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  • Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Rebecca West’s “The Crown Versus William Joyce”

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    The badge of maturity, for a literary genre, is the anxiety of influence—the compulsion felt by an aspiring writer to pee upon a fire hydrant that an earlier eminence once peed upon with distinction. Rebecca West, an unjustly neglected deity of “novelistic” reportage, would have approved of the vulgarity of this metaphor. In the 1941 masterpiece “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” where she micturated upon the fire hydrant of Yugoslavia for eleven hundred gloriously digressive pages, a “lavatory of the old Turkish kind” inspires an extended rumination on its dark dung hole.

    The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, one of West’s greatest heirs, would never have dwelled on such crude terrain. But many of Malcolm’s preoccupations were recognizable as attempts to overcome the debt that she owed her precursor. Legal conflicts—like the one at the heart of Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer”—make for a good example. West, who combined a psychoanalytic aversion to sentimentality with an anthropological curiosity, inspired a generation of writers to render courtroom proceedings as a civilized translation of a primordial rite. In 1946, her dispatch from Nuremberg began, “Those men who had wanted to kill me and my kind and who had nearly had their wish were to be told whether I and my kind were to kill them and why.” Vengeance might have underwritten a given trial’s stakes, but cases themselves were to be taken in as stylized performances. West treated trial coverage as a variant of drama criticism.

    West reserved her most operatic appreciation for tragedies of betrayal—“the dark travesty of legitimate hatred because it is felt for kindred, just as incest is the dark travesty of legitimate love.” A year before Nuremberg, West chronicled the prosecution, in London, of William Joyce, alias Lord Haw-Haw. Joyce was a second-tier Fascist who had defected to Berlin to serve as a radio broadcaster for the Nazis’ English service. He was infamous in Britain for his bloodthirsty prophecies of German triumph.

    The courthouse audience’s vexed relationship with Joyce was “something new in the history of the world”—a prototype of the parasocial. Joyce’s voice “had suggested a large and flashy handsomeness,” but his appearance broke the spell. “He was short and, though not very ugly, was exhaustively so,” with the look “of an eastern European peasant driven off the land by poverty into a factory town and there wearing his first suit of western clothes.” (Outdoing Malcolm in her icy dispassion, West was merciless with the poor jurors as well: “though they were drawn from different ranks of life, there is no rank of life in which middle-aged English people are other than puffy or haggard.”)

    What ought to be West’s considerable legacy has been reduced to her wit, and she was hilariously unsparing in her treatment of Joyce as “flimsy yet coarse.” This, West was well aware, represented a crystallization of the attitude that inspired his original treason. Joyce’s youthful high-society aspirations had been dismissed, and the pain of this injury fed his populist resentment: “What could the little man do—since he so passionately desired to exercise authority and neither this nor any other sane state would give it to him—but use his trick of gathering together luckless fellows to overturn the state and substitute a mad one?”

    Rejected by the smart establishment, Joyce ingratiated himself with a counter-élite that might dignify his bitterness as political courage. His fantasy of status and purpose destined him for Berlin, which he believed could teach England a thing or two about old-fashioned martial valor. In some ways, he prefigured the toadying courtiers of our era’s New Right, who fawn over despots with the same pick-me devotion.

    West found Joyce almost beneath contempt. The bureaucratic march toward his conviction was nevertheless “more terrible than any other case I have ever seen in which a death sentence was given.” Privately, she wrote, “I am consumed with pity for Joyce because it seems to me that he lived in a true hell.” The deadpan pathos of her report painted this hell as a shared reality. The despair that both created Joyce and attended his execution was universal: “Nobody in court felt any emotion when he knew that Joyce was going to die.” ♦

    The Crown Versus William Joyce

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    Gideon Lewis-Kraus

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  • Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing

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    The surprise and shock that so many people have registered at the photographs of Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House—soon to be replaced by his own ostentatious and overscaled ballroom—is itself, in a way, surprising and shocking. On the long list of Trumpian depredations, the rushed demolition might seem a relatively minor offense. After months marked by corruption, violence, and the open perversion of law, to gasp in outrage at the loss of a few tons of masonry and mortar might seem oddly misjudged.

    And yet it isn’t. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest of architectural critics, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but that the book of its buildings is the most enduring. The faith in order and proportion embodied in the Alhambra, the romance of modernity caught in the Eiffel Tower’s lattice of iron—these are not ideas imposed on buildings but ideals that the buildings themselves express, more lastingly than words can. Among them, not least, is the modest, egoless ideal of democratic tradition captured so perfectly in such American monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, which shows not a hero but a man, seated, in grave contemplation.

    The same restrained values of democracy have always marked the White House—a stately house, but not an imperial one. It is “the people’s house,” but it has also, historically, been a family house, with family quarters and a family scale. It’s a little place, by the standards of monarchy, and blessedly so: fitting for a democracy in which even the biggest boss is there for a brief time, and at the people’s pleasure. As Ronald Reagan said, after a victory more decisive than Trump could ever dream of, the President is merely a temporary resident, holding the keys for a fixed term. That was the beauty of it.

    The East Wing has never been a place of grandeur. The structure as we knew it was built in the anxious years of the Second World War. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to regularize a jumble of service spaces and, not incidentally, to carve out a secure refuge beneath them. But it quickly became a center of quiet power. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted women journalists there. Two decades later, Jacqueline Kennedy presided over a different kind of transformation from the same offices, founding the White House Historical Association. The wing’s very plainness came to symbolize the functional modesty of democratic government: a space for staff, not spectacle; for the sustaining rituals of civic life, not the exhibition of personal glory.

    All of that is now gone. The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. He asks permission of no one, destroys what he wants, when he wants. As many have noted, one of Trump’s earliest public acts, having promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art the beautiful limestone reliefs from the façade of the old Bonwit Teller building, was to jackhammer them to dust in a fit of impatience.

    Trump apologists say that earlier Presidents altered the White House, too. Didn’t Jimmy Carter install solar panels? Didn’t George H. W. Bush build a horseshoe pit? Didn’t Barack Obama put in a basketball court? What’s the fuss? And, anyway, who but élitists would object to a big ballroom that looks like the banquet hall of a third-rate casino? Who decides what’s decorous and what’s vulgar? Even the White House Historical Association, with a caution that has become typical of this dark time, confines itself to stating that it has been allowed to make a digital record of what’s being destroyed—as though that were a defense, rather than an epitaph.

    This, of course, is the standard line of Trump apologetics: some obvious outrage is identified, and defenders immediately scour history for an earlier, vaguely similar act by a President who actually respected the Constitution. It’s a form of mismatched matching. If Trump blows up boats with unknown men aboard—well, didn’t Obama use drones against alleged terrorists? (Yes, but within a process designed, however imperfectly, to preserve a chain of command and a vestige of due process.) If Trump posts a video featuring himself as the combat pilot he never was, dropping excrement on peaceful protesters—well, didn’t Lyndon Johnson swear at his aides from his seat on the john? What’s the fuss? The jabs and insults of earlier Presidents, though, however rough, stayed within the bounds of democratic discourse, the basic rule being that the other side also gets to make its case. Even Richard Nixon sought out student protesters one early morning—at the Lincoln Memorial—and tried to understand what drove them.

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    Adam Gopnik

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  • November 2025 U.S. Credits

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    Vanity Fair’s November 2025 issue, featuring Charli xcx

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  • Can the Golden Age of Costco Last?

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    By the seventies, FedMart had expanded throughout the Southwest, with its own stores and a number of franchises. Sinegal ran the distribution-warehouse system, which operated almost as a separate business and had become a profit center for the company. In 1975, the German businessman Hugo Mann invested in FedMart. Price hoped that this would be a chance to expand, but to Mann, it became clear, the deal was a takeover. “Those of us who knew Sol figured he would last between one day and six months,” Sinegal told me. “He almost lasted six months.” As the family weighed its next move, Robert had an idea. What if they made Sinegal’s distribution system the crux of a new endeavor, setting up a warehouse that stocked wholesale goods for small businesses?

    The first Price Club warehouse opened in 1976, in a former airplane hangar on San Diego’s northern outskirts. Price Club charged its small-business clientele twenty-five dollars a year for membership, cash flow that could be factored into the company’s gross margins. And wholesaling introduced a new level of efficiency—goods sold from the pallets on which they were delivered required little handling. Within a few years, Price Club began welcoming ordinary shoppers, and it soon had more than two hundred thousand members across locations in California and Arizona. The company went public, in 1979, almost by accident: there was no I.P.O., but, following stock splits, its number of shareholders had exceeded the S.E.C. maximum for a private company.

