disappeared to Belgium. He later faxed a note to his agent, explaining that he felt he’d failed as an actor. Fry was missing for several days, and friends feared that he’d taken his own life.

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    Rebecca Mead

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  • The Strange Afterlife of Hilma af Klint, Painting’s Posthumous Star

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    Later, af Klint claimed—implausibly, according to some historians—that Steiner had warned her that the world was not ready for what she was attempting to reveal, and that, discouraged, she stopped painting for eight years. When she resumed, she said, she worked at great scale and intensity. But she decreed that the works were to remain unseen for twenty years after her death, protected from ignorant audiences. Only decades later would it become evident that Hilma af Klint had produced one of the most significant creative innovations of the twentieth century.

    “It was delicious,” Louise Belfrage, a scholar and a colleague of Almqvist’s, said. “You have this woman genius, a prophet, making abstract paintings before Kandinsky? I mean, come on! It’s just so attractive.” Belfrage spoke of af Klint’s story like someone who had just been caught swiping icing off a cake: helpless, only half sorry. “It’s almost irresistible,” she said, and laughed.

    Soon after encountering af Klint’s work, Belfrage and Almqvist began to organize more seminars on her through the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit, the research and education nonprofit that Almqvist heads. Held everywhere from Oslo to Israel, they featured an impressively interdisciplinary selection of scholars, whose lectures touched on everything from early-twentieth-century scientific breakthroughs to occult philosophy. For Almqvist, af Klint became the magnifying glass through which a remote age could come alive. Almqvist and Belfrage compiled the talks into luxuriously produced books; Almqvist himself contributed essays and introductions.

    When, in 2018, the Guggenheim exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” “it was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,” Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared soon afterward, said. The choice of venue seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda looked eerily like a temple to house her works which af Klint had once imagined. The show became one of the most visited in the Guggenheim’s history, and its paintings became a permanent backdrop on social media. In the Times, Roberta Smith wrote that af Klint’s paintings “definitively explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project.”

    In the past decade, Hilma af Klint’s life has been reimagined as historical fiction, a children’s book, and a graphic novel. It has inspired at least two operas, a documentary, a bio-pic, a virtual-reality experience, and a six-hundred-square-foot permanent mosaic inside the New York City subway system.

    To Voss, this is the promise of art history: that death can confer the glory that life refuses, that what looks like failure might in fact be redemption deferred. “It’s soothing, I think, to see something so great and so beautiful that was not successful in its own time,” she said.

    Almqvist has come to believe that the resurrection of af Klint has also produced fantasies. In the nearly thirteen years since his first encounter with the artist, Almqvist has instated himself as a kind of one-man Greek drama—chorus and actor both, once the herald of plot and now its complicator. His own writing on af Klint, he told me, has turned out to be riddled with mistakes. “When you have someone like Hilma, where there are just so many holes to fill in, it opens things up for, well, conspiracy theories, quite frankly,” Almqvist said. “Most of what one knows about, or what one encounters in the literature about Hilma, is actually just myth.”

    But even myths require caretakers. In recent years, the question of who those caretakers should be—and what, exactly, they are protecting—has become something of a national debate in Sweden. As af Klint’s fame has grown, so have the questions—about what she believed, whom she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak in her name. The disputes play out in boardrooms and court filings and newspaper columns. They are often framed as debates about af Klint’s life and her past, but what is really at stake is her afterlife—her legacy, what it means, and who should get to define it in the future.

    The voices of astral beings suggested to af Klint that she should paint not reality as it seemed but a truer version, which lay beyond the material world.Photograph from Science History Images / Alamy

    In the autumn of 1944, when af Klint was eighty-one, she fell while getting off a streetcar in Stockholm; a few weeks later, she died from her injuries. In her will, she named her nephew, Erik af Klint, as her heir. Erik, an admiral in the Navy, was too busy to administer his aunt’s body of work, so Olof Sundström, a close friend of hers, catalogued the archive. But Erik remained involved. “It is my opinion that, at least for the time being, the work should only be seen by people who understand its value and can feel reverence for it,” he wrote to Sundström, in 1946. Journalists, he added, “are, of course, not allowed to come near it.”

    It was not until Erik had retired from the military that he began to tackle the question of what to actually do with the massive corpus of material—more than twelve hundred paintings and drawings and a hundred and twenty-four notebooks. He considered it his responsibility to find a permanent home for the works, but he was unsure how best to proceed and consulted various scholars and museums. To one, he spoke of a desire to “organize an exhibition to generate interest in it among a wider audience”; to another he said that the work should be displayed only “within closed societies,” and warned that “releasing it to the public can never lead to anything good.” In 1970, Erik met with people from Moderna Museet and the national museum to discuss a large-scale exhibition, but the idea was eventually abandoned. Ultimately, the Anthroposophical Society of Sweden agreed to house the archive, and in 1972 Erik established the Hilma af Klint Foundation. Its statutes prohibit the sale of af Klint’s most significant works—so as to safeguard them for, in the words of the four-page document, “spiritual seekers”—and require that the board be chaired by a member of the af Klint family, with the remaining seats occupied by members of the Anthroposophical Society.

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    Alice Gregory

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  • Hanif Abdurraqib on Ellen Willis’s Review of Elvis in Las Vegas

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    I have very little interest in Elvis Presley’s music, and I have even less interest in the mythology of Elvis as a Towering Figure in American Music. What I am abundantly interested in is resurrection, which means there are corners of the Elvis narrative that, when well illuminated, I find myself hovering over with fascination, or a kind of morbid pleasure. Ellen Willis’s 1969 review of an Elvis concert, the singer’s first in nine years, drew me right in.

    There is no single thing that makes a writer like Willis great, but what makes her work compelling, and what most informs my own writing, is that Willis—The New Yorker’s first pop-music critic—was never afraid to be overtaken by unexpected delight, even if it came at the expense of some preëxisting skepticism. Those two traits—skepticism and the potential for pleasure—exist at the intersection of Las Vegas and Elvis, especially during the summer of 1969. Elvis was not yet the sweat-drenched singer laboring through the hotel residencies of the subsequent decade, sluggishly dragging himself along for the sake of a paycheck.

    The Elvis whom Willis witnessed was, in fact, a man resurrected, not from the dead but from a long stretch of dissatisfaction with his own career path, which had led to film roles and soundtrack recordings and away, largely, from the stage. The previous year had marked a turnaround: there was the triumph of his comeback special, which was shot in June and aired in December. But to prove that he was fully back would require conquering Las Vegas, a place that was, at the time, “more like Hollywood than Hollywood,” Willis wrote.

    There’s a striking moment in her piece, a sort of mini-twist, when you can sense Willis’s mode of observation shift from bewilderment to something that reads as genuine fascination, bordering on outright enjoyment. It happens after Elvis arrives onstage, when Willis takes him in for the first time. She’s amazed by his new, slimmer physique (“sexy, totally alert”), but also puzzled by his hair, dyed black and no longer slicked into the famous ducktail. Her confusion gives way to a sense of wonder when she realizes that, despite his efforts to look younger, he’s not interested in performing as he did in his youth. She marvels at his playfulness, becomes fixated on his earnestness; she writes, of his performance of “In the Ghetto,” that “for the first time, I saw it as representing a white Southern boy’s feeling for black music, with all that that implied.” Although Willis herself was only twenty-seven—the magazine had hired her the previous year—she appreciated his maturation. “He knew better than to try to be nineteen again,” she notes. “He had quite enough to offer at thirty-three.”

    Willis’s Elvis column embodies one of her central gifts: her ability to walk you through an unfamiliar tunnel and lead you out the other side, into a bracing light, as surprised as she is that the destination looks the way it does. That this piece is not especially long causes the aforementioned twist to land even more forcefully. This is a writer saying, “We don’t have much time, and I’m not trying to change your mind, but I’m allowing you to witness how I was moved from one place to another.”

    Reading Willis’s review of Elvis as he is shocked back to life reminded me that my interest in the singer goes beyond resurrection. Elvis was among the earliest of what I think of as the blank-slate pop stars, a lineage of performers, encompassing more recent figures such as Taylor Swift, who are so infused with meaning, for so many, that they become a stand-in for grand emotions and concepts whether they believe in them or not. What fuelled Elvis’s stardom was that he could contain all the projections at once, and even cultivate them. It takes a sharp critical eye to capture an artist like that, to write not about what he means but about what he is doing. That work isn’t about stripping away the romance of a performer’s appeal. On the contrary, I find it deeply romantic. Willis gave herself over to the spectacle of an Elvis who was not yet finished, an artist who remained as alive as he’d ever been. ♦

    Viva Las Vegas: Elvis Returns to the Stage

    The King’s first concert at the International Hotel.

