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  • The Real Problem Is How Trump Can Legally Use the Military

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    The militarization of American cities, including Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, has brought home a perverse irony. Throughout the history of the United States, immigrants have come here to escape authoritarian governments. But, in the twenty-first century, it is Donald Trump’s crackdowns on immigration, and on the protests against them, that are giving him momentum in the direction of ersatz dictatorship. The President has also threatened to deploy troops in more cities, such as San Francisco, Baltimore, and New York, against the will of the states’ governors.

    At the nation’s founding, James Madison warned that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,” because of the temptation to turn soldiers into “instruments of tyranny at home.” The Constitution divides power over the military between the President, who is the Commander-in-Chief, and Congress, which funds and regulates the military, declares war, and provides “for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” In the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, Congress spelled out that it is generally forbidden to use the military for civilian law enforcement. But, in a statute from 1956, Congress gave the President the authority to federalize any state’s National Guard in the event of an “invasion by a foreign nation” or a “rebellion” against the federal government, or in cases when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

    In June, President Trump first mobilized thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of marines to L.A. to protect ICE officers and other federal employees, functions, and property at sites where people were protesting against the Administration. Those deployments provoked more protests, which, in turn, fuelled the Administration’s claims that troops are needed to quell them. The sight of armed soldiers outfitted for war on city streets strikes many Americans as a frightening escalation from a President seemingly bent on punishing those who oppose him. The problem, though, is not what’s illegal but what isn’t. The lawfulness of Trump’s actions hinges on circumstances specified by Congress, and the courts have not been uniform in evaluating them.

    A federal district court in California temporarily blocked the deployment of troops to L.A. in June. But the Ninth Circuit lifted the block, recognizing that courts are “highly deferential” to a President’s assessments. It found that Trump likely had a “colorable basis” for claiming to be “unable with the regular forces to execute” federal immigration law, given the evidence that some protesters had violently interfered with law enforcement by throwing things at ICE vehicles and federal officials, utilizing “dumpsters as a battering ram” at a federal building, lobbing Molotov cocktails, and vandalizing property. The California district court later ruled that the Administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using soldiers to execute federal law, and an appeal is pending.

    Last week, an Oregon federal district judge, Karin Immergut, who had been appointed by Trump, found that the President probably lacked the authority to federalize the National Guard to deploy in Portland in September. That conclusion rested largely on the contrast between Portland and L.A. in the weeks leading up to the President’s orders regarding each city. That is, unlike when Trump sent troops to L.A., “it had been months since there was any sustained level of violent or disruptive protest activity in Portland.” The Justice Department’s claims of disruptive protests in September included “setting up a makeshift guillotine,” posting a photo of an ICE vehicle online, and shining flashlights in drivers’ eyes—all of which, Judge Immergut said, could be successfully handled by law enforcement.

    The President didn’t help his case by spreading outlandish falsehoods. He posted on Truth Social about “War ravaged Portland,” “ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” and “Chaos, Death, and Destruction.” Even affording “a great level of deference” to the President, Judge Immergut concluded that the claim that Trump had been unable to execute federal law was “simply untethered to the facts.” But this commonsense point about Trump’s credibility may be controversial, too, because of the difficulty in determining when judicial second-guessing of the President’s assessments amounts to usurping the power that Congress has delegated to him. The Ninth Circuit may well ignore Trump’s posts and find that even low-level disruptions in recent weeks, or violent incidents from months earlier, are sufficient for him to send troops to protect federal officials’ ability to do their jobs. Meanwhile, a district court temporarily enjoined the deployment of troops in Illinois, noting that the Administration’s perception of events is “simply unreliable,” which was a polite way of rejecting the warping of reality entailed in viewing the protests in Chicago as a “rebellion.”