    The company’s début got Wall Street’s attention. Suddenly, Sinegal told me,“everybody found out how successful they were. Nobody dreamed it.” The next two years saw the opening of imitators such as Pace, BJ’s, and Sam’s Club. Price, now in his sixties, had managed a remarkable second act. (FedMart, meanwhile, was liquidated seven years after his departure.)

    In 1982, Sinegal, who had been working as an independent broker for consumer brands, was contacted by a Seattle retail heir named Jeffrey Brotman. His family had approached Price Club about opening a store in Seattle, but the Prices weren’t interested. Now Brotman suggested that he and Sinegal launch their own wholesale-club store there. The pitch that they made to investors, Sinegal told me, was simple: “Let’s duplicate what Price Club is doing.” They wanted a simple name for the new venture, and, he added, “we couldn’t come up with anything clever.”

    “Costco Wholesale Club Comes to SEATTLE,” a flyer for Costco’s first warehouse opening, in 1983, read, faintly implying that it already existed elsewhere. Costco, though, was a shrewd recombination of what had come before rather than a straight copy. It took up Price Club’s wholesale model of bulk efficiency and substantial membership fees, then, as time passed, added such FedMart staples as private-label goods, gas, and groceries. Staff, too, carried over: Sinegal recruited FedMart veterans.

    Costco’s success was swift—two more warehouses opened before the end of its first year. By the early nineties, Sinegal and Brotman (who had become the chairman) were gaining momentum, as was Sam’s Club—Walmart’s warehouse-club chain. Price Club, meanwhile, was flagging. Sol Price had relinquished his official leadership role, and Robert’s fifteen-year-old son had recently died of cancer, devastating the family. In 1992, the Prices decided to seek a buyer; Costco was the natural choice. The new company now had the scale to compete with Sam’s Club—but the enduring partnership that Price had hoped for did not materialize. “My dad had this idea that we could take these two companies that were so similar in terms of philosophy,” Robert told me, “and I would be chairman and Jim would be the C.E.O. It never worked.” Within a year of the 1993 merger, Robert left.

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    Molly Fischer

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  • The Man Who Sells Unsellable New York Apartments

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    In the city’s turbulent market, Jason Saft doesn’t just beautify properties. He reveals the new life they could bring you.

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    Alexandra Schwartz

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  • The Cocaine Kingpin Living Large in Dubai

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    Most of the Super Cartel’s top members have since been brought to justice. Taghi was arrested in Dubai in 2019 and deported to the Netherlands, whose ports have become drug-trafficking hubs. He stood trial and was sentenced to life in prison, in a courthouse so heavily fortified that it is known as the Bunker. (Despite the security precautions, the brother and the lawyer of a state’s witness, as well as the Dutch crime journalist Peter R. de Vries, were murdered during the proceedings.) Gačanin was arrested in Dubai in 2022, as part of a transnational effort known as Operation Desert Light. The next year, he was convicted by a Dutch court; Gačanin later made a deal with prosecutors in which he was sentenced to seven years in prison and forced to pay a million-euro fine. Riquelme is also imprisoned in the Netherlands; he was sentenced to eleven years. Imperiale was apprehended in 2021 and later deported to Italy, where he is now incarcerated.

    But Kinahan—who, through his lawyer, declined to comment for this article—remains at large in Dubai. In April, 2022, the Kinahan Organized Crime Group was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which compared the group to “Mexico’s Los Zetas, Japan’s Yakuza and Russia’s ‘Thieves In Law.’ ” The U.S. Ambassador to Ireland announced that a five-million-dollar reward would be given for tips leading to the arrest of Kinahan; his father, Christy Kinahan, Sr.; or his brother, Christy Kinahan, Jr. But, according to a former D.E.A. agent, American law enforcement cared about only one Kinahan. As the agent put it, “It’s all about Dan.”

    Portlaoise Prison, which is in the center of Ireland, is a nineteenth-century penitentiary built like a fortress—a one-star establishment, at best. In 1997, twenty years before the Dubai wedding, Christy Kinahan, Sr., was imprisoned in a rodent-infested block called the E Wing. Inmates slept one to a cell and urinated in buckets.

    Kinahan, Sr., grew up in a middle-class family in Dublin. He became involved in petty crime at a young age, initially check fraud. Well-dressed, and able to affect a refined Anglo-Irish accent, Kinahan, Sr., was an adept con man. All criminals love nicknames, but the Irish do them best: the Penguin, the Viper, Fatso. Kinahan, Sr., became the Dapper Don.

    In the late seventies, heroin began ravaging Dublin’s inner-city projects. A man named Larry Dunne was the city’s first godfather of heroin importers, but he was jailed in 1985. Kinahan, Sr., seeing a business opportunity, filled the gap. A sharp young detective, Michael O’Sullivan, noticed him. “There was somebody new in the market, and it just didn’t fit,” O’Sullivan told me. “Often, people in the heroin business get messy. They know the heroin trade because they use heroin.” But, in O’Sullivan’s opinion, Kinahan, Sr., wasn’t a dope fiend, and he ran an efficient business.

    One day in 1986, O’Sullivan disguised himself as an electrician and followed Kinahan, Sr., to his apartment, where he caught him with a large quantity of heroin. The police later found other contraband, as well as various language-studies cassettes—Kinahan, Sr., was teaching himself French and Arabic. He was convicted of heroin possession, jailed for six years, and released in 1992. Months later, he was caught with stolen checks. The arresting officer told me that Kinahan, Sr., was an “impressive, kind of intelligent guy—no aggression.” After the arrest, Kinahan, Sr., was granted bail, then vanished.

    “Here’s your problem.”

    Cartoon by Edward Steed

    By the mid-nineties, Irish organized crime had outgrown the country’s policing capacity. Drugs were pouring in; kidnappings and bank jobs were being perpetrated with seeming impunity. In 1996, a crime journalist, Veronica Guerin, was shot dead by a member of a gang that she’d covered, the Gilligans. The public outrage that followed led the Irish government to establish the Criminal Assets Bureau, which allowed lawmakers to seize money and property from convicted criminals.

    The formation of the bureau, however, had an unintended consequence: it turned some Irish criminals into international potentates. Many Dublin mobsters moved to Amsterdam, which at the time was not unlike the cantina in “Star Wars”: a place where an assortment of major villains could freely hang out, exchange contacts, and collaborate. Kinahan, Sr., became one such expat. Another was John Cunningham, who’d been jailed, in 1986, on a kidnapping charge; he’d escaped from a prison south of Dublin in 1996. Cunningham and Kinahan, Sr., began working together, transporting heroin, cannabis, cocaine, Ecstasy, and guns to Ireland. During the same period, the Dutch police caught Kinahan, Sr., with a cache of drugs and weapons, and imprisoned him for a year. Upon serving his sentence, he went back to work. In 1997, Kinahan, Sr., returned to Ireland to attend his father’s funeral, where he was arrested for the check fraud that had led him to skip bail four years earlier. He wound up in Portlaoise.

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    Ed Caesar

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  • A “New Middle East” Is Easier to Declare Than to Achieve

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    President Donald Trump arrived at Ben Gurion Airport on Monday morning, October 13th, just as Hamas was releasing the last surviving Israeli hostages after two years of cruel captivity and Israel had halted its devastating bombardment of Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, two thousand Israelis and sixty-seven thousand Palestinians had been killed. The Strip had been reduced to a landscape of destitution and ruin. A ceasefire that could, and should, have come long ago was finally, fitfully, taking hold.

    In Jerusalem, Trump was greeted on billboards and in the Knesset as a modern Cyrus the Great—the Persian ruler who, in 538 B.C., allowed the Jews to return to the Holy Land from their Babylonian exile and rebuild the Temple. During Trump’s speech to the Knesset, two left-wing lawmakers, Ofer Cassif, a Jewish Israeli, and Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian Israeli, raised small placards reading “Recognize Palestine.” Guards swiftly hauled them from the chamber. The President praised the speed with which this modest protest was suppressed. “That was very efficient,” he said brightly. In his self-admiring rambling, Trump took time out to thank his lead negotiator, Steve Witkoff (a “Kissinger who doesn’t leak”), and one of his wealthiest patrons, Miriam Adelson (“She’s got sixty billion in the bank!”), then turned to trash Joe Biden—the “worst President in the history of our country by far, and Barack Obama was not far behind.”

    It is impossible not to feel immense relief that this long, terrible war may at last be ending; it is also hard to ignore that the President’s decision to apply his sense of leverage and cunning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu owed little to consistent strategy, empathy, or conviction. Indeed, his reckless musings earlier this year about making Gaza a “Riviera of the Middle East” stoked the Israeli right’s fantasies of resettling the Strip and annexing the West Bank. They also deepened much of the world’s anger. The pivotal moment came on September 9th, when Netanyahu ordered an air strike on a residential building in Doha, hoping to kill four Hamas leaders who were then engaged in ceasefire negotiations. The strike missed its targets but clearly rattled Trump.

