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  • The Runaway Monkeys Upending the Animal-Rights Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Ava Kofman

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  • Joachim Trier Has Put Oslo on the Cinematic Map

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Margaret Talbot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Ed Caesar

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  • Trump and the Presidency That Wouldn’t Shut Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Jill Lepore

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

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

    Cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Larissa MacFarquhar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Stephen Witt

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  • Jennifer Lawrence Goes Dark

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

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

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

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

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

    Cartoon by Ellie Black

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

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    Jia Tolentino

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Crown Versus William Joyce

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    Gideon Lewis-Kraus

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  • Can the Golden Age of Costco Last?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Molly Fischer

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  • The Man Who Sells Unsellable New York Apartments

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

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    Alexandra Schwartz

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  • The Cocaine Kingpin Living Large in Dubai

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “Here’s your problem.”

    Cartoon by Edward Steed

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

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

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    Ed Caesar

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  • Donald Trump’s Deep-State Wrecking Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Andy Kroll

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

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

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    Eren Orbey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cartoon by P. C. Vey

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

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

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

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    Anthony Lane

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  • Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Emma Green

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  • What Zohran Mamdani Knows About Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Eric Lach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai

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

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

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

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

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

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    Emily Nussbaum

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  • A Year of Convulsions in New York’s Prisons

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan

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

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

    Nicholas wrote quickly and decided on a headline:

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

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

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

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

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

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    Jennifer Gonnerman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Jennifer Wilson

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