    What is perhaps most concerning is that wide judicial deference to a truth-indifferent President may mean that there is effectively little to no constraint on what he can do, which would quickly erase the separation of powers, not to mention the federalism, that the Constitution is supposed to insure. The statute on federalizing the National Guard is only one of many laws that allow the President to decide whether certain circumstances exist—an invasion, a rebellion, an emergency, an “unusual and extraordinary threat”—and so exercise an extraordinary power. Last week, Trump said that, if necessary, he would invoke another statute, the Insurrection Act, which creates an exception to the prohibition on using the military for law enforcement: “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I’d do that.” The Insurrection Act, which Trump has frequently mentioned in the past, gives the President staggeringly broader power. For instance, it permits him to use military force inside the U.S. “as he considers necessary to suppress” any “conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs the execution” of federal law. Judges and state officials must surely understand that, if they stymie Trump, he is poised to unleash a more dangerous and harder-to-check power that Congress has already handed him.

    Congress wrote such statutes with the apparent assumption that whoever held the office of the Presidency would use the powers they granted in good faith. Courts, for their part, developed legal doctrines that require them to presume the President’s good faith in deferring to him. The law may therefore be on the President’s side, which is troubling for what it suggests about its capacity to protect against tyranny. Judge Immergut insisted that “this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.” We must hope that they do not turn out to be one and the same. ♦

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    Jeannie Suk Gersen

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  • Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the “War from Within”

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    For someone openly campaigning to get a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump has been going about it in an unusual way. Early last month, the President proclaimed in a press conference that the Department of Defense would thereafter be known as the Department of War. At the same briefing, the presumed new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, promised that the armed forces will deliver “maximum lethality” that won’t be “politically correct.” That was a few days after Trump had ordered the torpedoing of a small boat headed out of Venezuela, which he claimed was piloted by “narco-terrorists,” killing all eleven people on board, rather than, for instance, having it stopped and inspected. After some military-law experts worried online that this seemed uncomfortably close to a war crime, Vice-President J. D. Vance posted, “Don’t give a shit.”

    So it felt fairly ominous when hundreds of serving generals and admirals were summoned from their postings around the world for a televised meeting on Tuesday with Trump and Hegseth, at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. “Central casting,” the President said, beaming at the officers in the audience, who sat listening impassively, as is their tradition. He praised his own peace efforts, particularly in the Middle East, and mused about bringing back the battleship (“Nice six-inch sides, solid steel, not aluminum,” which “melts if it looks at a missile coming at it”), then issued what sounded like a directive. He proposed using American cities as “training grounds” for the military, envisioning a “quick-reaction force” that would be sent out at his discretion. “This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” Trump said, like a theatre teacher trying to gin up interest in the spring musical. “That’s a war, too. It’s the war from within.”

    Peace abroad and war at home? It was an unusual note to strike in an electoral democracy, even if recent reports had indicated that a draft National Defense Strategy would shift the military’s focus from Russia and China to domestic and regional threats. But though Trump keeps talking about his domestic military missions in a dramatic future tense, not much has been demanded of the ones deployed so far. In Washington, D.C., where troops were sent this summer as part of a supposed war on crime, they were seen picking up trash, painting fences, and finding lost children, while the arrests they initiated often led to trumped-up charges that grand juries rejected, in what the Times described as a “citizens’ revolt.”

    When that offensive petered out, Trump turned his attention to immigration enforcement in the Windy City. (“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” he warned on social media.) Yet there has been an asymmetry between the Sturm und Drang of that operation—a midnight raid featured agents rappelling from helicopters onto a South Side apartment building—and its effect. Alderperson Andre Vasquez, who chairs the city council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said that his office had not seen enforcement “to the level of what is being promoted by the President,” and reporters struggled to square government claims about the number of detainees with court records. Even so, the Border Patrol announced that a marine unit would be relocated to Chicago. “Lakes and rivers are borders,” an official said. With what, Michigan?

    Cities do have problems, but no matter how much Trump wants to literalize the culture war they are not war zones. Memphis and Portland are next on the President’s list. But the generals and the admirals assembled at Quantico might have reasonably noticed a paradox: although Trump seems to want no restraints on what he can do with the military, he hasn’t yet articulated anything specific for it to do, other than make a show of reducing crime in places where the rate is generally already falling.