    Like so many Presidents before him, he had indulged Netanyahu’s propensity to take American military and political support for granted. But the strike on Doha touched something more sensitive than principle: the bottom line. The Trump family’s business ventures are increasingly entwined with Qatari and Gulf capital. Trump compelled Netanyahu to deliver a scripted apology to the Qataris— a humbling that restored their confidence and amour propre, reassured Turkey and Egypt, and led these regimes to press Hamas into accepting the pending ceasefire agreement. The most consequential Israeli air strike of the war, in the end, was one that failed.

    The President now hails “the historic dawn of a new Middle East.” When, during the hopeful years of the Oslo Accords, Shimon Peres used that phrase, he was mocked for his naïveté. Trump’s version owes less to diplomacy than to real-estate patter, the it’s-so-if-you-believe-it’s-so spirit he called on when insisting that Trump Tower had sixty-eight floors, though it actually had fifty-eight. As much as the President prizes “deal guys” over starchy diplomats, however, attaining peace in the Middle East is not so simple as unloading a defunct casino. The Administration cannot just declare an end to what the President calls “three thousand years” of conflict and move on to its domestic project of undermining the rule of law. History resists the shortcut.

    The idyll of a “new Middle East” in Netanyahu’s triumphalist view is one in which, owing to his Churchillian leadership, the threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen, and Iran are all diminished or defeated. Behold the dawn. As for Netanyahu’s failure to safeguard the country on October 7th? All is forgotten. This willfully blinkered vision, or, more precisely, reëlection platform, ignores the cost in global opinion along with the moral and political fractures within Israel itself. It also overlooks the rage bred into the bones of young Palestinians, who have lost family members and friends but not their insistence on dignity and a home. Real progress in the region, real justice and stability, will require healing, constancy, imagination, and endurance—day after day, year after year, long past any one Administration.

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    David Remnick

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  • Donald Trump’s Deep-State Wrecking Ball

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    At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the U.S.I.P. was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the O.M.B. to dismantle the organization.)

    The O.M.B. staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than seven billion dollars that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused U.S.A.I.D. of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of fifty per cent.

    Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the O.M.B. staff. Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”

    What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of Presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers, and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health-care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an A.I.-generated video that depicted his budget director—who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or cancelled twenty-six billion dollars in funding for infrastructure and clean-energy projects in blue states—as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the President of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the O.M.B. told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the Commander-in-Chief.”

    At the start of Trump’s second term, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which promised to slash spending and root out waste, dominated the headlines. A gaggle of tech bros, with little government experience, appeared to be marching into federal buildings and, with the President’s blessing, purging people and programs seen as “woke” or anti-Trump. The sight of Musk swinging a chainsaw onstage at a conservative conference captured the pell-mell approach, not to mention the brutality, of the billionaire’s plan to bring the federal government to heel.

    But, according to court records, interviews, and other accounts from people close to Vought, DOGE’s efforts were guided, more than was previously known, by the O.M.B. director. Musk bragged about “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper,” but the details of the agency’s downsizing were ironed out by Vought’s office. When DOGE took aim at obscure quasi-government nonprofits, such as the United States Institute of Peace, O.M.B. veterans saw Vought’s influence at work. “I can’t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,” the former O.M.B. branch chief told me. Vought also orchestrated DOGE’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, crippling a regulator that Republicans had hoped to shutter during Trump’s first term. “DOGE is underneath the O.M.B.,” Michelle Martin, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a grassroots group founded by Vought, said in May, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing . . . was at the direction of Russ.”

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    Andy Kroll

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  • Did a Brother’s Quest for Justice Go Too Far?

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    Scott Johnson’s murder case became synonymous with a movement to redress anti-gay violence in Australia. But the evidence that led to a man’s conviction has never been made public.

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    Eren Orbey

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  • V. R. Lang, a Forgotten Queen Bee of Modern Poetry

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    Candidly. The past, the sensations of the past. Now!
    in cuneiform, of umbrella satrap square-carts with hotdogs
    and onions of red syrup blended, of sand bejewelling the prepuce
    in tank suits, of Majestic Camera Stores and Schuster’s

    And here is Lang, in an unnamed poem, in dialogue:

    A: If you threaten me, I shall die.
    B: If you are threatened, you should know why.
    A: Dying is the last place love can go.
    It is its cave, and dark love
    Is silent and cuneiform.

    At once we sense a closing in. The lines are curter, slanting toward aphorism; a rhyme rings out; and “cuneiform,” which for O’Hara is one verbal flourish among many, allows Lang to deliver a singular shock. What’s clear is that to position her as O’Hara’s “muse,” as more than one commentator has called her, is demeaning and dead wrong. They were creative trading partners, and the trade was mutual and free. “At 11 each morning, we called each other and discussed everything we had thought of since we had parted the night before,” O’Hara wrote. In one poem, dedicated “To V. R. Lang,” he hymns her as “friend to my angels (all quarrelling),” and in “A Letter to Bunny” he pays tribute to her editorial gifts. When one of his poems threatens to turn into “a burner full of junk,” O’Hara says, it is Lang who comes to the rescue. “You enable me, by your least / remark, to unclutter myself, and my / nerves thank you for not always laughing.”

    One project that consumed both Lang and O’Hara was the Poets’ Theatre, which was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950. The opening night, on February 26, 1951, was attended by such luminaries as Thornton Wilder, Richard Wilbur, and Archibald MacLeish. Among the delights on offer that evening was a play by O’Hara, “Try! Try!” (hardly the most propitious of titles), with set designs by Gorey. It was directed by Lang, who also played a character named Violet—clad, in the words of O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch, “in her rattiest white sneakers and a faded red and white apron.”

    The very phrase “Poets’ Theatre,” it must be said, does not inspire huge confidence, being a compound of two unstable elements. One might as well speak of embezzlers’ Jell-O. The atmosphere, according to Alison Lurie, who observed it at close quarters, was one of “rehearsals, feuds, affairs, debts, and parties.” Yet solid achievements were registered in the ensuing years, such as a reading of Djuna Barnes’s “Antiphon,” which was attended—at Lang’s brazen invitation—by T. S. Eliot. Lurie argues that, although Lang was not much of an actress (she reserved her most expert shape-shifting for life offstage), her trick was to treat those around her as if they were playing parts. “They were excited to be told, and often behaved afterwards in line with Bunny’s definition,” Lurie writes.

    To be honest, the whole setup sounds exhausting. Things came to a head when Lang wrote a play of her own, “Fire Exit,” which had its première in 1952. “She directed it, produced it, and starred in it. She also chose the cast, designed the costumes and sets, arranged the music and lighting, did the publicity, and managed the theatre,” Lurie tells us. For some of the in-house regulars, evidently, such imperiousness was too much, and a campaign was mounted to “Stop Bunny.” On the other hand, you have to ask: Was Lang beset by anything more than the exasperation of every poet and every novelist—the loss of control that arises when words are released from the confines of the page and encouraged to run free in the theatre, or onscreen, at the whim of other voices and under the guidance of other hands?

    The irony is that “Fire Exit,” whatever the ordeal of its conception, emerges as a careful comedy, touched with pathos. How performable it might be, these days, is open to debate, but Lang’s ear for casually loaded prattling does not desert her:

    MRS. BLANCHE: I think there’s someone, Pol,
    She’s waiting on. A long time.
    You know, you met him. A musician.
    A classical.

    MRS. POLLY [decidedly]: He ain’t no one for her.
    Kind of funny-looking, I thought.
    She needs a Real Man.

    “I need more structure in my life than just being told what to do and what to say by the people who control me.”

    Cartoon by P. C. Vey

    The woman these people are talking about is Eurydice—often hailed as “Eury”—and the musician is Orpheus. Lang’s leaning into myth recurs in her second play, “I Too Have Lived in Arcadia.” (Neither drama is reprinted in “The Miraculous Season,” but both were appended, with a generous helping of poems, to Lurie’s memoir when it was reprinted in 1975. Beautiful spidery illustrations by Gorey preface each section of Lurie’s book.) “Arcadia” sprang from an agonized affair between Lang and an abstract painter named Mike Goldberg; as dramatis personae, they are Chloris and Damon, who inhabit a desolate Atlantic island. They are joined by an irate third party, Phoebe, plus a poodle named Georges. He is not a happy dog: “Lady, not to eat and not to love / And to no purpose but to live it up / And have a ball, was I brought into life. / The plot grows sad, no longer good for laughs.”

