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  • The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department

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    The early magazine was riddled with mistakes. The New Yorker was known for its newsbreaks, which mocked other publications’ errors and oddities. In 1929, Ross concluded, “We are running misprints and clumsy wordings from other publications, and otherwise being Godlike, so WE MUST BE DAMN NEAR PURE OURSELF.” Soon, there were several full-time checkers. When the magazine profiled Luce, and wanted to confirm the number of rooms in his mansion, a checker was sent there to pose as a prospective renter.

    Ross was delighted by the new arrangement. He began firing off memos:

    “Can moles see? And do they ever come above ground of their own volition?”

    “Can you find out whether or not there is a Podunk River in Connecticut?”

    “Do the catalogues of Sears and Montgomery Ward still list farm and stock whips, drovers’ whips and quirts?”

    What Ross gave to the checkers was the idea that it mattered to understand the world in all its weirdness. Also: a willingness to admit ignorance. He once popped his head into the checkers’ room and asked, “Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?”

    Ross was never satisfied with his creation. “He must have set up a dozen different systems, during my years with him, for keeping track of manuscripts and verifying facts,” James Thurber wrote. Ross studied the New York Telephone Company’s system of checking names and phone numbers and concluded that, despite its best efforts, it never managed to put out a directory with fewer than three mistakes. Thurber continued, “If the slightest thing went wrong, he would bawl, ‘The system’s fallen down!’ ”

    How do you confirm a fact? You ask, over and over, “How do we know?” Years ago, John McPhee wrote about a Japanese incendiary balloon that, during the Second World War, floated across the Pacific and struck an electrical cable serving a top-secret nuclear site; a reactor that enriched plutonium for the atomic bomb bound for Nagasaki was temporarily disabled. How did McPhee know? Someone had told him. How did that person know? He’d heard about it—secondhand. The checker, Sara Lippincott, spent weeks trying to track down an original source. Just before the magazine went to the printer, she got a lead. She called the source at home, in Florida. He was at the mall. How to locate him in time? She called the police. They found him and put him in a phone booth. Did he know about the incident? He did. How? He was the reactor’s site manager; he saw it happen. The detail made it in.

    Sometimes one source is enough. Sometimes ten aren’t. Checking is a forced humility. The longer you check, the more you doubt what you think you know. We are constantly misunderstanding one another, often literally. In the nineties, the former Secretary of Education William Bennett, a family-values Republican and the editor of an anthology called “The Book of Virtues,” uttered the phrase “a real us-and-them kind of thing.” It was misheard as “a real S & M kind of thing.” The magazine had to issue a correction. People also lie, regret, renounce. One subject of a Raffi Khatchadourian piece complained that multiple details about his life were made up and demanded to know what idiot had given Khatchadourian the erroneous details. The idiot was the man himself; the details came from his book. A disputatious source is actually more helpful than the opposite. The checking system, like the justice system, requires something to push against. When Parker Henry checked Patrick Radden Keefe’s Profile of Anthony Bourdain, Bourdain wasn’t able to get on the phone, so Henry sent him a memo containing a hundred or so facts about some of the most sensitive parts of his life, including his heroin use and the collapse of a romantic relationship. He responded, “Looks good.”

    Checkers talk to virtually all sources in a piece, named and unnamed. They also contact people who are mentioned, even glancingly, whom the writer didn’t already speak to, and many people not mentioned in the piece at all. Checkers don’t read out quotes or seek approval. Sources can’t make changes. They can flag errors, provide context and evidence. The checker then discusses the points of contention with the writer and the editor. It’s an intentionally adversarial process, like a court proceeding. You want to see every side’s best case. The editor makes the final call. In a sense, the checker is re-reporting a piece, probing for weak spots, reaching a hand across the gulf of misunderstanding. The checker also asks questions that, in any other situation, might prompt the respondent to wonder if she was experiencing a brain aneurysm. “Does the Swedish Chef have a unibrow?” “He actually has two separate eyebrows that come close together above his nose.” Could a peccary chase a human up a tree? Certainly if it’s a white-lipped peccary, which is the size of a small bear and prone to stampede. Zadie Smith once received a call regarding whether, years earlier, at Ian McEwan’s birthday party, a butterfly landed on her knee. When a Talk piece by Tad Friend described the singer Art Garfunkel waving his arms around, the checker asked Garfunkel to confirm that he had two arms.

    Anne (Dusty) Mortimer-Maddox, a former longtime checker, used to say, “The way you fact-check is like reading them a bedtime story.” She went on, “You tell people facts rather than asking them. When fact checkers say, ‘Is it true that . . .,’ they come off sounding like district attorneys.” But sometimes, no matter how much you coo, a subject wants to yell. This also serves a purpose. Nick Paumgarten likes to note that checkers are in the fact business and the customer-service business. It helps if everyone comes away feeling heard. Peter Canby’s philosophy was that it’s better for a subject to scream before a piece is published than after—a controlled explosion. Screamers still provide useful information. They’re better than ignorers or trolls. Elon Musk once sent back an imagined Mad Libs-style story, riffing on all the details to be checked. Steve Bannon responded to a checking question with a blank e-mail.

    Usually, checkers are pretty successful at getting people to respond. Checkers are not exactly neutral arbiters, but they’re as close as you’re going to get—a last chance to argue your case. The Taliban typically plays ball. So does the C.I.A. The F.B.I. does not. One checker spoke by phone with Osama bin Laden’s former Sharia adviser; he asked her to dress for the conversation “in accordance with Islamic principles of modesty.” Different cultures have different relationships with facts. The French position is that, if the author says something happened, it happened. One veteran Chinese journalist quoted in an Evan Osnos piece, who had never before experienced fact checking, said, “I felt like I was in the middle of an ancient ritual.” People can be surprisingly honest. Nicolas Niarchos, checking a piece by Ben Taub, called up one of the most powerful smugglers in the Sahel, who cheerfully confirmed every detail, including his trafficking of humans. At the end of the call, he said, “I have one request.”

    Niarchos said, “What is that?”

    He replied, “I want you to call me something else.”

    “What would you like us to call you?”

    “I’d like to be called Alber the Gorilla.”

    The request was denied.

    The real thrill is in having a license to ask, as directly as possible, about the thing you really want to know. Did Harvey Weinstein commit rape? Did the government know about the massacre? A checker named Camila Osorio once spent months on the phone with a former guerrilla commander who, it turned out, was implicated in a bombing in Colombia that almost killed Osorio’s mother.

    A long checking call can be a weirdly intimate space. You ask about mass murders, traumas, state secrets, often with little preamble. A government official, after a call, once accused a checker of being “creepily obsessed” with him.

    So far, Anna has found errors of counting, errors of framing (“One quibble with the framing, if you’ll allow me, is that you never mention how checkers quibble with the framing”), and errors of the too-good-to-check variety. For example, it turns out that Zadie Smith was asked not about a butterfly on her knee but about a slug on a wineglass. However, it’s one thing to know the facts, and another to persuade the author. Most writers appreciate having been checked but resent being checked. Checking makes evident how badly you’ve misinterpreted the world. It upsets your confidence in your own eyes and ears. Checking is invasive. In the eighties, Janet Malcolm was sued for defamation in a drawn-out case that involved the parsing of her reporting notes. She’d been accused of fabricating quotes; she maintained that she merely stitched quotes together, a journalistic transgression but, ultimately, not a legal one. (A court ruled in Malcolm’s favor.) From then on, the checking department required authors to turn over notes, recordings, and transcripts. “It’s like someone going through your underwear drawer,” Lawrence Wright told me. Checkers can see your shortcuts, your reportorial wheedling, your blind spots. Ben McGrath, another checker turned writer, said, “It’s really interesting to realize that, these people you’ve been reading and admiring, there’s six errors on every page. And it’s not that they’re full of shit. It’s that this is what every person is like.” As a general rule, the better the reporter, the better she gets along with checkers. Jay McInerney, a former checker, once wrote, of authors, “They resent you to the degree that they depend on you.” McInerney, who wrote “Bright Lights, Big City,” about a fact checker at a lightly fictionalized New Yorker, is probably the most famous former checker. He will admit he was not a great one; he got fired after about a year, when his claim that he could speak French was disproved by a litany of errors he let through in a piece reported from France. “I’ve written that I’m the first fact checker to get fired,” he told me. I pointed out that checkers hate claims like “the first.” “Nobody’s ever fact-checked me out of it,” he said. “Why don’t you just write it and see what the fact-checking department says?” (The department ransacked the archives and searched for checking rosters, and concluded that his assertion is nearly impossible to confidently confirm.)