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    Hanif Abdurraqib

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  • The Meaning of Trump’s Presidential Pardons

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    “No maga left behind,” Martin tweeted. He seems to mean it: Trump granted two hundred and thirty-eight pardons and commutations in his first term; less than a year into his second, he has issued nearly two thousand. In most cases, of course, the person being pardoned had been found guilty of a crime. The pardon economy presents the possibility that, if you’re nice enough to the President, a jury’s judgment might be set aside. But you have to stay nice: on Newsmax, Trump mused about a potential pardon for Diddy, on his conviction for prostitution-related charges. “I got along with him great,” the President said, “but when I ran for office he was very hostile.” He added, “I’m being honest—it makes it more difficult to do.”

    Many of Trump’s pardons have helped him secure political loyalties. He has pardoned more than a thousand people convicted on charges related to the events of January 6th, as well as dozens of fake electors and lawyers who supported those events. But some of the most egregious acts contain a financial element. Last month, Trump pardoned the Chinese Canadian billionaire Changpeng Zhao, who founded the crypto exchange Binance. In 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to report the use of the platform by terrorist entities and individuals sanctioned by the U.S. government. This spring, according to the Journal, Binance took steps that boosted the value of a stablecoin developed by World Liberty Financial, in which the Trump family has a large stake, including the receipt of a two-billion-dollar investment. (Representatives for both World Liberty Financial and Binance denied that there was any impropriety.) When asked on “60 Minutes” about Zhao’s pardon, Trump said, “O.K., are you ready? I don’t know who he is.”

    The ingenuity of Trump’s initiative is that it is explicitly permitted by the Constitution, which states that the President “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.” But the power can still be politically entangling. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has generally argued that Trump’s pardons are correcting overzealous prosecutions by the Biden Administration of political enemies and financial upstarts—in effect, claiming that the social consensus has shifted to the right. But Trump’s popularity has declined—it’s forty-one per cent in the Times’ polling average—and this month’s elections went badly for the G.O.P., so the correcting-Biden justification may have less traction.

    That could prove particularly true with Trump’s stickiest problem, which he’s lately been calling the “Epstein hoax.” Over the summer, after Justice Department officials had promised to review investigative files on the activities of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, met with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a twenty-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually exploit and abuse minors. She told Blanche that Trump had always been “a gentleman” and that she’d never seen him in Epstein’s house or “in any type of massage setting.” She was then moved to a minimum-security prison, where she is reportedly preparing an application for commutation, but last week House Democrats released thousands of documents obtained from Epstein’s estate, including some e-mails that appeared to contradict her.

    Last week, the White House said that Trump is not considering a pardon for Maxwell, and no wonder. If he were to issue one, it would highlight, in a very public way, the system that he and his subordinates have built: a separate tier of justice for his allies and investors—a legal gray zone for people the President finds useful. ♦

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    Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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  • What Was the American Revolution For?

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    Under the threat of censorship and other forms of menace (the Trump Administration this year has so far fired the Archivist of the United States and the Librarian of Congress and has tried very hard to get the Smithsonian Institution to do its curatorial bidding), some organizations have decided to do nothing at all, as if they could simply pretend that the nation was not about to celebrate the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of its birth. “People are terrified,” one art-museum curator told me, not only about what to exhibit but about what to write on labels. She says she keeps asking herself, “Should I just put the stuff on the wall and say, ‘This was made in this period?’ ” Others are opting to un-celebrate and, instead, to denigrate the anniversary, following the logic of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s original introduction to the 1619 Project, which cast the Revolution as regrettable. “One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” Hannah-Jones had written, a claim to which some prominent historians publicly objected, leading the Times to issue a partial correction (“some of the colonists”). One group of historians, for instance, is planning a panel discussion at an academic conference on whether it would be better to “smear” the Revolution than to commemorate it.

    Even those cultural organizations, from historic houses to public-school districts and universities, that have decided to do something for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth appear to be doing considerably less than they did for the two-hundredth. For the bicentennial, the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged a nearly seven-thousand-square-foot blockbuster exhibit on Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; critics may have found it tacky, but it became a hugely successful travelling show. For 2026, the Met is planning to display, in the American Wing, thirty-two works from its own collection; one colleague of mine referred to putting on this exhibit as effectively “staging a die-in.” A frustrated curator told me that this modest scale is all the Met can do because “Look at the moment we’re in.”

    Another option is to try to capture this moment. The New York Public Library’s bicentennial exhibit, “The American Idea,” displayed the Bay Psalm Book, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, but for next year the library is planning to ask visitors to reflect on the meaning of the anniversary, and to archive their answers. In the nineteen-seventies, National Public Radio, with generous funding from the N.E.H., staged a yearlong series of three-hour Saturday-morning call-in programs called the “American Issues Radio Forum.” Given that the Trump Administration has gutted the N.E.H., defunded NPR, and shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it’s difficult to see how public media can mount anything as ambitious as was achieved a half century ago. A spokesman for NPR told me that its two-hundred-and-fiftieth agenda is “still in the planning phase.”

    A year, these days, is a lifetime. In 2024, the Declaration House in Philadelphia—a bicentennial-era reconstruction of the building where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence—installed “The Descendants of Monticello,” a hauntingly beautiful and provocative work by the artist Sonya Clark. Clark placed large video monitors behind the building’s windows, turned outward toward the street, so that passersby were met by the filmed and photographed eyes of the descendants of the people Jefferson enslaved, including his own descendants by way of Sally Hemings. Declaration House is part of Independence National Historical Park; under the new regime, no Park Service site will be allowed to display any exhibit that does the essential work of scrutinizing the relationship between liberty and slavery in American history, or the relationship between Native nations and the federal government, because to do so is now considered advancing a “corrosive ideology.” The President’s House Site, built atop the foundations of the mansion where George Washington resided while in Philadelphia, has been asked to review panels describing the lives of nine people who lived there as Washington’s property, owing to the Administration’s requirement that any displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” be removed. Under this logic, to note that Washington owned slaves is to disparage him but to pretend that those nine people never existed comes at no cost to their memory. (Online, citizens have been archiving signs slated for destruction under the hashtag #SaveOurSigns.)

    The hurdles facing museums and other institutions make it particularly impressive that many have already launched or are about to launch remarkably thoughtful two-hundred-and-fiftieth exhibits and activities. This month, History Colorado will open an N.E.H.-funded exhibit called “Moments That Made US,” featuring artifacts that mark turning points in American history, including Nixon’s tape recorder, the inkwell that Grant and Lee used to sign the surrender at Appomattox, one of the first copies of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo printed in Mexico, and some moon rocks brought to Earth on Apollo 11 in 1969. Jason Hanson, History Colorado’s effervescent chief creative officer, told me that he thinks of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to talk about what it means to be an American and what we want it to be going forward.” He also thinks that it’s easier to be sunny about the two-hundred-and-fiftieth outside the original thirteen colonies, which he calls the “OG13.” “We are ready for an American history that doesn’t always say, ‘The meaning of this event is this,’ ” Hanson told me. “We are having an argument in the country about the meaning of events.” He’s up for it. He’s likewise excited about the state’s plan to commemorate the nation’s birthday, which is also Colorado’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, by organizing teams to climb the state’s fourteeners, mountains taller than fourteen thousand feet. (Climbing mountains turns out to be wonderfully semiquincentennial. “Climb the Mountain, Discover America” is the slogan for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth used by Monticello, Jefferson’s mountaintop home, which will be unveiling a new center for history and citizenship.)

    Back on the edge of the Atlantic, another early stunner is “The Declaration’s Journey,” which opened on October 18th at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution and traces the travels of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence across centuries and continents. “We tell the story of the Revolution all the time,” the exhibit’s curator, Philip Mead, told me. (Mead is a former doctoral student of mine, and I should be clear that I’ve got about as much distance from this topic as a letter has from an envelope.) He said, “You know what they say about stories? There are two plots. A stranger comes to town, or a man goes on a trip. We’re telling those two stories here. The Declaration comes to town. The Declaration goes on a trip.” The exhibit opens, by way of prologue, with two borrowed artifacts: the wooden Windsor chair in which Jefferson is believed to have written the Declaration, on loan from the American Philosophical Society, and a rusted metal prison bench, on loan from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, from which Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The Declaration comes to town. The Declaration goes on a trip.

