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  • And Your Little Dog, Too, by David Sedaris

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    “He just bit me!” I said.

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

    “Your dog just bit me!” I repeated.

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

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

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

    “How is this O.K.?” I asked.

    Blank expressions.

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

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

    “Whatever,” one of the men said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Unfortunately, I had already finished signing her book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cartoon by Maddie Dai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    David Sedaris

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  • The Airport-Lounge Wars

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

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    Zach Helfand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Ben Taub

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  • In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Alex Ross

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  • Disappeared to a Foreign Prison

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

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

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

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

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

    Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby

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

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

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    Sarah Stillman

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

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    “What kind of power?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Jon Lee Anderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Ariel Levy

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  • Edwidge Danticat on Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”

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

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

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

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

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

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    Edwidge Danticat

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  • Kash Patel’s Acts of Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cartoon by Victoria Roberts

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

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    Marc Fisher

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  • Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cartoon by Avi Steinberg

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

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

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

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    Rivka Galchen

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  • Stephen Fry Is Wilde at Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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    Rebecca Mead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Alice Gregory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Viva Las Vegas: Elvis Returns to the Stage

    The King’s first concert at the International Hotel.

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    Hanif Abdurraqib

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  • In Gaza, Home Is Just a Memory

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    In October, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, after two years of war. In the weeks since, sporadic Israeli strikes have killed at least a hundred people in Gaza, according to Palestinian health officials, but the ceasefire, however fragile, is holding, and so is a semblance of hope. Palestinians are now returning to destroyed city blocks, where services are scarce, and access to water, food, and electricity is limited. The few remaining schools are still doubling as shelters, and local charity groups are trying to circulate aid and other basic resources.

    The United Nations estimates that at least 1.9 million people were displaced during the war. One of them is Shahd Shamali, who is twenty years old, and is currently living at a camp in Deir al-Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip. For several weeks, we communicated via WhatsApp video calls. From my screen, I could see her sitting at a shared desk in a room, where others held their phones at chest height to catch the router’s range. When our calls dropped, as they often did, Shamali and I would switch over to text messages and voice notes.

    Shamali was raised in Rimal, a neighborhood in western Gaza City, near the Mediterranean Sea. It was once a business and commercial hub, with ministries, banks, schools, and galleries within a few blocks of one another. Palm-lined boulevards cut between modern glass apartment buildings, and upscale restaurants overlooked the water. The neighborhood has since been reduced to a sprawl of tents and wreckage, storefronts hanging from cages of bent metal. Shamali and her family lived in Al-Jundi al-Majhoul Tower—a fourteen-story building that sat across from an ice-cream shop and a sports store and was home to hundreds of residents. On September 14, 2025, they learned of an impending strike, forcing them to evacuate the area.

    In written responses to The New Yorker, the Israel Defense Forces said they act in accordance with international law, taking “all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians.” When asked about the strike on Al-Jundi Tower, the I.D.F. referred to a previously issued statement about a strike on a “high-rise tower in Gaza” on September 14th, which said that the building was being used by Hamas for “intelligence gathering” purposes.

    I spoke with people in Gaza who recalled receiving an advance warning of ninety minutes before their building was struck by the I.D.F., whereas others told me they were given less than five minutes. Shamali and her neighbors in Al-Jundi Tower had twenty minutes. I asked her to describe her home, and the life she made there, before it was erased, and the consequential choices she and her family made in the brief evacuation window: what they took, how they got out, and where they went. “Those twenty minutes,” Shamali told me, “felt like two seconds.” Her account captures the kind of tragedy that Palestinians have endured, and how it shapes their thinking about what lies ahead, even after the ceasefire—their feelings about home and about the future, when both remain precarious.

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    Mohammed R. Mhawish

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  • What Was the American Revolution For?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Jill Lepore

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  • David Byrne’s Career of Earnest Alienation

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Photograph by David LaChapelle for The New Yorker

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

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    Amanda Petrusich

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  • Rian Johnson Is an Agatha Christie for the Netflix Age

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

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

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

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

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

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    Anna Russell

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  • Laura Loomer’s Endless Payback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Antonia Hitchens

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  • Introducing Shuffalo, Our New Word Game

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    Anagrams hold a special place in the annals of wordplay. Although dismissed by some as “intellectually frivolous” (A. E. Housman) or a mere “trifle” (Ben Jonson), the art of anagramming—rearranging the letters in one word or phrase to form another—has provided plenty of writers with literary inspiration. The metaphysical poet George Herbert, for instance, observed that the letters in MARY can be shifted around to spell ARMY, taking this to be a sign of the Holy Mother’s mysterious power. For Vladimir Nabokov, who created the alter ego Vivian Darkbloom—see what he did there?—anagrams were metaphors for the unconscious: “All dreams are anagrams of diurnal reality,” he wrote. And any genealogy of letter-scramblers must include the poet Jim Morrison, who unforgettably nicknamed himself “Mr. Mojo Risin’.”

    You don’t have to be a writer, or on psychedelics, to enjoy the power of the anagram. Most puzzle fans know the rush of extracting a word from alphabet soup, or the delight of realizing that, say, the letters in BRITNEY SPEARS can also spell PRESBYTERIANS. If this kind of thing lights your fire, then The New Yorker’s new daily game, Shuffalo, is for you.

    Shuffalo is an anagramming challenge with a twist: your goal is to unscramble a set of letters to make a word—but every time you do, an additional letter gets added to the set. As you play, the words get longer and the game gets tougher, culminating in an eight-letter scramble. (If you get that far and want to really show off, play on to the nine-letter bonus round.) Those who get stuck can always use a hint, but keep in mind that your final badge is determined by the number of hints you used. To see how it’s done, watch this video featuring the comedian and self-proclaimed vocabulary whiz Kate Berlant.

    Part of the fun of Shuffalo—which was based on a game created by the New Yorker crossword constructor Adam Wagner—lies in the surprising transformations that you discover as you play. It calls to mind the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse: tack on one thing, and you get another thing entirely. Add an “I” to SOLVE, it turns out, and you can make OLIVES; then add a “T” to make VIOLETS; an “N” to make NOVELIST; and another “N” to make INSOLVENT. (Well, maybe that last one isn’t such a big leap.)

    You can play a new Shuffalo every day in our Games hub, or by signing up for the Puzzles & Games newsletter. Is it intellectually frivolous? Depends who you ask. Either way, we hope it will add some delight to your diurnal reality. ♦

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    Liz Maynes-Aminzade

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  • The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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    James Somers

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