    Like customer-service bots, or H.R. directors, checkers and writers talk around things. They perform a delicate linguistic dance. At an exhausting stalemate on a minor point, the writer might say, “I think it’s O.K.,” which means “I know it’s not exactly correct, but you’re being a prig.” The checker might respond, “It won’t keep me up at night,” which means “You’re a barbarian, but it’s your name on the piece.” Deft checkers position themselves as collaborators. In a closing meeting— where the writer, editor, checker, and copy editor go over a piece—they come not just with errors but with solutions. Writers hate to be embarrassed by their own ignorance. Anna has a good ear for rhythm, and tends to cringe when left with no choice but to scramble it. Her negotiation style is disarming bluntness. It helps that she’s funny. (Anna: “Do you have a fix here?” Zach: “I had one, didn’t I?” Anna: “It wasn’t very good.”) The nuclear option is to invoke “on author,” which signifies something impossible to verify but witnessed or experienced by the author, and therefore grudgingly allowed by the checker, who renounces all culpability. Julian Barnes once explained, “If, for example, the fact checkers are trying to confirm that dream about hamsters which your grandfather had on the night Hitler invaded Poland—a dream never written down but conveyed personally to you on the old boy’s knee, a dream of which, since your grandfather’s death, you are the sole repository—and if the fact checkers, having had all your grandfather’s living associates up against a wall and having scoured dictionaries of the unconscious without success, finally admit they are stumped, then you murmur soothingly down the transatlantic phone, ‘I think you can put that on author.’ ”

    One compromise is the hedge, phrases such as “likely,” or “around,” or “something like,” which turn the game of dictional darts into a round of horseshoes. Writers resent the “maybe”s and “at least”s and “almost”s that pock their prose like pimples—but perhaps not as much as they’d resent losing the material. Years ago, the magazine excerpted Ian Frazier’s book “Travels in Siberia,” which was supposed to begin, “There is no such place as Siberia.” The checker insisted upon “Officially, there is no such place as Siberia.” “I ended up not totally happy with it, but not regretting it,” Frazier said. “This kind of fact checking wasn’t nitpicking and wasn’t just a bureaucratic thing. It was an artistic advance of the twentieth century. It just clicked with modernism.” He went on, “Modernism is goodbye to self-expression, hello to what’s right in front of you,” and that means you better get the thing right. The hedge is an acceptance that the world is impossible to know accurately. It imparts to the writing a humbleness, an understatedness, and, perhaps, a smug fussiness: in other words, what people think of as The New Yorker’s voice. Still, the hedges irritate. One checker, upon leaving the magazine, wrote a goodbye e-mail saying, “After five years, I’m still fully in awe of the magazine that comes out every week.” Tad Friend replied-all, “As the magazine comes out 46 times a year, can we say ‘almost every week’?” (Friend was almost right; the actual number was forty-seven.)

    Certain genres accommodate checking better than others. Investigatory works rely on it. Personal history does, too, though this often creates complications. One checker called checking a memoir “the full colonoscopy.” A colleague had to call up Emily Gould, whose husband, Keith Gessen, had written an essay about the birth of their first child. He described a geyser of blood effusing from his wife during labor. The checker asked Gould about the purported effluence. Gould ended the conversation.

    “You mean all those bands we stopped listening to in high school kept making music?”

    Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai

    Humor can short-circuit the checking machinery. When a humorist and a checker click, they stick together. Anne Stringfield used to check Steve Martin’s Shouts & Murmurs. They ended up married. Usually, things go the other way. I once took part in a closing meeting during which we debated, for ten minutes, whether Michael Schulman’s use of the phrase “assless chaps” was redundant and meaningless; technically speaking, all chaps are assless.

    “I find that often a fact checker forces you to tie a knot in the sentence unnecessarily,” David Sedaris told me. One of his essays describes a trip to a small-town Costco, where he bought “a gross of condoms.” The checker said that, actually, he hadn’t: Costco doesn’t sell a gross, which is a hundred and forty-four. “So I made it ‘a mess’ of condoms, which just made them sound used,” he said. “If the essay was about how many condoms Costco sells, definitely, have the exact number. But this was about my experience being gay in a small Southern town. Can you let me have this?” Humorists can infuriate the checkers, who recognize that even funny nonfiction has to be completely real; it’s held to the same standard as anything else. Last year, Jane Bua checked a Sedaris essay about meeting the Pope. She checked a detail about the color of the buttons on a cardinal’s cassock so assiduously (the department’s perception), or maddeningly (Sedaris’s), that he e-mailed his editor, “Can you slip her a sedative?” Sedaris has complained, “Checking is like being fucked in the ass by a hot thermos.” Bua mentioned this to the checker on Sedaris’s next piece, Yinuo Shi. Shi considered the analogy and said, “If a thermos works, the outside wouldn’t be hot.”

    Like darkness retreats, or ayahuasca, checking tends to alter the way you think; it’s also usually enjoyed for a limited time. A few make a career of it. One of the first hires Harold Ross made for the checking department, in 1929, was a man named Freddie Packard. Packard initially worked under Rogers Whitaker. After Packard had missed a “boner,” as an error was called, Whitaker forced Packard to memorize and recite the galley page. Ross esteemed Packard and relied on him; he also started him on a salary equivalent to about twenty-nine thousand dollars today. (Checking salaries remained borderline unlivable until the magazine’s staff unionized, in 2018.) Packard left for Europe during the war. Ross begged him to return. “JOB WIDE OPEN STOP,” Ross wired. “ARE YOU AVAILABLE STOP CAN PAY MORE THAN FORMERLY STOP.” Packard became the first real head of fact checking, a position he held until shortly before his death, in 1974. That’s a long time checking facts. There are many checkers today in the Packard mold. He spoke multiple languages. He commanded a vast sphere of knowledge. He lived in fear that around every corner loomed catastrophe. One week, a colleague noticed Packard moping around the office and asked what was wrong. Packard said he had two colds.

    Perhaps the most revered of all checkers was Martin Baron, who put in thirty-six years. Baron was gentle, fatherly, and prim. Alex Ross once wrote a piece mentioning a minor Mozart canon titled “Leck mich im Arsch.” Baron stayed up late combing through Mozart biographies so he wouldn’t have to call a Mozart scholar and repeat the phrase “lick me in the ass.” He was almost pathologically punctilious. The checkers loved Baron. He’d bestow upon them honorifics, as in Professor Seligman or Dr. Kelley. He felt that, as a checker, he should avoid errors at all times. John McPhee said, “Somebody told me, ‘The thing you’ve got to know about Martin Baron, he is always right. And take that literally.’ If a Shakespeare play was mentioned in a piece, he would have to go and check the author’s name.” By the end, he’d spent so much time checking that he had difficulty making any assertions at all. He would phrase statements as questions: Wouldn’t you say it’s a nice day? After Baron’s death, Ian Frazier recalled, “Gesturing to the water below the window, he once said to me, ‘I think that’s the Hudson River.’ ”

    The job wears on people in different ways. Some checkers find it difficult to sleep. The novelist Susan Choi, a onetime checker, recalled colleagues vomiting out of stress. In the nineties, everyone smoked cigarettes by the gross. (Anna is letting me have this “gross”: “King Zog of Albania reportedly smoked a hundred and fifty cigarettes daily.”) It’s a job for the anxious. The next boner is always lurking out there, in the dark. I was once assigned a piece by Ben Taub that mentioned Lake Victoria’s four thousand miles of shoreline. Thirty seconds of Googling confirmed the fact, but the exact circumference varied, slightly, between sources. Why? I contacted Stuart E. Hamilton, a professor of geography and geosciences at Salisbury University. “It is a horribly confusing answer and involves physics and fractals,” he told me. This is called the coastline paradox, an offshoot of Zeno’s paradox. “Do not go down that rabbit hole,” Hamilton warned. “Everything is infinity long if you have a small enough ruler.” This is the checker’s paradox, too. The more you know, the more you know that there is more you don’t know. The facts of the universe are infinity long. You either let this drive you crazy or you adjust your ruler size. Taub’s detail ran as “more than four thousand miles of jagged shoreline,” and I never lost sleep over checking again.

    Some people greet a New Yorker correction as they would an eclipse. In 1994, several errors appeared in a Talk of the Town piece. The magazine issued a correction, which several publications reported as if it were a seminal event. Hendrik Hertzberg went to the library to investigate. “This was not the first correction in the magazine’s history, it was roughly the three hundredth,” he reported. He added, “Every great journalistic enterprise occasionally makes errors.” I can confirm. Since that first correction, I let through some more. I will not name the figure, to avoid startling Anna.

    People like finding errors in the magazine, probably because the magazine is so smug about its fact checking. Checking does contain an element of theatre—a performance of over-the-top diligence that burnishes a myth but doesn’t always correlate with accuracy. Checking isn’t a marketing ploy, exactly, but it is good marketing. To some, it’s just artifice. In the eighties, the writer Alastair Reid admitted to devising composite characters and scenes: combining multiple real details into one fake one. Shouldn’t checking have caught that? Afterward, Michael Kinsley, the editor of The New Republic, wrote of meeting a New Yorker fact checker at a party: “This fellow—a real individual, not a composite—regaled the gathering with tales of chartering airplanes to measure the distance between obscure Asian capitals, sending battalions of Sarah Lawrence girls to count the grains of sand on a particular beach referred to in an Ann Beattie story, and suchlike tales of heroic valor in the pursuit of perfect accuracy.” Kinsley went on:

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    Zach Helfand

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  • Patricia Lockwood Goes Viral

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    On a humid evening in May, Patricia Lockwood, who writes with the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid, was scanning the menu at a Mexican restaurant near her home, in Savannah, Georgia. Her husband, Jason Kendall, an agricultural-commodities researcher whom Lockwood calls Corn Man, sat next to her. Both find dining to be a delicate business. Lockwood got COVID in March of 2020 and continues to experience aftereffects from the virus; she has adopted a ketogenic diet—high in fat, low in carbs—to help manage her symptoms. Kendall has had a fragile stomach ever since he suffered a set of catastrophic hemorrhages three years ago and nearly died.

    The Culture Industry: A Centenary Issue
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    When a waitress stopped by, Kendall ordered cauliflower tacos with no sauce; Lockwood asked for fish ones without tortillas. “It’s very embarrassing, because it became a podcast diet,” she said of her keto regimen, in a tone that suggested that embarrassment, for her, is more of a theoretical than a felt phenomenon. Lockwood, who is forty-three, has close-cropped hair, expressive hands, and the rapid-fire, matter-of-fact confidence of someone who speaks even faster than she thinks. The playwright Heidi Schreck, who helped to adapt Lockwood’s life story for television, told me, “The first thing that always comes to mind, when I think of Tricia, is that self-portrait of Hildegard von Bingen”—the twelfth-century German abbess and mystic, who, in a book devoted to her divine revelations, depicted herself with a writing tablet on her lap and flames shooting out of her habit. Lockwood’s lack of inhibition can lead to trouble. At a panel in New York hosted by the Women’s Prize earlier in the spring, she suddenly slid off her stool mid-gesticulation. She no longer allows herself to do karaoke.

