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.
I often wake up before dawn, ahead of my wife and kids, so that I can enjoy a little solitary time. I creep downstairs to the silent kitchen, drink a glass of water, and put in my AirPods. Then I choose some music, set up the coffee maker, and sit and listen while the coffee brews.
It’s in this liminal state that my encounter with the algorithm begins. Groggily, I’ll scroll through some dad content on Reddit, or watch photography videos on YouTube, or check Apple News. From the kitchen island, my laptop beckons me to work, and I want to accept its invitation—but, if I’m not careful, I might watch every available clip of a movie I haven’t seen, or start an episode of “The Rookie,” an ABC police procedural about a middle-aged father who reinvents himself by joining the L.A.P.D. (I discovered the show on TikTok, probably because I’m demographically similar to its protagonist.) In the worst-case scenario, my kids wake up while I’m still scrolling, and I’ve squandered the hour I gave up sleep to secure.
The Culture Industry: A Centenary Issue Subscribers get full access. Read the issue »
If this sort of morning sounds familiar, it’s because, a couple of decades into the smartphone era, life’s rhythms and the algorithm’s have merged. We listen to podcasts while getting dressed and watch Netflix before bed. In between, there’s Bluesky on the bus, Spotify at the gym, Instagram at lunch, YouTube before dinner, X for toothbrushing, Pinterest for the insomniac hours. It’s a strange way to live. Algorithms are old—around 300 B.C., Euclid invented one for finding the greatest common divisor of two integers. They are, essentially, mathematical procedures for solving problems. We use them to coördinate physical things (like elevators) and bureaucratic things (like medical residencies). Did it make sense to treat unclaimed time as a problem? We’ve solved it algorithmically, and now have none.
A feeling of overstimulation is one consequence of algorithmic life. Another is a certain jumbledness in our ideas. Why do we care about what we care about? Walking into your basement in the dark, you might stumble into a cobweb; one strain of philosophical thought holds that this is how caring works. We become ensnared by the possibilities that happen to present themselves as we live—we get caught in webs of care. You run into your elderly neighbor in the morning and, that night, wonder how he’s doing. Your middle schooler likes Chappell Roan, and soon you do, too. A single encounter with “The Fountainhead” at thirteen might make you a lifelong libertarian. Algorithmic culture taps into the casual randomness with which we apportion our care; it takes advantage of the fact that what we bump into today might obsess us tomorrow. Its webs, meanwhile, are woven by machines that are owned by corporations.
I’ve long felt caught in my personal web, and have struggled to get out. Then, one morning last year, I started chatting with the A.I. system Claude in my predawn kitchen, in an experimental spirit. “I’m finally starting to make progress on the article I’m writing,” I typed on my phone while the coffee brewed.
“Good morning!” the system replied. “That’s wonderful to hear—there’s nothing quite like that feeling when a piece you’ve been working on starts to come together. What’s the article about, and what helped you break through to this progress?”
I didn’t answer. I had no desire, at that hour, or any hour, to let an A.I. act as a writing coach. But, having used my phone, I could now put it down. I sipped my coffee and began marking up an old draft.
I kept chatting with Claude and ChatGPT in the mornings—not about my writing but about subjects that interested me. (Why are tariffs bad? What’s up with crime on the subway? Why is dark matter dark?) Instead of checking Apple News, I started asking Perplexity—an A.I.-based system for searching the web—“What’s going on in the world today?” In response, it reliably conjured a short news summary that was informative and unsolicitous, not unlike the section in The Economist headed “The World in Brief.” Sometimes I asked Perplexity follow-up questions, but more often I wasn’t tempted to read further. I picked up a book. It turned out that A.I. could be boring—a quality in technology that I’d missed.
