In August, 2021, thirty-two Afghans who had fled their country just before the Taliban took over arrived at the border, hoping to claim asylum. Poland refused to process them. So the Afghans, stranded, sat in a muddy no man’s land, flanked by armed border guards on both sides. Technically, they were already in Poland, in a tiny village called Usnarz Górny. There was no fence there, so locals and journalists could interact with the refugees. Images of an Afghan woman camped out with a gray cat went viral. The European Court of Human Rights soon ordered Poland to give the migrants assistance and temporary shelter.
Within weeks, Poland announced a state of emergency and closed areas near the border to medics, humanitarian workers, and reporters, among others. The Polish journalist Aga Suszko, who helped with the reporting for this piece, recalled, “I’m in a democratic country, covering something happening before my eyes that’s very significant, and suddenly: ‘You cannot see it, so you cannot report on it, because you cannot see it.’ ”
Illustration by Anuj Shrestha
The weather in the forest cooled, and rain set in. The Afghans were sleeping on the ground. That September, Poland’s interior minister held a press conference, aired on national TV, in which he displayed a photo, purportedly of a man having sex with a cow, and claimed that it had been discovered on a device confiscated from a migrant.
In October, migrants attempted more than ten thousand crossings (the Polish border guard counts crossings, not people), and Poland passed a law effectively legalizing “pushbacks.” In a pushback, authorities force migrants back across the border immediately after they arrive, often violently, without considering asylum claims or other needs. (The guards often send them through access gates.) The law appeared to violate E.U. and international law’s principle of non-refoulement, which forbids returning people to places where they face threats to their life or freedom. The Afghans would clearly be in danger if sent home. Even if they were returned only to Belarus, they would be at risk: border guards there regularly beat migrants who failed to complete the journey to Poland. Yet Poland pushed back the thirty-two Afghans, including a fifteen-year-old girl, arguing that they had remained outside Polish jurisdiction the whole time, so non-refoulement didn’t apply.
The next month, hundreds of desperate and marooned migrants, freezing in makeshift encampments on the Belarusian side of the border, tried to break through the barbed-wire fence to Poland. Polish border guards responded with tear gas and water cannons. “I had my life before 2021 and my life after,” Suszko, the journalist, told me. She’d grown up hearing the story of how, in the nineteen-eighties, the Solidarity movement had heroically overthrown the oppressive Communist regime, transforming the country into a democracy that generally respected human rights and the rule of law. “It was the death of Poland as I knew it,” she said.
Since 2021, Poland has built the permanent border wall that Ahmed crossed; razor-wire fences stand on both sides of it. Thousands of security officers are now stationed there, along with cameras, thermal and motion sensors, night-vision devices, and other surveillance tools.
“Yes, that’s me, it’s my bedroom,” she said. “I never sleep like that.” She was struck by how floppy her cheek was. She told Perret, “I don’t know where I am anymore.”
He showed her another photo, of a man in her bedroom with graying hair and a tattoo. “Do you recognize this location?” he asked.
“Who is this guy?” she said. “I never wanted to have sex with him.”
When he mentioned a Skype username that her husband had used to communicate with her rapists, she said, “You’re speaking Chinese to me.”
Perret asked if she wanted to press charges. Her husband, he explained, had kept a list of more than fifty people in the past decade who’d raped her while she was unconscious. The thought of pressing charges hadn’t occurred to Gisèle, but she said yes.
An officer drove Gisèle home while Dominique stayed at the police station. “I got caught up in a vicious cycle,” he confessed. “I realized that, with sleeping pills, it was very easy to get what I wanted, which I couldn’t get otherwise, which was normal, because it wasn’t her way of life.” He said that he had ruined his family. He was disgusted with himself. “I had fantasies that gradually came true, and I wanted to take them further,” he said.
When Gisèle got home, she put a load of laundry into the washing machine. Then she asked her closest friend in Mazan to come over. As she waited, she hung Dominique’s boxers and pajamas on a clothesline in her garden. It was good that the sun was out, she thought—his clothes would dry quickly. She did some ironing and vacuumed the bedrooms.
The next morning, her three children—David, Caroline, and Florian—came from Paris to the police station to meet with Perret, who filled them in on his investigation. As Gisèle drove with them back to Mazan, she felt relieved that there was leftover pumpkin soup in the refrigerator that she could serve for dinner. But her children were not interested in sitting down for a meal. Caroline, who was forty-one and a communications manager, said that the house suddenly looked uglier and older, and she no longer liked the smell. She and her brothers started going through her father’s drawers, where they discovered unpaid bills. A few hours later, Perret called Caroline and asked her to return to the station. He realized that he’d recognized her face. At the station, an officer showed her two photographs of her asleep in bed. In both pictures, she was lying on her side, her underwear exposed. “It should be noted that Mme. Caroline Pelicot is shaking and informs us that she feels very ill,” the officer wrote. “Let us suspend the meeting.”
When Caroline returned to the house, she later wrote, her mother looked up at her “casually, as if I’d just come back from a pleasant walk.” David, the oldest child, who works in marketing, had always credited his father with giving him “a good education, values, a backbone.” He told me, “I decided very quickly to erase this man from my memory.” He and Florian put Dominique’s belongings in trash bags, and drove to the dump. They made ten trips. Caroline destroyed framed photographs and art on the walls, as well as a trunk of family photo albums. “I think my mother resented me for that—for being in that kind of frenzy,” Caroline said later. Gisèle remembers telling Caroline, “Don’t break everything, please. There are things I’d like to keep.” Of all her children, Caroline was the one that Gisèle struggled with the most. “She’s one of those highly strung people who love and lose their temper in the same breath,” Gisèle writes in her new memoir, “A Hymn to Life.” “She seems to have been filled since childhood with a feeling of insecurity that I have never really understood or been able to soothe.”
As a child, Caroline considered her father “more motherly than my mother,” she said. She described him as a “dad who listened, who came to see me in my room, who sat on the edge of my bed and said, ‘But, Caroline, you can’t say that—you can’t behave like that.’ ” He helped all three of his children with their homework, played soccer with them, and cooked for the family. After Caroline had her own child, she and her husband, Pierre, spent a few weeks every summer with her parents. In the evenings, they drank cocktails and played Trivial Pursuit and sometimes stayed up until 1 A.M. talking. “I adored this man,” Pierre said later. Florian’s wife, Aurore, was similarly struck by the family’s rapport. “I remember telling my husband that they were U.F.O.s,” she said. “I, who came from a complicated family with taboos, arrived in a loving, demonstrative family. For me, it was a bit like the ideal family.”
It wasn’t exactly a house or, I guess, it was less than a house. Specifically, it was half of a house, three stories, divided top to bottom, clapboarded, on a corner lot in Somerville. There was a house on the left, where whoever lived there fought all the time—you could hear them through the wall, horsehair plaster and lath—and then there was the house on the right, where we, the loopy semi-vegetarians, lived in, I admit it, squalor, two thousand square feet of it, much of the time smelling of sex, salty and oil-and-vinegary. One night, everyone stood together in the second-floor hallway, listening to the shrieking on the other side of the wall—louder and wilder than the noises you hear at night in the woods, fox and vixen, courting, mating—trying to decide whether to call the cops. Tracy Chapman, who’d huddled in the hallway that night, wrote “Behind the Wall”: Last night I heard the screaming. I didn’t live there then, but later I heard that screaming, too.
I think Tracy found the house her junior year at Tufts. I was a year behind her. Don’t get your hopes up. We never met. I can’t tell you anything about Tracy Chapman, because I don’t know anything about Tracy Chapman, and probably, if I knew anything, I wouldn’t tell you. I moved in only after she’d moved out, but people would still call on the phone, asking for her. Fans, reporters, fans. Did we know where she was? Did we know how to reach her? Could we get a message to her? No. Wasn’t she amazing, the best thing ever in the whole wide, wonderful, cocked-up world? Yes.
This isn’t a story about Tracy Chapman. It’s a story about the house. There were six bedrooms, but sometimes there were eight or nine or ten or even a dozen people living there, because it was cheaper if you shared and the place was such a mess—what was one more sweaty body compared with two more hands to do chores and another person to split the rent? There was also a dog named Takisha and a cat named Buddha and another cat named Misha that S., who became a soil scientist, had inherited from his grandmother, who’d named him after Mikhail Baryshnikov, because of how high the cat could leap. When S. moved out—I think he went to Japan?—he gave Misha to a very nice old lady named Donna, who lived in a vinyl-sided yellow house next door. That cat strode down the street like a lion, king of the pride. Once, he won a battle with a pit bull. Man, that cat could fight.
None of the rest of us had anything like Misha’s self-possession, or not when I lived there. No one was who they meant to be, not yet, anyway. We were embryos, stem cells, brain stems of our future selves, wet behind the ears, wet all over. We lived in muddled, uncertain, thrilling, and dizzying chaos, slamming doors, crying into pillows, pondering the possibilities of turnips and menstrual cups and macrobiotics and Audre Lorde. One chapter of our lives had ended, but the next chapter hadn’t begun, and none of us were sure what we wanted, only that we wanted it, longed for it, were desperate for it. I’ve been told that it’s the work of young adulthood to learn that you are in charge of your own life. Easier said than done, but for sure wackier and more fun in a house with a bunch of other misfits, especially if at least one person knows how to make a decent frittata, though it can be a little tricky figuring out how to take charge of your life if you’re trying to do it in the shadow of Tracy Chapman.