    The call to Quantico initially came from Hegseth, lately seen staging a pushup contest with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. At the Pentagon, Hegseth, who has few typical qualifications for his position, has largely focussed on a de-wokeification program, restoring the names of Confederate generals to military bases and, last week, rejecting efforts to revoke the Medals of Honor for soldiers involved in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. At Quantico, he declared that to instill a “warrior ethos,” a new promotions policy would be based on “merit only.” But it sounded like a pretty superficial idea of merit. “It all starts with physical fitness and appearance,” Hegseth said. He mentioned beards and fat (he’s against them) more than he did drones or missiles. “It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon,” he added. “It’s a bad look.” But does Hegseth want the best generals, or just the best skinny ones?

    It’s interesting that the long tail of the misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should wind its way here, to a militaristic right-wing President who loudly denounced those foreign conflicts but means to treat American cities as war zones, and to a Defense Secretary who wants to do away with rules of engagement. Among the defense community, the reaction to the Quantico speeches was an extended eye roll. “Could have been an email,” an anonymous senior official told Politico. On Tuesday, the White House announced that troops would be sent to Portland to “crush violent radical left terrorism.” That sounded much more frightening than the policy details reported by Oregon Public Radio: two hundred National Guard troops would be sent to provide additional security at federal facilities. For now, there is a heavy element of make-believe in the President’s domestic military ambitions, which, as was the case with the now greatly diminished doge project, allows him to pretend that he wants a major substantive change when what he really seems to want is more power.

    On Wednesday, in Memphis, the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told a group of deputized federal officers, “You are unleashed.” That same day, the President’s lawyers asserted in a letter to Congress that the country is now formally in an “armed conflict” with the drug trade broadly, a determination through which Trump can claim extraordinary wartime powers. (There have been three more lethal attacks on boats in the southern Caribbean since early September, the most recent on Friday.) Each of these steps has elements of military theatrics and cosplay authoritarianism, but the more the White House insists on the trappings of war—the troop deployments, the “warrior ethos” grooming, the emergency legal powers—the more it risks nudging us toward an actual one. ♦

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    Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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  • Grace and Disgrace

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    On a humid Charleston evening ten years ago, a ninth-grade dropout with a bowl haircut named Dylann Roof walked into a Bible-study class at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church, home to the oldest historically Black congregation in South Carolina. Roof, twenty-one, carried a .45-calibre Glock semi-automatic and eight magazines of hollow-point bullets. He settled into a seat near Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state senator, who was leading a discussion of a parable from the Gospel of Mark. Around them sat a dozen parishioners, all Black, mostly women decades older than Roof.

    Roof had set down his creed on a website he called “The Last Rhodesian”: a lonely, seething hatred of Black people, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics. He posted photographs of himself holding a Confederate flag and standing at Sullivan’s Island, where hundreds of thousands of Africans had once been sold into bondage. “We have no skinheads, no real K.K.K., no one doing anything but talking on the internet,” he wrote. “Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

    In the Bible-study class, Roof sat quietly for forty-five minutes. When the assembled bowed their heads in prayer, he stood, drew the Glock, and began to fire—pausing only to reload, then firing again. He loosed some seventy-five rounds. Tywanza Sanders, a young barber who had come with his mother, collapsed to the floor. As he lay dying, he asked, “Why are you doing this?”

    “Y’all are raping our women and taking over the country,” Roof replied.

    He spotted a woman praying under a table. “Shut up. Did I shoot you yet?”

    “No,” she said.

    “I’m going to let you live,” he told her, “so you can tell the story of what happened.”

    What lingers in memory from Charleston, beyond the horror of the massacre, are the funerals that followed—above all, Barack Obama at the service for Clementa Pinckney, closing his eulogy by singing the first verse of “Amazing Grace.” That unscripted hymn may have been the most moving moment of his Presidency. Yet another moment was still more poignant, and, for many, beyond comprehension. Two days after the murders, at Roof’s bond hearing, the families of the dead spoke through their grief. They did not renounce him. They forgave him.