    For anyone who champions Lang, the question has to be: Could you spot her work without her name attached? What, if any, are its distinguishing marks? Well, for one thing, get a load of the animals—an arkful of them prowling the poetry, frequently when they are least expected. “O he has a wildebeeste’s eyes, not nice, / And a tongue like an ice pick.” To and fro Lang ranges in creaturely time, back into prehistory: “The Brontosaurus / Stand and watch, their pale, already weedy eyes / Are hurting them, and their unmanageable crusted limbs.” Human beasts are rarely alone, and far from secure at the apex of the animal kingdom. “Cats walked the walls and gleamed at us,” “Where lovers lay around like great horned owls,” and “We lay fat cats under a milkweed sky.”

    Those last three, it should be emphasized, are all first lines. Lang is, in the richest sense, a promising beginner. Out of the blocks she launches herself, like a sprinter in spiked shoes. Feel the whoosh as her openings hurtle by: “Darling, they have discovered dynamite.” “Here was the fright, the flight, the brilliant stretch.” “Spring you came marvellous with possibles.” (The last of those is from “The Pitch,” which was published in Poetry in 1950. It should be anything but possible to write an arresting line about springtime, more than half a millennium after Chaucer, yet Lang pulls it off.) As often as not, the preliminary burst is comic, as we barge into a tête-à-tête or the fallout from a filthy private joke: “Why else do you have an English Horn if not / To blow it so I’ll know to let you in?”

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    Anthony Lane

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  • Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education

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    Federal agencies started investigations across the state, including into the entire University of Maine system. The Department of Agriculture, which provides significant grant money to the university, announced that it would be reviewing the system’s compliance with Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination at federally funded schools and protects women’s access to sports. Soon afterward, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration informed the university that funding for its Maine Sea Grant program, which supports coastal communities, had been discontinued. Joan Ferrini-Mundy, the university’s president, was at a dogsled race near the Canadian border when she got the news. She rushed to a hot-cocoa stand and called Senator Susan Collins.

    Maine can feel like a small town. It has about one and a half million people, with true “Mainer” status reserved for families who have lived there for generations. UMaine embodies this ethos. It’s the state’s only flagship public school and its only top-tier research university. Maine’s politics are purple: Democrats hold the governor’s mansion and the legislature, but Trump carried one of the state’s four electoral votes in 2024, and Collins, a Republican whose family has deep UMaine ties, has held her Senate seat for nearly three decades. When Collins heard about the Sea Grant cuts, she had just returned from the Maine Fishermen’s Forum, a gathering for the state’s fishing industry. The potential consequences of the cuts couldn’t have been clearer.

    On a recent morning, Gayle Zydlewski, the director of the Maine Sea Grant program, took me out on the Damariscotta River, near the coast. The water was dotted with signs of a nearly invisible ecosystem: clamdiggers on the shore, kelp lines in the current, rows of what looked like small floating oil drums, which turned out to be an underwater oyster farm. Sea Grant helps keep this ecosystem functioning.

    We stopped at a wooden platform in the middle of the river and hopped up. Beneath our feet were trapdoors, which opened to reveal trays of about two hundred oysters. Workers hauled them up, sorted them by size, hosed them off, and bagged them so that they’d be ready to sell. Brendan Parsons, who owned the oyster farm, explained how Sea Grant had supported his business: the Maine Oyster Trail, a statewide tourism program developed by Sea Grant staff, funnels visitors to his farm and restaurant. About half his workers had taken a Sea Grant training course. UMaine’s researchers are also developing cheaper methods of growing oysters. “This isn’t some willy-nilly program,” Parsons said. “It’s just astonishing that people would think that there’s waste there.”

    UMaine is a land-grant university, with a mission to support agriculture and forestry. Researchers joke that Sea Grant is the university’s “salty extension.” “A lot of people in the country, when they think of research institutions, they tend to think of the Ivy League colleges,” Collins told me. But much more of higher education looks like UMaine. The school’s scientists are developing blight-resistant potatoes and testing ways to make jet fuel out of the wood in Maine’s forests. “This is not research that is likely to be picked up by a Harvard or a Yale,” Collins said.

    The senator recalled having at least five conversations with Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce—which oversees NOAA—about Sea Grant. Within days of receiving the termination letter, UMaine was told that the funding would eventually be restored. But the narrative around the university had been set, and the crackdown was just beginning. As Andy Harris, a Republican congressman, wrote in a statement about UMaine a week later, “Women and Girls’ sports must be protected from woke identity politics.”

    When the U.S.D.A. opened its Title IX review of UMaine, in February, the school’s leaders responded but never heard back. Two weeks later, Griffin Dill, who runs UMaine’s Tick Lab, forwarded them an e-mail he had received, stating that the U.S.D.A. had been directed to pause all funding to Columbia and the University of Maine system. Dill’s lab, which dissects ticks to check for Lyme and other diseases, seemed far removed from campus culture wars. “No one likes ticks,” he said.

    As the spring went on, the confusion deepened. Grant administrators logged in to federal dashboards to draw down funds that had been awarded, only to find money missing. One vanished U.S.D.A. grant was for a STEM program for rural high-school girls, including “students from minority, immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking families.” When the university wrote to the U.S.D.A., program officers explained that the funds had been paused “during the transition of government” but wouldn’t elaborate; when UMaine officials tried to call, no one answered. A program officer for a different grant, related to soil health, wrote that his department had been told to pause any Biden-era funding. “I am very sorry and know this is causing much turmoil on your side,” he added.

    Ferrini-Mundy told researchers that whenever they discovered that money was missing, received a notice letter, or even heard a rumor about a funding change, they were to report it. At town halls, professors worried aloud about their labs, staff, and graduate students, whom they employed with federal money. It wasn’t even clear which grants were being frozen as part of a Maine-specific Title IX crackdown, which ones were part of the broader DOGE dragnet, or what other mysterious government machinations might be to blame.

    In April, UMaine learned that a Department of Energy grant for a floating offshore wind-turbine project was suspended—on the same day that a three-hundred-and-seventy-five-ton platform had been hauled to a dock in Searsport. The university couldn’t fund the project’s launch, but it couldn’t leave the platform in port, either, forcing school officials to find emergency funds to move forward. Trump, who has called wind turbines “ugly,” had issued an executive order pausing leasing and permitting for offshore wind projects. Yet when UMaine contacted the Department of Energy, a program officer explained that the suspensions were tied to another executive order: “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Different political priorities had gotten tangled together. Offshore wind had become part of a debate about transgender athletes, rather than a debate about offshore wind.

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    Emma Green

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  • The Real Problem Is How Trump Can Legally Use the Military

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    The militarization of American cities, including Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, has brought home a perverse irony. Throughout the history of the United States, immigrants have come here to escape authoritarian governments. But, in the twenty-first century, it is Donald Trump’s crackdowns on immigration, and on the protests against them, that are giving him momentum in the direction of ersatz dictatorship. The President has also threatened to deploy troops in more cities, such as San Francisco, Baltimore, and New York, against the will of the states’ governors.

    At the nation’s founding, James Madison warned that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,” because of the temptation to turn soldiers into “instruments of tyranny at home.” The Constitution divides power over the military between the President, who is the Commander-in-Chief, and Congress, which funds and regulates the military, declares war, and provides “for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” In the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, Congress spelled out that it is generally forbidden to use the military for civilian law enforcement. But, in a statute from 1956, Congress gave the President the authority to federalize any state’s National Guard in the event of an “invasion by a foreign nation” or a “rebellion” against the federal government, or in cases when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

    In June, President Trump first mobilized thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of marines to L.A. to protect ICE officers and other federal employees, functions, and property at sites where people were protesting against the Administration. Those deployments provoked more protests, which, in turn, fuelled the Administration’s claims that troops are needed to quell them. The sight of armed soldiers outfitted for war on city streets strikes many Americans as a frightening escalation from a President seemingly bent on punishing those who oppose him. The problem, though, is not what’s illegal but what isn’t. The lawfulness of Trump’s actions hinges on circumstances specified by Congress, and the courts have not been uniform in evaluating them.

    A federal district court in California temporarily blocked the deployment of troops to L.A. in June. But the Ninth Circuit lifted the block, recognizing that courts are “highly deferential” to a President’s assessments. It found that Trump likely had a “colorable basis” for claiming to be “unable with the regular forces to execute” federal immigration law, given the evidence that some protesters had violently interfered with law enforcement by throwing things at ICE vehicles and federal officials, utilizing “dumpsters as a battering ram” at a federal building, lobbing Molotov cocktails, and vandalizing property. The California district court later ruled that the Administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using soldiers to execute federal law, and an appeal is pending.