On set, a young director named Victor Velle was rehearsing the train-station scene with the actors playing George and Uncle Jack. Velle, who wore a neck brace (Fourth of July diving accident), was joined by Katya Alexander, who had worked at the Sphere before Saatchi hired her as Fable’s head of production. They would shoot the actors talking face to face, to create emotional depth, but then separate them for the A.I. work, which for some shots required the use of a motion-controlled robotic camera.
“It’s not just putting together this puzzle,” Velle said. “It’s re-creating the pieces so that the puzzle fits together.” Tiny dramaturgical details had been lost to time. In the train station, Uncle Jack holds an umbrella while accepting cash from George. “Is it going to be weird for him to fumble with an umbrella as he puts the money in his pocket?” Alexander asked. “How does he pick up the suitcase? We don’t have a shot of him picking it up.”
Velle added that Welles’s actors often handled props in an “aesthetically pleasing” way: “Orson is the king of cool, so how to do it with his flavor?”
They had put out a call for actors in Backstage, seeking not exact look-alikes but people with what Velle described as a “regal nineteen-forties vibe.” He said, “In that period, a lot of people would act as if they had tons of Botox—their foreheads don’t move.” The three actors they hired worked with a coach, Kimberly Donovan, to study their 1942 counterparts. “You’re reverse engineering someone else’s performance,” Donovan told me. Holt, for example, “attacks every word,” whereas Moorehead’s delivery can be “soft and kitten-like.”
Cody Pressley, an actor with a sonorous Wellesian voice, was playing both George and Eugene in separate scenes. Pressley said that he often gets cast in period pieces. (Previous roles include Gerald Ford’s photographer in “The First Lady” and a drunk teen in “Stranger Things.”) He’d been camping in Colorado when he got the call from Fable and rushed back to L.A. “It’s so very technical,” he told me. “You have to match the cadence of an actor from the forties. You have to match the words verbatim. And you basically have to keep your head still.”
They started shooting the scene. John Fantasia, who was playing Uncle Jack, stumbled over a wordy bit of dialogue. “Cut!” Velle yelled. He gave Pressley a note: “George’s voice is a tiny bit higher pitch than what you did.” They rolled again, as the robotic camera whirred. Later, Fantasia told me that he had limited knowledge of A.I. “As an actor, I thought, I don’t think I’ll ever want to do this, because it’s contributing to the downfall,” he said. “But then I thought, It’s already seeped into the Hollywood subculture.” Plus, he added, “it’s a paying gig.”
In the afternoon, Saatchi and Rose took me to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Margaret Herrick Library. The two made an odd couple. Saatchi was in minimalist black-and-white, in the style of a Silicon Valley guru. Rose, who had flown in from Missouri, wore a tucked-in plaid shirt with a tie and had a Nikon camera hanging from his shoulder, like a tourist at Niagara Falls. We sat in a reading room and opened a folder of weathered correspondence. First came a letter dated August 18, 1941, in which the R.K.O. employee Reginald Armour gushed to Welles, “If the picture turns out to be as good as the script, you already have another smash hit on your hands.”
Next, he brought out a stack of canary-yellow index cards, thick as a sandwich. It was covered in his scrawl. From the lined pages, he distills the material and copies things a second time onto the cards. “And, from here, it goes in right in there,” he said, gesturing to his head.
This process of underlining, copying, and recopying is the backbone of Newsom’s working life. He spends his ninety-minute commute—between Kentfield, in Marin, where he lives with his wife, the documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, and their four children, and Sacramento, where he usually overnights once or twice a week—making notations in the back seat of the gubernatorial S.U.V. Between meetings and after dinner, the pads and cards come out. What he described as the resulting “hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands” of pieces of paper lived for a while as ballast in the trunk of his car. Today, they occupy an unofficial archive off the Governor’s office, with a filing system of his own conception. If an adviser tells Newsom something that strikes him as odd, he has been known to vanish into his archive, emerge with a folder (“There are, like, tabs and things,” Jason Elliott told me with horror), and extract a note proving that, months ago, the same adviser told him something else.
Because of his reading struggles, Newsom rarely gives long written speeches; instead, he memorizes. (He sees the lines of text on a teleprompter screen as a single image, like a Chinese character, which he uses to recall the next line.) Lindsey Cobia told me, “A four-hour podcast where he gets asked about everything from U.F.O.s to his policy on assisted suicide is actually a more comfortable space for him, because of his dyslexia, than reading a ten-minute speech.” Lateefah Simon, a Bay Area congresswoman, who shared consultants with Newsom during the 2020 Democratic National Convention, recalled that they left to help him with speech prep—normally a half-hour task. “ I didn’t see them for, like, three hours,” she said. “He wanted to do it over and over.”
Simon met Newsom twenty-five years ago, when she was the director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, an organization representing girls in the juvenile-justice system. She was chanting with a bullhorn outside his office in protest of his approach to welfare. “The electeds never come out to see you,” she said. But Newsom did, and he listened to the protesters’ grievances for an hour. “At the end, he said, ‘My office is always open to all of you.’ ” Simon began watching his press conferences. “I would tell my members, ‘Write his stats down, and let’s check them—because he has no notes!’ ” Newsom’s stats checked out; he can “drill down,” as he put it, on almost any subject at the slightest invitation. He sometimes gives the impression of a man with more stamina for talking than people have for listening.
On the campaign trail, Newsom has a mental stack of cue cards that he riffs on the way a jazz pianist might improvise from a chord chart. His movements through the language can be weird. (“The rule of law, not the rule of Don, and I hope it’s dawning on people” is a construction that he has found fit to repeat on air.)
“Prove to me you can be nice to people.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
Hilary, who is now the co-president of PlumpJack, sees his displays of esoteric knowledge as compensatory. In the family, she was thought to take after their brilliant, charismatic father. “My mom was incredibly shy, and always told everyone that Gavin was just like her—but she was super critical of herself,” she said. “I think there was this quiet rebellion in him that wanted to say, I’m not like that.” In high school, he began slicking his hair, wearing suits, and carrying a briefcase, inspired by the TV show “Remington Steele.” He was trying to channel the era’s buffed iconography of masculine power, but came off like Alex P. Keaton. “I remember paying him five dollars to go to the Levi’s store in San Rafael with me and get a pair of Shrink-to-Fit jeans, because I’m, like, ‘You’re bad for my luck in high school,’ ” Hilary said. In light of his trajectory from problem child to aloof entrepreneur, Newsom, who is said to be planning a run for higher office, has an opportunity to become America’s first Gen X President.
Neff agreed with other AutoAdmit commenters who argued that Michael Brown deserved to be killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, complaining that “the violent criminals are even MORE heroic to Black people.” He claimed that the four liberal congresswomen known as the Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—want to “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES.” In another post, Neff warned that “once Democrats have the majorities to go full F**K WHITEY, things are going to get really wacky really quickly” and lamented that “there’s a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in origin.”
In July, 2020, after a CNN reporter discovered Neff’s AutoAdmit posts, Neff resigned from Fox News. (Years later, Neff, who went on to work as a producer on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, would maintain that he was “the least racist person on AutoAdmit,” noting that, unlike many of the site’s users, “I never posted the N-word.”) Carlson, for his part, said that he was unaware of the posts. “We don’t endorse those words,” he said. “They have no connection to this show.” But Neff’s AutoAdmit habit was not a secret to some people he worked with. At the Daily Caller, Neff bragged about his posts to at least one colleague. “He was really proud of his AutoAdmit persona,” a former Caller staffer remembered. And Neff’s connection to Carlson was not a secret on AutoAdmit, either. In 2017, when Scott Greer, who had been a colleague of Carlson’s and Neff’s at the Daily Caller, appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to promote his book “No Campus for White Men,” Neff dropped a favorite AutoAdmit catchphrase—“the sweet treats of scholarship”—into Carlson’s script introducing Greer. Neff’s fellow AutoAdmit members didn’t miss the Easter egg. “We maed [sic] it,” one wrote.
An analysis of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer found that, between November, 2016, and November, 2018, Carlson was mentioned in two hundred and sixty-five of its articles, most of them featuring clips of his show, with titles like “Tucker FILLS Liberal Kike with LEAD for Demanding Gun Control” and “Tucker Carlson FORCES Fat Beaner Whore to CHOKE to DEATH on GREASYTACOS.” (Hannity, by comparison, was the subject of twenty-seven Daily Stormer articles during that period; Laura Ingraham, another of the network’s prime-time hosts, was the subject of four.) As one blog post on the site celebrated, “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Other than the language used, he is covering all our talking points.”