    Felicia Sanders, Tywanza’s mother, addressed Roof directly: “We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms. You have killed some of the most beautiful people that I know. Every fibre in my body hurts, and I will never be the same. But, as we say in Bible study, we enjoyed you. May God have mercy on you.” The daughter of Ethel Lance, who died at the age of seventy, told him, “You took something very precious away from me . . . but I forgive you.” Obama later said that the “decency and goodness of the American people shines through in these families.”

    It was impossible not to recall those words of mercy while watching the memorial service, last Sunday, for Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist assassinated this month as he spoke at Utah Valley University. Tens of thousands of people filled a stadium in Glendale, Arizona, to honor him. Kirk was thirty-one, with a wife and two small children. The service lasted more than five hours, but the moment that stilled the crowd came when his widow, Erika, spoke of her husband’s killer in the language of absolution. “That man, that young man, I forgive him,” she said. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love—love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”

    President Donald Trump, who spoke next, embraced Erika Kirk, but at the microphone he all but rebuked the spirit of her forgiveness. Charlie Kirk, he said, in the course of a self-regarding and vengeful ramble, “did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them.” Other Administration speakers, including J. D. Vance and Stephen Miller, echoed Trump, not Erika Kirk. Retribution, division, grievance—this is the official language of the regime.

    At the start of Trump 1.0, the journalist Salena Zito wrote in The Atlantic that the press took him literally but not seriously; his supporters took him seriously but not literally. The line was meant to suggest how out of touch the press was. Trump himself told Zito that his true aim was, in her words, to “bring the country together—no small task.”

    Of course, this was never the case, and each week brings fresh evidence of the darkness we are being led into: the attack on the rule of law, the weaponization of the state against the President’s enemies, the erosion of civil liberties, the colossal Trump-family grift. The assault is relentless. In the days after the memorial, Trump managed to “unite” the country by renewing his threats against Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian guilty of nothing more than making fun of him; by pushing through a last-minute indictment of James Comey; by convening a press conference where he pronounced on the science of autism—“based on what I feel”—in a manner so reckless that it was guaranteed to sow confusion and anguish among parents desperate for clarity; and by informing the United Nations that America is “the hottest country anywhere,” that he deserves Nobel Prizes for ending “seven unendable wars,” that the U.N. is a useless organization, and that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” We look forward to next week.

    It is not easy to reconcile the act of forgiveness with some of the positions Charlie Kirk once took. They were in moral opposition to the civil-rights-era spirit that infused the parishioners of Mother Emanuel. But his instinct to argue, to engage, left open the possibility of evolution. Trump is long past that horizon. His appetites and his animosities only deepen. Hope lies not in expecting a late-in-life conversion experience in the Oval Office but in carrying out the ordinary work of civic life—in persuading neighbors, friends, even family who have supported Trump to reconsider their decision, one hard conversation at a time. Grace is not weakness but resolve, the Charleston families believed, and politics, too, depends on a willingness to coax one another toward better ground. In that work of persuasion, of politics—slow, imperfect, yet necessary—we attempt to close the distance between what we are and what we might still become. ♦

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    David Remnick

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  • Alina Habba Isn’t Going Anywhere

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    Habba’s allegiance to Trump has never been in question. It’s at the root of many of the complaints about her—and the fears that Habba, who had no prior experience as a prosecutor, will use the US attorney job to pursue a partisan political agenda. Her critics see Habba as epitomizing what it takes to get ahead in Trump’s orbit: looking the part, and a willingness to relentlessly defend the president, especially on TV. “It’s not a question of hating her,” Cobb says. “It’s a question of her being grossly unfit for the job.”

    Habba is a naturally magnetic presence, which she amplifies with snug clothes and a bejeweled crucifix necklace. At a 2024 Trump campaign rally in Madison Square Garden, she shimmied onto the stage wearing a sequined jacket whose red and white letters spelled out MAGA. Yet she sounds genuinely surprised at the arena in which she has become famous, claiming she had little interest in politics and wanted to stay under the radar. “It was a decision [to represent Trump] that I took really seriously, and I had a feeling it would change my life,” she says. “But I didn’t really understand the gravity, in hindsight, of how much it would.”