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    Jill Lepore

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  • David Byrne’s Career of Earnest Alienation

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    In Jonathan Demme’s film “Stop Making Sense,” Byrne wore an oversized suit while performing “Girlfriend Is Better.”Photograph from Collection Christophel / Alamy

    In subsequent years, the influence of Afrobeat—an expansive term for music that combines West African polyrhythms, particularly from Nigeria and Ghana, with elements of jazz and funk—became increasingly palpable in Byrne’s writing. In 2018, the Beninese musician Angélique Kidjo released a track-by-track remake of “Remain in Light,” Talking Heads’ fourth album, from 1980. When I interviewed her that year, Kidjo told me that she was drawn to the record in part because, when she heard the single “Once in a Lifetime” at a party, she presumed it was by African musicians. “That music brought me back home, without me understanding what the Talking Heads were about,” she said. Byrne said that he never worried too much about potential accusations of cultural appropriation. (Incidentally, “Remain in Light” preceded Paul Simon’s “Graceland” by six years.) “I didn’t think about it all that much, because we weren’t directly copying anything,” Byrne said. “There was an obvious influence, and I made that clear.” When “Remain in Light” was released, he provided critics with a short bibliography, including books on Haitian voodoo and African musical idioms. “People thought it was very pretentious at the time,” he recalled, laughing. “But it encouraged people to challenge us with those kinds of questions.”

    One day, I asked Byrne if, when the band was starting out, he would have known what to say if someone had asked him what type of music he played—or, actually, if he knew how to answer that question now. He thought about it for a moment. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t know how to answer it.”

    In 1984, Talking Heads released “Stop Making Sense,” a concert film directed by Jonathan Demme. The movie opens with Byrne walking onstage carrying an acoustic guitar and a boom box, which he places on the floor. He looks gaunt, almost haunted; his affect is erratic, chilly. “Hi,” he says flatly. “I’ve got a tape I want to play.”

    Over a prerecorded beat, Byrne launches into “Psycho Killer.” In a review of the film in this magazine, Pauline Kael described Byrne as having a “withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality,” adding, “He’s an idea man, an aesthetician who works in the modernist mode of scary, catatonic irony.” (To be clear, she loved the film, which she called “close to perfection.”) “Stop Making Sense” is extraordinary on its surface, but if you rewatch it enough you’ll start noticing spontaneous flashes of unmediated humanity that, collectively, do something nutritive for the soul—the moment, say, about four minutes into “Girlfriend Is Better,” when Byrne holds the microphone out to a gaffer clutching a light, who leans forward and very calmly says the words “Stop making sense,” or, about three minutes into “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” when the rhythm guitarist Alex Weir whips around to look at the keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Worrell, who is not in focus, does this glorious little snaky dance, a flawless expression of pleasure. For me, “Stop Making Sense”—possibly the entire nineteen-eighties—peaks with the band’s performance of “Burning Down the House.” By then, Byrne has been joined onstage by the rest of Talking Heads, as well as Weir, Worrell, the percussionist Steve Scales, and the vocalists Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt. At the start of the second verse, Scales turns to the camera and sticks out his tongue. “Strange but not a stranger / I’m an ordinary guy!” Byrne shouts. Watching it, I suddenly feel as though I could lift a small car. Demme lingers on Weir, who is clearly having the time of his life; there’s a moment, not long before the end of the song, when Byrne and Weir start dancing together, running in place, kicking their knees up, and then they exchange the sort of look—pure rapture, a kind of impeccable joy—that I’ve only ever seen on the faces of small children when a beloved parent returns home and throws open the front door.

    A man standing on a staircase while dressed in a marching band uniform

    Photograph by David LaChapelle for The New Yorker

    For “Girlfriend Is Better,” Byrne puts on the enormous suit that makes his head appear tiny. Even now, forty-one years later, the look is striking. In a “self-interview” that accompanied the film, Byrne said that he liked the proportions of the suit because “music is very physical, and often the body understands it before the head,” and that he liked the phrase “Stop making sense” because it’s “good advice.” There is, of course, a strong current of senselessness running through the film. During “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody),” the band’s most sparsely arranged song, and also its most tender, Byrne dances with a floor lamp. “That’s a love song made up almost completely of non sequiturs, phrases that may have a strong emotional resonance but don’t have any narrative qualities,” Byrne once said of its lyrics. That might be true in some technical way. Or it’s possible that love itself doesn’t have any narrative qualities. Cumulatively, the language adds up to something:

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    Amanda Petrusich

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  • Rian Johnson Is an Agatha Christie for the Netflix Age

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    When the film director Rian Johnson was a child, he picked up the final book that Agatha Christie published before her death, in 1976: “Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case.” The novel was sitting on a shelf in his grandparents’ sprawling home, in Denver. It had a moody black cover that featured an illustration of the mustachioed detective Hercule Poirot. “It felt very adult,” Johnson told me recently. “Very creepy.” The story takes place at a grand country house where the guests have an unfortunate habit of dying, or nearly dying, under seemingly unrelated circumstances. A hunting accident. A poisoning. A bullet to the head.

    The book was not only a dynamite mystery; it also represented a kind of magic trick. Although it was published at the end of Christie’s life, she wrote the manuscript in the middle of her career, in the nineteen-forties. Then, in a twist worthy of Poirot, she sealed it away in a bank vault for thirty years, insuring that it was kept secret. As her popularity waned, she suddenly produced—voilà!—a book written at the height of her powers. The novel was, Johnson said, “very mysterious and awesome, and very, very weird.” Soon, he was bingeing Christie novels two or three at a time. He once walked into a fire hydrant while reading one.

    In Los Angeles, earlier this year, Johnson’s normally mild countenance grew animated as he recounted the plot of “Curtain.” “Do you want it spoiled?” he asked. “Do you really?” We were sitting in the sunlit offices of his production company, T-Street, surrounded by shelves filled with trinkets: a hollow Bible concealing a cigar, an engraved knife. On the wall was a print by the eighteenth-century artist Matthias Buchinger, who was born without hands or legs, from the collection of the late magician Ricky Jay. Johnson, who is short, with a salt-and-pepper beard, has a nerdy, understated demeanor. He was dressed casually, in the type of short-sleeved button-down you might wear to a family barbecue. He believes that people-pleasing leads well into directing. If you didn’t know better, you might mistake him for a particularly nice I.T. guy.

    In 2019, Johnson tried his own hand at a murder mystery with the film “Knives Out.” Close-quartered and stylish, the movie begins at a Gothic New England mansion where the wealthy patriarch Harlan Thrombey has been found with his throat slit. Harlan has an avaricious family, each member of which has something to gain from his death. Like Christie’s novels, the film is a study of its time. The Thrombeys argue bitterly about politics, money, and immigration. (“Alt-right troll,” Harlan’s granddaughter says to her cousin. “Liberal snowflake,” he responds.) Like Christie, Johnson gave his mystery a detective with a high regard for his own intellect: the Southern gentleman Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig. The film was a surprise hit with critics and audiences. The Guardian called it “deliciously entertaining.”

    At fifty-one, Johnson is a Hollywood rarity: a writer-director with a singular vision, able to turn his oddball, idiosyncratic stories—written by hand, in moleskin notebooks—into blockbuster hits. He flits among genres, creating intricate, puzzle-like plots that reward multiple viewings. The success of “Knives Out” cemented Johnson’s status as an Agatha Christie for the Netflix age. Natasha Lyonne, who stars in his mystery TV series, “Poker Face,” told me, “His plots are all right there in his mind’s eye.” In the writers’ room, he will quietly flesh out inventive killings while others are discussing home renovations, then reveal them with a flourish. Craig said, of Johnson, “He’s always playing 4-D chess.”

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    Anna Russell

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  • Laura Loomer’s Endless Payback

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    “I’d love to talk to you sometime,” Curran said. “I’ll give you my contact.” He pressed a Secret Service commemorative coin into her palm.

    Loomer has described her work by quoting Plato: “No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” At the memorial, at least in some corners, she was being received with reverence. “People who are entrusted with the life of the President value the work that I’m doing,” she told me. She radiated a sense of weariness that this grand task, of being Trump’s protector and soothsayer, fell to her. “Why is it that I’m the one that has to identify people who are actively working against him?”

    One afternoon in September, Mark Warner, the Democratic senator from Virginia, was scheduled to visit the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for a classified oversight briefing and a meeting with Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, the agency’s head. “Why are the Pentagon and IC”—intelligence community—“allowing for the Director of an Intel agency to host a rabid ANTI-TRUMP DEMOCRAT SENATOR,” Loomer posted in advance of the visit. “Clearly, a lot of Deep State actors are being given a pass in the Intel community to continue their efforts to sabotage Trump.” Warner’s meeting was abruptly cancelled. “I was in disbelief,” Warner, who is the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me. “You’ve got an individual that the Trump Administration was reluctant to hire because she was so far out, yet seems to have unbelievable access to call the shots and then brag about it on her social-media feed.” (Loomer told Warner to “cry more, bitch!”)