    Last week, an Oregon federal district judge, Karin Immergut, who had been appointed by Trump, found that the President probably lacked the authority to federalize the National Guard to deploy in Portland in September. That conclusion rested largely on the contrast between Portland and L.A. in the weeks leading up to the President’s orders regarding each city. That is, unlike when Trump sent troops to L.A., “it had been months since there was any sustained level of violent or disruptive protest activity in Portland.” The Justice Department’s claims of disruptive protests in September included “setting up a makeshift guillotine,” posting a photo of an ICE vehicle online, and shining flashlights in drivers’ eyes—all of which, Judge Immergut said, could be successfully handled by law enforcement.

    The President didn’t help his case by spreading outlandish falsehoods. He posted on Truth Social about “War ravaged Portland,” “ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” and “Chaos, Death, and Destruction.” Even affording “a great level of deference” to the President, Judge Immergut concluded that the claim that Trump had been unable to execute federal law was “simply untethered to the facts.” But this commonsense point about Trump’s credibility may be controversial, too, because of the difficulty in determining when judicial second-guessing of the President’s assessments amounts to usurping the power that Congress has delegated to him. The Ninth Circuit may well ignore Trump’s posts and find that even low-level disruptions in recent weeks, or violent incidents from months earlier, are sufficient for him to send troops to protect federal officials’ ability to do their jobs. Meanwhile, a district court temporarily enjoined the deployment of troops in Illinois, noting that the Administration’s perception of events is “simply unreliable,” which was a polite way of rejecting the warping of reality entailed in viewing the protests in Chicago as a “rebellion.”

    What is perhaps most concerning is that wide judicial deference to a truth-indifferent President may mean that there is effectively little to no constraint on what he can do, which would quickly erase the separation of powers, not to mention the federalism, that the Constitution is supposed to insure. The statute on federalizing the National Guard is only one of many laws that allow the President to decide whether certain circumstances exist—an invasion, a rebellion, an emergency, an “unusual and extraordinary threat”—and so exercise an extraordinary power. Last week, Trump said that, if necessary, he would invoke another statute, the Insurrection Act, which creates an exception to the prohibition on using the military for law enforcement: “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.” The Insurrection Act, which Trump has frequently mentioned in the past, gives the President staggeringly broader power. For instance, it permits him to use military force inside the U.S. “as he considers necessary to suppress” any “conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs the execution” of federal law. Judges and state officials must surely understand that, if they stymie Trump, he is poised to unleash a more dangerous and harder-to-check power that Congress has already handed him.

    Congress wrote such statutes with the apparent assumption that whoever held the office of the Presidency would use the powers they granted in good faith. Courts, for their part, developed legal doctrines that require them to presume the President’s good faith in deferring to him. The law may therefore be on the President’s side, which is troubling for what it suggests about its capacity to protect against tyranny. Judge Immergut insisted that “this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.” We must hope that they do not turn out to be one and the same. ♦

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    Jeannie Suk Gersen

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  • What Zohran Mamdani Knows About Power

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    One of Mamdani’s more poetic campaign motifs is “public excellence”—the idea that socialists need not compromise on quality-of-life concerns. In the past few months, Mamdani has attempted to reframe his suspicion of police as a human-resources issue, an obstacle to excellence: rank-and-file cops are regularly asked to handle distressing situations outside their skill set, such as dealing with the homeless and the mentally ill. He hopes to take those tasks off their hands by creating a Department of Community Safety, though, by his own admission, some of the details are “still to be determined.” At the prompting of a Times interviewer, in September, Mamdani half-apologized for his old tweets about the N.Y.P.D., but he rejects the notion that his views have evolved. “The principles remain the same,” he told me. “There are also lessons that you learn along the way.”

    No small number of Mamdani’s detractors wonder if someone of his age and experience will be capable of running the biggest city in the country. New York has a hundred-and-sixteen-billion-dollar budget, three hundred thousand employees, and a police department larger than the Belgian Army. For more than a century, people have wondered if the city is ungovernable; with the exception of Fiorello La Guardia, who had New Deal money raining down on him, every idealistic leader who has been elected mayor has left City Hall in some way battered by it. “The good mayor turns out to be weak or foolish or ‘not so good’ . . . or the people become disgusted,” the muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1903. A City Hall veteran recently told me, “You’re constantly making bad decisions that you know are bad decisions. You’re presented with two bad options, and you’ve got to pick one, and that’s your day.”

    If Mamdani is elected, the N.Y.P.D. may well continue to sweep up homeless encampments and forcibly remove protesters who block bridges or roads; he hasn’t yet ruled these things out. (“His administration will not seek to criminalize peaceful protest or poverty,” a Mamdani aide said.) At a recent forum on public safety sponsored by the policy journal Vital City, he was asked about police involuntarily detaining the mentally ill. “It is a last resort,” Mamdani said. “It is something that—if nothing else can work, then it’s there.”

    Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. This was the same year that his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, released “Mississippi Masala,” about a romance between a spunky Indian Ugandan exile (Sarita Choudhury) and a straitlaced Black carpet cleaner (Denzel Washington) in small-town Mississippi. While scouting for a location to set the scenes of her protagonist’s childhood in Uganda, Nair found an airy hilltop property in Kampala, overlooking Lake Victoria. The home appeared in the movie, and Nair and her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, bought it. Zohran spent his first five years there, playing in the lush gardens under jacaranda trees. In a Profile of Nair from 2002, John Lahr wrote that the director’s “talkative doe-eyed son” was known by “dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani.” (Mamdani’s staff today still call him Z, though recently some have started, winkingly, to address him as Sir.)

    Nair met Mahmood while she was researching “Mississippi Masala.” The daughter of a stern, high-ranking Indian state official, she studied at Harvard, and by her thirties had garnered attention for films that examined life on the margins of Indian society: among cabaret dancers, street children, visiting emigrants. Mahmood was born in Bombay in 1946 and grew up in Uganda, part of the Indian diaspora that emerged in East Africa during the British colonial period. In 1962, the year Uganda became independent, Mahmood was awarded one of twenty-three scholarships to study in America which were offered to the new country’s brightest students. (Barack Obama’s father had come to study in the U.S., three years earlier, under a similar program for Kenyan students.) He returned home after his studies abroad, and, like the protagonist Nair later imagined for “Mississippi Masala,” was exiled in Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion of some sixty thousand Asians from the country. The event became a focus of Mahmood’s writing on the pains of decolonization; for Nair, it became the backdrop for a love story. “He’s some kind of lefty,” Nair told her collaborator, Sooni Taraporevala, the day they planned to meet Mahmood for an interview.

    In 1996, Mahmood published his breakthrough work, “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism,” which described the persistence of colonial structures in independent African nations. He dedicated it to Nair and to Zohran, who, he wrote, “daily takes us on the trail that is his discovery of life.” Three years after the book was published, Columbia offered Mahmood a tenured professorship. The family moved to New York, into a faculty apartment in Morningside Heights, where they often had Edward and Mariam Said and Rashid and Mona Khalidi over for dinner. “For Zohran, they were ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties,’ ” Mahmood told me in an e-mail.

    During the fall of 1999, Mamdani’s parents enrolled him at the Bank Street School for Children, a private school. The first year, he felt singled out—“being told again and again that I was very articulate with my English,” Mamdani recalled. Eventually, though, he settled into a typical Upper West Side childhood: Absolute Bagels, soccer in Riverside Park, listening to Jay-Z and Eiffel 65 on his Walkman on the way to school. In 2004, Mahmood took a sabbatical, and the family returned to Kampala for a year. One day, Mahmood went to Zohran’s school, to see how his son was adjusting. “He is doing well except that I do not always understand him,” Zohran’s teacher told him. On orders from the headmaster, the teacher had asked all the Indian students to raise their hands. Zohran had kept his down, and, when prodded, he’d protested, “I am not Indian! I am Ugandan!”

    Mahmood Mamdani, Mira Nair, and Zohran in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991.Photograph courtesy Mira Nair

    On a Saturday morning this summer, I met Mamdani outside the Bronx High School of Science, his alma mater, to walk around with one of his favorite old teachers, Marc Kagan, who happens to be the brother of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court Justice. Kagan, the author of “Take Back the Power”—a firsthand account of his years as a radical organizer in the city’s transit union—taught social studies at Bronx Science for ten years. He inspired fervent admiration in his students, some of whom (Mamdani included) called themselves Kaganites. In his classes, Kagan talked about how race, gender, and class had shaped world events. “We got away from the great-man theory of history,” Kagan, a bespectacled, gray-bearded guy in his late sixties, said as we crossed the school’s sunken courtyard. Mamdani caught my eye and mugged. “There’s just one,” he said, nodding toward Kagan.

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    Eric Lach

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  • Keri Russell’s Emotional Transparency Has Anchored Three Decades of TV

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    “I’m not even sure I remember that,” Russell said, sipping a beer.