    Somehow Habba has become quite comfortable in the partisan fray. “She has been at President Trump’s side for years; he trusts her implicitly,” says Gor. “She will deliver in spades as US attorney because, similar to the president, she prioritizes winning.”

    How Habba defines winning is the controversial part. Three days after Trump announced her appointment as top prosecutor, she told Jack Posobiec, a conservative podcaster, “We could turn New Jersey red…. Hopefully, while I’m there, I can help that cause.” Shortly afterward, her office filed trespassing charges against Newark mayor Ras Baraka and assault charges against New Jersey congressperson LaMonica McIver related to a confrontation outside a Newark ICE facility (to which McIver has pleaded not guilty), and in July, she said she was launching an investigation into New Jersey governor Phil Murphy after he made remarks suggesting he would house a migrant. The three elected officials are Democrats.

    “Her nomination should have been dead in the water the minute she said that on the podcast,” says Joyce White Vance, a former federal prosecutor and an MSNBC legal analyst. “It is absolutely disqualifying. Nominations have died for far less. If you’re looking for single points of failure in the Republican Party that demonstrate how badly they’ve been corrupted by Trump, that’s one of them.”

    The Baraka charges have since been dropped, and Habba tells me she does not plan on using the judicial system to make New Jersey more Republican. “If I wanted to do that, I would have run myself,” she says. “There’s a governor’s race happening right now, and I did not run.”

    Instead, Habba is deep into an equally bruising campaign: to retain her job. In early July, Trump nominated her to a full term as US attorney, but the US senators from New Jersey, both Democrats, signaled they would block her confirmation. Then, federal judges ruled Habba had to vacate the job and appointed an experienced federal prosecutor as an interim replacement. Trump’s team countered by firing the replacement, withdrawing Habba’s nomination to take the post permanently, and deeming Habba the first assistant US attorney…who, because the US attorney seat is vacant, is automatically promoted. At least temporarily. The wrangling has resonance beyond New Jersey, because the Trump administration has used similar maneuvers to appoint prosecutors in offices from upstate New York to Los Angeles. It’s part of an effort to exert greater control over the criminal justice system that recently saw the president push out a Virginia US attorney, Erik Siebert, after Siebert reportedly declined to file charges for mortgage fraud against New York attorney general Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey, due to insufficient evidence.

    The contours and stakes may be new, but life around Habba is rarely dull. On a single day in late August, a New York appeals court tossed out the $454 million civil fraud judgment against Trump (though it declined to overturn the fraud case), handing Habba a large measure of vindication; three hours later, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled that Habba is holding the US attorney’s job illegally. The Department of Justice is appealing the latter ruling. At the center of a storm, though, Habba is unfazed, even floating a headline for this story: “‘Alina Habba isn’t going anywhere.’”

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    Chris Smith

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  • The Art of the Impersonal Essay, by Zadie Smith

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    If it were up to me, for example, I would very happily switch that rickety, always ill-fitting term “humanism” with something broader, more capacious. A bright, shiny neologism that would still place human flourishing at the center of our social and political processes, but which also encompassed the supremacy of all living things—including the natural world. As a philosophy, it would stand in pointed opposition to the current faith in the supremacy of machines, and of capital. Philoanimism? But the name is not good. (I’d be glad to hear alternative options!) It would be the work of many hands, this discourse, and it would understand that in these fractious times, although our commonalities may prove dispiritingly tiny or difficult to locate, they still exist. We’ve managed to locate them before, and not so long ago, using language as our compass. For example, the most inspiring (to me) political slogan of the past twenty years managed to create a common space in a single phrase: “the ninety-nine per cent.”