On a Monday morning in April, 2023, Carlson was at his winter home in Florida, having just sent his producers the first draft of his monologue for that evening’s show—a lengthy attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom Carlson liked to refer to as Sandy Cortez, invoking her high-school nickname—when he got a call from Fox News’ chief executive, Suzanne Scott. “We’re taking you off the air,” Scott told him. He was being fired. Scott offered him the opportunity to include his own statement in a press release that Fox would send out in fifteen minutes announcing his departure, a face-saving gesture that would make it seem like the decision was a mutual parting of ways. Carlson refused. If Fox was firing him, he wanted the world to know. When the phone call was over, he sent an e-mail to his staff—known inside Fox as the Tuckertroop—telling them the news.
In the days after Carlson’s firing, there was much speculation, both inside and outside of Fox, about the reasons behind it. Six days earlier, the network had settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, which alleged that Fox News hosts, including Carlson, had knowingly aired false accusations that the company’s voting machines were used to change vote totals in the 2020 Presidential election. Some thought that Carlson’s dismissal had to do with offensive comments that were revealed during discovery, including a text message in which Carlson reportedly called Irena Briganti, the head of Fox News’ media-relations department, a “cunt.” Others wondered whether it could have been because of another lawsuit, brought by Abby Grossberg, a former head of booking on Carlson’s show, who accused him and the network of creating a hostile work environment. (Fox settled the suit for twelve million dollars.) Still others speculated that it had something to do with a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, a January 6th protester from Arizona who was at the center of a conspiracy theory—amplified by Carlson—that Epps was a government provocateur placed in the crowd to spur an insurrection. In fact, a sympathetic profile of Epps had appeared on “60 Minutes” the night before Carlson’s firing. Perhaps Murdoch, who, at ninety-two, fit squarely in the CBS show’s viewer demographic, had seen it and got spooked. (Epps’s suit was eventually dismissed.)
Trump, for his part, was effusive in his praise of Weiss. “I think you have a great new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise,” he said during his sit-down with O’Donnell. “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person.” After the recording concluded, Weiss stepped forward to introduce herself to the President. It was the first time that she’d met the man whose presence now loomed over her installation at the network. They greeted each other warmly, exchanging a kiss on the cheek.
Weiss grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, “raised in what can be accurately described as an urban shtetl,” she wrote in her 2019 book, “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” Her great-grandfather Philip (Chappy) Goldstein was a successful flyweight boxer who sometimes sported a Star of David on his boxing silks. Her parents worked in the family’s furniture store, where Weiss’s father, Lou, had a flair for marketing, doling out a line of candies called Weiss Krispie Treats to customers. Weiss attended a Jewish day school—which one of her three sisters now heads—and the family spent a couple of summers in Jerusalem, where her parents learned Hebrew. “I grew up in a family where we belonged to three synagogues,” Weiss told an interviewer in 2019. “It was not unusual for me to read Torah at shul and then go, say, to a Chabad family for lunch before heading to basketball practice.”
The Weisses’ Shabbat dinners featured a rotating cast of guests and were often contentious. “I remember vividly, like, constant debate,” Weiss’s sister Casey told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last year. “Sometimes it got really heated.” Lou, who grew up in a “McGovern liberal” household, had become a conservative at Kenyon College. He kept copies of Commentary magazine and the Financial Times around the house, and frequently contributed op-eds to local Pittsburgh papers. His politics were centered around free markets and support for Israel. “They hate gays, and they subject women to horrible second-class treatment—not every single person, but as a group,” he told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle in 2017, for an article about Syrian refugees. “If you bring them here, ultimately, they will vote. If you think they’ll vote to support Israeli interests, you’re sadly mistaken.” Weiss’s mother, Amy, has described herself as a “very moderate liberal Democrat”; she threatened a Lysistrata-esque sex strike in 2016 if Lou voted for Trump. (He ended up writing in Amy’s name.)
Weiss’s bat-mitzvah ceremony was held at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, which, in 2018, became the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, a mass shooting that left eleven congregants dead. Weiss covered the massacre for the Times, writing a moving report about the aftermath. “When an anti-Semitic murderer mows down Jews in the synagogue where you became a bat mitzvah, you might find yourself in the sanctuary again,” she wrote. “But instead of family and friends, the sanctuary is host to a crew of volunteers—the chevra kadisha—who will spend the week cleaning up every drop of blood because, according to Jewish tradition, each part of the body must be sanctified in death and so buried.”
One of Weiss’s elementary-school teachers told the Post-Gazette that Weiss was “a power to reckon with, even in second grade.” At Shady Side Academy, a secular private high school, Weiss led pro-Israel events and organized student groups for interdenominational understanding. Students followed a dress code, inspiring a lifelong practice. “If you’re really getting down to work and you’re Bari Weiss,” her youngest sister, Suzy, told me, “you’re putting on a collared shirt.”
“Mr. Karamazov is my father’s name. You can call me Dmitri, Mitka, Mitya, Dima, Mityok, D-Man, D. Doggy-Dogg . . .”
Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers
After graduation, in 2002, Weiss worked on a kibbutz near the Gaza border and studied at a yeshiva in Jerusalem before entering Columbia the following fall. During her sophomore year, she took an introductory course with Joseph Massad, an assistant professor in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department. Massad, a Jordan-born Palestinian academic, had recently become the subject of student accusations that the department’s faculty trafficked in antisemitism. In 2004, the Boston-based advocacy group the David Project helped produce a short film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” which featured interviews with Jewish students accusing certain professors of harassing them because of their support for Israel. A student who had served in the Israeli Army said that, during a public lecture, Massad asked him, “How many Palestinians have you killed?”
I was in a yellow cab in high summer when I saw it. Twenty-three at the time, I sometimes skimmed articles about politics on my clunky BlackBerry while cruising through Central Park to my first real job, fund-raising for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Usually, the ride was placid. This time, I opened a link to an article in Politico (still an upstart outlet at the time) about a quickly growing controversy. Apparently, the latest cover of The New Yorker was a doozy.
Barry Blitt’s already infamous illustration, which graced the July 21st issue, shows Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. The rug in the room, flat and ornate as a coin, looks proper to its setting. So does an insouciantly drawn old chair. But look at the Obamas! Instead of their customary J. Crew-ish Presidential attire—thin lapels, a sleeveless dress—the charismatic couple are outfitted in clothes that look like the loose parts of one big racist joke. The presumptive Democratic nominee wears a white thawb and sandals, and the future First Lady appears in the clichéd garb of an outdated Black radical: black shirt, camo pants, a rifle slung across her back. He wears a turban shaped like the Guggenheim; she’s got a scribbled-in Afro. Her face looks cruelly joyful while his is impossible to read. In the fireplace, an American flag is being eaten by flames. Osama bin Laden’s face sneers from a portrait on the wall. The couple bump their knuckles together, a reference to a recent bout of hysteria over an identical real-life gesture, sparked by a Fox News host who referred to it as a “terrorist fist jab.” It’s an image tightly packed with complex meanings, to say the least.
Nearly two decades later, it can be hard to remember just how flagrantly racist the rhetoric against the Obamas often was. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton’s aide Mark Penn spent a whole TV interview testing how many times he could smoosh the words “cocaine” and “Obama” together. Right-wingers insisted not only that Obama had been born outside the United States but that he’d been educated at a Muslim “madrassa.” Michelle Obama’s throwaway comment about not having felt fully “proud” of her country until recently was pilloried as if she had cried, “Kill Whitey!” Speaking of “Whitey,” someone started a spurious rumor that she’d been recorded using the word.
Blitt’s cover was, at heart, a work of media criticism, aimed at this latticework of horseshit. Here’s one big risk a public satirist of racism takes: by displaying a panoply of tropes and crude imagery, he reveals just how well he knows and can deploy them himself. It’s a generous act: assuring the rest of us—just as fixated on and poisoned by this stuff, whether we acknowledge it or not—that someone else is weighed down by this, too.
Once I got to the office, I found out a lot of people were furious. Or at least they acted that way. One strain of the uproar had a touch of blithe condescension: there were people out there who wouldn’t get the joke, and who would take the cover as a straightforward assertion by The New Yorker—of all the joints in the world—regarding the attitudes and ideologies of the Obamas. Another strain, somewhat more reasonable, still rang of a prudish fear of images to which I have never been able to relate: to reproduce this imagery, for any reason at all, some said, was to add to its total volume and, over time, to augment its dark power.
I’ll admit, I laughed in the cab. I still do when I see the cover now. I regard it as important evidence of the darker edges of a promising moment, a portrait of a nation that too often sees cartoons when confronted with flesh and blood. ♦
We spent Christmas Eve driving around Caracas, revisiting familiar places, such as San Agustín del Norte, the neighborhood where my grandfather grew up, and Bellas Artes, the picturesque museum district. My grandfather, despite nearing his centenary year, insisted on driving—his way of retaining a sense of control among the local and geopolitical chaos. During the crisis years, in the second half of the twenty-tens, when poverty, violent crime, and civil unrest reached a fever pitch, my grandparents had purchased an armored Toyota Camry, the only bulletproof vehicle they could afford. But the car—small, low to the ground, and exceedingly heavy, owing to the ballistic steel and glass—is not suited to a city like Caracas, which is rife with steep inclines and deep potholes, and is best travelled in a four-by-four. The car was surely designed for a foreign diplomat to drive down one straight road between an embassy and a hotel; instead, it suffers greatly at the twists and turns of this city, and at the hands of my grandfather, who drives boldly.