As it happened, around this time, the algorithmic internet—the world of Reddit, YouTube, X, and the like—had started losing its magnetism. In 2018, in New York, the journalist Max Read asked, “How much of the internet is fake?” He noted that a significant proportion of online traffic came from “bots masquerading as humans.” But now “A.I. slop” appeared to be taking over. Whole websites seemed to be written by A.I.; models were repetitively beautiful, their earrings oddly positioned; anecdotes posted to online forums, and the comments below them, had a chatbot cadence. One study found that more than half of the text on the web had been modified by A.I., and an increasing number of “influencers” look to be entirely A.I.-generated. Alert users were embracing “dead internet theory,” a once conspiratorial mind-set holding that the online world had become automated.
In the 1950 book “The Human Use of Human Beings,” the computer scientist Norbert Wiener—the inventor of cybernetics, the study of how machines, bodies, and automated systems control themselves—argued that modern societies were run by means of messages. As these societies grew larger and more complex, he wrote, a greater amount of their affairs would depend upon “messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine.” Artificially intelligent machines can send and respond to messages much faster than we can, and in far greater volume—that’s one source of concern. But another is that, as they communicate in ways that are literal, or strange, or narrow-minded, or just plain wrong, we will incorporate their responses into our lives unthinkingly. Partly for this reason, Wiener later wrote, “the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”
The messages around us are changing, even writing themselves. From a certain angle, they seem to be silencing some of the algorithmically inflected human voices that have sought to influence and control us for the past couple of decades. In my kitchen, I enjoyed the quiet—and was unnerved by it. What will these new voices tell us? And how much space will be left in which we can speak?
Recently, I strained my back putting up a giant twin-peaked back-yard tent, for my son Peter’s seventh-birthday party; as a result, I’ve been spending more time on the spin bike than in the weight room. One morning, after dropping Peter off at camp, I pedalled a virtual bike path around the shores of a Swiss lake while listening to Evan Ratliff’s podcast “Shell Game,” in which he uses an A.I. model to impersonate him on the phone. Even as our addiction to podcasts reflects our need to be consuming media at all times, they are islands of tranquility within the algorithmic ecosystem. I often listen to them while tidying. For short stints of effort, I rely on “Song Exploder,” “LensWork,” and “Happier with Gretchen Rubin”; when I have more to do, I listen to “Radiolab,” or “The Ezra Klein Show,” or Tyler Cowen’s “Conversations with Tyler.” I like the ideas, but also the company. Washing dishes is more fun with Gretchen and her screenwriter sister, Elizabeth, riding along.
Podcasts thrive on emotional authenticity: a voice in your ear, three friends in a room. There have been a few experiments in fully automated podcasting—for a while, Perplexity published “Discover Daily,” which offered A.I.-generated “dives into tech, science, and culture”—but they’ve tended to be charmless and lacking in intellectual heft. “I take the most pride in finding and generating ideas,” Latif Nasser, a co-host of “Radiolab,” told me. A.I. is verboten in the “Radiolab” offices—using it would be “like crossing a picket line,” Nasser said—but he “will ask A.I., just out of curiosity, like, ‘O.K., pitch me five episodes.’ I’ll see what comes out, and the pitches are garbage.”
“You’re not going to ask how I got the ship in the bottle?”
Cartoon by Roland High
What if you furnish A.I. with your own good ideas, though? Perhaps they could be made real, through automated production. Last fall, I added a new podcast, “The Deep Dive,” to my rotation; I generated the episodes myself, using a Google system called NotebookLM. To create an episode, you upload documents into an online repository (a “notebook”) and click a button. Soon, a male-and-female podcasting duo is ready to discuss whatever you’ve uploaded, in convincing podcast voice. NotebookLM is meant to be a research tool, so, on my first try, I uploaded some scientific papers. The hosts’ artificial fascination wasn’t quite capable of eliciting my own. I had more success when I gave the A.I. a few chapters of a memoir I’m writing; it was fun to listen to the hosts’ “insights,” and initially gratifying to hear them respond positively. But I really hit the sweet spot when I tried creating podcasts based on articles I had written a long time ago, and to some extent forgotten.
“That’s a huge question—it cuts right to the core,” one of the hosts said, discussing an essay I’d published several years before.
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:
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 Subscribers get full access. Read the issue »
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.
“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.”