    Loomer had started to attack Warner the previous week, after he visited an ICE detention center. (Members of Congress are allowed to conduct such visits for oversight purposes, but many have been turned away or arrested.) “I don’t follow Ms. Loomer’s tweeting,” Warner told me. “But I was told that she’d gone on a screech for some time, calling me out.” He wasn’t sure whether to categorize her as a “trolling blogger” or a shadow member of the Administration. “When Laura Loomer tweets, Trump’s Cabinet jumps,” he said. Some of Warner’s Republican friends on the Hill had been attacked by her, too. Warner went on, “She’s an equal-opportunity offender.”

    By then, Loomer’s interference in government matters had become a regular occurrence. In early April, Mike Waltz, then the national-security adviser, walked into the Oval Office to find Loomer sitting across from the President, in the midst of a presentation that questioned the allegiances of a number of members of his National Security Council. After the meeting, Trump hugged Loomer, then promptly fired six members of the N.S.C. He also fired General Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and of U.S. Cyber Command. According to Loomer, Haugh, a thirty-three-year veteran of the Air Force, was close with General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Trump had appointed and then clashed with during his first term. Wendy Noble, Haugh’s deputy, was also fired; she was apparently connected to another Trump critic, James Clapper, Barack Obama’s director of National Intelligence.

    Loomer wanted Waltz gone, too—he had been tagged as a neocon who, in her estimation, was contravening Trump’s desires. She was also concerned about his judgment: his deputy, Alex Wong, was married to a career prosecutor who had worked at the Department of Justice during the Biden Administration. A few weeks later, they both departed. Loomer posted, “SCALP.”

    According to three people with direct knowledge of Waltz’s ouster, Loomer had nothing to do with it. “It wasn’t working out with him,” someone with close ties to the White House told me. “She ends up getting the credit for it because she’s the one out there talking.” (Weeks before, Waltz had inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, to a Signal chat in which members of the Administration were discussing plans to bomb Yemen.) Still, White House officials—and operatives across Washington—have no choice but to deal with her. “I was on an hour-long Zoom call, which probably cost, when you think of how much everyone was getting paid, at least fifty thousand dollars, to talk about what to do about Loomer,” a consultant who works with the Administration told me. Her screeds are routinely cited in major newspapers and footnoted in lawsuits; her targets range from low-level government employees to the Pope. Recently, Loomer posted that an official at Customs and Border Protection was “Anti-Trump, pro-Open Borders, and Pro-DEI.” Three days later: “Now he’s FIRED.” She described Lisa Monaco, Microsoft’s new head of global affairs—and Joe Biden’s Deputy Attorney General—as a “rabid Trump hater,” and demanded that the company’s government contracts, which total billions of dollars, be revoked. “Wait till President Trump sees this,” she wrote. Not long afterward, Trump called for Monaco to be fired. Loomer picked up the baton, tagging Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O. “Are you going to comply? Or continue to be two-faced?” she wrote. “How dare you.”

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    Antonia Hitchens

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  • The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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    Kanerva’s book receded from view, and Hofstadter’s own star faded—except when he occasionally poked up his head to criticize a new A.I. system. In 2018, he wrote of Google Translate and similar technologies: “There is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding.” But GPT-4, which was released in 2023, produced Hofstadter’s conversion moment. “I’m mind-boggled by some of the things that the systems do,” he told me recently. “It would have been inconceivable even only ten years ago.” The staunchest deflationist could deflate no longer. Here was a program that could translate as well as an expert, make analogies, extemporize, generalize. Who were we to say that it didn’t understand? “They do things that are very much like thinking,” he said. “You could say they are thinking, just in a somewhat alien way.”

    L.L.M.s appear to have a “seeing as” machine at their core. They represent each word with a series of numbers denoting its coördinates—its vector—in a high-dimensional space. In GPT-4, a word vector has thousands of dimensions, which describe its shades of similarity to and difference from every other word. During training, a large language model tweaks a word’s coördinates whenever it makes a prediction error; words that appear in texts together are nudged closer in space. This produces an incredibly dense representation of usages and meanings, in which analogy becomes a matter of geometry. In a classic example, if you take the word vector for “Paris,” subtract “France,” and then add “Italy,” the nearest other vector will be “Rome.” L.L.M.s can “vectorize” an image by encoding what’s in it, its mood, even the expressions on people’s faces, with enough detail to redraw it in a particular style or to write a paragraph about it. When Max asked ChatGPT to help him out with the sprinkler at the park, the model wasn’t just spewing text. The photograph of the plumbing was compressed, along with Max’s prompt, into a vector that captured its most important features. That vector served as an address for calling up nearby words and concepts. Those ideas, in turn, called up others as the model built up a sense of the situation. It composed its response with those ideas “in mind.”

    A few months ago, I was reading an interview with an Anthropic researcher, Trenton Bricken, who has worked with colleagues to probe the insides of Claude, the company’s series of A.I. models. (Their research has not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal.) His team has identified ensembles of artificial neurons, or “features,” that activate when Claude is about to say one thing or another. Features turn out to be like volume knobs for concepts; turn them up and the model will talk about little else. (In a sort of thought-control experiment, the feature representing the Golden Gate Bridge was turned up; when one user asked Claude for a chocolate-cake recipe, its suggested ingredients included “1/4 cup dry fog” and “1 cup warm seawater.”) In the interview, Bricken mentioned Google’s Transformer architecture, a recipe for constructing neural networks that underlies leading A.I. models. (The “T” in ChatGPT stands for “Transformer.”) He argued that the mathematics at the heart of the Transformer architecture closely approximated a model proposed decades earlier—by Pentti Kanerva, in “Sparse Distributed Memory.”

    Should we be surprised by the correspondence between A.I. and our own brains? L.L.M.s are, after all, artificial neural networks that psychologists and neuroscientists helped develop. What’s more surprising is that when models practiced something rote—predicting words—they began to behave in such a brain-like way. These days, the fields of neuroscience and artificial intelligence are becoming entangled; brain experts are using A.I. as a kind of model organism. Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscientist at M.I.T., has used L.L.M.s to study how brains process language. “I never thought I would be able to think about these kinds of things in my lifetime,” she told me. “I never thought we’d have models that are good enough.”

    It has become commonplace to say that A.I. is a black box, but the opposite is arguably true: a scientist can probe the activity of individual artificial neurons and even alter them. “Having a working system that instantiates a theory of human intelligence—it’s the dream of cognitive neuroscience,” Kenneth Norman, a Princeton neuroscientist, told me. Norman has created computer models of the hippocampus, the brain region where episodic memories are stored, but in the past they were so simple that he could only feed them crude approximations of what might enter a human mind. “Now you can give memory models the exact stimuli you give to a person,” he said.

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    James Somers

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  • The Runaway Monkeys Upending the Animal-Rights Movement

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    The collaboration between certain MAGA influencers and animal-rights activists has drawn out the most confrontational tendencies within each camp. This summer, Loomer and White Coat Waste took aim at an unusual target: Nicole Kleinstreuer, a toxicologist who is spearheading the N.I.H.’s effort to expedite, of all things, the replacement of animals in regulatory testing and research. Under Kleinstreuer’s leadership, the agency has launched a new office to develop and validate alternatives to animal studies, such as computer simulations and “organ on a chip” technologies. Kleinstreuer has said that she wants to “create lasting change for animal-free science.” But because she has echoed the scientific consensus—namely that, in the meantime, some animals remain necessary—White Coat Waste has branded her an enemy of progress and a “Fauci-loving ‘animal testing czar.’ ” Kleinstreuer, who subsequently received harassing messages and death threats online, has required security protection.

    White Coat Waste’s criticism of Kleinstreuer has set it apart from the broader animal-rights movement. (“Have they lost their fucking minds?” Lisa Jones-Engel, the PETA scientist, said.) It is far from the only group, however, peddling the claim that an immediate end to animal research would be not only ethically justified but scientifically sound. This absolutist framing elides the fact that, though non-animal methods are highly effective in certain areas—such as skin sensitivity and eye irritation—they cannot replicate the complexity of living, functioning organisms, especially in efforts to understand whole-body reactions, neurochemistry, and progressive disease. Monkeys remain critical, not least for vaccine development and studying reproductive health. As an N.I.H. official wrote in a letter to members of White Coat Waste’s board, “True progress in this area cannot occur overnight—it takes time, and pretending otherwise is misleading, counterproductive, and dangerous.”