    Lockwood began her writing life quietly, as a poet. She found her first major audience on Twitter, posting self-proclaimed “absurdities”—such as a series of Dadaistic sexts that made florid metaphorical use of rock slides, dewdrops, and plot holes in the novels of Dan Brown—that quickly came to define the medium’s zany, waggish ethos. When she returned to the page, it was with a memoir, “Priestdaddy” (2017), which chronicled her improbable childhood as the daughter of a guitar-shredding, action-movie-obsessed Midwestern Catholic priest. Lockwood has since added fiction and criticism to her literary arsenal. Across genres, her calling card is her unmistakable voice, which sasses and seduces with quick wit and cheerful perversity, pressing the reader close to her comic, confiding “I.” “Due to certain quirks in my upbringing, I love men easily, which is either Christly or some slut thing” is classic Lockwood. So is the fact that this confession appears not in a personal essay but in a review of the works of John Updike.

    When she got sick, her first instinct was to make a joke. “My story will be that John Harvard gave it to me” is how she started an essay published in the London Review of Books in July, 2020. The last thing she had done, before the pandemic hit, was give a lecture at Harvard about the nature of life online; on the plane back home, a man had coughed and coughed. A few days later, she was flattened with a fever. Even after her temperature dropped, things stayed wrong. Her hands would burn or go numb; her skin glittered with pain. She noticed that her body had become attuned to Savannah’s weather, as if its pressure systems affected some mysterious one within. A prickling at the base of her neck, a twinge in her thumb: here comes the storm.

    The worst problem, though, was with her mind. In the L.R.B. essay—“Insane After Coronavirus?” is the title—Lockwood described “stumbling in my speech, transposing syllables, choosing the wrong nouns entirely.” Her memory had crumbled; she could barely read. Still, she thought that she saw a faint glimmering beyond the fog. “I know I used to be able to do this, I will be able to do it again,” she wrote. That oasis turned out to be a mirage—the beginning, not the end, of her ordeal. “That was the last time I felt that I sounded like myself,” Lockwood said, at dinner.

    For a writer like Lockwood, the voice on the page is the whole game; the prospect of losing it is terrifying, the equivalent of a pianist’s crippling arthritis. But it was also uncannily familiar. When she fell ill, Lockwood had just finished writing her first novel, “No One Is Talking About This” (2021). Its unnamed, alter-ego protagonist has found renown for her playful posts on a Twitter-esque platform. But the more she lends her sensibility to the internet, the more she fears that her private stream of consciousness has been swept away in the surge of the collective’s, which has barnacled her language with its own diction, its own clichés. Possessed by the hive mind, she is increasingly haunted by “the unshakeable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head.”

    The cure for a life lived too much online is to unplug, difficult as that might be. But what to do about an illness that no one fully understands, least of all the sufferer? Lockwood now knows that much of what plagued her was a state of perpetual migraine. She typically experienced not headaches but extreme sensory disturbances—a vision of a gorilla in a tree, say—and something that she called “the refrains,” the constant mental repetition of a line of dialogue, a sentence, a phrase from a song. She would jot these down in her “mad notebook,” a blue-covered Moleskine, along with fragments of ideas that she was having, observations from the reading she was struggling to do, and various medical regimens she was trying: gabapentin, rescue triptans, the migraine medications Ajovy and Qulipta. At the restaurant, she recalled that the first thing to really help was a tea steeped with psilocybin mushrooms that had been mailed to her by the writer Jami Attenberg. “A tiny dose,” she insisted.

    “You would be out in the swimming pool, sometimes for hours in the afternoon,” Kendall remembered. He is forty-four, bald and athletic, with the calm, capable demeanor of Mr. Clean’s laid-back little brother. When Lockwood was at her sickest, she became convinced that the floorboards of their apartment were going to collapse under her feet. Kendall took action, moving them out of the city and to a house on nearby Wilmington Island, where she could float freely. “I thought we could therapeutically reorient your body,” he said.

    Two people looking at a painting in a gallery.

    “I particularly like how its abstract qualities make anything I say about it sound plausible.”

    Cartoon by Robert Leighton

    “I could listen to music again,” Lockwood recalled. In the pool, she played “Hosianna Mantra,” by the pioneering German electronic band Popol Vuh, on repeat. The album, from 1972, has been described as a “meditation on faith and uncertainty”—a kind of prayer. “Maybe that’s why the writing came back.”

    Once Lockwood was well enough, she began to shape the fragments from this shattered period of her life into a novel, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” which Riverhead will publish in September. “I wrote it insane,” she told me, “and edited it sane”; it is a collaboration between two different people, both of whom happen to be her. Illness is repeatedly figured as a kind of impostor or thief—not merely as an experience undergone by the self but, Lockwood writes, “the thing that the self had been replaced by.” Getting sick, she said, thrust the questions that lurk at the heart of all novels, and all lives, to the center of hers: “What is the performance of a self? What is a person? What am I?”

    Like other writers to whom the label of autofiction has been applied, Lockwood finds it fruitful to draw on her own experience in her work. Yet, when she writes in a strictly factual mode, she is sometimes accused of fabrication. In 2016, The New Republic sent Lockwood to a Trump rally in New Hampshire, where she described seeing a photograph on the jumbotron of Melania in a bikini embracing an inflatable Shamu. Writing for the L.R.B. about Karl Ove Knausgaard—she is a contributing editor at that publication, brought on not to edit other people’s essays but, she told me, “as an outsider artist” to write freewheeling, minimally edited essays of her own—she recounted a trip that she had made to a literary festival in Norway, only to discover that Knausgaard had cancelled his appearance and been replaced by an Elvis impersonator. Both details were singled out by critics as too outrageously weird, too obviously Lockwood-like, to be unembellished. This makes her indignant. “I almost never make up anything,” she told me. “I just notice different things.”

    So, in her company, did I. There is a kind of Lockwood lens that brings into focus the improbable and hilariously bizarre features lurking in the midst of ordinary life, which a different writer might prefer to smooth over for realism’s sake. One morning in Savannah, I went with Lockwood and Kendall to Fancy Parker’s, an upscale gas-station grocery store, to get snacks. After breaking off to examine the chips selection, I found the two of them in the home-goods corner, where an employee with the bulging biceps and voluminous pompadour of Johnny Bravo was wrangling a massive statue of the Virgin Mary onto a shelf next to some scented candles. Lockwood chatted with him amiably. “We get the Catholic catalogues in my home, and they can be quite pricey,” she said, as if they were discussing the cost of eggs and not a life-size sculpture of the mother of God.

    In Lockwood’s world, the apparition of a saint is not strictly strange. She is the second of five children born to Greg and Karen Lockwood, high-school sweethearts from Cincinnati, Ohio. Karen came from a big Catholic family; Greg was an atheist and, like many atheists, proud of it. After they married, at eighteen, he enlisted in the Navy, serving on a nuclear submarine. It was hundreds of feet under the sea, following marathon viewings of “The Exorcist,” that he met God and found his faith.

    Soon afterward, Lockwood was born, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her father began his career as a Lutheran minister, but converted to Catholicism when she was six. At the Vatican, his case was reviewed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later to be Pope Benedict XVI, who gave him permission, as Lockwood writes, to keep his wife and even his children, “no matter how bad they might be.” Greg Lockwood turned out to be no ordinary man of the cloth. As depicted in “Priestdaddy,” his titanic charisma was matched only by his gale-force whims. Karen, the family’s indefatigable center, kept the household running as Greg moved them from rectory to rectory in what Lockwood has called “all the worst cities of the midwest.”

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    Alexandra Schwartz

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  • How a Billionaire Owner Brought Turmoil and Trouble to Sotheby’s

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    But the timing of Drahi’s acquisition of Sotheby’s was unfortunate. Six months after the deal was completed, the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the art market. The main auction houses, led by Sotheby’s, scrambled to take their business online, but public sales fell by around a third. Then, for a while, the good times roared back. But now the art market has become a stressed and anxious realm, enduring its first prolonged contraction in a generation.

    During the same period, Drahi’s broader business empire has experienced the worst crisis of his career. After amassing sixty billion dollars of debt, Altice was hit by rising interest rates while seeing indifferent performance by its brands on both sides of the Atlantic. In the summer of 2023, one of Drahi’s closest business partners was arrested following a corruption investigation. Altice USA’s shares currently trade for around $2.50, less than a tenth of their price in 2019.

    All the while, Sotheby’s has assumed a new, unstable identity: as both a billionaire’s indulgence and the subject of his latest corporate experiment. At a hearing in the French Senate in 2022, Drahi said that he did not buy Sotheby’s for power or influence. Instead, he intended to triple the value of his investment. “This is always the goal of the entrepreneur,” he said.

    For those caught up in the experiment, it has been torrid in the extreme. Since 2019, hundreds of employees have left Sotheby’s—up to a quarter of the workforce, according to some estimates—including dozens of specialists who bring in the consignments essential to the company’s bottom line. (Sotheby’s disputes this.) Last year, sales fell by twenty-three per cent. As the auction house has cut costs and shed staff, its holding company, which is controlled by Drahi, has extracted more than a billion dollars in dividends from the business—mainly to manage its debt load.

    Last fall, after a round of layoffs, Drahi sold a minority stake in Sotheby’s—close to a third of the company—to ADQ, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, for around a billion dollars. The move gave rise to speculation that he might sell the business outright. But people close to Drahi insist that he is more likely to give up his telecom holdings, at least in Europe, than to let go of Sotheby’s. “This is for his grandchildren,” the associate said.