    Too late: Rhys was already reliving the conflict. “I was outraged at the time,” he said. “I was, like, ‘That is disgusting! This is the fucking culmination of six years of work! You can’t do that to her!’ She was, like, ‘It’s O.K., that’s fine.’ Because she’s prepared and then she kind of . . . does it.”

    “You’re making me sound very professional,” Russell said, amused.

    “No, no, no. I’m just recounting what happened on set. And then I saw it, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, fucking hell, how did she do that?’ ”

    “But the writing was really great,” Russell said.

    Rhys turned toward me, then whispered, “And the quick deflection.”

    I asked how their romance started. “Oh, we just sort of started having sex,” Russell said. “No, I’m kidding. I don’t know.” She turned to Rhys: “How did we get together?” He told me that he’d had his share of on-set romances, and knew the pitfalls: “So, I would say, slowly. With a lot of, kind of, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t. Oh, this is terrible, we shouldn’t!’ . . . Inevitably, a bottle of red wine would be opened.”

    Their bosses found out in stages. Season 2’s opening episode includes a sequence in which the Jenningses’ daughter walks in on her parents having oral sex, 69 style. Schlamme told me that, though he loved emotional risk-taking on set, he had always been “stunningly uncomfortable” shooting literal sex scenes, which could feel invasive. Not this time: “They were so comfortable! It was like we were filming a scene about eating Cheerios. And they had jokes. Matthew kept saying, ‘Hey, Keri, could you do me a favor? When she opens the door, could you jerk your head back really far, so it looks like I have a huge penis?’ ” When the scene was done, Schlamme walked over to the script supervisor and said, quietly, “Those two people are fucking.”

    Soon afterward, thieves broke into Russell’s house, in Brooklyn, while she and Rhys were asleep in a garden-level bedroom. (Her kids were at Deary’s place.) After hearing noises, the couple barrelled up into the living room, naked, with Rhys brandishing a poker from the fireplace. The thieves ran off with items that they stuffed into Rhys’s backpack. (In Rhys’s telling, he feared having a “Force Majeure”-style failure of nerve in front of his girlfriend; Russell laughed when she heard this account and reminded me that he was a storyteller, saying, “He’s not Irish, but he might as well be.”)

    “You have him in your phone as ‘God (Work)’?”

    Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai

    The police arrested the thieves; the district attorney, hoping for a nice news story involving a star, arranged to have the stolen merchandise returned to Russell on set. That’s when a crew member blew the couple’s cover by yelling, in front of the entire production, “Wait, that’s not Keri’s backpack—it’s Matthew’s.”

    At the upstate hotel, Russell’s friends Mollie, a retired nonprofit executive, and Andrea, a coder, arrived for a planned hike in the mountains. The actress’s weekly drinking buddies and frequent travel companions, they were fellow-parents at St. Ann’s School—their kids had nicknamed the trio the Moms Gone Wild. We climbed to a high-up shelter, where four chunky stone seats faced a clearing with a dramatic view of the mountains. The previous day, there had been a tragedy in Texas, in which young girls at a summer camp had drowned in a flash flood. The women talked about the event in quiet tones, trading stories of their own near-misses when their children were small—the sorts of scary stories that become funny anecdotes after nothing bad happens, like the time Mollie’s baby fell off a sled on the way home from Fort Greene Park.

    Did Russell’s kids want to act? She winced, as if she’d tasted sour milk. “They can do it when they’re older,” she said. “I think it’s Creep City.”

    She had recently read Sarah Polley’s memoir, “Run Towards the Danger,” in which the director and actress described, among other things, her misery as a child star on Canadian TV, starring in “Road to Avonlea.” When Polley was nine, she’d been pressured into running through live explosives during the filming of the movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen”; in her teens, she was paralyzed by stage fright while playing Alice in Wonderland. Russell knew that Miller, her lawyer friend, who had recommended the book to her, had started to question whether children should work as professional actors at all.

    Russell sympathized with Miller’s thinking. But when she thought back on her early years, she was struck less by moments of danger than by what she described as “adultification”—being exposed early to enormous responsibility. She explained, “The second you start getting paid like an adult, you’re expected—it doesn’t matter what people say!—to act like an adult.” Russell hadn’t been victimized sexually, she noted, although as a young actress she’d had her share of sketchy moments. (Later, she told me, in broadly comic terms, about the time a married producer—“an ogre”—had tried to play footsie with her under the table.) Like every actress of her era, she’d had an “all-around” meeting with Harvey Weinstein. Hers took place in a room at the Peninsula Hotel, in Beverly Hills; because Russell’s manager insisted on chaperoning her, nothing unusual happened, unless you count her and Weinstein bonding over their shared love of Leon Uris novels.

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    Emily Nussbaum

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  • A Year of Convulsions in New York’s Prisons

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    J. B. Nicholas runs a news website called The Free Lance from his home in upstate New York, and, near the end of last year, he started obsessively tracking one story: a man confined at a state prison outside of Utica had died in early December after an encounter with correction officers. Reporting on a prison death can be tricky, but, in this case, there was evidence that rarely exists—video footage.

    The New York attorney general, Letitia James, promised to release the footage, and, shortly before noon on December 27th, Nicholas was seated at his computer, waiting for James’s virtual press conference to begin. Nicholas, who is fifty-five, brought unusual expertise to this story: he had spent twelve years in the state’s prison system, from 1991 to 2003, serving time for manslaughter.

    James appeared on his computer monitor, framed by the U.S. and the New York State flags. She explained that the videos were from body-worn cameras that the officers had on “at the time of the incident.” The cameras had been powered on, but not activated, so the officers did not realize they were recording. “These videos are shocking and disturbing,” James said. “I encourage taking caution before viewing.”

    In the footage, a forty-three-year-old Black man named Robert Brooks appears in prison greens. It is 9:21 P.M. on December 9th, and Brooks is outdoors, on a walkway at Marcy Correctional Facility. He is surrounded by officers. At 9:22 P.M., three of them carry him by his limbs—wrists cuffed behind him, head hanging down—into a building, and then into a room in the infirmary. Two stethoscopes hang on the wall by the door, next to a poster about how to aid a choking victim. The guards place Brooks on a gurney covered by exam paper. And then a group of officers, all of whom appear to be white, start beating him.

    Most of the officers are dressed in blue uniform shirts and navy uniform jackets, with a U.S.-flag patch on one arm. At 9:25 P.M., one officer shoves what appears to be a rag into Brooks’s mouth. Another lifts him by the neck and repeatedly drops him on the gurney. A third officer strikes Brooks with Brooks’s own boot. An officer steadies himself by placing his hand on a counter, then stomps on Brooks’s groin. At 9:26 P.M., another officer enters the room and locks a pair of cuffs around Brooks’s ankles.

    As the minutes tick by, and the beating continues, Brooks becomes increasingly bloodied and unresponsive. More than a dozen people either participate in or witness what is happening, but nobody intervenes. Nobody even seems particularly surprised or distraught. Two male nurses watch from the hall, and a camera captures them smirking.

    Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan

    At 9:32 P.M., the nurses enter the room. One stands next to Brooks’s limp body and attempts to find a pulse. The other reaches into a cupboard for an Ambu bag—a resuscitation device—that he will hook up to an oxygen tank. The nurses’ smiles have vanished. By “approximately 9:40,” it was later disclosed, Brooks was “clinically dead.”

    Watching the footage at his desk, Nicholas was incensed. “It’s a snuff film—state-sanctioned, -sponsored, -broadcast snuff film—that should make everybody fucking furious!” he told me. “It was just confirmation of what we—we, meaning formerly incarcerated people—have known for decades: that this goes on regularly.”

    Nicholas wrote quickly and decided on a headline:

    WORSE THAN GEORGE FLOYD: VIDEO SHOWS PRISON ‘BEAT-UP SQUAD’ KILLING INMATE ROBERT BROOKS

    In the weeks that followed, Nicholas worked non-stop. He heard that Attorney General James was seeking court orders to seize the firearms of some of the officers who had been involved, so he borrowed his girlfriend’s car and drove several hours to cover the proceedings. When he found himself far from home with no money for a hotel, he pulled out a tent and a sleeping bag and camped outdoors, in the middle of winter.

    James had released two hours of video footage from four body-worn cameras, but, because it had been recorded in standby mode, there was no audio. In early January, Nicholas studied the footage second by second and published a “visual investigation” on YouTube—a fifteen-minute compilation, which he narrated, identifying each person by name and detailing his role in the assault.

    Of all the correction officers who appear in the footage, one stands out: a tall man with a shaved head named Anthony Farina. At a certain point in Nicholas’s narration, he says, “There’s Farina stuffing the rag in Brooks’s mouth and then punching him repeatedly in the face.” (Months later, Farina’s lawyer claimed that his client had been trying to “wipe the face of Mr. Brooks,” to clean off pepper spray—not “stuffing something down his throat.”) At another point, Nicholas says, “There goes Farina stomping on Brooks’s genitals.”