    Pretending otherwise, though, holds greater emotional appeal. “People want the idea that we don’t need animals anymore to be true because they love animals,” Heather Sidener, a former head of clinical medicine at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, said. “They haven’t really had the hard conversation with themselves about, What if it was my husband? What if it was my child? Would I really say to them, ‘I think you should die because I don’t think we should use animals to see if this new medicine is safe’?” Cindy Buckmaster, a scientist and a former chair of Americans for Medical Progress, an advocacy group for animal research, told me that when we no longer need lab animals it will be the “happiest day of my life”—but that, until then, researchers should insure that each animal they do use is made to count. “The way we view animals has changed a lot in the past twenty years,” she said, “and we need to own up to our shortcomings.”

    After his disillusionment, Gluck, the primate researcher, retrained as an ethicist. In this role, he often finds himself giving lectures on the moral quandaries posed by his past career. Though his audience sometimes looks to him for prescriptions, he tends to avoid TED-talk bromides and ten-point plans, emphasizing, instead, his epistemic humility. There is still so much we don’t know about monkeys—but what we do know, he contends, should make scientists worry that the conditions of captivity are damaging their research. “The primary question we have to be concerned with is: how do we do this differently?” he told me recently. “Who are these animals? What is their life like? How can you create an environment that is least abusive?” Recognizing that animals are complex beings, with complex needs, may not only reduce their suffering but also yield better science.

    A few weeks after my trip to Yemassee, the remaining macaques were apprehended after trappers noticed their footprints in some freshly fallen snow. Westergaard announced that the monkeys were healthy, safe, and celebrating their reunion. PETA had its doubts. Someone in town had told the activists that a monkey had been hit by a car, and the group was now demanding that Alpha Genesis provide “proof of life.” On Facebook, Westergaard thanked the people of Yemassee for their support during the recapture mission. “As for PETA,” he added, “they can go f*** themselves.”

    Throughout the year, Westergaard did not respond to my texts, calls, voice mails, or e-mails; when I visited his office to request an interview, security escorted me off the premises. Neither he nor his company responded to questions about animal-welfare violations and allegations of negligence. Meanwhile, he continued to spar with PETA online. At one point, he denounced the documents that it had released from Strickland as part of a “misinformation campaign” that sought “to erode public trust in critical research institutions.” This seemed curious, since Westergaard had spent much of the spring and summer cozying up to an Administration that routinely attacked such institutions. In May, after Alpha Genesis passed its most recent U.S.D.A. inspections without any citations, Westergaard announced his company’s unwavering support for Trump’s Make America Healthy Again initiative. “We believe that cutting-edge science and compassionate care go hand-in-hand,” he said, adding that the recent inspection results reflected “the organization’s proactive, professional approach to research and animal husbandry.” One of his press releases featured an A.I.-generated illustration of three grinning macaques in MAHA baseball caps. Another euphemistically described the axe that the Administration has taken to the scientific enterprise as “programmatic changes in research priorities.” That these “programmatic changes” threaten to demolish not just animal research but one of its crowning achievements—the reduction of childhood illness and death through vaccination—went unmentioned.

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    Ava Kofman

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  • Who My Child Was and Would Be

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    But it had not, as I discovered in November of 2019. Chatting on FaceTime one day, Nat mentioned that he was visiting a nearby L.G.B.T.Q.-aid organization to explore the feminine side of his personality. At first, I assumed it was identity tourism, a kind of dabbling in alternate selves. Then he made clear that he wanted to be changed utterly—to become a woman.

    This came as a shock. To me, he was a man, a lovably androgynous person with a Y chromosome and a visible Adam’s apple. Why did he want to become a woman? Nat tried to explain, and at first his wish seemed entangled with his periodic depressions—which were deeper and darker than I had realized. When lost in their depths, he told me, he felt absolutely hollow. “I don’t feel like I have any reason to live,” he said.

    This was a painful exchange. Melancholy, we often believe, is an occupational hazard for creative people, and Nat, a poet, visual artist, translator, and d.j., certainly fits into that demographic. But “melancholy” is also a pretty word for depression.

    Of course, depression, for many people on the brink of transitioning, can be a red herring. Friends and family will often counsel against making such a weighty decision in the midst of emotional turbulence, not grasping that a profound sense of misalignment is what is feeding the turbulence in the first place. I went down that road myself, urging Nat to tackle the depression first.

    “I understand that you are responding to a deep impulse,” I wrote him in a long e-mail. “An impulse that deep and consistent should not be ignored. But what is it telling you? I don’t see how a regimen of hormones, or smoother skin, or a redistribution of body fat, is going to ease the sort of disquiet that you were telling me about.”

    I was fighting it. That’s obvious. In my e-mail, I cast the impulse to alter his body as naïve literalism—as if the body were just an industrial container for the interesting person inside.

    Yet Nat had already begun to say goodbye to his old body. He had been struggling during those weeks with pneumonia. This meant long days at home, full of fatigue and shallow breathing. He binged “The Sopranos,” drank bone broth, took numerous baths. In the bath, he told me, he would study his body in the water, and recognized that he would be leaving it behind. He felt a kind of grief, he told me. But this didn’t change his mind—it was just the cost of changing, of sloughing off the old self.

    I sensed myself tiptoeing through in our next few exchanges. I didn’t want to drive Nat away. I also didn’t want him to turn into a woman. It was that simple, which is to say, not simple at all.

    For weeks, I felt an impending loss: the precious fact of having a son was about to be taken away. I wasn’t hung up on dynastic issues. Yet I think there’s something raw, some product of the primitive brain, that makes a father identify with a son. You see yourself in this other, beloved being. I was afraid of losing that.

    The fear entered my dreams. One night, I was a woman, alone in an apartment, a stalker waiting outside the door. Myself-as-woman was both Nat and me: she vulnerable in transition, me powerless to stop it. I told Nat none of this. I could grieve for the son I was losing while preparing myself to have a daughter.

    I meanwhile chose the crisis-management technique favored by most bookish people: books. I read Jan Morris’s “Conundrum” (1974), marvelling at the hypermasculine roles Morris had inhabited before transition—soldier, climber of Everest, political journalist, father. She had transitioned so long ago that the vaginoplasty was performed in a mysterious clinic in Casablanca. Yet her description of awakening in a dark room after the procedure, the indecipherability of the space a metaphor for her slippery self, could have been written yesterday.

    I also read Rachel E. Gross’s “Vagina Obscura” (2022), with its portraits of the gynecologic surgeon Marci Bowers creating, with almost sculptural skill, vaginas attentive to pleasure. It left me wondering how long before the bespoke became indistinguishable from the “natural,” and whether Nat, despite his hesitations, would someday alter himself that way, too.

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    James Marcus

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  • Joachim Trier Has Put Oslo on the Cinematic Map

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    Using this location had personal benefits: on the days he was filming at the house, he could see his daughters for breakfast and put them to bed. Trier deeply understands a director like Gustav, with his art-monster tendencies and half-blundering, half-charming attempts to reach his daughters, but he hardly wants to be Gustav. In fact, much of Trier’s process seems to be about finding ways to buck that model. It helps, as Helle told me, that Trier is “endlessly fascinated” by other people’s psychology—“penetrating the top layer of big emotions and trying to understand why people are like they are. That is a constant conversation, at home and with our friends.”

    Trier, who is tall and slim, with closely trimmed hair, a stubbly beard, blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, and a penchant for black chinos and sneakers, looks like your favorite history teacher. On set, he bounces with a natural athleticism. He used to race down ski slopes; he has gone more slowly ever since an accident in 2019 which nearly necessitated the amputation of his foot. Trier is gregarious and emotionally accessible, prone to clasping his hands together in enthusiasm, uttering an exuberant “Exa-a-actly!” when he agrees with a comment, and tearing up while directing. (He also got misty when I recounted something kind his wife had said about him.)

    This last tendency is one he shares with the director of photography on “Sentimental Value” and “Worst Person,” the Danish cinematographer Kasper Tuxen. “A lot of D.P.s are kind of super-masculine,” Trier said. “Kasper is so sensitive and lovely—he’s really engaged with what the actors are doing.” Tuxen told me that it posed a technical hazard to film scenes he found especially moving. Trier’s movies are shot on 35-mm., and Tuxen scoots in close to the actors, often on a rolling stool ignominiously known as a butt dolly. “Shooting on film, you have an actual optical-glass viewfinder,” Tuxen said. “It’s beautiful for seeing things clearly, but the condensation from a wet eyeball is a problem. When my operating eye gets wet, the glass gets fogged up. So I need to use a heated viewfinder, to cook my tears.”