    The question is what he will leave behind. Drahi and his team wouldn’t be the first, or the last, corporate titans to trip and stumble in the vagaries of the art market. “This is niche,” a leading New York art adviser told me. “And if you don’t get it, this is what happens. They’re not art people. And maybe they can never be art people.” But the other version is that Drahi is deliberately hollowing out one of the world’s great auction houses, turning it from an institution of taste and knowledge into something much closer to a generic platform that sets a price for things that have no price, taking a cut along the way. To make Sotheby’s more like everything else, in other words. “I think if he could automate this business, just put it online, take out all the people . . . that’s his goal,” a former director said. “It’s just pure money.” But was it ever about anything else?

    The word “auction” comes from the Latin auctio, which means “increase.” But it’s always been a bit more complicated than that. In the fifth century B.C.E., Herodotus described the Babylonian custom of selling girls for marriage. The more attractive ones were sold first, with ascending bids; then the process was turned on its head, with “the plainest” won by the suitor who would accept the smallest dowry. Auctions can be as varied as human desire. There are whispered auctions in Italy and simultaneous-yelling auctions in Japan. For years, cod was sold in the fish market at Hull, in northern England, by descending bids (the Dutch method) before switching to English, or ascending, bids later in the day. Seventeen miles downriver, in Grimsby, fish auctions worked the other way around.

    In 193 C.E., the Roman Empire was sold to the highest bidder, one Marcus Didius Julianus, giving rise to a memorable case of buyer’s remorse. “He passed a sleepless night; revolving most probably in his mind his own rash folly,” Edward Gibbon reflected. (Emperor Julianus was murdered two months later.) Auctions are built on an illusory symmetry of hope. Buyers sense a bargain, sellers hope for a war. What you want is validated because someone else wants it, too. Everyone believes in their own capacity to master the situation. In 1662, Samuel Pepys, the London diarist, watched three ships auctioned “by the candle” (the length of time it took a one-inch candle to melt) and noticed that one bidder was particularly successful: “He told me that just as the flame goes out, the smoke descends, which is a thing I never observed before, and by that he do know the instant when to bid last.”

    The task of the auctioneer is to dramatize the possibilities of the sale while attempting to control them at the same time. “To get the audience’s confidence right away, and after that to dominate it—in the nicest possible way,” Peter Wilson, a legendary Sotheby’s chairman, told this magazine, in 1966. Wilson, a former British intelligence officer, led the company’s expansion into the U.S. market and introduced the first evening sales—with ball gowns and television cameras—in the fifties. Even today, when people complain that much of the excitement of live bidding has disappeared, salesrooms at the major auction houses retain a singular atmosphere of politesse and extortion. Money is present like sin in church: sometimes its presence goes unsaid; sometimes it is the only thing being said.

    One Tuesday in early March, I stopped by Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction in London. The equivalent sale in 2023 brought in more than two hundred million dollars and was led by a Wassily Kandinsky landscape that sold for forty-five million. This year, the top lot was a large, hypnotic study of a girl, “Cosmic Eyes (in the Milky Lake),” by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, with an estimate of less than a quarter of that. The mood was brittle and unsure. Earlier in the day, tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump had unnerved global markets.

    A few minutes before the auction began, the walls were lined with Sotheby’s specialists, arranged sharply by the phones, while people in cashmere and expensive anoraks milled about. Oliver Barker, the company’s star auctioneer of the past decade, tucked in his shirt. Barker always looks happiest when the bidding is in “a new place,” which means that a fresh competitor has entered the fray. The rest of the time, he is more like a solicitous but firm personal trainer, asking for one more rep. “Give me six, please, Alex,” he said, not really asking, to Alex Branczik, a chairman of modern and contemporary art, who was wrangling the Nara’s lead bidder over the phone. Barker wanted another hundred thousand pounds. “It’s here at six million five hundred thousand,” Barker said. “Want to give me six?” Branczik gave him six.

    There were outbreaks of what the auction houses like to call “determined” or even “passionate” bidding. Lisa Brice’s “After Embah,” a bold, reddish mise en scène featuring a silhouette of Nicki Minaj, sold for £4.4 million, a record for the artist. A dark Alberto Burri, “Sacco e Nero 3,” from 1955, shot through its high estimate, to four million pounds. But most of the contests were thin and quick. A van Gogh drawing once owned by Taubman (“much loved at Sotheby’s here,” Barker said) sold on a single bid for less than its estimate. “Give me a bid, sir,” Barker pleaded, dropping the bid increments as he attempted to shift a large gray Christopher Wool canvas on the wall to his right. Again, Barker extracted a single offer, and again below the estimate. The Wool was sold in fifty-one seconds. In all, the evening sale—Sotheby’s first major auction of 2025—raised a little more than sixty million pounds, including fees, around forty per cent less than the previous year.

    Even people intimately involved with the big auction houses can’t figure out whether they are great or terrible businesses these days. Given that Sotheby’s charges a “buyer’s premium”—essentially a commission—of twenty-seven per cent on all lots up to a million dollars, and often a seller’s fee on top, the margins should be tremendous. “It’s never not been profitable,” the longtime employee insisted. It’s just that the profits are so much harder to come by. At the height of the eighties art boom, Sotheby’s made an annual profit of a hundred and thirteen million dollars. Twenty-five years later, in 2014, at the peak of the next wave, the auction house made just twenty-nine million dollars more—the price of a mid-range Basquiat.

    Part of the problem is the sheer expense of keeping the show on the road. Sotheby’s and Christie’s feel fancy because they are. Sotheby’s has premises in forty countries. At the time of the Drahi acquisition, it employed more than fifteen hundred people. The cost of parties, marketing, shipping, insurance, and the decorous administration of nearly five hundred sales a year only ever drifts one way. “You basically make profit in December,” a Paris-based art adviser who used to work for one of the big two told me. “Until November, you pay the fixed cost of the company.”

    A major auction house has many parts. “Sotheby’s is really three businesses, which had been run as one business,” a former employee who joined under Tad Smith told me. Since the late eighties, Sotheby’s has offered loans and other financial products, secured against art (in fact, anything that the auction house will sell) as collateral. When Drahi acquired the company, Sotheby’s Financial Services was lending around eight hundred million dollars a year.

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    Sam Knight

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  • Bill Belichick Goes Back to School

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    On the morning of December 12th, Bubba Cunningham, the athletic director at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, sent the football team’s equipment manager to pick up a U.N.C. sweatshirt with removable sleeves. He asked his wife to go to Goodwill and buy a suit jacket. Cut the sleeves off, he texted her, then added, “(Seriously).”

    Sixteen days earlier, U.N.C. had announced the retirement of its football coach, Mack Brown. This had come as news to Brown. Cunningham was now preparing to reveal his replacement: Bill Belichick, who led the New England Patriots to a record six Super Bowl victories before leaving the team in January, 2024, fifteen wins shy of breaking Don Shula’s record as the winningest head coach in N.F.L. history. Colleges had hired former N.F.L. coaches before (Pete Carroll, at U.S.C.; Nick Saban, at Alabama), but there was no coach quite like Belichick, a brilliant tactician with an introvert’s appetite for granular detail, a shabby habit of wearing the sleeves of his sweatshirts cut off near the elbow, and the delicacy of a junk-yard dog. As far back as 1993, during Belichick’s first head-coaching job, with the Cleveland Browns, Sports Illustrated described him as “an automaton who offers no positive motivation and sees players only as faceless cogs.” At press conferences, he delivered curt non-answers or sometimes simply walked out of the room. Observers, including colleagues, called him “robotic,” “gray,” “flat,” “the Kremlin,” “Sominex,” “Asshole,” “Doom and Gloom,” “a potted palm,” and “the greatest enigma in sports.” After two Patriots cheating scandals—Spygate (2007) and Deflategate (2015)—Shula started calling him “Belicheat.”

    The split with the Patriots and the team’s owner, Bob Kraft, was characterized as mutual. No one believed that. According to ESPN, the Atlanta Falcons came close to hiring Belichick; then Kraft warned the Falcons’ owner that Belichick, whom he’d worked with for a quarter century, was arrogant, untrustworthy, domineering, cold. Belichick got no offers. For the first time in forty-nine years, he spent football season not on the field but as a TV commentator—a member of the media, which he’d always seemed to despise.

    U.N.C., a twenty-eight-sport school that plays in the Atlantic Coast Conference, calls its athletic teams the Tar Heels, a reference to the distinctive footprints made by Colonial laborers who worked in turpentine distilleries. Carolina is a basketball school, and Chapel Hill is a basketball town. The men’s team has won as many national championships as Belichick has Patriots-era Super Bowl rings. Shelby Swanson, a recent U.N.C. grad who was the sports editor for the Daily Tar Heel, Carolina’s student newspaper, recently told me, “I’m from here. Both of my parents went to U.N.C. I just graduated from U.N.C. Basketball is the national brand.” Football has always been “sort of an afterthought,” she said, adding, “I mean no disrespect to the great players who’ve come through here, but literally for the entirety of my life I don’t think U.N.C. football has been nationally relevant.”

    Carolina’s football team has never won a national championship, and last won a conference title in 1980, when Lawrence Taylor played linebacker. Fans have been known to arrive at games late and leave early, if they come at all. Yet U.N.C. football has repeatedly, and wishfully, been called a “sleeping giant,” as if all the team needed were a jolt.

    At two o’clock on the day that Cunningham sent his wife to Goodwill, Belichick’s hiring was announced at a standing-room-only press conference on campus. U.N.C.’s chancellor gave Belichick the sweatshirt; Cunningham got a laugh by putting on the mutilated jacket. Belichick calmly answered reporters’ questions. When one asked whether he was biding his time until he could get back to the N.F.L., Belichick, without ripping the guy’s head off, replied, “I didn’t come here to leave.”