    James had promised to investigate Brooks’s death “thoroughly and swiftly,” but, on January 2nd, she recused herself from the case, because of a conflict of interest. Her office defends correction officers in civil lawsuits, and it was already representing a sergeant and three officers who had been present during Brooks’s beating and who had been sued by other incarcerated men alleging brutality. (In one instance, from the fall of 2024, the three officers were allegedly involved in a beating so violent that the victim was hospitalized for almost two weeks.) James referred the Brooks case to a special prosecutor, William Fitzpatrick, the longtime district attorney of Onondaga County.

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    Jennifer Gonnerman

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  • The Prime Minister Who Tried to Have a Life Outside the Office

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    By the time she was twenty, Marin had relocated to Tampere, a post-industrial city once known as the “Manchester of the North.” She was living with her boyfriend, Räikkönen, whom she had met at a bar called Emma. (“We totally forgot that was the name,” Marin told me. “We had no idea until recently we named our daughter after a bar.”) One day, Marin decided to attend a meeting of the S.D.P.’s youth organization. “When I walked into the room everyone just stared at me,” she writes. It was rare for a person without a social connection, someone just off the street, to get involved in Party affairs. She found the meeting underwhelming. The attendees were debating whether they should buy lunch for volunteers at an upcoming event. “I couldn’t believe it,” she writes. “These were young people, my peers. Weren’t we supposed to be the most passionate members of the political system? Where was the revolution?” And, she adds, lunch “should have [been] provided, without question or argument.”

    Marin enrolled at the University of Tampere in 2007, and there she found her cohort. The school had a reputation as a “red campus.” (The filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, who is known for his absurdist social-realist films, studied there in the late seventies.) Marin joined reading groups, where she read “all the socialist classics.” The following year, she launched her first campaign, a run for city council, which she lost. Her slogan was “Four Targets in Four Years.” I asked what the targets had been. “I don’t remember,” she said. “They weren’t that ambitious, something about recycling.”

    The S.D.P., which Marin officially joined in 2007, was actually an odd choice for a Gramsci-reading freshman. Founded in 1899, it was increasingly viewed as out of touch, but she saw herself as part of a movement to revitalize the once storied workers’ party. The times required it. When the global recession hit Finland, the government implemented austerity policies that harked back to the days of eraser splitting. For millennials, who were now starting out in their adult lives, it was a galvanizing moment.

    The Finnish media began inviting young up-and-coming political figures—including Marin, who in 2010 became vice-chair of the S.D.P.’s youth organization—to participate in televised debates. Another rising star was Li Andersson, who belonged to the youth organization of the Left Alliance, a party to the left of the S.D.P. “We were on this show—it translates very strangely—but it was called ‘Hate Evening,’ ” Andersson, who is now a member of the European Parliament, told me. She knew Marin only by reputation: “Sanna was seen as being more on the red-green side of the Social Democrats, so more modern.” (The term “red-green” in Finland describes people who support workers’ rights and environmentalism.)

    Marin won a seat on the Tampere City Council in 2012, running as a left-leaning S.D.P. candidate. Using Photoshop, she had made her own posters, which she and Räikkönen passed out on the street. (“I have handed out tens of thousands of flyers,” Räikkönen told me.) Marin was appointed leader of the city council at twenty-seven, the youngest person ever to hold that position.

    But Marin’s true star turn came in 2016, after a clip from an hours-long city-council meeting that she led went viral. Marin was trying to move along a vote on a green initiative: the construction of a three-hundred-million-euro tram system. It was a big price tag for Tampere, a city known for its shuttered textile factories. Several council members dragged out the proceedings, with one speculating that unemployed people might “ride around together on the tram as there is nothing else to do.” At the front of the room was Marin, then thirty, training her icy blue eyes on each person trying to stall. “Is Council Member Kaleva seriously asking for yet another turn? Last time, you were reading out a newspaper column.” Marin prevailed, and the video now has nine hundred thousand views, equivalent to a sixth of the population of Finland.

    Around Christmas of 2018, just months before the general election, Antti Rinne, the leader of the S.D.P., fell ill and was reportedly placed in a medically induced coma. He recovered, and that June, after the S.D.P. won more seats in Parliament than any other party, Rinne became Prime Minister. But six months later he was forced to resign, after he was accused of mishandling a labor dispute at the expense of postal workers, drawing rebuke from the Center Party, whose support he needed to govern. His coalition fell apart, and, in an intra-party election held to succeed him, Marin won by three votes against a more centrist male challenger.

    “Nobody in Finland was thinking about her age or gender,” Salla Vuorikoski, a journalist for Helsingin Sanomat, the country’s largest newspaper, and the author of a 2024 biography of Marin, told me. “We knew her as a minister from Tampere. But when she had that first press conference I turned to my husband and said, ‘This is going to be huge abroad.’ She looked different.”

    Before arriving in Helsinki, I watched “First Five,” an HBO documentary series from 2023 about Marin and the other party leaders—Maria Ohisalo, Annika Saarikko, Anna-Maja Henriksson, and Andersson—in her government. “First Five,” which is mostly made up of sit-down interviews and news clips, felt a lot like a Finnair in-flight safety video: reassuring in terms of national welfare but a tad impersonal. (The most interesting tidbit is Andersson telling her friends that Bernie Sanders called to ask about parental leave and early-childhood education in Finland.) “I don’t even remember doing the documentary,” Marin told me. I wondered if the series was flat because its subjects had grown tired of talking about their “lipstick government,” as some critics had begun calling it. As Andersson said, “It was, like, ‘Oh, wow, they’re all making decisions together in the sauna.’ ”

    The next day, Marin gave me a tour of Kesäranta, a villa in a leafy part of Helsinki that serves as the official residence of the Finnish Prime Minister. The current P.M., Petteri Orpo, was out of town and had told Marin that she could show me around. “This is very Finnish,” Marin said of her successor’s hospitality. “Even though we’re opponents, people are cozy.” She led me to the sauna—one of more than three million in the country—which was in a stand-alone cabin. “This was one of the few places I could relax during COVID,” Marin told me. “I’d come in here at 11 p.m. and just . . .” She trailed off, miming an exhale.

    We wandered around the grounds, which overlooked the waters of Seurasaarenselkä. She pointed out a basketball court, where she used to shoot free throws to decompress. We walked into the main house, and several members of the house staff waved hello. Marin showed me into a dining area that doubled as a conference room and pointed up at the ceiling: “Whenever Emma used to play upstairs, the chandelier would shake.” She gestured out the window. I could see a small gazebo on the water’s edge, and she told me that she and Räikkönen had been married there, in 2020. The pair would split three years later.

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    Jennifer Wilson

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  • The Hague on Trial

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    It was “humiliating” to be called “a Mossad plant,” she told Khan, according to a recording she made of the call. “I have basically lost any friend that I did have at the court. . . . I don’t know where to look anymore. . . . I just think it’s time for me to go.”

    Khan warned her more than once of “wolves around us.” The call lasted an hour, and during it he asked six times if she was recording their conversation. (She lied and said no.) But his tone was supportive; he encouraged her to take the time off that she needed, and to get continued pay through medical leave. Occasionally, he sounded confident that he was innocent of any misconduct, reminding her repeatedly that it was her choice if she wanted to initiate a more comprehensive investigation, including of him. “The truth will come out,” he assured her. Yet, at other moments, he sounded anxious that she might pursue a complaint against him. He told her that speculation about this was “keeping things alive,” and he urged her to formally clarify that she had no intention of accusing him of inappropriate behavior. “Then it’s well and truly over,” he said, and the I.C.C. could end the “feeding frenzy” by telling journalists, “Fuck off now—leave her alone.”

    “Things are being pushed,” Khan told her, by forces out to “get rid of the warrants for Palestine, get rid of the warrants for Russia, get rid of the whole court.” Khan and the Malaysian woman were both married, and he warned her that a misconduct scandal would not only harm the woman and her family, and Khan and his family. The “casualties” would also include “the justice of the victims that now, finally, are on the cusp of progress.”

    Ninety minutes after the call ended, an anonymous X account began leaking details from the same secondhand report that had been included in the anonymous e-mail. Stories appeared in the media, including an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, on October 23, 2024, which reported that the woman had accused Khan of “locking her into his office and sexually touching her,” making “visits to her hotel room in the middle of the night, demanding to be let in,” and “claiming to have a headache and lying on her hotel bed, sexually touching her.” A few weeks later, the I.C.C.’s governing body requested an external investigation. By the time the U.N. began one, the woman was levelling an even more serious allegation: that Khan had repeatedly forced her into “coercive” sex. (Khan, who has denied any misconduct, declined requests for an interview.)