When my grandparents felt that Caracas was at its most dangerous, around 2019, they rarely left their neighborhood at all. In recent years, as violent crime has declined, they’ve become more willing to venture out, eager to reconnect with a place that, for years, they felt they could not explore. On Christmas Eve, we looked through the car windows with awe at a city that my grandparents had almost forgotten, and that I had never got to know in the first place—a mosaic of colorfully painted houses and narrow favela streets, loud with the sound of motorbikes and music, interspersed with walkways wrapped in Christmas lights.
There was something slightly comical about the aesthetics of Christmas, shaped as they are by the colder global North, being superimposed on this tropical landscape. But the humor quickly turns dark when you cross the Río Guaire into San Agustín del Sur, the hillside favela near my grandfather’s old quarter, and arrive at a pyramidal building called El Helicoide. A wildly ambitious brutalist project, the structure was intended as a luxury shopping mall, complete with a four-kilometre ramp that loops around it, allowing vehicles to drive right in and park inside. It is now one of the most notorious political prisons in South America. For the past three months, it has also been a Christmas tree. An L.E.D. star sits atop the pyramid, and strands of colorful lights encircle the structure, like tinsel.
Inmates have reported cruel and inhumane treatment: electrocution, beatings, and simulated executions, among other horrors. Many were arrested for protesting Maduro’s regime, after he stole the Presidential election, in 2024. Some were detained for simply sending texts questioning the government’s legitimacy—messages that were uncovered during the phone searches that have become a routine part of law enforcement in Caracas.
Trump’s aggressive actions toward Venezuela only worsened the Maduro regime’s paranoia, and, in turn, its authoritarian grip on power. A common slogan, written on the armored personnel carriers that could be seen coming and going from El Helicoide at all hours of the day, translates to the declaration “To Doubt Is Treason.” The city’s most ubiquitous image, painted all over Caracas by government-commissioned muralists, is of the eyes of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, watching us.
In September, after the Trump Administration had begun striking boats off the coast of Venezuela, I was out photographing the local flora, a few streets down from where my grandparents and I live. After taking a picture of an unusually overgrown kapok tree—which, my neighbors later told me, was near a property owned by a high-ranking government official’s daughter—plainclothes officers approached me. They asked fairly banal questions about my employment and my reasons for taking photographs, and they looked through my phone, where they discovered that I had some text messages in English, further arousing their suspicion.
After roughly half an hour of sitting with the officers in the shadow of the kapok, being interrogated about my thoughts on the government, a four-by-four pulled up. Officers from SEBIN, the country’s intelligence service, dressed in black balaclavas and combat gear, with semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, emerged from the vehicle and said that they were going to take me somewhere for questioning. They explained that, for my own safety, they were going to have to restrain me, and, in a gesture painfully symptomatic of the fact that I have spent far too much of my life in England, I made sure to shake the officers’ hands before they zip-tied my wrists.
When the King visited Greenland in April—looking jaunty and at ease while cruising on a fjord with the Prime Minister, and taking a coffee-and-cake break with locals at a cultural center in Nuuk—the contrast with Vance’s gloomy trip couldn’t have been starker. Shortly before the royal visit, the King had issued an updated coat of arms for the Kingdom of Denmark in which the symbols for Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the other Danish territory, take up more space. In the new flag, it’s easier to see that Greenland’s polar bear is roaring.
Denmark recently pledged to give Greenlanders an additional quarter of a billion dollars in health-care and infrastructure investments. Trump’s nakedly imperialistic rhetoric has also prompted Danish leaders to look more honestly at their own role as a colonial power. In August, for example, Frederiksen issued an official apology for a program, started in the nineteen-sixties and continued for decades, in which Danish doctors fitted thousands of Indigenous Greenlandic women and girls with intrauterine birth-control devices, often without their consent or full knowledge.
Such reckonings are overdue. In 2021, Anne Kirstine Hermann, a Danish journalist, published a pioneering book, “Children of the Empire,” in which she chronicled how little say Greenlanders had in Denmark’s decision to incorporate the former colony into its kingdom, rather than granting it independence. Hermann told me, “Danes aren’t used to being the villain—we’re do-gooders. But Greenland has a whole different experience.”
Pernille Benjaminsen, a human-rights lawyer in Nuuk, said that Danes have always compared themselves, favorably, “to what happened in North America—putting Indigenous people in reservations, killing them.” But, she noted, “a lot of bad things also happened in Greenland—we had segregation between white Danish and Greenlandic people, we had eras when we were asked to leave stores when Danish people wanted to enter.” She added, “We need to kill the narrative that there can be a ‘good’ colonizer.”
Benjaminsen credited Prime Minister Frederiksen for being more forthright about the colonial past. Around the time that Trump returned to office, Frederiksen posted online that Danes and Greenlanders “have some dark chapters in our history together, which we, from the Danish side, must confront.”
Some people in Copenhagen told me that, for younger Danes, the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. had spurred soul-searching about their own country’s racism toward Inuit Greenlanders. But Denmark’s sudden attentiveness to Greenland was also an inadvertent gift from Trump. Hørlyck, the photographer, told me, “He has activated Danish people’s connection to Greenland.” Danes of his generation were asking themselves, in a way they hadn’t before, “What do I really know about Greenland? Have I really talked to Greenlanders?” He went on, “It’s quite funny that the strategy over there from Trump opens up something positive here.”
Trump’s antagonism toward Greenland has also changed Danish views about European unity. In the past, Danes had been soft Euroskeptics. They joined the E.U. in the nineteen-seventies, but they kept their own currency, the krone, and in 1992 they voted against the Maastricht Treaty, which tightened European conformity regarding security, citizenship, and other matters. When Frederiksen recently called for more defense spending, she acknowledged, “European coöperation has never really been a favorite of many Danes.” They’d grumbled, she said, about everything from “crooked cucumbers and banning plastic straws” to open immigration policies, which Frederiksen’s government had rejected.
Ole Wæver, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen, told me that Danes have long had a “kind of anti-E.U. sentiment, with a lot of the same arguments that you saw in Brexit—‘Oh, it’s big bureaucracy,’ ‘Brussels is far away,’ ‘It’s taking away our democracy.’ ” Such attitudes, Wæver said, had helped to make Denmark “go overboard” in its allegiance to America. Elisabet Svane, a columnist for Politiken, told me, “Our Prime Minister used to say, ‘You cannot put a piece of paper between me and the U.S., I’m so transatlantic.’ She’s still transatlantic, but I think you can put a little book in between now.”
In Peru every August, throngs of Catholics set out on foot from the remote northern town of Motupe, bound for a cliffside chapel that houses the Cross of Chalpon. The cross, made of guayacán wood and ringed with precious metals, stands about eight feet tall and is believed to have been discovered, as if by a miracle, in a nearby cave in 1868. The ascent takes about an hour, and venders along the way sell religious images and replicas of the cross, as well as roasted corn and Inca Kola. A highlight of the pilgrimage comes when a procession bears the cross downhill, to the church of San Julián, in Motupe’s main plaza. The next day, the Bishop of Chiclayo, the regional capital, leads a Mass for a congregation that fills the square. A brass band plays and helicopters scatter rose petals over the faithful. For decades, the presiding bishop was a member of Opus Dei, a traditionalist movement, founded in Spain in 1928, that has thrived in Latin America. In 2014, however, Pope Francis appointed Robert Prevost, an Augustinian priest from Chicago who had spent a dozen years as a missionary in Peru, to the post.
Prevost himself, of course, is now the Pope; he was elected on May 8th and took the name Leo XIV. Made famous overnight, he stuck to a Midwestern matter-of-factness: he addressed the cardinals who’d elected him in flat-vowelled English, phoned his family daily, kept up his morning habit of doing the Times’ Wordle puzzle, and sent e-mails and texts from his personal accounts. His election was striking but not altogether surprising: he was on many Vatican watchers’ lists and, since the Second Vatican Council, in the early nineteen-sixties, it has been the pattern that a dynamic, pathbreaking Pope is succeeded by a more sober, deliberate ally. Leo—who in recent years worked closely with Pope Francis as the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, a powerful Vatican office—seems likely to carry forward his predecessor’s emphasis on the poor and those on the margins of society with a steadiness that will complement the Argentinean prelate’s improvisatory style.
The public was instantly captivated by Prevost’s background. He was called “the first American Pope,” “the pan-American Pope” (as a bishop, he was required to take Peruvian citizenship), and “the three-world Pope” (to account for his time in Rome). Following accounts that his mother’s family was from New Orleans and his maternal grandfather, born in Haiti, was listed as Black in the 1900 census, he was hailed as “the Black Pope”—until reports of his Sicilian, French, Québécois, Spanish, Cuban, and Creole ancestry brought him the tag “the immigrant Pope.”