    The American director Mike Mills (“Beginners,” “20th Century Women”) is a close friend of Trier’s; he also works with Tuxen. Mills and Trier both approach filmmaking with an unabashed sincerity, even as they play around with winking archival montages, flash-forwards, and other arch techniques. The two have regular Zoom conversations that can last for hours, and they share preliminary cuts of their films with each other. Mills said that he and Trier, “two very therapized men,” were uncomfortably aware of film history being “filled with narcissists who maybe made great films but were horrible to be close to.” He went on, “If you’re the type of person who sees a lot of that as being a dead end, or problematic, or not leading toward happiness or a richer life, how do you react to that?” Like Trier, Mills has a tendency to make therapeutically savvy remarks, then worry aloud that they sound pretentious.

    I ran Mills’s comments by Trier when I met him for coffee during the New York Film Festival. In directing, Trier said, “there’s a lot of heavy lifting, both in getting your creative control and in getting everyone on board—leading a big team of people early in the morning when they’re tired, and half of them have undiagnosed A.D.H.D. but you love their energy.” This situation “can encourage macho behavior, because you’re a leader—the militaristic general.” When Trier needs to rally his troops, he deepens his voice, claps his hands, and announces, “politely but sternly, like a teacher—‘We gotta focus, everybody!’ ” He prefers to operate in a mode “of tender encouragement, because people work better that way—at least, the people I want to work with.”

    I visited the set of “Sentimental Value” last October. The shoot was on a soundstage a thirty-minute train ride from downtown Oslo. Inside was a re-creation of the first and second floors of the house in Frogner. To film a montage of the house at various historical junctures, from the nineteen-tens to the nineteen-eighties, it had been easier—though not easy, and not inexpensive—to build a replica than to retrofit the actual house. A production-design team had layered the walls of the imitation house with a palimpsest of wallpapers; when the scenes for one time period were done, the team peeled off a layer to reveal the one underneath.

    That day’s shoot was set at a house party in the sixties, when the place was occupied by Gustav’s aunt, Edith, his mother’s sister, who lives openly with her girlfriend. Gustav’s mother, we’ve learned, joined the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Norway and was imprisoned by the Gestapo. She later died, by suicide, when Gustav was young. Edith likes to crank up the music at her parties when the neighbors complain—one of them, she’s sure, ratted out her sister.

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    Margaret Talbot

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  • Voting Rights and Immigration Under Attack

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    Sixty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed two pieces of legislation that are, to a remarkable degree, animating forces in the most volatile aspects of the current political moment. In August, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a crowning achievement of the civil-rights movement which paved the way for the election of thousands of African Americans to political office in states where, previously, they were not even allowed to vote. Two months later, he signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, overturning the Immigration Act of 1924, which, by way of eugenics, had sought to curate an immigrant stock of white Europeans. Taken together, the laws democratized the idea of who could be an American, and also which Americans could freely exercise their rights at the ballot box. The Trump Administration and its Republican allies are now engaged in a concerted effort to return the United States to the landscape that preceded them.

    The G.O.P. under Donald Trump, like many reactionary nationalist movements, is disproportionately concerned with demographics. Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade has reached a point where masked federal troops are snatching people from their homes—including an instantly infamous ice raid on Chicago’s South Side that involved a Black Hawk helicopter—their cars, their workplaces, courthouses, and public streets. Further demonstrating the nature of the President’s exclusionary vision, on Thursday the Administration announced that it will slash the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. next year to seventy-five hundred, with priority given to white Afrikaners. In addition, the Administration is insisting that universities accept fewer international students, recognizing that admission to such institutions is often the first step toward citizenship.

    The President’s goals were made plain on the first day of his second term, when he issued an executive order defying the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship clause. The clause was written after the Civil War to affirm that emancipated native-born Black people were citizens, as was virtually anyone born in this country. But it has been targeted as a means of insuring that children born here without a parent who is either a citizen or a permanent resident are not automatically granted citizenship themselves. Courts blocked the executive order, so, in September, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to take up the question of its legality. The attorneys general of twenty-four Republican-led states have urged the Court to act in Trump’s favor.

    At the same time, the President’s desire to control which Americans’ votes will count has been manifested in the battle over congressional maps. The maps are typically revised every ten years, after the census. But three states—Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina—have redrawn their maps at Trump’s behest, creating potentially six more G.O.P.-held seats, and several others, including Louisiana, have taken steps to do the same. This is a transparent attempt to move the goalposts ahead of the 2026 midterms, when a three-seat shift would give Democrats control of the House of Representatives.

    In response, at least five states with Democratic majorities are considering redrawing their maps. To counter Texas’s move, California put redistricting on its November ballot, which could give the Democrats five more seats, and voters appear set to approve the measure. In a perverse mirroring of a provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department is dispatching federal election monitors to some California districts.

    But the potential impact of state efforts would likely pale in comparison with the one presented last month at the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case Louisiana v. Callais. In January, 2024, following court orders, Louisiana—which is allotted six seats in the House of Representatives, and where African Americans make up a third of the population—passed a map that created a second majority-Black district. In March, after a legal challenge, the state attorney general defended the map before the Supreme Court, asserting that it was consistent with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits drawing districts in a way that minimizes minority voters’ ability to elect their candidates of choice. (Strategically drawn districts were key in preventing African Americans from gaining political power prior to the civil-rights movement.) But a group identifying itself as “non-African American voters” has claimed that the protections enshrined in Section 2 are themselves discriminatory, in that they offer Black voters an entitlement not offered to non-Black voters. And Louisiana has effectively switched sides, arguing that the map it defended just last year should now be struck down.

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    Jelani Cobb

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  • Ed Caesar on Nick Paumgarten’s “Up and Then Down”

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    The shortest magazine pitch of Nick Paumgarten’s life actually took place in an elevator, which the writer was sharing with an elevator-phobic editor, and consisted of a single word: “Elevators!” The article that followed, in April, 2008, is titled “Up and Then Down.” It is the story of a man named Nicholas White—who was trapped in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill Building, in midtown Manhattan, for forty-one hours—and also a study of “elevatoring,” a delicious word for the discipline of designing vertical transportation.

    A long piece about elevators might sound a little dry, even for a magazine that once published a forty-thousand-word article about oranges. (“What is there to say, besides that it goes up and down?” Paumgarten asks, coquettishly.) But, as Gerard Manley Hopkins nearly said, there lives the dearest freshness up down things. Paumgarten’s story is a parade not only of fascinating facts—there are, or were, fifty-eight thousand elevators in New York City; the super-fast elevators in the Taipei 101 Tower are pressurized to prevent ear damage; all door-close buttons in elevators built after the early nineteen-nineties are designed not to work—but also of indelible similes. In speeded-up CCTV footage of White stuck in the elevator car, he looks “like a bug in a box.” At thirty-two hundred feet, a hoist rope will snap “like a stream of spit in a stairwell.”

    In one passage, Paumgarten notes that passengers “know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die.” Ever since Paumgarten’s article came out, I have not shared an elevator without remembering the dots on a die and feeling a jolt of pleasure.

    “The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war,” Paumgarten writes. (Pretty good, that.) When I first read those words, I was twenty-eight and living in London. Except for two copses of skyscrapers in which our financiers—and finances—go up and down, London remains a fairly horizontal city. It’s easy to spend a busy week there without riding in an elevator. To Paumgarten, elevators were ostensibly banal; to me, they seemed exotic.

    His narrative structure, too, contains tensile strength. The reader is introduced to White’s entrapment, and then, just as White is contemplating his own death, diverted to learn about elevatoring before returning to his story, and so on. The subject matter goes up and down; the narrative breathes in and out (with just the right amount of anxiety). I am not the first or the last writer to have borrowed Paumgarten’s template.

    Lurking behind the vertical fun is tragedy, which lends the piece an unexpected power. “Up and Then Down” mentions 9/11: we learn that some two hundred people were killed in elevators on that day. But, in a broader sense, the article is about the fear of being trapped up high. People who work in skyscrapers have always found it psychologically necessary to forget about the physicality of towers. September 11th reminded us, horrifically, of what a tall building is; in its playful way, “Up and Then Down” does, too. It’s striking that “Man on Wire,” the gorgeous and vertiginous documentary about Philippe Petit’s wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, was touring film festivals when Paumgarten’s piece was published.

    When I’m in New York, I often feel like the pig in “Babe: Pig in the City.” I’m continually baffled by American tipping protocol; I get on an express when I need a local. Imagine my gratitude to Paumgarten, then, when I first visited The New Yorker’s current offices, at One World Trade Center. The elevators there are “destination dispatch,” which, per “Up and Then Down,” assigns “passengers to an elevator according to which floor they’re going to.” I’d never ridden a destination dispatch before. A fresh opportunity for humiliation awaited. But, thanks to Paumgarten’s sideways instruction manual, I knew what to do. ♦

    Late on a Friday night, Nicholas White got stuck on an elevator in a nearly empty office building.