    Hours after the announcement, an enterprising U.N.C. alum trademarked the nickname Chapel Bill. It zipped into circulation in the shops on Franklin Street, the backbone of Chapel Hill’s historic core, where one need only step over a low stone wall to be on campus. U.N.C., the oldest public university in the United States, opened in 1795, predating the town that grew up around it. Chapel Hill, which is closer to Virginia than to South Carolina, sits midway between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, in forests so dense that, this time of year, one can lose sight of the horizon amid a disorienting spectrum of sun-soaked green. In June, Thad Dixon, a new Carolina defensive back and a Los Angeles native, referenced the “culture shock” of moving to Chapel Hill by saying, “There’s a lot of trees out here, bro.”

    The men’s basketball team plays in the Dean Dome, which is named for Dean Smith, U.N.C.’s most revered coach, who led the team from 1961 to 1997, winning two championships and thirteen A.C.C. tournament titles. Smith integrated Carolina basketball, and helped integrate Chapel Hill. He stressed team over self, a philosophy that became known as the Carolina Way. There is never any question of filling the Dean Dome. Cunningham decided to present Belichick there, on December 14th, at halftime of a game against La Salle.

    The equipment manager had made another stop, at Julian’s, a men’s clothier that has been on Franklin Street since 1942. The store occupies a long ground-floor space fragrant with polished wood and good wool. The owner, Bart Fox, often works at a desk in the rear, where a muted television shows whatever Carolina game happens to be on. The equipment manager asked for sports jackets, shirts, and ties, telling Fox, “You have five minutes. He’s gonna be on camera.”

    Fox assessed Belichick to be just shy of six feet tall, barrel-chested, and still “mostly muscle,” with none of the stooping that begins to happen to men in middle age. He selected a lightweight wool jacket in a hopsack weave that featured a tight pattern of light blue, medium blue, and eggshell, which together created the appearance of the official school color, Carolina blue, a color that must never be called baby blue or powder blue. Fox described it to me as the blue that a Chapel Hillian sees when looking up at the sky on a nice day. (But don’t call it sky blue, either.) U.N.C. had tinkered with Carolina blue over the years, arriving at a slightly richer shade for uniforms: Pantone 542. Older alums griped, but optics prevailed—the new version popped on television.

    At the Dean Dome, the court cleared for halftime, and an m.c. stepped out with a mike. After congratulating the U.N.C. women’s soccer team for its twenty-third national title, he introduced Belichick as “one of, if not the, best ever.” Belichick joined him and said, “Can’t wait to get started.” He often mumbles and speaks so inaudibly that Swanson, the former Daily Tar Heel sports editor, told me she once had to borrow audio from someone who’d placed a recording device directly beneath his mouth at a presser.

    The crowd cheered, but I wouldn’t say wildly. Julian’s framed a photo of Belichick’s appearance, pairing it with a mannequin outfitted in the clothing that Fox had selected, and added a sign: “Dress like coach!” The sign was leaned against a larger framed image—of Dean Smith, on the cover of Sports Illustrated, shown triumphantly cutting down a championship net.

    “And then she opened Instagram, anticipating fresh new content—only to realize that she’d just closed it two seconds ago!”

    Cartoon by Yinfan Huang

    In Chapel Hill, all kinds of things get painted Carolina blue: fences, buildings, hair, fire trucks. About twelve years ago, a contractor named Geary Blackwood hauled a massive flint rock to one of his properties, on a busy highway, to mark a row of mailboxes that kept getting mowed down. He decorated the rock with some leftover paint, which turned out to be “kind of a darker blue,” he told me. “In this part of the country, that doesn’t sit too well with a lot of people.” Dark blue is the color of U.N.C.’s archrival, Duke, a private university in Durham, one town over.

    Blackwood recently went to a hardware store where an employee had become known for her ability to mix a proper Carolina blue, and bought new paint. At Walmart, he bought bucketloads of industrial glitter. While the paint was wet, he used a leaf blower to bedazzle the rock. “When the sun hits it, it’s beautiful,” Blackwood told me. We were standing within sight of the rock on a nuclear afternoon in July; the surface did have the twinkling depth of a star-choked sky. I asked him why he’d decided to repaint it now. He said that it was to honor Belichick’s predecessor, Mack Brown—“a beautiful man.” Blackwood, and a lot of others I met in Chapel Hill, felt that the university had treated Brown harshly at the end of his tenure. When I asked what he thought of Belichick, he said, “I really like Mack Brown a lot.”

    Blackwood climbed onto a front loader and drove it off the back of a flatbed truck. He and a crew had spent the morning working on a refurbishment project at Kenan Stadium, where the football team has played since 1927, and where the Belichick era will formally begin, on the evening of September 1st, when the Tar Heels host Texas Christian University. Season tickets sold out, even with a price hike of twenty-five per cent. Individual tickets have sold out, too. Gabe Feldman, a sports-law professor at Tulane, told me, “The attention on those first few games is going to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen in college sports. It’s something people still can’t quite wrap their heads around.” Carolina football is being called “the thirty-third N.F.L. team” before the first snap.

    The author and sportswriter Art Chansky grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, near Boston. He moved to Chapel Hill in the seventies, to attend U.N.C., and stayed. As a longtime Patriots fan, he considered Belichick a “hero,” he told me this summer. We were sitting on the patio at a chain restaurant called First Watch, eating from a hot skillet of blueberry-lemon cornbread. “He’s a genius of the nuances of football,” Chansky told me. “But can he get the players—and enough of them? That’s the big question. And can he coach them?” Belichick has spent his entire career focussing on experienced, peak-conditioned professionals, not teen-agers weeks out of high school. Chansky wondered what might happen when Belichick inevitably “gets tough on them.” In recent years, the N.C.A.A. has streamlined the transfer process, making it relatively easy for a player who feels slighted to change schools in a huff. As a sports psychologist at U.N.C. once pointed out, the football players often present as grown men, but beneath the uniform “they’re still college students.”

    Or at least they’re supposed to be. Student athletes are expected to balance competition with scholastics, a once sacrosanct ideal that’s getting overshadowed as intercollegiate sports increasingly resembles the pros. A player who fails classes may lose a scholarship or a spot on a roster—a coach is supposed to monitor academic performance—but at this point all you hear about is money. In June, a federal court in California finalized a settlement, in House v. N.C.A.A., allowing colleges, for the first time, to share a certain percentage of athletic revenue with their players. U.N.C. athletics brought in a hundred and fifty-one million dollars in 2023-24, about half of which came from television rights and ticket sales. Per the House settlement, the school can now spend $20.5 million paying athletes, with an allowable annual increase of four per cent. (Football and men’s basketball are expected to receive most of the money, because they earn the most.) Allocating a fixed amount of cash up and down a roster involves weighing the dollar value of each position; overspend on your quarterback and you’ll have less money to attract the players necessary to support him. Belichick had to make such calculations constantly in the N.F.L., which has a salary cap.

    College sports was already being transformed by the “name, image, and likeness” rule, or N.I.L., which took effect in 2021, allowing student athletes to be compensated for appearances, autographs, and endorsements—the kind of thing that used to result in penalties. That first year, the N.I.L. market was worth an estimated nine hundred and seventeen million dollars; it’s now worth an estimated $2.3 billion. Star players have landed million-dollar deals with brands like Bose and 7-Eleven. Shedeur Sanders (of the Cleveland Browns) reportedly had an N.I.L. value of $4.8 million at the University of Colorado, where he played for his father, Deion. The U.N.C. quarterback Drake Maye (now of the Patriots) had deals with Jimmy’s Famous Seafood and Zoa Energy, which is owned by Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, and with Mitchell Heating and Cooling. In 2022, Maye, addressing rumors about courtship from other teams, told a reporter, “Sadly, I think money is becoming a reason why kids go places,” and “I think college football is going to turn into a mess.”

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    Paige Williams

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  • Pam Bondi’s Power Play

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    It is rare for an Attorney General of the United States to venture into the offices of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. Up two floors and down a hallway the length of a city block from the A.G.’s fifth-floor suite, the division is a high-security area; visitors must deposit their cellphones in a cabinet before they enter and are required to punch in a code at the door. At about 1 P.M. on February 10th, just a few days after she was sworn in as the nation’s eighty-seventh Attorney General, Pam Bondi arrived at the division, accompanied by her security detail. A secretary stepped into the office of the division’s acting chief, Devin DeBacker. “Were you expecting the Attorney General?” she asked. DeBacker hurried out and saw Bondi. She was holding framed portraits of leaders of the prior Administration—President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris, and Bondi’s predecessor, Merrick Garland. For the past four years, the portraits had hung on the wall, and the facilities staff hadn’t yet got around to removing them. Bondi, furious, did the job herself. “Don’t you people realize who won the election?” she demanded. DeBacker had served in the White House counsel’s office during Donald Trump’s first Administration and was about to be named the senior deputy of the division. Instead, hours after Bondi’s appearance, he was informed that he was being demoted. The offending portraits were cited as the cause.

    A more conventional Attorney General might have minimized the encounter for fear of seeming petty or punitive. Bondi bragged about it on Fox News, in an interview with the President’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who hosts a show on the network. “Someone didn’t tell them that there’s a new President,” Trump said to Bondi as the pair strolled down the West Wing colonnade. “I did,” Bondi replied. To Bondi and her allies, the outdated portraits offered proof that the department was riddled with suspect personnel seething at the election results. “This is the same National Security Division that was responsible for a lot of the underpinnings of the prosecution against the President,” Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, told me. “The idea that it was, ‘Oh, sorry, mere oversight’—I mean, come on, we’re not stupid.”