“You can settle your check whenever you’re ready to understand my need to turn this table over at least three times tonight in order to make any sort of living.”
Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
The press descended on his childhood home, a modest brick bungalow in Dolton, Illinois, just south of Chicago, and on his boyhood church there, St. Mary of the Assumption, which was shuttered in 2011, its rose window cracked and weeds sprouting near its cornerstone. His elder brother John, a retired Catholic-school principal, confirmed that Leo was a White Sox fan and liked the thin-crust pizza at Aurelio’s; Sox fans started showing up at home games dressed in papal garb, and Aurelio’s introduced a pie called the Poperoni. His eldest brother, Louis, Jr., a retired Navy man, described himself as a “MAGA type” and “Rob” as “much more liberal,” but suggested that he would lead the Papacy “down the middle.”
The summer had the feel of a soft opening to Leo’s pontificate, in part because many papal events had been arranged before he was elected. In Rome, he arrived by helicopter at the Jubilee of Youth, which drew about a million young Catholics to a park south of the city, and he presided over the canonization of the “first millennial saint,” Carlo Acutis, an Italian teen-ager known as “God’s influencer,” who, before his death, from leukemia, used digital media to promote Catholic values. Leo took part in a Vatican conference on the climate emergency, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, a guest speaker, called him an “action hero” because, as soon as he became Pope, he “ordered the Vatican to put solar panels on the buildings.” He met with people who had a wide range of viewpoints, including Ben Shapiro, the conservative podcaster; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the host of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” who presented him with the Prevost family tree; Father James Martin, a Jesuit who advocates “building bridges” with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics; and Cardinal Raymond Burke, a “rad-trad” advocate for the restoration of the Latin Mass.
Then, on September 30th, a news correspondent for EWTN, a Catholic broadcaster, asked Leo about a controversy in Chicago: the archbishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich, planned to give an award to Senator Dick Durbin for his long support of migrants’ rights. Traditionalists pointed out that Durbin, a Democrat, has also long supported abortion rights. The Pope replied, “Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but says, ‘I’m in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life. Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion,’ but ‘I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants who are in the United States’—I don’t know if that’s pro-life. So they are very complex issues. I don’t know if anyone has all the truth on them, but I would ask first and foremost that there’d be greater respect for one another.”
Some saw those remarks as a rebuke of the White House (“Holy Smackdown,” the Daily Beast announced, “Pope Leo Trashes Trump’s Signature Policy”), others as Leo giving cover to Cardinal Cupich. (Because of the controversy, Durbin decided not to accept the award.) The website Where Peter Is, which focusses on the Papacy, saw it as a sign of “Leo’s unifying, de-escalation-oriented priorities.” It was, in other words, an instance of Leo going about the Papacy the way his brother said he would—playing it down the middle.
“I’m so happy for you.”
Cartoon by Jon Adams
“I’m just a month and a half into this new mission,” Leo told a friend in an e-mail in July. A man who a decade ago was presiding over pilgrimages in a remote Peruvian town is now leading a global religion with more than a billion followers, and will have to contend with rising authoritarianism and Christian nationalism, a Church divided between progressives and conservatives, clashes over immigration, grinding wars, and a climate crisis rapidly growing more intense. The Pope’s life, since he entered a seminary high school in 1969, as he turned fourteen, has been a series of assignments, each with clear objectives. The question now is: What is the papal mission, as he sees it?
In 1955, when Richard J. Daley, who went to Mass every morning, became the mayor of Chicago, there were 1.7 million Catholics among the city’s population of some four million people. Irish, Italian, German, and Polish communities each worshipped—in Latin—at their own churches, often within blocks of one another. Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, the archdiocese, led by Cardinal George Mundelein, had been allied with the Democratic Party and labor unions, and had promoted social activism through groups such as Young Christian Workers and the Catholic Interracial Council. During the postwar years, though, tens of thousands of white parishioners chose to move to new enclaves in the city and the suburbs as, owing to the Great Migration, the Black population, long sequestered on the South Side, grew and expanded into other neighborhoods.
Robert Prevost’s parents—Louis Prevost, from the South Side, and Mildred Martinez, from the North Side—met while pursuing graduate degrees in education at DePaul, a Catholic university in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. After marrying, they moved to Dolton, a mostly white suburb that was thriving along with the nearby steel mills and refineries. He worked as a school principal and superintendent; she was a librarian at Mendel Catholic, a high school run by the Augustinian order, a community founded in 1244 and named for St. Augustine, a fourth-century Bishop of Hippo and the author of “Confessions.”
The Prevosts raised their three sons in Dolton; Rob was born there in 1955. The boys rode bikes and played baseball with the kids on the block, John told reporters. They knew that their mother’s father had been born in Haiti, he said, but “we never really talked about it.” They were altar boys at St. Mary of the Assumption, often serving at six-thirty Mass before school, a diligence that the priests rewarded by taking them to Sox games. A Spanish Augustinian named Fidel Rodriguez, whom their father had met through a local charity effort involving migrant workers, sometimes came to supper, dressed in the black habit worn by members of the order. “He had quite an impact on me,” Robert Prevost said, years later. “I never forgot it, in terms of his sense of humor, his generosity, his willingness to serve these people who were, if you will, kind of down and out, and just the way he reached out to them.” Rob practiced celebrating the Mass by draping a sheet over an ironing board in the basement and consecrating Necco wafers. “He was going to be a priest,” John said. “Period. End of discussion.”
In 1995, after a couple of years in Mexico, her mother heard that one of Rosalinda’s brothers was getting into trouble in the States and decided that she needed to live closer to him. Rosalinda wanted to stay, but her mother ignored her pleas, saying, “Pack your bag, because tomorrow we’re leaving early.” It took them three attempts before they were able to sneak across the border, with the help of smugglers, who drove them to San Bernardino. During the ride, one of the men groped Rosalinda, who was fourteen. “There was nothing I could do—I couldn’t scream or anything,” Rosalinda said, wiping away tears. “I just had to stay silent. After that, I told my mother, ‘You do whatever you want, but I am _never_crossing again. That’s it, I’m finished.’ ” Two years later, as a high schooler in San Bernardino, she met Manuel and became pregnant with José.
As a couple, Rosalinda and Manuel had sometimes contemplated returning to Mexico. But only once, more than fifteen years ago, did they come close, after a particularly humiliating experience of trying to sign up their young children for Medicaid. Rosalinda told me, “The woman who worked there made me feel so bad that I came back sobbing, and I said, ‘I don’t want to live in this country anymore.’ ” But when she and Manuel asked José, who was twelve at the time, if he wanted to move to Mexico, he begged them to keep the family in America. “And they respected my wishes,” José told me, recalling the conversation. “They listened.”
About half of the Garcías’ extended family now lived in Southern California. The other half, in Mexico, Rosalinda knew largely by name only. Until recently, she and her husband had a vibrant social life in San Bernardino. For many years, she regularly attended an evangelical church, and she still went to exercise classes with friends she’d made there. Manuel, for all his shyness, had been a regular on a recreational baseball team.
Rosalinda hadn’t forgotten her youthful promise to never cross the border again. It felt surreal to be returning to Mexico, which, after her three decades in America, seemed like a construction of her imagination. “We are afraid, because we’re moving to a place that we don’t remember,” she told me, sighing. “I guess that’s just how it goes.”
On weekends, the family liked to unwind at a nearby R.V. park and private campground where they had been members for years. There were campsites for tents and trailers, rental cabins, barbecue grills, two lakes, and three swimming pools. It had long been Rosalinda’s favorite place, and now it had the additional appeal of being private property. “It’s all fenced in, so it’s one of the few places outdoors where ICE can’t just show up,” José explained. Last spring, when the raids in San Bernardino hit their peak, Rosalinda camped there for two weeks. “I slept in a tent close to the showers so that I would be more comfortable,” she said.
One Saturday afternoon, Rosalinda, Ana, José, Irene, and I piled into their black Tahoe and drove to the campground. In the car, Rosalinda wanted me to listen to one of her favorite norteños—a type of Mexican folk song that heavily features the accordion. “It’s the one I’m going to listen to when I leave the United States,” she explained. The song was called “El Mojado Acaudalado,” or “The Wealthy Wetback,” reclaiming a slur that dates from the early twentieth century and refers to Mexican immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally by crossing the Rio Grande. The song’s narrator is a migrant who has saved up money while working in the U.S. and is finally returning to his homeland. Rosalinda sang along to every word:
“That’s his living room,” Nelson’s lighting director, Budrock Prewitt, told me on the road to Camden. He meant the stage—specifically, a twelve-by-thirty-two-foot maroon rug that Nelson’s crew rolls out at each venue before putting every instrument, amp, and monitor in the same spot as always. Whenever Nelson needs to replace the bus, a company that he’s been working with for decades re-creates the same interior in the next one, as precisely as possible. And Nelson keeps his buses leased year-round, whether they’re in use or not. “They park up and wait for us to come back,” his production manager, Alex Blagg, told me. “My bunk is my bunk.”
“We only go skating because we’re too embarrassed to wear our Christmas sweaters on land.”