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    Ed Caesar

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  • Jennifer Lawrence Goes Dark

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    Lawrence liked Scorsese’s idea, and put together an adaptation of “Die, My Love” with her production company. (Scorsese is credited as a producer on the film; next year, he’ll direct Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in an adaptation of “What Happens at Night,” by Peter Cameron, which he read immediately after “Die, My Love.”) Lynne Ramsay, the mercurial Scottish filmmaker, signed on to direct, and Robert Pattinson took the part of the husband, called Jackson in the film. Lawrence’s character is named Grace; rural France has been replaced by Montana. The couple moves there while Grace is pregnant, and we briefly see them wild and free before the baby is born. Their relationship breaks down in the postpartum months, as Grace is driven well past the edge of sanity by isolation, sexual rejection, and the stuff of new motherhood—leaking nipples, laundry baskets, the sight of a man who’s been wearing the same disgusting fucking robe every single day. The film takes a shotgun to certain postpartum clichés: Grace doesn’t care about being a picture-perfect mother, and she’s not too touched-out for sex. She walks around with dirty bare feet and keeps her baby up out of boredom and throws herself violently at Jackson, to no avail.

    To different viewers, the movie might seem like a sideways romantic drama, a psychological thriller, or a very dark comedy. It is certainly, like Ramsay’s other films—such as “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which centers on a boy who goes on a killing spree, and his parents—a tone poem of sublimated misery. Lawrence’s previous film was the comedy “No Hard Feelings,” in which her character, a dirtbag Montauk townie paid to deflower the nerd son of out-to-lunch parents, drew closer to her public image than anything she’d done before. Now, in “Die My Love,” her role diverges from that persona more than ever. As Grace, she crawls through tall grass, clutching a butcher knife, and wanders under the predawn moonlight, desperate for someone to fuck her, or maybe to behead her. Her eyes yawn open, crackling with static. She vibrates with restlessness and fury. You can see the cognitive distance between her and reality increasing, inch by inch, in her face.

    Lawrence has sat for dozens of magazine profiles since she was a teen-ager. She’s drunk cheap bourbon with reporters in her back yard and got in a sauna for scene and color. But she’s become more sparing with press in the past half decade. In late September, she and a publicist sat in a side room at Via Carota, an unflashy but impossibly in-demand celebrity-magnet restaurant in the West Village. I walked in and said hello. Lawrence confessed that, just before she left the house, her too-small mouth guard had got stuck in her mouth. “Can you imagine?” she said. “After ten years of being, like, ‘I used to be folksy, but everyone thought everything was a shtick,’ then I show up for my first day of this, like”—she did a Farrelly-brothers-style impression of clumsy, mouth-guard-wearing Jen. “I was, like, I will do anything to prevent this from happening. It would be like if I tripped and fell on my way into the room.”

    Lawrence has a low voice and is beautiful in a manner that feels unstingy. She was dressed like the wealthy millennial mother that she is: a soft red cardigan over a white shirt, a white skirt with a black sweater around her waist, a gold pendant, black sandals. Her long, dark-blond bangs were a little messy. In person, as onscreen, she’s often very still; her face, with its rounded cheekbones and straight planes, will become marble-like and sculptural. Then everything rearranges in a swarm of sudden feeling.

    “Every time I do an interview, I think, ‘I can’t do this to myself again,’ ” Lawrence told her fellow-actor Viola Davis a few years ago, adding, “I feel like I lose so much control over my craft when I have to do press for a movie.” I got the sense that, with me, she was trying to be careful. She seemed conscious of a lesson learned at peak fame: she doesn’t want to be the trick pony; she wants to be the rider holding the reins. Still, frequently, something unbridled would burst through. Soon after I sat down, Lawrence asked me if it was O.K. if she “vaped . . . constantly,” then noted that she’d have to stop in November, when she planned to get her boobs done. (Nicotine constricts blood vessels—bad for tissue healing.) Later, we discussed the cervical details of our respective childbirth experiences, and she cheerfully offered the phrase “huge vagina.”

    Cartoon by Ellie Black

    When I mentioned going through old articles about her, she winced. “Oh, no,” she said. “So hyper. So embarrassing.” I said that it must have been self-alienating to have people demand and obsess over her genuine personality, and then to decide that it was fake. “Well, it is, or it was, my genuine personality, but it was also a defense mechanism,” she said. The pedestal of fame had felt treacherous and false: “And so it was a defense mechanism, to just be, like, ‘I’m not like that! I poop my pants every day!’ ” Lawrence had anticipated the turn in public opinion long before it happened, and rarely felt at ease. “I was young, I lived alone, I was being chased,” she said. Paparazzi followed her when she drove around in Los Angeles; at night, adrenaline threw off her sleep. She had too many projects and was doing too much press, and she felt “pissed,” she said. “I look at those interviews, and that person is annoying. I get why seeing that person everywhere would be annoying. Ariana Grande’s impression of me on ‘S.N.L.’ was spot-on.” (“I’m just, like, a snackaholic,” Grande said, in 2016, on a “Celebrity Family Feud” sketch, sporting a tight dress and a perfectly groomed blond wig. “I mean, I love Pringles. If no one’s looking, I’ll eat, like, a whole can.”) But the backlash did make her life seem “uninhabitable,” Lawrence said. “I felt—I didn’t feel, I was, I think—rejected not for my movies, not for my politics, but for me, for my personality.”

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    Jia Tolentino

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  • Trump and the Presidency That Wouldn’t Shut Up

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    The list of figures in American history with whom Donald J. Trump has been compared since he announced his bid for the Presidency a decade ago is longer than his trademark necktie, as red as a gash. It’s taller than Trump Tower, gleaming like a blade. It has a higher turnover than his beleaguered first Cabinet. It includes even more goons, toadies, and peacocks than his current Administration. And yet the comparisons keep coming, in the daily papers, in the nightly podcasts, online, online, online. Is Trump more of a liar than Joseph McCarthy; is he slicker than Huey Long? Is he as mean-spirited as Father Charles Coughlin, more sinister than George Wallace? Is he as much of a fraud as P. T. Barnum, even more of an isolationist than Charles Lindbergh? He is trickier than Richard (Tricky Dick) Nixon, but to what degree?

    Trump plays this game, too. He loves it, and why not? It only ever helps him, inflates, magnifies, and amplifies him, the drumbeat deafening, ceaseless, Trump, Trump, Trump. He’s Andrew Jackson (or is he more like Andrew Johnson?); he’s Ronald Reagan. He thinks only Abraham Lincoln has been treated as unfairly as he has—or, no, “I believe I am treated worse.” Shall we compare him to a summer’s day?

    Everything that has happened in the furor, disarray, and murderous violence of American politics over the past decade has led the commentariat to scramble for antecedents. That includes me. Is this unprecedented? This is the question journalists have been asking historians for a decade now. It arrives by text and voice mail. It arrives by post and e-mail. It knocks on the door and all but raps on the windowpane, tap, tap, tapping. I have been asked this question in the dog park, at the drugstore, in a hayfield, by my mailman, during a snowstorm, while knitting in my kitchen, and in every last blasted Zoom room. And historians—or most of us, anyway—answer, meekly, bleakly, dutifully, hauling out of the archives the disputed election of 1876, the 1970 shooting at Kent State, the parents’-rights movement of the nineteen-twenties, the impeachment of the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. Compared to x, Trump is y. But why? On the upcoming fifth anniversary of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, might it not be best, at this point, simply to stop? Very little in human history is altogether without precedent if you look at it long enough. And what of it? If U.S. history is a map, we are off the grid, over a cliff, lost at sea without a compass. Can anyone honestly maintain that the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, in 1856, or the shots fired by four Puerto Rican nationalists from the balcony of the Capitol, in 1954, offer meaningful points of comparison to the assassination of Charlie Kirk or the events of January 6th?

    I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no reason to study history, to write and to read history. There’s every reason, even more so in tempestuous times than in quieter ones. Learning to code turns out to have been a terrible call; how much more precious to have studied the past, the mystery of iniquity, the chaos of strife, the messy, gripping, blood-drenched record of yearning that is the twisted and magnificent course of human events. Nor do I mean to suggest that this is the worst moment in the history of the United States. It is not. I mean only to warn that the false analogy offers false comfort. Analogies are tempting because they can be helpful, a flashlight on a moonless night. “The many uses of analogy,” the historian David Hackett Fischer wrote in a 1970 book called “Historians’ Fallacies,” are “balanced by the mischief which arises from its abuse.” A flashlight is not the same as daylight. With a flashlight, you see only what you’re pointing it at, and yet, cheered by its warm glow, you might forget that you are, in fact, in the dark.