    Selective leaks from the ambiguous phone call—in particular, Khan’s references to Palestinians and other victims being “on the cusp of progress”—have improbably bound together the woman’s allegation of sexual abuse with the international power struggle over the Israeli arrest warrants. Khan and his lawyers have contended that Netanyahu and his allies are exploiting a vulnerable woman in order to discredit the case against the Israeli leaders. Netanyahu, in turn, has repeatedly claimed that Khan sought the warrants only to divert attention from the woman’s charges.

    Indeed, in a video interview in August with Breitbart, Netanyahu accused Khan of an elaborate scheme, claiming that, when Khan learned about the woman’s allegations, “he said, ‘I’m ruined. I have to get out of this somehow,’ so he decided the best way to get out of that was to hit the Jews, or to hit the Prime Minister of the Jewish state.” Dismissing the I.C.C. as “a completely corrupt organization,” and describing the female accuser as a Malaysian hostile to Israel, Netanyahu charged, without evidence, that the court had told her, “Listen, it’s more important to falsely accuse Israel of these war crimes than for your charges to be heard.”

    “Long story short: ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘what good are monkey bars without monkeys?’ ”

    Cartoon by Michael Maslin

    The Trump Administration and Netanyahu allies in the Republican-led U.S. Congress have seized on the sexual-abuse allegations as part of a broader defense of Netanyahu and Gallant against the I.C.C. charges. Six days after the October 17th call and leak, Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, announced that the woman’s claims had put “a moral cloud” over Khan’s decision to seek the warrants. President Trump, in a statement, has accused the court of “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel” which constitute “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” The U.S. has now sanctioned Khan, his two deputies, and several I.C.C. judges—freezing their assets, blocking their access to the U.S. financial system, and restricting their ability to enter the country. Several I.C.C. staffers with American ties resigned.

    The international uproar over the sexual-abuse charges culminated in an article this spring in the Wall Street Journal, which reported the woman’s allegations and strongly suggested that Khan had sought the warrants as a tactical deflection. Six days later, Khan took a leave of absence that brought the work of the court to a virtual standstill.

    The attempt to link the sexual-assault allegations and the Israeli warrants is at odds with many facts. Khan’s pursuit of the warrants was hardly new or secret. A team of lawyers in the prosecutor’s office had worked for several months on an investigation of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Because accusing Israel of grave misdeeds was so explosive—Khan described it to Amanpour as “the San Andreas Fault of international politics and strategic interests”—he had also, in January, 2024, made the unorthodox choice to solicit a second opinion from an outside panel of experts.

    That panel included two former judges who had overseen international criminal tribunals, a former legal adviser to the British Foreign Office, and Amal Clooney, a British Lebanese human-rights lawyer and the wife of George Clooney. They concluded that there was sufficient evidence for charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity on both sides of the Gaza conflict, including at the top of the Israeli chain of command. The lawyers inside the I.C.C. prosecutor’s office agreed. The Hamas-led attack on October 7th had killed about twelve hundred people in Israel, including at least eight hundred civilians, and taken some two hundred and fifty hostages. By May, 2024, the Israeli assault on Gaza had killed upward of thirty-five thousand people, many of them women or children. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least thirty-two Palestinians, including twenty-eight children, had died of malnutrition or starvation at Gaza’s hospitals. An internationally recognized panel of experts was warning that more than a million Gazans could soon face catastrophic hunger. (The reported death toll has now exceeded sixty-six thousand; at least four hundred and fifty people have died of malnutrition or starvation, including a hundred and fifty-one children.)

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    David D. Kirkpatrick

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  • Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the “War from Within”

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    For someone openly campaigning to get a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump has been going about it in an unusual way. Early last month, the President proclaimed in a press conference that the Department of Defense would thereafter be known as the Department of War. At the same briefing, the presumed new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, promised that the armed forces will deliver “maximum lethality” that won’t be “politically correct.” That was a few days after Trump had ordered the torpedoing of a small boat headed out of Venezuela, which he claimed was piloted by “narco-terrorists,” killing all eleven people on board, rather than, for instance, having it stopped and inspected. After some military-law experts worried online that this seemed uncomfortably close to a war crime, Vice-President J. D. Vance posted, “Don’t give a shit.”

    So it felt fairly ominous when hundreds of serving generals and admirals were summoned from their postings around the world for a televised meeting on Tuesday with Trump and Hegseth, at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. “Central casting,” the President said, beaming at the officers in the audience, who sat listening impassively, as is their tradition. He praised his own peace efforts, particularly in the Middle East, and mused about bringing back the battleship (“Nice six-inch sides, solid steel, not aluminum,” which “melts if it looks at a missile coming at it”), then issued what sounded like a directive. He proposed using American cities as “training grounds” for the military, envisioning a “quick-reaction force” that would be sent out at his discretion. “This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” Trump said, like a theatre teacher trying to gin up interest in the spring musical. “That’s a war, too. It’s the war from within.”

    Peace abroad and war at home? It was an unusual note to strike in an electoral democracy, even if recent reports had indicated that a draft National Defense Strategy would shift the military’s focus from Russia and China to domestic and regional threats. But though Trump keeps talking about his domestic military missions in a dramatic future tense, not much has been demanded of the ones deployed so far. In Washington, D.C., where troops were sent this summer as part of a supposed war on crime, they were seen picking up trash, painting fences, and finding lost children, while the arrests they initiated often led to trumped-up charges that grand juries rejected, in what the Times described as a “citizens’ revolt.”

    When that offensive petered out, Trump turned his attention to immigration enforcement in the Windy City. (“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” he warned on social media.) Yet there has been an asymmetry between the Sturm und Drang of that operation—a midnight raid featured agents rappelling from helicopters onto a South Side apartment building—and its effect. Alderperson Andre Vasquez, who chairs the city council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said that his office had not seen enforcement “to the level of what is being promoted by the President,” and reporters struggled to square government claims about the number of detainees with court records. Even so, the Border Patrol announced that a marine unit would be relocated to Chicago. “Lakes and rivers are borders,” an official said. With what, Michigan?

    Cities do have problems, but no matter how much Trump wants to literalize the culture war they are not war zones. Memphis and Portland are next on the President’s list. But the generals and the admirals assembled at Quantico might have reasonably noticed a paradox: although Trump seems to want no restraints on what he can do with the military, he hasn’t yet articulated anything specific for it to do, other than make a show of reducing crime in places where the rate is generally already falling.

    The call to Quantico initially came from Hegseth, lately seen staging a pushup contest with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. At the Pentagon, Hegseth, who has few typical qualifications for his position, has largely focussed on a de-wokeification program, restoring the names of Confederate generals to military bases and, last week, rejecting efforts to revoke the Medals of Honor for soldiers involved in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. At Quantico, he declared that to instill a “warrior ethos,” a new promotions policy would be based on “merit only.” But it sounded like a pretty superficial idea of merit. “It all starts with physical fitness and appearance,” Hegseth said. He mentioned beards and fat (he’s against them) more than he did drones or missiles. “It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon,” he added. “It’s a bad look.” But does Hegseth want the best generals, or just the best skinny ones?

    It’s interesting that the long tail of the misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should wind its way here, to a militaristic right-wing President who loudly denounced those foreign conflicts but means to treat American cities as war zones, and to a Defense Secretary who wants to do away with rules of engagement. Among the defense community, the reaction to the Quantico speeches was an extended eye roll. “Could have been an email,” an anonymous senior official told Politico. On Tuesday, the White House announced that troops would be sent to Portland to “crush violent radical left terrorism.” That sounded much more frightening than the policy details reported by Oregon Public Radio: two hundred National Guard troops would be sent to provide additional security at federal facilities. For now, there is a heavy element of make-believe in the President’s domestic military ambitions, which, as was the case with the now greatly diminished doge project, allows him to pretend that he wants a major substantive change when what he really seems to want is more power.

    On Wednesday, in Memphis, the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told a group of deputized federal officers, “You are unleashed.” That same day, the President’s lawyers asserted in a letter to Congress that the country is now formally in an “armed conflict” with the drug trade broadly, a determination through which Trump can claim extraordinary wartime powers. (There have been three more lethal attacks on boats in the southern Caribbean since early September, the most recent on Friday.) Each of these steps has elements of military theatrics and cosplay authoritarianism, but the more the White House insists on the trappings of war—the troop deployments, the “warrior ethos” grooming, the emergency legal powers—the more it risks nudging us toward an actual one. ♦

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    Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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  • Meet the Suspicious 8: Dividends Over 6% With Plenty of Problems

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    Meet the Suspicious 8: Dividends Over 6% With Plenty of Problems

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