Cartoon by Victoria Roberts
Nelson’s band does not have its own name. On ticket stubs and marquees, they’re simply Family, as in “Willie Nelson and Family.” For fifty years, Nelson’s sister Bobbie anchored the group from behind a grand piano. She and Willie had a pact: they’d play to the end of the road. When Nelson’s drummer, Paul English, died, he was replaced by his brother, Billy. Jody Payne was Nelson’s longtime guitar player; now his son Waylon plays in the band. Bee Spears started on bass at nineteen and stayed until his death, at sixty-two. Mickey Raphael, who joined the band at twenty-one, is now seventy-four.
Nelson’s road crew is family, too. His tour manager, John Selman, is the son of Wally Selman, who ran the Texas Opry House; he was hired twenty years ago, straight out of college. Prewitt and Larry Gorham, a Hells Angel who handles security, have been with Nelson since the seventies. So has Nelson’s manager, Mark Rothbaum. Rothbaum’s parents fled Poland in 1937; his mother died when he was thirteen. He stopped caring about school. “I was just fucking angry,” Rothbaum told me. He got a job with a business manager in Manhattan. One day, he saw Nelson behind a glass partition at his office, on West Fifty-seventh Street. “He looked like Jesus Christ,” Rothbaum recalled. “He was glowing.” Rothbaum worked his way into the circle. “I adopted them. But I had to do it. I had to become useful.” He and Nelson have never had a contract. “You couldn’t put a piece of paper between us,” he says.
Family members call this Willie World, and it, too, is elastic. When the steel player Jimmy Day drank his way out of it, Nelson didn’t replace him. The steel parts simply disappeared. When Spears went on tour with Guy Clark, Nelson brought in Chris Ethridge, of the Flying Burrito Brothers, to play bass—and, when Spears called and asked to come home, Nelson welcomed him back and kept Ethridge on. For a while, he toured with two bassists and two drummers: a full-tilt-boogie band captured on “Willie and Family Live,” from 1978. At around the same time, Leon Russell joined them on piano, bringing along his saxophone player and the great Nigerian percussionist Ambrose Campbell. When Grady Martin, the top session player in Nashville, retired from studio recording, he went on the road, too, upping the number of people onstage to eleven. “Willie ran a refugee camp, to some extent,” Steve Earle told me.
Bee Spears died in 2011, Jody Payne in 2013, Paul English in 2020, and Bobbie Nelson in 2022. “The biggest change was Sister Bobbie,” Kevin Smith, who now plays bass, told me. Bobbie outlined the chord structure of every song. After her death, Smith was shocked at how little sound there was onstage. These days, Nelson and Raphael take all the solos. Sets are shorter. Lukas sits in when he’s not out touring on his own; his brother Micah, who plays guitar with Neil Young, joins when he can. But Nelson’s sound has been stripped to its essence. “It’s more like spoken word now,” Raphael said. “Like poetry with a rhythm section.”
Nelson goes from number to number with almost no patter—an approach he learned from the great Texas bandleader Bob Wills, who kept audiences on the dance floor for hours. In Camden, he got through twenty-four songs in sixty-five minutes, pausing only to wipe his brow with a washcloth or to sip from a Willie’s Remedy mug full of warm tea. The set didn’t feel hurried—on “Funny How Time Slips Away,” Nelson gave the song’s ironies and regrets space to sink in—but the crew kept an eye on the clock. After Camden and Holmdel, Nelson was scheduled to play Maryland, Indiana, Wisconsin, and, finally, Farm Aid, at the University of Minnesota: six shows in eight days at the end of eight months on the road. “He just keeps going and going,” Annie said. “He’s Benjamin Buttoning me.”
I ran into Annie in Camden, doing her laundry backstage by the catering station. She and Nelson met in the eighties, on the set of a remake of “Stagecoach.” Annie is two decades younger than Willie. She is sharp, protective, and unflappable, with a wide smile and long, curly hair that she has allowed to go gray. She told me that the build-out for Farm Aid was supposed to have started that day in Minneapolis. CNN was planning a live telecast. But Teamsters Local 320—made up of custodians, groundskeepers, and food-service workers at the university—had chosen that moment to go on strike. Members of IATSE, the stagehands’ union, would not cross the picket line, and neither would Nelson. Cancelling the concert, though, would break faith with the people Farm Aid was meant to serve. “It’s not great for us,” Annie said. “But who really suffers? The farmers. This year of all years.”
All founders have an origin story involving some intractable problem that they simply could not accept. For Rodgers, it was paper. Her mother was a matrimonial attorney, and Rodgers, as part of her childhood chores, organized stacks and stacks of financial-disclosure documents, including for couples getting prenups. There had to be a better way, she would later say. While attending Suffolk University Law School, she took a class called Lawyers and Smart Machines, on how to automate certain legal processes. “They taught us coding, which I did not excel in,” she admitted. That’s where Jaffe, an engineer, later came in, though the two eventually had their own split. (Rodgers preferred not to go into detail.)
Rodgers began developing her platform a few years after graduating from law school, just before her own wedding, to another lawyer. “We were the first couple to use HelloPrenup,” she said. “We were the test case.” She and her husband had met on Match.com—“old school,” she noted—and got married in 2019, in Newport, Rhode Island, at the picturesque Castle Hill Inn, overlooking Narragansett Bay. “Oh, my God, I had the best wedding. I had the best wedding,” she said.
Surveying the scene at Sadelle’s, we guessed where Affleck and Lopez might have sat. “It’s so crowded,” Rodgers observed. “Maybe in the back somewhere.” We started discussing the end of her own marriage. She and her husband had a baby in 2020, and the onset of the pandemic left them without family help. “He’s a patent litigator. He was very busy. I was working as an attorney, plus trying to build this business,” she said. “It was just, like, pressure on pressure on pressure.” They divorced in 2022.
But the COVID lockdown also primed HelloPrenup for success. No one wanted to visit a lawyer’s office. “Everything was becoming digitized in a really rapid way,” Rodgers said. By early 2021, roughly two and a half million women had left the labor force, in what became known as a she-cession. An article on HelloPrenup’s site sounded off: “Who was expected to stay home, watch the kids, become a pseudo-teacher, take care of household responsibilities and manage to still be at their work-from-home desk eight hours a day? Women.” Amid the ashes of girlboss feminism, Rodgers saw opportunity. “Prenups can solve for the motherhood penalty, because you can have an equalization clause,” she told me, explaining that a greater share of assets could compensate for a stay-at-home parent’s lost earning potential.
Rodgers refers to prenups as “the modern vow,” as they can govern finances and other major life decisions during marriage. Couples today want those choices to be made in the spirit of equality and backed by a contract. “They ask, ‘Are our in-laws going to move in? Are we going to buy a house or do the FIRE method and travel the world?’ ” FIRE is a life style popular with millennials and Gen Z marked by extreme saving and aggressive investment; it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.” An elder millennial, I had to look it up.
In February of 1990, it was reported that Donald and Ivana Trump were divorcing, after thirteen years of marriage. The news dominated the headlines. “They ran it before the story out of South Africa,” one outraged New Yorker told a local TV crew, referring to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison that week. People immediately began speculating about the spoils. “It’s not just a marriage on the line. It’s Donald Trump’s reputation as a dealmaker,” the journalist Richard Roth declared on CBS News. The couple had a prenup—and three “postnups”—allegedly granting Ivana around twenty million dollars, a fraction of Trump’s purported five-billion-dollar fortune. “IVANA BETTER DEAL,” read the cover of the Daily News. In a skit on “Saturday Night Live,” Jan Hooks, playing Ivana, balks at the prenup: “That contract is invalid. You have a mistress, Donald.” (There were rumors that Trump had been unfaithful with a Southern beauty queen named Marla Maples.) Phil Hartman, playing Trump, flips through the pages of the contract before saying, “According to Section 5, Paragraph 2, I’m allowed to have mistresses provided they are younger than you.”
The prenup largely held. Ivana got a measly fourteen million, a mansion in Greenwich, an apartment in Trump Plaza, and the use of Mar-a-Lago for one month a year. But it was understandable that the public thought that Trump’s entire empire might be at stake. In the eighties, prenups were usually in the news for getting tossed out. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Steven Spielberg was ordered to pay his ex-wife, the actress Amy Irving, a hundred million dollars after a judge voided their prenup, which had allegedly been scrawled on a scrap of paper. (Irving conveyed through a representative that “there was no prenup ever even discussed.”)
Sometimes the axon highways almost seem to pave themselves. My daughter, Laura, began to read all of a sudden, the summer before kindergarten. (“It’s hard to believe that ‘knock’ starts with ‘k,’ ” she said, while following along as I read her a bedtime story about Amanda Pig.) But even she didn’t become a reader entirely on her own. All children have to learn the relationships between letters and meaningful sounds. For some it’s harder than for others. “Maybe instead of four lanes you have two,” Gaab said, “or instead of a smooth surface you have a bumpy one.” Caroline had a large vocabulary, and she was read to as often as Laura was, both at home and at school, and there were just as many colorful plastic alphabet magnets stuck to the refrigerator in her kitchen. But she needed teachers who understood that literacy doesn’t happen naturally, especially for children with dyslexia.