    During the past six months, Bondi has presided over the most convulsive transition of power in the Justice Department since the Watergate era, and perhaps in the hundred-and-fifty-five-year history of the department. No Attorney General has been as aggressive in reversing policies or firing personnel. None has been as willing to cede the department’s traditional independence from the White House. In Trump’s second term—“Season 2,” Mizelle called it—“the handcuffs are taken off,” he said. “We actually get to do everything that the President wants us to do, everything that Pam wants us to do.”

    Bondi’s Justice Department has vigorously defended even the most extreme elements of Trump’s agenda, including the deportation of migrants to Central American prisons and the elimination of birthright citizenship. Bondi has embraced the President’s most outlandishly unqualified nominees—such as Alina Habba, his choice to be the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, who previously served as his private lawyer and has never worked as a prosecutor—and attacked “rogue judges” who stand in her way, filing misconduct complaints against them and urging that they step aside from cases. Most alarming, Bondi’s Justice Department has demonstrated a willingness to use criminal law to exact revenge against Trump’s political enemies. Bondi has reportedly ordered up a grand-jury probe into the Obama Administration’s analysis of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, a subject already thoroughly investigated. Trump proclaimed himself “happy to hear” the news, though he was perhaps not totally satisfied. Asked about Ukraine at a news conference last week, Trump invoked Hillary Clinton’s role in the “Russia, Russia hoax,” and, pointing at Bondi, said, “I’m looking at Pam, because I hope something’s going to be done about it.”

    Bondi’s performance has produced almost universal outrage from Democrats, and, in private, at least, the unhappiness crosses party lines. I spoke to officials who have served at senior levels in every Republican Justice Department since Ronald Reagan’s, including some who support much of Trump’s agenda. They shared criticism of Bondi that ranged from troubled to appalled, worrying about everything from what one former senior official called Bondi’s “ferociously sycophantic” rhetoric about the President to the purges of career staff. Bondi, many have concluded, has turned the Justice Department into a mere arm of the White House.

    For Bondi, complaints from Democrats and what remains of the G.O.P. establishment are of little concern. The events of the past several weeks, however, have exposed a far greater problem for Trump’s Attorney General: the rage of the MAGA right. For years, much of the movement has been obsessed with the government’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier, child sex offender, and onetime friend of Trump’s. Once Trump returned to power, these followers were convinced, his Justice Department would reveal the truth of various conspiracy theories involving Epstein: among them that his death while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges was not suicide, and that he maintained a “client list” of celebrities and politicians. But Bondi botched the matter from the start, a misstep that threatened to turn the President’s base against him.

    Bondi’s Epstein travails began on February 21st. Just a month into the new Administration, she appeared on Fox News to tease disclosures about the case: “a lot of flight logs” and “a lot of names,” she said. Asked about the famed client list, she offered, “It’s sitting on my desk right now.” The next week, Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, appeared at a White House event for conservative “influencers,” distributing white binders labelled “Epstein Files: Phase 1.” The material turned out to be mostly a rehash of previously released information. This not only infuriated Epstein conspiracy theorists but also annoyed White House officials, who hadn’t been informed of the stunt in advance. Speaking again on Fox News the next week, she assured the network’s Sean Hannity that she had received “a truckload of evidence,” and that Patel would produce “a detailed report as to why all these documents and evidence had been withheld.”

    Cartoon by Roz Chast

    That never happened. Instead, in early July, the Justice Department issued a memo saying that there was no client list and that it would release nothing more about Epstein. This announcement, predictably, provoked a full-blown revolt from the right. During a Cabinet meeting at the White House, Bondi attempted to revise her statement about the client list. “My response was it’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed, meaning the files, along with the J.F.K., M.L.K. files, as well,” she said. The following weekend, the conservative group Turning Point USA held an annual conference in Bondi’s home town of Tampa, and speaker after speaker called for her ouster. “Her days are numbered,” the conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly predicted. “I just don’t think Pam Bondi is skilled enough to avoid making another mistake very soon.” Congressional Republicans demanded more documents, and Speaker Mike Johnson said, of Bondi’s comments about the client list, “She needs to come forward and explain that to everybody.”

    As the backlash grew, Bondi seemed engaged in a frantic scramble to appease Trump and the MAGA movement, directing attention to other favored targets. The Justice Department took the unusual step of confirming that it was conducting criminal investigations into the former C.I.A. director John Brennan and the former F.B.I. director James Comey. It fired Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan who worked on the Epstein case and who—more to the point—is James Comey’s daughter. When Trump, citing the “ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,” instructed the Justice Department to “produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony,” it scrambled to comply. (Federal judges refused to unseal the testimony, with one writing that its release would provide no new information and would only “expose as disingenuous the Government’s public explanations for moving to unseal.”) In late July, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, in a surprising move for the department’s second-ranking official, spent two days interviewing Epstein’s partner and procurer Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a twenty-year sentence for participating in Epstein’s sexual abuse of children.

    A senior Administration official told me that Bondi’s mistakes on Epstein reflected a broader failure among members of the Administration to appreciate the hold that the issue has on the MAGA world. Many did not recognize “the almost cult around the subject matter,” the official said, and so “she may have treated it a little more cavalierly than if she had it to do over now.” Some Bondi critics—perhaps engaged in wishful thinking—suggested that she had lost stature in the Administration. “I had some conversations with some White House officials,” Laura Loomer, the right-wing conspiracist and Trump ally, told me. “And they told me that the President wasn’t going to fire her but that they were going to have a conversation with her to curb back her Fox News appearances.” (Administration officials said that this conversation didn’t occur.)

    Bondi appears to have retained the backing that matters most: Trump’s. In late July, when she seemed at risk of losing her job over the ongoing fiasco, I asked to speak to Susie Wiles, the President’s chief of staff. Wiles, who has known Bondi since she ran for Florida attorney general in 2010, called that very night, and praised her in terms I hadn’t expected: “You know, she looks like Barbie. She’s blond and beautiful, and I think people will underestimate her because of how she looks. But she’s got nerves of steel, and she has stood up to some withering situations with a fair amount of grace.” About Bondi’s relationship with Trump, Wiles was succinct. “I have a long one,” she said. “Hers is longer.”

    Mike Davis, who heads the conservative legal group Article III Project, told me, “This Epstein mess could have been communicated better.” Still, he said, “no Republican Attorney General has been more effective so quickly as Pam Bondi. She’s not going anywhere, and she shouldn’t go anywhere.” The latest confirmation of her standing came last week, when Trump, announcing a “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime,” said that he was placing the District of Columbia’s police department under federal control and deploying National Guard troops to assist them. Bondi, he said, would be in command. On Thursday night, she named the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration the “emergency police commissioner”—only to back down the next afternoon after the D.C. attorney general sued.

    If Trump is sticking with Bondi, it may be because, as one prominent conservative lawyer and Justice Department veteran told me, “in Pam Bondi, Donald Trump has the Attorney General he always wanted.” Trump’s previous selections for the post were among his greatest regrets of his first term. His initial choice for the job, the former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the probe into the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia, leading to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special prosecutor. Trump’s second pick for Attorney General, William Barr, was loyal for a long time—until he refused to back Trump’s effort to declare the 2020 election stolen. Assembling his Cabinet for a second term, Trump would not tolerate any risk of subversion. He was looking for “the opposite of Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr,” Davis told me.

    Not surprisingly, Trump balked at the establishment candidates presented to him for the post: Jay Clayton, his first-term chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Robert Giuffra, a chair of the venerable New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell; and Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey. Trump turned instead to the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a flagrantly unsuitable choice; Trump’s private lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, encouraged the selection. But Gaetz’s escapades—he was under a congressional ethics investigation for sexual misconduct and drug use—proved to be too much even for the Republican-controlled Senate. Bondi, who had been “godmother” to Gaetz’s Australian-shepherd mix, said privately that he was a poor choice for the job. (A Justice Department official denied this.)

    As the Gaetz nomination foundered, Trump turned to Bondi, a former prosecutor who had served two terms as Florida’s attorney general, between 2011 and 2019. She had been the state’s first major elected official to endorse him in 2016, announcing her backing after her first choice, Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, withdrew from the primary race. At the time, the state’s Republican senator, Marco Rubio, was still in the running, deriding Trump as a “con artist.” But Adam Goodman, a political consultant who had recruited Bondi to run for attorney general, urged her to take the risk of supporting Trump. He seemed unlikely to win the G.O.P. nomination, but, Goodman argued, “if he does, wow, you’ll be the first major elected G.O.P.er from Florida at the table.” The bet, of course, succeeded. Trump wiped out the opposition, and Bondi secured a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. Her address to delegates did not stint on contempt for Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. “Lock her up,” she said, pointing to a sign attacking Clinton. “I love that.”

    In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Bondi had no compunction about echoing Trump’s stolen-election claims, promoting what she called “evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots,” and joining the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani at the infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping news conference. Trump fomenting an insurrection on January 6th did not lessen her support; in 2021, she chaired two Trump-affiliated committees, earning more than two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Two years later, after Trump was indicted for trying to change the outcome of the 2020 election in Georgia, Bondi told Hannity that, once Trump returned to office, “the Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones.” In 2024, in addition to being a fixture on the campaign trail for Trump, Bondi was an observer at his Manhattan trial relating to his hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels. When he was convicted on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records, Bondi reached a different verdict. It was, she proclaimed, “a sad day for our justice system.”

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    Ruth Marcus

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  • The Otherworldly Ambitions of R. F. Kuang

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    Rebecca F. Kuang finished her second year of college with little sense of what she wanted to do with her life. In the fall of 2015, she took a leave from Georgetown, where she was studying international economics, and got a job in Beijing as a debate instructor. In her spare time, she took coding classes online. “I really like mastering the rules of something and then seeing if I can crack it and get really good at it,” she told me. One day, while on a coding website, she came across an ad for Scrivener, a popular word-processing application. Though she had dabbled in fan fiction, she had little experience as a writer. But Scrivener seemed so easy to use that she downloaded it and began writing a fantasy story. Kuang didn’t know much about structuring a story, so she searched Google for how-to books about plotting, world-building, and character development. Each time she finished a chapter, she e-mailed it to her father in Texas, where she’d grown up. He was an ideal reader, offering nothing but praise and a desire for more. When she sent him the final chapter, he asked, “What are you going to do now?” She consulted Google again and, about seven months after she’d begun writing, found an agent.