    Peer into the dark. Earlier this fall, Trump reposted on Truth Social a four-minute news clip generated by A.I. The clip purported to be a segment from Lara Trump’s Fox News show, reporting on Trump’s announcement of the launch of “medbeds . . . designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength” at special hospitals about to open all over the country. Medbeds, which can cure all ailments and reverse aging, appear regularly in science fiction. (Think of the “biobeds” in the “Star Trek” sick bay.) They began featuring in online conspiracy theories in the early twenty-twenties; QAnoners claim that medbeds exist, and have existed for years, and that the rich and powerful use them (and that J.F.K. himself is on one, still alive), and that soon Trump will liberate them for use by the rest of us, as if Trump were Jesus opening the gates of Heaven and medbeds eternal life.

    Take out your flashlight and ask the inevitable question: Is there any precedent for a President of the United States doing such a thing? Is American history any guide to understanding why Trump, or someone on his staff, posted (and soon afterward deleted) a fake video about a nonexistent news report concerning a fictional miracle cure, an episode whose political significance strikes me as asymptotically approaching zero?

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    Jill Lepore

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  • Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound

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    Reeder had tested children’s imagery and believed that most children were hyperphantasic. They had not yet undergone the synaptic pruning that took place in adolescence, so there were incalculably more neuronal connections linking different parts of their brain, giving rise to fertile imagery. Then, as they grew older, the weaker connections were pruned away. Because the synapses that were pruned tended to be the ones that were used less, Reeder thought it was possible that the children who grew up to be hyperphantasic adults were those who kept on wanting to conjure up visual fantasy worlds, even as they grew older. Conversely, perhaps children who grew up to become typical imagers daydreamed less and less, becoming more interested in the real people and things around them. Maybe some children who loved to daydream were scolded, in school or at home, to pay attention, and maybe these children disciplined themselves to focus on the here and now and lost the ability to travel to the imaginary worlds they’d known when they were young.

    Cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson

    Clare had not been discouraged from daydreaming as a child, and she had preferred it to the other common form of imaginative dissociation, reading. Daydreaming was more pleasurable for her because she had struggled to learn to read, and even once she knew how she’d found it slow going. When she received a diagnosis of dyslexia, as an adult, the tester told her that, rather than processing individual letters or sounds, she was memorizing pictures of whole words, which made it hard to recognize words in different fonts. Her visual sense was so overweening that reading was strenuous, because she was easily distracted by the squiggles and lines of the text.

    Naturally, aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading. Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and, because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds.

    Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books—since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull—or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. Some aphantasics found the movie versions of novels more compelling, since these supplied the pictures that they were unable to imagine. Of course, for people who did have imagery, seeing a book character in a movie was often unsettling—because they already had a sharp mental image of the character which didn’t look like the actor, or because their image was vague but just particular enough that the actor looked wrong, or because their image was barely there at all and the physical solidity of the actor conflicted with that amorphousness.

    Presumably, novelists who invented characters also had a variety of responses to seeing them instantiated in solid form. Jane Austen wrote a letter to her sister in 1813 in which she described going to an exhibition of paintings in London and searching for portraits that looked like Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Bingley, two main characters from “Pride and Prejudice.” To her delight, she’d seen “a small portrait of Mrs Bingley, excessively like her . . . exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite color with her.” Austen did not see Elizabeth at the exhibition but hoped, she told her sister, to find a painting of her somewhere in the future. “I dare say Mrs D.”—she wrote, Darcy being Elizabeth’s married name—“will be in Yellow.”

    One of the twenty or so congenital aphantasics who contacted Adam Zeman after his original 2010 paper was a Canadian man in his twenties, Tom Ebeyer. Ebeyer volunteered to participate in Zeman’s studies, and, after Zeman published his 2015 Cortex paper on congenital aphantasia, Ebeyer was one of the participants quoted in the Times article about it. After that, hundreds of aphantasics reached out to him on Facebook and LinkedIn. They asked him questions he didn’t know the answers to: Does this mean I have a disability? Is there a cure?

    Many of Ebeyer’s correspondents felt shocked and isolated, as he had; he decided that what was needed was a online forum where aphantasics could go for information and community. He set up a website, the Aphantasia Network. He didn’t want it to be a sad place where people commiserated with one another, however. There were good things about aphantasia, he believed, and he began to write uplifting posts pointing them out. In one, he argued that aphantasia was an advantage in abstract thinking. When prompted by the word “horse,” a person with imagery would likely picture a particular horse—one they’d seen in life, perhaps, or in a painting. An aphantasic, on the other hand, focussed on the concept of a horse—on the abstract essence of horseness. Ebeyer published posts about famous people who had realized that they were aphantasic: Glen Keane, one of the leading Disney animators on “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast”; John Green, the author of “The Fault in Our Stars,” whose books had sold more than fifty million copies; J. Craig Venter, the biologist who led the first team to sequence the human genome; Blake Ross, who co-created the Mozilla-Firefox web browser when he was nineteen.

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    Larissa MacFarquhar

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  • Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid

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    Working with Nvidia hardware has become a status symbol—a sign that one is serious about A.I. Talking with engineers about the equipment, I was reminded of the time I saw a snaking line of young men standing in the cold to buy sneakers from the streetwear brand Supreme.

    Earlier this year, CoreWeave went public. Venturo and his co-founders are now billionaires. The company owns several hundred thousand G.P.U.s, and its platform trains models for Meta and other leading labs, in addition to OpenAI.

    This summer, I visited a CoreWeave facility on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The building, a large warehouse, was surrounded by a thick fence and dotted at regular intervals with security cameras. I went through a turnstile, where I was greeted by a security guard wearing a bulletproof vest and a holstered Taser. After surrendering my phone, I took two lime-green earplugs from a dispenser and entered the facility.

    I was joined by three CoreWeave engineers, geeks who had adapted to hyper-scale capitalism as Darwin’s finches had to the Galápagos Islands. Jacob Yundt, from corporate, was lean and eloquent, with a swooping part in his hair. Christopher Conley, an enthusiastic explainer with sunglasses and a beard, oversaw the hardware. Sean Anderson, a seven-foot-tall former college-basketball center, wore a shirt that read “MOAR NODES.”

    The nodes in question were shallow trays of computing equipment, each weighing around seventy pounds and holding four water-cooled G.P.U.s along with an array of additional gear. Eighteen of these trays are stacked, then connected with cables to a control unit, to form the Nvidia GB300 computing rack, which is a little taller than a refrigerator and costs a few million dollars. In a busy year, a typical rack will use more electricity than a hundred homes. Dozens of them stretched into the distance.

    CoreWeave keeps its racks in white metal cabinets, to help them stay cool and to dampen noise. Conley unlatched a door to show me a rack in action, and I was buffeted with air. The noise was unholy, as if I’d opened a broom closet and found an active jet engine inside. I watched the blinking lights and the spinning of the fans. “Tinnitus is an occupational hazard,” Conley shouted at me.

    I looked around. There were hundreds of identical cabinets in the facility. Above us was a metal catwalk, lined with power distributors for the computing equipment. I thought of monks in cloisters, soldiers in barracks, prisoners in cells. What type of person voluntarily worked in such a place, I wondered. “I was told by H.R. that I can’t ask this kind of question anymore, but I like to hire people that can endure a lot of pain,” Yundt later said. “Endurance athletes, that sort of thing.”

    CoreWeave wouldn’t tell me which customer was using its technology that day, although Yundt suggested that the training run we were witnessing was a modest one. He began to detail the configuration of the rack. Unable to hear what he was saying, I nodded sagely, as if in a conversation at a night club. Even with the plugs in, my ears were starting to ring, and I was developing a headache. Yundt turned to me. “Sometimes a customer will tie up this entire place for weeks at a time,” he shouted. His parted hair began to flap in the fan exhaust. “We call those ‘hero runs.’ ”

    CoreWeave’s hardware can train an A.I. from scratch to completion. Software developers, typically at a workstation in Silicon Valley, upload to the data center a file of numbers known as “weights” and a vast array of training data, which might be text or images or medical records or, really, anything at all. In their initial configuration, the weights are random, and the A.I. has no capabilities.

    The A.I. is then exposed to a slice of the training data, and asked to offer a prediction about what should ensue—the next few letters in a sentence, say. An untrained A.I. will invariably get this prediction wrong, but at least it will learn what not to do. The weights must be modified to absorb this new piece of information. The math is unwieldy, and is especially dependent on an operation known as matrix multiplication.

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    Stephen Witt

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