A decade ago, Emily Hanford, a senior correspondent at American Public Media, was researching a story about college-level remedial-reading classes. She became interested in dyslexia and then in literacy generally, and in 2022 she produced an immensely influential podcast series, “Sold a Story,” about reading instruction in American schools. The central argument is that teachers all over the country employ instructional methods and materials that were proved, long ago, to be not just ineffective but counterproductive. Such methods, Hanford demonstrated, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how children learn to read. They direct beginning readers to look for hints in illustrations and to make deductions based on context, word length, plot, and other cues, with only incidental reliance on the sounds represented by letters. The idea is that, as children become adept at deduction, the mechanical side will, in effect, take care of itself.
Skilled reading has many elements. A popular metaphor is the “reading rope,” created by the psychologist Hollis Scarborough in 2001. It depicts eight “strands,” which readers weave together as they become proficient. The strands include not just an understanding of the sounds represented by letters and combinations of letters but also such elements of language comprehension as vocabulary, grammar, reasoning, and background knowledge. All the strands are necessary. In Hanford’s view, the ones related to word recognition, including phonological awareness and decoding, have often been neglected. That harms many students and is a disaster for children with dyslexia.
Antipathy to phonetic decoding is sometimes traced to the nineteenth-century American educator Horace Mann, who described the letters of the alphabet as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” and argued in favor of teaching children to recognize words as discrete units. A later, more powerful influence was Marie Clay, a teacher and researcher in New Zealand, who studied schoolchildren learning to read and concluded, in the nineteen-sixties, that understanding the relationships between letters and sounds wasn’t essential. Hanford, in the second episode of “Sold a Story,” says, “Her basic idea was that good readers are good problem solvers. They’re like detectives, searching for clues.” The best clues, Clay reasoned, were things like context and sentence structure. Frank Smith, a British psycholinguist, came to the same conclusion. He argued that, to a good reader, a printed word was like an ideogram. “The worst readers are those who try to sound out unfamiliar words according to the rules of phonics,” he wrote, in 1992.
There have always been opposing voices. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” a brutal indictment of “whole word” methods. “If they had their way, our teachers would never tell the children that there are letters and that each letter represents a sound,” Flesch writes. To illustrate the problem, he recounts a story, told by a literacy researcher, about a boy who could read the word “children” on a flash card but not in a book. (The boy explained that he recognized the flash card because someone had smudged it.) Flesch’s book spent months on best-seller lists, but teaching methods like the ones he had seemingly destroyed remained widely used.
“We’re only walking to the other end of the cage.”
Cartoon by Lynn Hsu
Today, two of the most popular reading-instruction programs are Units of Study, whose principal author is Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Both are traceable to the work of people like Clay and Smith, and both are sold by the same educational publisher. They have remained entrenched in school systems even though scientific studies have shown that their theoretical foundations are flawed. Technology that allows researchers to track the eye movements of people as they read has demonstrated, for instance, that good readers actually do decode words by looking closely, if quickly, at letters and combinations of letters. Dehaene writes that “ ‘eight’ and ‘EIGHT,’ which are composed of distinct visual features, are initially encoded by different neurons in the primary visual area, but are progressively recoded until they become virtually indistinguishable.” If fluent readers are able to read familiar words in a way that makes it seem as though they’re recognizing ideograms, it’s because they analyzed them phonetically during earlier encounters, prompting their brains to create permanent neural pathways linking spelling, sound, and meaning.
That phrase is at the heart of the free-trade lexicon. Free trade in goods or services, unencumbered by tariffs or other barriers, is likely to lead to greater total output than if there had been no trade. Specialization makes economic sense: not every country should grow its own peppers. (Years ago, Navarro described this as “one of the deepest truths in all of economics.” He now refers to “so-called gains from trade.”)
In Cambridge, Navarro needed to produce a dissertation about the economics of corporate charitable giving. Dubin needed to pay his rent. (“I was a poor student, and he was rehabbing a triplex in Central Square.”) Money changed hands. “He told me the direction he wanted to go, and I helped him get there, theoretically and empirically,” Dubin said. “I might have used his data to set up models and get him going. And then he took over at some point and it became his own.” Dubin, speaking half seriously, described this as “one of my first consulting experiences.” He observed that “most people, at that level, would not pay someone else to help them.” But Navarro saw nothing improper in the exchange, and neither did Dubin.
The two men become close friends. “We went to the Cape together,” Dubin said. “We double-dated.” They also co-wrote several papers. Dubin remembers that Navarro, who was “very into his health, into his body,” was an enthusiast of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a gooey, unregulated byproduct of the paper industry that purportedly soothes muscle strains. According to Dubin, Navarro wasn’t immune to the substance’s notorious side effect: “He reeked of garlic because of it.” (Navarro told me that, today, he doesn’t “drink, smoke pot, use any hard drugs or even prescription medicines,” adding, “Just not my thing. Live clean or die.”)
Navarro’s dissertation, submitted in 1986, doesn’t acknowledge Dubin’s contributions. According to every economist I asked, that omission constitutes an academic violation. Harry Holzer, a public-policy professor at Georgetown, told me that, if someone “is actually developing his models for him, I think it crosses a boundary.” Holzer, who served as the chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Clinton Administration, is a former Harvard acquaintance of Navarro’s. “At a minimum, a footnote acknowledging a person’s input is appropriate,” Holzer said.
Lawrence Goulder, the sole surviving member of Navarro’s dissertation committee, agrees. If Navarro received substantial help, he told me, then some recognition of that would have been “expected,” and its absence was “inappropriate.” (Goulder, who’s now at Stanford, noted that, at Harvard, Navarro had taught him to windsurf.)
Navarro, asked if he’d engaged in an academic deceit, said, of Dubin, “I don’t recall him providing any substantive assistance on my dissertation.” Navarro also pointed to other publications in which he had thanked Dubin for his help.
Later in life, Peter Navarro introduced readers of his books to a friend named Ron Vara. According to “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks,” a 2001 book of financial advice that urged retail investors to be alert to world events, Vara had been the captain of a reserve unit at the time of the Gulf War. He now lived on a houseboat in Miami and was known as the Dark Prince of Disaster, for making “macroplays”—trades taking nimble advantage of sudden onsets of human misery. Vara had macroplayed Hurricane Andrew and a Taiwanese earthquake. In 1986, when Vara was a “struggling doctoral student in economics at Harvard,” he’d apparently been clairvoyant: two days before the Chernobyl disaster, he’d shorted companies invested in nuclear energy.
Vara appears in several other Navarro books, including “Death by China,” where he’s quoted as saying, “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon, and a cell phone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.” Vara was also credited as the executive producer (and the musical director) of the videos that Navarro showed to his Rising China class at U.C. Irvine.
During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, “went off his rocker,” as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, “The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum.”
Liebling, who joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935, ten years after its founding, quickly made a reputation as a humorous and versatile observer of the human condition. “I am a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter,” he confessed. And Liebling once boasted to a friend, “I write better than anyone who writes faster, and faster than anyone who writes better.” Among sportswriters, he was esteemed for his boxing coverage. His unapologetic passion for food, evidenced by his waistline, was one of the great romances in literary journalism. As he saw it, dieting represented an absolute evil: “If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.”
Liebling took over The Wayward Press, a column in the magazine, in which he prosecuted the sins and miscues of the Fourth Estate, which he labelled “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” Although he was terribly nearsighted, out of shape, and plagued by gout (his great friend and colleague Joseph Mitchell once observed him using a strip of bacon as a bookmark), his vigorous coverage of D Day and the liberation of Paris led the French government to award him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Untidy in his personal life, he was on his third wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, when he died, at the age of fifty-nine.
Liebling’s foremost talent was bringing memorable characters roaring to life, so it’s not surprising that he fell in love with Earl Long. The New Yorker wisely allocated three issues to Liebling’s profile of Long, titled “The Great State”; the articles were later collected in a book with a superior title, “The Earl of Louisiana.”
Like other reporters who joined in the merriment, Liebling came to Louisiana to scoff at Long. “I had left New York thinking of him as a Peckerwood Caligula,” he confessed. But, when he watched news coverage of the legislative session, he listened closely to what the ranting governor was saying to the recalcitrant legislators. Long was attacking a law, passed around the time of Reconstruction, that allowed election registrars to disqualify voters on “educational” grounds, a measure designed to push Black people off the voter rolls. “It took me a minute or two to realize that the old ‘demagogue’ was actually making a civil-rights speech,” Liebling wrote. He began to recognize Long as something more important than another Southern political buffoon. Long was a skillful progressive politician operating in a conservative, racist environment. For all the droll humor in Liebling’s coverage, that insight is what made his report a classic.