    “The Poppy War,” which was published in 2018, as Kuang was preparing to graduate from college, tells the story of Fang Runin, or Rin, a young orphan from a poor region of the Nikan lands—a thinly veiled China—who distinguishes herself among the privileged students at an élite military school. (Kuang has described Rin as a reimagination of Mao Zedong as a teen-age girl.) Rin possesses shamanic powers that can call forth a vengeful god, but victory on the battlefield doesn’t result in the harmony she had hoped for. She’s brave but not all that reliable—another character calls her an “opium-riddled sack of shit.” “The Poppy War” mixes elements of Kuang’s family history with fictionalizations of the Nanjing Massacre and the Battle of Shanghai. But it’s also about democracy, nationalism, and the fallibility of popular will. The story, which continued in two subsequent books, is filled with big, messy teen-age emotions—from the longing for heroism to the insecurity of trying to measure up to your rivals—that have inspired readers to debate their favorite characters and write their own fan fiction.

    Kuang, who publishes under the name R. F. Kuang, has worked in an unpredictable range of styles and genres during the past ten years. In 2021, the “Poppy War” series was a finalist for a Hugo Award, which recognizes the best science-fiction and fantasy books. In 2022, Kuang published “Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution,” a playfully erudite work of speculative fiction, set in the eighteen-thirties, about the history of academia, the politics of translation, and the long arc of colonialism. She began working on it while she was a Marshall Scholar, in the midst of completing a master’s degree in contemporary Chinese studies at Oxford. “Babel” won the Nebula Award for best novel and was a Times best-seller. In 2023, she returned with “Yellowface,” a gossipy work of literary fiction about a white author navigating a cynical, identity-obsessed publishing industry in the era of Twitter beefs and social-media cancellations. It, too, was a best-seller. This month, Kuang will publish her sixth novel, “Katabasis,” and, while I was reporting this piece, she finished the first draft of another one, tentatively titled “Taipei Story.”

    Kuang, who recently turned twenty-nine, has also been pursuing a Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale, where she’s writing a dissertation on cultural capital and Asian diasporic writing. In April, I went to visit her, in New Haven, to talk about “Katabasis.” I’d never been so curious about another writer’s routines, habits, and time-management skills.

    We met at Atticus, a popular campus bookstore and coffee shop. Kuang lives in the Boston area with her husband, Bennett Eckert-Kuang, a Ph.D. student in philosophy at M.I.T. During the spring, she spent a few days a week in New Haven, teaching a writing course for undergraduates and meeting with her advisers and students.

    “I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” Kuang told me. “I have different interests and different expressions and different priorities.” She speaks with a gentle, almost dazed curiosity, and poses ideas in terms of premises and theories, brightening whenever she has settled on a phrasing she likes. Her careful, coolly composed thoughts belie a mind that seeks constant stimulation. Looking back on the “Poppy War” trilogy or “Yellowface,” she explained, was like returning to “a version of myself that doesn’t exist,” and she discussed the choices she’d made in those books with a fond, if wary, distance.

    The current version of Kuang might be described as a tabula-rasa novice, a highly accomplished author who would prefer to be an eager disciple. “I think there is no attraction, for me, to being the most competent or well-read person in the room, because then there’s nowhere to go,” she told me. “I find starting at zero, that epistemic humility—I find that very useful.”

    Kuang is one of the most relaxed graduate students I’ve ever met, and I got the impression that this wasn’t only because of her relative financial security. Most people pursuing a Ph.D. feel panicked that they will never read enough. Kuang sees possibility instead, as though academia is meant to be constantly humbling. “I hate having my own mind for company,” she said. “I really love when someone else is the expert.”

    At the next table, undergraduates chatted at a distracting volume about Marxist theory, and, as they tried to outdo one another, I was reminded of the anxieties that drive “Katabasis.” Like “Babel,” Kuang’s new book can be classified in the genre of “dark academia,” a brooding, post-Hogwarts take on the campus novel which fetishizes Gothic architecture, houndstooth blazers, and dusty tomes. Even within these conventions, “Katabasis” has an extremely specific premise. It revolves around Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, two graduate students who venture to Hell to rescue their adviser Professor Grimes, who has recently died. He was a cruel mentor, yet they fear that they will never succeed on the job market without securing a letter of recommendation from him. The only way to make it to Hell without dying, though, is to master a series of logical paradoxes, and the rules governing this fictional underworld rely on both magic and a faint grasp of Plato and Aristotle.

    “Katabasis” is an effective satire of academic life. But there are very basic questions that Alice, a brilliant thinker and a rabidly box-ticking student, faces—and they feel like some that Kuang is contemplating herself. “What burns inside you? What fuels your every action? What gives you a reason to get up in the morning?” When Alice’s adviser asks these questions, she doesn’t have any good answers.

    Growing up outside of Dallas, Kuang was self-conscious about the way she spoke. “I just would not put air through my vocal cords,” she said. “I think I was just really, really scared.”

    Kuang’s parents, Eric and Janette, are from China, but they met in Orange County in 1989, when Eric was a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. The couple returned to China in 1994, after Eric completed his Ph.D. Their first child, James, was born in Guangdong in 1995, and Rebecca was born the following year. “I struggled with my identity when I moved back,” Eric told me. “After five years in the U.S., after Tiananmen Square, I couldn’t find my place in China anymore.” In 2000, a year after Rebecca’s younger sister, Grace, was born, the Kuangs moved back to the U.S.

    Kuang was a quiet and studious child. One day, in middle school, she went to a meeting with the debate team from a local high school, which was recruiting future competitors. “We are champions,” Kuang recalled the coach saying to her class. The coach told them that he could spot the “winning mind-set” in students; Kuang felt that he was looking right at her. She was instantly entranced. She began competing in Lincoln-Douglas debate, a one-on-one style that focusses on the ethical implications of real-world issues, and her difficulties with speaking quickly disappeared. Debate suited her personality at the time: awkward, analytical, dutiful.

    The Dallas area was a hotbed of competitive debate, and, at first, the oratorical polish of Kuang’s teammates was intimidating. She spent months being coached on the art of the syllogism, a kind of logical argument in which one deduces a conclusion from a set of premises. “The idea that you could take something that seemed up to personal charisma or rhetorical choice and map it to this very rigid, argumentative structure was mind-blowing,” she said. At the highest levels, debate is a combination of politics and philosophy, and skilled debaters must master analytical reasoning and the ability to speak as fast as possible.

    “I know you’re my family, but I don’t find these visits comforting.”

    Cartoon by Tom Toro

    Kuang quickly distinguished herself, attending summer camps where top young debaters from around the country trained. After her first year of high school, she transferred to Greenhill School, a private academy outside Dallas which is a debate powerhouse. She routinely skipped class to research debate topics, a process that opened her eyes to issues like systemic racism and mass incarceration. The cloistered intensity of debate also came to define her social world. It was a period of “sustained obsession.” On her bedroom wall, she tacked up a group photograph from debate camp, and would look at it while thinking about everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. These were her greatest rivals, and her closest friends.

    I watched a YouTube video of Kuang at a debate tournament as a senior in high school. In such spaces, calm is the ultimate measure of swagger. “The term was ‘perceptual dominance,’ ” she told me. Her opponent was a noisy avalanche of language, but Kuang appeared cool and nonchalant. Having debated when I was in high school—though not at this level—I felt nervous as Kuang slowly rose to conduct her cross-examination. She was ruthless and precise, and she won the round by a unanimous decision. By most metrics, she was one of the most successful high-school debaters of that year.

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    Hua Hsu

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  • The Family Fallout of DNA Surprises

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    Lily Wood is forty-three years old but considers April 9, 2019, to be her “rebirth day.” That was the date she received her results from Ancestry, the direct-to-consumer DNA-testing company. A self-described biohacker, Wood had been curious to see whether she had a genetic predisposition to diseases like Alzheimer’s. “I wanted to get ahead of things,” she told me.

    It was actually her second time testing. The first time, Wood had used 23andMe, but the results had seemed off to her. “The ethnicity was wrong,” she said, before correcting herself. “I thought it was wrong.” Her heritage, as she’d always understood it, was French on her father’s side and Norwegian on her mother’s. And yet the 23andMe customers who had come up as genetically close matches had Italian names. Wood, who lives in Minneapolis, where she grew up, called her sister, who speculated that a strand of hair belonging to a lab technician had gotten into the vial. Her sister advised her to try Ancestry. When the new results came in, Wood learned that there was a man in the company’s database with whom she shared fourteen hundred centimorgans, a measure of genetic overlap that typically denotes a half sibling. But this man was a stranger to her—and the site said that he had Sicilian ancestry.

    Wood drove to her mother’s house, a few miles away. When she arrived, her mother, Vicki, was sitting at the kitchen table with her husband, Wood’s stepfather. At the mention of the close match’s surname, Vicki’s face turned bright red. She replied that it was the name of her old boss at FedEx. Wood was nonplussed. “I was, like, ‘What are you saying right now? Are you . . . ? What?’ ” she recalled. Wood’s stepfather looked at his wife and said, “You never thought this was going to come back and bite you, did you?” Vicki then filled in a few details. She had gotten pregnant after sleeping with a higher-up on a business trip in Memphis while married to her first husband, Wood’s presumed father.