    Sometimes the very act of seeking solidarity is characterized merely as the pursuit of “common ground,” a destination easily disparaged as a middling, nowhere, apolitical place. At other times, it is suspected of being a happy-clappy zone of magical thinking, where people have to pretend to be the same and to have experienced identical things in order to work together. I’d rather think of it as “the commons.” And when I sit down to essay I find it helpful to remind myself of the radical historical roots of that concept. I picture the blasted heath of the nineteenth century, a piece of open land that is about to be fenced in by the forces of capital, but upon which a large crowd has gathered, precisely to protest the coming enclosure. But not only that. A variety of overlapping causes are represented in that space, although they are all fundamentally concerned with freedom. Abolitionists, suffragists, trade unionists, working people, and the poor are present in abundance, alongside some land-reform radicals you might call socialist Christians, and, yes, O.K., a few old Chartists. Plus some anti-vaxxers, a smattering of Jacobites, and a couple of millenarians. (That’s the trouble with no fences: anybody can turn up.) Today, on the commons, all of these people have gathered to oppose a common enemy—the landowner—but disputation and debate are still everywhere, and you, the next speaker to get on the platform, must now decide how to address this huge crowd. You might have a very specific aim in mind: a particular argument, a singular cause, a deep desire to convert or sway. But you are not in your living room, your church, your meeting hall, or your corner of the internet. You are on a soapbox on the commons; anybody might be standing in front of you. Will you be so open and broad as to say not very much at all? Or so targeted that you are, practically speaking, talking to yourself? It’s complicated. Some rhetoric will definitely be necessary. You’ll need to warm them up before you lay it on ’em. And you can never forget that all around you is an explosion of alterity: people with their own unique histories, traumas, memories, hopes, fears. But this multiplicity needn’t shift your commitments—it may even intensify them.

    Imagine, for example, an early-nineteenth-century lady abolitionist, standing in cold weather, listening to a labor activist. He is arguing for expanding the franchise from a propertied élite—male, of course—to all workingmen, but not once does he mention the vote for women. My imagined abolitionist grows colder—and angrier. But the gentleman’s blinkered position might also prompt her into a new form of solidarity, nudging her toward the realization that arguing for the mere “liberty” of the enslaved, as she does, is insufficient: her call, too, must include a demand for their full enfranchisement. The next time this lady abolitionist of mine steps onto the commons, she may find herself more willing to stand on her rectangular box and make the connection between many forms of disenfranchisement, which, though they may appear dissimilar, have their crucial points of continuity. After all, one thing workingmen, women, and almost all of the enslaved had in common, on the commons, was the fact that none of them could vote. (A point of convergence that Robert Wedderburn—essayist and preacher, and the son of an enslaved Jamaican woman—noted frequently.)

    What kind of discourse can draw out such analogies while simultaneously acknowledging and preserving difference? (An enslaved man is not in the same situation as a laboring peasant.) What kind of language will model and leave open the possibility of solidarity, even if it is solidarity of the most pragmatic and temporal kind? The speaker will have to be open, clear, somewhat artful. They’ll have to be relatively succinct, making their argument in no more than, say, six sections. Their speech will be impassioned but expansive, and I think it helps a bit if it has a little elegance, enabling arguments to glide straight past the listener’s habitual defenses, although this gliding—like a duck crossing a pond—will usually involve a lot of frantic paddling down below, just out of sight. A complex performance, then. Because the crowd is complicated. Because life is complicated. Any essay that includes the line “It’s really very simple” is never going to be the essay for me. Nothing concerning human life is simple. Not aesthetics, not politics, not gender, not race, not history, not memory, not love.

    “To essay” is, of course, to try. My version of trying involves expressing ideas in a mode open enough, I hope, that readers feel they are trying them out alongside me. While I try, I am also striving to remain engaged (and engaging) yet impersonal, because although the personal is certainly interesting and human and vivid, it also strikes me as somewhat narrow and private and partial. Consequently, the word “we” appears in my essays pretty frequently. This isn’t because I imagine I speak for many, or expect that my views might be applied to all, but because I’m looking for the sliver of ground where that “we” is applicable. Because once you find that sweet spot you can build upon it. It’s the existentialist at my desk who is best placed to find that spot. She says to herself: Almost all of the people I know (and I myself) have experienced pain. And absolutely all of the people I know (and I myself) will die.