Liebling’s articles about Long caught my eye when they were published, in the spring of 1960. They influenced my decision to attend Tulane University, in New Orleans, the city that Liebling had painted so vibrantly; they also pointed me toward journalism, and they fixed in my mind The New Yorker as my ideal professional destination. For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth. Most of them, that is. Liebling displayed a New York City chauvinism by mercilessly skewering Chicago, the “second city.” In the evening, when the commuters fled, Chicago was a “vast, anonymous pulp,” he wrote, “plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit. Chicago after nightfall is a small city of the rich who have not yet migrated, visitors, and hoodlums, surrounded by a large expanse of juxtaposed dimnesses.”
I have in my office a poster on which Liebling’s portrait is accompanied by his cautionary warning: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” ♦
The godmother of “Industry” is Jane Tranter, a powerful executive producer who has worked in both the U.K. and Hollywood. In the early twenty-tens, Tranter had the idea of making a show about newcomers to the City of London. “I could not work out why young people, after the whole credit crunch and everything that had happened with the banks, were still flocking in their hordes to go and work in the City,” she told me. “Wasn’t this the generation that was meant to be saving the world from the atrocious mistakes of my generation?” (One bleak data point in Tranter’s research file was the death of a young intern, in 2013, who worked at a bank in London; he suffered a seizure after working three nights in a row without sleep. In the pilot of “Industry,” a trainee expires under similar circumstances.) Tranter secured a modest budget from HBO to explore the idea, with the directive, she told me, to “just make it young and sexy somehow.” By chance, a colleague had met Down and Kay while discussing a different project, a psychological thriller, and steered them to Tranter. “They were so bright and so personable, and they had exactly what you want when you are tackling something like this,” Tranter told me. “They both had authenticity, and they had objectivity and clarity. But they also had scores to settle.”
Cartoon by Roz Chast
On set, the pair work together seamlessly—so much so that the cast and crew refer to them by the moniker M.K. The actor Ken Leung, who plays Eric Tao, a veteran trader, told me, “I almost never think of one without the other. You wouldn’t want to talk to one about something without the other knowing. It would feel wrong.” (One instance of score-settling: a scene in which Eric undresses in front of underlings is based on the behavior of a former senior colleague of Kay’s, who would summon him to his office on a Friday afternoon to talk about the week’s business, all the while stripping down to his underwear before putting on his weekend clothes.) When Down and Kay do interviews together, they regularly finish each other’s sentences. Tranter told me, “I often think, if they both get on their phones during a meeting, or on set, that they are texting each other.”
The two men’s temperaments are very different. Down overflows with ebullient confidence, whereas Kay is more anxious and cerebral. Myha’la told me, “Mickey feels very like a superstar—kind of flashy, like an old-school director. I know for a fact that he really badly wants to be on the Director Fits Instagram account, where they say, ‘Look at this great director, and look at his awesome outfit.’ And then, with Konrad, I feel like I have seen his heart blossom in real time this season. He gets such a twinkle in his eye, and a chaotic excitement, when he is, like, ‘Let’s try this.’ ” She went on, “They’re no longer holding on to anything so tightly, and they are really eager to let us play with them, because of the trust that’s been built.” Their own ambitions are unabashedly large. “I like reading biographies of John Boorman and David Lean and all these great directors,” Kay told me. “Sometimes I think I won’t be satisfied until I can see Mickey on a hilltop overseeing, like, fifteen hundred extras, through a megaphone, directing a big, two-and-a-half-hour-long period epic.” He continued, “It’s, like, someone is detonating something, and Mickey is saying, ‘We missed that by thirty seconds,’ and the whole shot costs another hundred and twenty grand. That excites me.”
Down and Kay met in 2007. Down had just arrived at Oxford for his first year, and Kay was a second-year student. Down recalled that Kay was playing foosball: “I sidled up to him, and he said, ‘Oh, you’re new—you’re going to fucking hate it here.’ ” They were both members of Regent’s Park College, which enrolls a high proportion of divinity students. Both had been bounced there after being rejected by older and more prestigious Oxford colleges. Kay blew his interview at his first choice by holding forth about Homeric allusions in “Ulysses,” despite never having read the book. “I fucked up so badly I cried afterward,” he told me. Both arrived at Oxford with the insouciance of privilege, having been privately educated at exclusive institutions, Down at Charterhouse School (Thackeray, Vaughan Williams) and Kay at King’s College School, Wimbledon (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Sickert). Down studied theology; he had applied for the subject because he knew it was statistically much easier to get into Oxford as a theologian than as a historian, his true interest. (Robert Spearing has leveraged a similar application tactic in “Industry.”) Kay studied English literature, favoring modules on sparse modernist poetry to ones on lengthy Victorian novels. Both did the minimum of academic work. Down tried his hand at acting, without great success. “One play was just a disaster—it was Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author,’ and on the first night I got the cue wrong, and we skipped about forty minutes of the play,” he told me. Mostly, the two went out.
Entering the television or film industry at the bottom rung, or trying to launch a career as a writer, wasn’t a realistic proposition for either man upon graduation. Down’s parents, who are partners in their own architectural practice, in North London, urged him to enter a steady profession such as the law. He had done a summer internship at the Home Office, and he was invited to apply for the intelligence services. Down, whose mother is Ghanaian and whose father is white British, said, “There was a diversity ‘fast stream.’ I got to the meeting and we were all Black or brown people. I thought, That’s interesting.” But he didn’t get the job. Not knowing what else to do, he successfully applied for a summer internship at Morgan Stanley, and after it ended he went to Rothschild. Élite financial institutions in the U.K. recruit from half a dozen similarly élite universities and, traditionally, have accepted a significant number of humanities grads, many of whom have never taken an economics class. Of course, not all jobs in finance require math skills: Anraj Rayat, a close friend of Kay’s, who works as a sales trader at Barclays and was an inspiration for the confrontational, scabrous character of Rishi Ramdani in “Industry,” told me, “There’s a job called prime brokerage, and I always say that their biggest skill set is asking clients ‘Red or white?’ and ‘Still or sparkling?,’ because that’s basically all you need to do.” Nevertheless, it was clear that there were other qualifications under consideration. Down said, “I didn’t get a single technical question at my interview—it was all questions about university, and literally talking about people that we both knew.”
As Sacks aged, he felt as if he were gazing at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new kind of affection for humans—“homo sap.” “They’re quite complex (little) creatures (I say to myself),” he wrote in his journal. “They suffer, authentically, a good deal. Gifted, too. Brave, resourceful, challenging.”
Perhaps because love no longer appeared to be a realistic risk—he had now entered a “geriatric situation”—Sacks could finally confess that he craved it. “I keep being stabbed by love,” he wrote in his journal. “A look. A glance. An expression. A posture.” He guessed that he had at least five, possibly ten, more years to live. “I want to, I want to ••• I dare not say. At least not in writing.”
In 2008, Sacks had lunch with Bill Hayes, a forty-seven-year-old writer from San Francisco who was visiting New York. Hayes had never considered Sacks’s sexuality, but, as soon as they began talking, he thought, “Oh, my God, he’s gay,” he told me. They lingered at the table for much of the afternoon, connecting over their insomnia, among other subjects. After the meal, Sacks wrote Hayes a letter (which he never sent) explaining that relationships had been “a ‘forbidden’ area for me—although I am entirely sympathetic to (indeed wistful and perhaps envious about) other people’s relationships.”
A year later, Hayes, whose partner of seventeen years had died of a heart attack, moved to New York. He and Sacks began spending time together. At Sacks’s recommendation, Hayes started keeping a journal, too. He often wrote down his exchanges with Sacks, some of which he later published in a memoir, “Insomniac City.”
“It’s really a question of mutuality, isn’t it?” Sacks asked him, two weeks after they had declared their feelings for each other.
“Love?” Hayes responded. “Are you talking about love?”
“Yes,” Sacks replied.
Sacks began taking Hayes to dinner parties, although he introduced him as “my friend Billy.” He did not allow physical affection in public. “Sometimes this issue of not being out became very difficult,” Hayes told me. “We’d have arguments, and I’d say things like ‘Do you and Shengold ever talk about why you can’t come out? Or is all you ever talk about your dreams?’ ” Sacks wrote down stray phrases from his dreams on a whiteboard in his kitchen so that he could report on them at his sessions, but he didn’t share what happened in therapy.
Kate Edgar, who worked for Sacks for three decades, had two brothers who were gay, and for years she had advocated for gay civil rights, organizing Pride marches for her son’s school. She intentionally found an office for Sacks in the West Village so that he would be surrounded by gay men living openly and could see how normal it had become. She tended to hire gay assistants for him, for the same reason. “So I was sort of plotting on that level for some years,” she told me.
In 2013, after being in a relationship with Hayes for four years—they lived in separate apartments in the same building—Sacks began writing a memoir, “On the Move,” in which he divulged his sexuality for the first time. He recounts his mother’s curses upon learning that he was gay, and his decades of celibacy—a fact he mentions casually, without explanation. Edgar wondered why, after so many years of analysis, coming out took him so long, but, she said, “Oliver did not regard his relationship with Shengold as a failure of therapy.” She said that she’d guessed Shengold had thought, “This is something Oliver has to do in his own way, on his own time.” Shengold’s daughter, Nina, said that, “for my dad to have a patient he loved and respected finally find comfort in identifying who he’d been all his life—that’s growth for both of them.”