    The next week was emotionally confusing for Wood. Money had been tight when she was growing up; the man she now calls her “birth-certificate father” had driven a cab, and she’d swept the floors at a local private school in exchange for tuition. Suddenly, here she was, Googling her biological father, a longtime executive at the shipping company, and finding pictures of what appeared to be him and his children riding horses at their ranch in Wyoming. She felt like her world was “shattering,” she told me, but no one around her registered the news that way. She remembered being asked, in the family group chat, what side dish she was bringing for Easter dinner. “We’re a sweep-it-under-the-rug sort of family,” she said. But, as Wood saw it, this wasn’t exactly her family anymore. She confronted her mother, telling her that she did not seem very remorseful. Her sister thought their mother might interpret this as sex-shaming. Wood protested. “I don’t care who she slept with or if the marriage was closed, open, whatever,” she said. “This isn’t about sex. This is about the lie.”

    Wood tracked down her biological father and introduced herself. His initial response was encouraging. He said that he remembered her mother. “We will help bring clarity to this,” he assured her, and told her he’d be in touch soon. A week later, she heard from him again, but the tone had shifted. By then, she had reached out to the man Ancestry had indicated was a half sibling. Her biological father chastised her. “His words were like ‘We don’t do shock and awe in my family’—as if I’m this, like, Jerry Springer–Maury Povich person.”

    But Wood did ultimately get into the paternity-surprise media business. Six weeks after her rebirth day, she purchased a mike and, using her living room as a studio, launched a podcast devoted to interviews with people who, like her, had found out through commercial DNA testing that they had been misinformed about their biological parentage. Wood named her podcast “NPE Stories.” The term N.P.E. is often credited to a 2000 study conducted by a pair of geneticists at Oxford who examined whether male Britons with the last name Sykes could be traced to a single shared ancestor through their Y chromosomes. But they kept coming across men named Sykes who didn’t even share their father’s Y chromosome. They called these subjects, diplomatically, “non-paternity events.” In 2017, the acronym became a more entrenched online community when a woman named Catherine St Clair created a Facebook group, eventually called N.P.E. Fellowship, for people who had discovered misattributed parentage through commercial DNA tests. She rebranded N.P.E. to stand for the less technical “not parent expected,” and welcomed late-discovery adoptees (L.D.A.s) and donor-conceived persons (D.C.P.s) to join the family fray.

    When Wood started her show, there was already a podcast of N.P.E. tell-alls called “CutOff Genes.” Soon came others: “Everything’s Relative,” “Family Twist,” “Sex, Lies & the Truth.” Before long, anyone with a Spotify account could listen to hundreds of hours of adults trying to make sense of their parents’ sex lives. (Episodes about people who found out that their parents had been swingers in the seventies practically formed their own subgenre.) A man named Jonathon told the hosts of “Sex, Lies & the Truth” that, after being contacted by a daughter he never knew he had, he was upset with her mother at first, but then he reflected that thirty years earlier he had been a “weed-smoking hippie” while she had also been involved with a man training to be an engineer. “In that race, I was Seabiscuit,” he said. Not all episodes are so convivial. Many N.P.E.s look back on their childhoods and—cataloguing every slight, every time they felt different—wonder, Was that why?

    Paternity has historically been tricky to pin down. “Mommy’s baby, daddy’s maybe,” as the saying goes. But now the milkman’s kid can buy a DNA test from Target. (Occasionally, people learn that their mother used an egg donor, but paternity surprises are more common.) Since the first commercial DNA test débuted, in 2000, the market has exploded. A 2025 YouGov poll found that one in five Americans has taken a direct-to-consumer DNA test. A few years ago, a research team at Baylor College of Medicine surveyed more than twenty-three thousand customers of these kits and learned that three per cent of them had discovered that a person whom they’d believed to be their biological parent wasn’t. (That number is in line with a 2005 study from a university in Liverpool which found a 3.7-per-cent median rate of misattributed paternity in the general population.) If the ratio holds, that means around two million Americans who have taken one of these tests are N.P.E.s.

    A cottage industry has sprung up to service them. There are therapists who specialize in treating N.P.E.s, and “DNA detectives” who can track down relatives who haven’t taken tests by triangulating the results of those who have. There are coaches who guide parents in breaking the news about their child’s origins. Brianne Kirkpatrick Williams, of Watershed DNA, is a genetic counsellor who advertises on her website that she spent years delivering bad news to expectant parents, which makes her uniquely qualified to aid clients who want to inform their grown children that they were donor-conceived, say, or to let their spouses know that they were “contacted by a previously unknown biological child.” She charges eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars for a four-session “Prepare to Share” package.

    I became interested in doing a story on N.P.E.s after a friend’s ex-boyfriend found out in his thirties that he was one. Hunter (not his real name) was a state-level politician who ran a campaign on his working-class roots, only to find out that his mother had had an affair with a well-off scientist. Hunter had known his biological father his whole life as a family friend; sometimes this man dropped off hand-me-downs that his sons—Hunter’s half brothers—had outgrown. Hunter told me that he had joined Facebook groups devoted to N.P.E.s but promptly left them. “It was too much,” he said.

    It turns out that anger at your mother and a hobbyist’s understanding of genetics is a potent, and potentially politicized, combination. Some factions are trying to transform N.P.E.s from an identity group into an interest one. A guest on Wood’s podcast, for example, an N.P.E. named Richard, who is a clinician by profession, argued that people could be entitled to sue their mother for keeping the identity of their father secret, on the grounds of “parental alienation.” Severance, a magazine that covers N.P.E.s, was launched in 2019 by a Pennsylvanian writer named B. K. Jackson; it takes its name from a belief that N.P.E.s have been “severed” from their biological families. Alongside extramarital affairs, the magazine lists “adoption, kidnapping, undisclosed step-parent adoption, paternity fraud, donor-assisted conception” and “nonconsensual sex” as causes of severance. Such rhetoric, which places gamete donation next to criminal acts, has alarmed many in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, as has the legal-advocacy work of a Seattle-based organization founded by an N.P.E. called Right to Know. The group wants to mandate the inclusion of donor and surrogate names on birth certificates, which currently reflect legal, not genetic, parentage. Some in the L.G.B.T.Q. community fear that this will, by default, force them to report more information than opposite-sex couples are required to. In making its case, Right to Know can at times rely on nascent, controversial theories within the world of genomics, which many scientists caution overstate the impact of genes on our health and personalities.

    In myth, if a hero wants to achieve greatness—to slay a multiheaded Hydra, to part the Red Sea, to bring balance to the Force—he is almost required to have a dramatic paternity reveal. But now millions of mere mortals are having to contend with the same epic dilemmas: What’s the appropriate amount of anger over an extramarital affair? Will our roots always tug at us, even if we don’t know they’re ours? Who or what, exactly, determines our destiny?

    In 1999, the producers of “Maury” came to their host, Maury Povich, with an idea to boost ratings. “These soap operas—they take six months to reveal someone’s secret father,” Povich remembered them saying. “We can do that in fifteen minutes, on air.” The show became known for its flamboyant paternity-test reveals, and for men, suddenly off the hook for child support, doing celebratory dances. Povich told me, “People come up to me all the time on the street. They like to grab their pregnant wife and get me to say, ‘You are the father.’ ” His show was controversial; scholars have accused it of reinforcing stereotypes about Black women’s promiscuity, but nonetheless it became a cultural touchstone. In a 2015 “Saturday Night Live” “Weekend Update” segment about Black History Month, Michael Che joked about Povich: “He set more Black men free than Abraham Lincoln.” Povich’s show was also an unlikely educational resource. In the nineties, DNA was the stuff of science fiction—I first heard about it in “Jurassic Park”—but here it was something real, with real-life consequences.

    The scholar Nara B. Milanich, in her book “Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father,” observes that, in the past, “biological paternity was considered an ineffable enigma of nature, not just unknown but indeed unknowable.” For much of the twentieth century, the closest thing to a paternity test was the ABO blood-type test, invented in 1924 by a German doctor named Fritz Schiff. But that test could only exclude a possible father, not positively identify one. Then, in 1984, a British geneticist named Alec Jeffreys discovered DNA fingerprinting, which allowed scientists to take a sample of hair, skin, or saliva and single out a sequence of nucleotides specific to one person. But such testing was intended for professionals in a lab. That all changed when a retired business owner in Texas had some extra time on his hands.

    People had always asked Bennett Greenspan whether he was related to the economist Alan Greenspan. “I had no answer,” he said. He had never met Alan Greenspan and had never heard that he was a distant relation. Most of us in his position would simply have replied no, but Greenspan, now seventy-three, had been fascinated by genealogy since he was a child. He once brought an empty chart to a shiva, where he mined his elderly Eastern European relatives for intel. He always felt that there were “paper-trail roadblocks” stopping him from getting a full picture of his family tree.

    In 1997, Greenspan read an article in the Times about a group of geneticists who had tested the Y chromosomes of Jewish men who believed themselves to be part of an ancient priestly tradition called the cohanim. He called Michael Hammer, one of the researchers quoted in the story, who ran a lab at the University of Arizona, and asked to buy a DNA test; Greenspan figured that, if science could try to trace Jewish men alive today to Aaron and Mt. Sinai, there might be hope for his family tree. Hammer told him that his DNA tests were for anthropological purposes only. Greenspan countered with a technique he had learned from sales, which was to let an awkward silence emerge. Hammer fell for it, interjecting, “Someone should start a company for this, because I get calls from crazy genealogists like you all the time.” Hammer and the University of Arizona agreed to let Greenspan run direct-to-consumer tests out of their lab for a fee, and, in 2000, FamilyTreeDNA, the first home DNA-testing kit, was born. Greenspan remembered getting calls from confused customers: “These brothers called and they go, ‘We think your test is wrong—we two match, but our little brother doesn’t.’ I said, ‘Come on.’ ”

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    Jennifer Wilson

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