    These two facts, one almost total and the other universal, represent the firmest “we” I know, and have occupied my imagination since I was a teen. That was the moment when the fact that we were all death-facing and pain-adjacent first dawned, and seemed to make it perfectly obvious, for example, that the death penalty was a monstrosity, and prison usually a conceptual mistake, in which the most common crime was poverty. It was not until I got to college that I met people who, facing the same fundamental facts—pain, death—had come to what they considered to be perfectly reasonable but very different conclusions. I met people who believed in such a thing as “the criminal mentality.” I met people who thought poverty was primarily a sign of laziness or a lack of ambition. What once appeared simple turned complex. My beliefs remained, but the idea that they were or should be “perfectly obvious” to all—that’s what evaporated.

    Aside from the fact that I never meant to be an essayist in the first place, one detail that has surprised me most during the past twenty years is that I have, in fact, written more personally in the essay form than I ever expected or intended. Still, as I look back on my “I,” across so many essays, I notice that the person typing out this “I” remains very hard to pin down, even for me. For starters, it’s never quite the same “I” who’s typing the word “I,” because of the way time works. Because of the way life is. I have been, for example, very single and very married. I’ve been poor, middle class, and wealthy. I’ve loved women, I’ve loved men, but loved no one for their gender specifically—it’s always been a consequence of who they were. Sometimes I’ve sat at my desk dressed like Joan Crawford. Other times, like someone who has come to fix your sink. I’ve sat there utterly childless and then very much full of child, or with a child in a Moses basket at my feet. I’ve been the mother of a British citizen and then the mother of an American. As a semi-public person, I’ve been the subject of various projections, and watched unrecognizable versions of “me” circulate in the digital sphere, far beyond my control. But I also remain who and what I have always been: a biracial black woman, born in the northwest corner of London, to a Jamaican mother and an English father. I personally feel like an outsider who belongs nowhere—and have never really minded this fact—but in the commons of my essays I understand that many or even most of my readers feel otherwise about this thorny matter of “belonging,” so I am often trying to write the kinds of sentences that remember this key fact, too.

    If my own “I” remains a various thing—as I have written about too often—it is its very variousness that forces me to acknowledge the points of continuity: the fundamentals. What I honestly believe, as a human being. Every version of me is a pacifist. Every version believes that human life is sacred—despite the fact that the word “sacred” is most often used as a weapon in the arguments of conservatives, and remains basically inadmissible within the four isms that have done the most to form me. (But that’s a novelist for you. We can’t function on isms alone.) Every version of me knows that education, health care, housing, clean water, and sufficient food are rights and not privileges, and should be provided within a commons that is itself secured beyond the whims of the market. Yet to say these things is (in my view) really to say the bare minimum: it is almost saying nothing at all. The only significance of these beliefs, to me, when I am essaying, is that they are pretty much immovable, and whether I am reviewing a movie, describing a painting, arguing a point, or considering an idea, they represent the solid sides of my damn rectangle, no matter what the title in the center turns out to be. ♦

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    Zadie Smith

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  • Jenny Slate, Like Her Emmys 2025 Dress, Is in a Moment of “Vibrant Bloom”

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    After Jenny Slate wrapped shooting for Dying for Sex, in which she plays Nikki, a freewheeling thespian taking care of her best friend, who has terminal cancer, she cut her hair short. “Emotionally speaking,” she tells VF, “there’s just so much going on for me all the time, that I don’t like a lot of fuss anymore around my physicality.” At Sunday night’s Emmys 2025 ceremony, where she received her first nomination for outstanding supporting actress in a limited series, her hairstylist Jordan M gave it a middle part and a face-framing bend. The new style is the kind of dramatic change one might expect of a classic breakup haircut—and in some ways, it is. The show, she says, helped her let go of some deep-seated self-criticism and emerge with a newfound self-understanding. “I can’t contort myself or over-adorn myself to try to send a message to anyone before I send a message to myself about what’s going on. I actually know very well how I like to feel and what I like to look like.”

    Slate, whose work has long explored a childlike curiosity toward the weirdness of the world, delighted in the fact that her Emmys dress, by Rosie Assoulin, is the silhouette she sketched as a kid when she was drawing “fancy people”: strapless, with a sweetheart neckline. “I had one of those moments that people sometimes have with their wedding dress where they’re, like, Whoa,” Slate says. (She had it, in fact, with her own wedding dress when she married her husband, the writer Ben Shattuck, in their living room.) Still, the dress was all grown-up, Old Hollywood glamour. Its sculptural black bodice contrasts with a billowing and slightly sheer white skirt, a tonal echo of the monochrome Slate, with the aid of her stylist Jordan Johnson, has been drawn to recently. (Her stand-up-special tuxedo and the gown she wore to accept her award for outstanding supporting performance in a limited series at this year’s Gotham Awards, for instance, both by Thom Browne.) It falls, she says, into the perfect combination of structure and comfort. But the big red flower on the sternum, which reminds Slate of when “a pie wins first prize,” is pure pleasure. “The dress is an exact expression of how I feel about myself and my work right now,” Slate says. “I feel strong. I have a preparatory process. I am structured. I feel matured, but I also feel like it is total fucking party time for me, and that I am really, really in a moment of vibrant bloom.”

    For the Emmys she kept her jewelry (“little, tiny things in my ears”) and makeup similarly minimal. Kirin Bhatty, her makeup artist for more than a decade, mixed a Chanel Water-Fresh Tint with moisturizer for a light, unencumbered finish. “I used to do lashes,” Slate says. “Now I’m just starting to pare it down.” But, in a trait she shares with the real-life Nikki Boyer she portrays on screen, “I love a lip.” After mulling a couple options, she went with Chanel Rouge Allure Liquid Velvet in Énigmatique. To foreclose pre-carpet nerves, her getting-ready soundtrack includes Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief, Aldous Harding, and—to invoke the feeling of her grandmothers, of true love and “soft, cushy feelings”—Chet Baker.

    Slate seems comfortable dwelling in places of contrast. When we speak about her look, a few days before the ceremony, she’s in Cleveland, wrapping the shoot on a not-yet-announced film, and living in a football-themed rental apartment provided by the movie’s producers. “It’s just a ton of team spirit in here,” she says. “The sconces even say Cleveland Browns.”

    Slate, consummate team player, has been thinking a lot about the ways outward appearances can mirror or support inner change. Her onscreen persona experienced a style evolution of her own. A few minutes into the first episode of Dying for Sex when, outside of a Brooklyn deli, Nikki learns from her best friend Molly (Michelle Williams) that the cancer she kicked into remission two years ago is back, metastasized, and incurable, Nikki is a study in muchness. Her plaid coat and mustard crushed velvet bag are oversized, her hair is loose, she wears a tangle of gold necklaces, and her hands glint with bracelets and rings. She moves through most of the Kübler-Ross grief stages, and then some, in mere moments, shifting from a stunned recitation of everything Molly’s done to keep the cancer at bay, to body-shaking sobs, to glorious, cathartic anger channeled toward the shop owner telling her to keep it down. “She’s an actress,” Molly tells the man, gravely. “Her emotions live very close to the surface.”

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    Keziah Weir

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  • New Yorker Covers, Brought to Life!

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    In the hundred-year history of The New Yorker, photography has appeared on the cover exactly twice. For the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary, in 2000, the dog-loving portraitist William Wegman dressed up one of his Weimaraners as Eustace Tilley, our dandyish mascot, originally drawn by Rea Irvin. (The butterfly that canine Eustace studies through his monocle also has a dog’s head.) But no human had broken the barrier until last month, when Cindy Sherman’s image of herself as Eustace covered a special issue on the culture industry. Otherwise, what distinguishes New Yorker covers is the imaginative reach of pen and paintbrush: political metaphors (Lady Liberty walking a tightrope), whimsical New York street scenes, daydreaming cats. Every week comes a work of art.

    But what if those images could spring to life, like Pygmalion’s statue? For The New Yorker’s centenary, the magazine asked six photographers to reinterpret covers from our archives as flesh-and-blood portraits, starring familiar faces. The role of Eustace went, this time around, to Spike Lee, who traded in the classic monocle for a movie camera. After all, isn’t Eustace a kind of filmmaker, zooming in for an extreme closeup of the butterfly? The artist Awol Erizku, known for turning Manet and Vermeer paintings into contemporary Black portraiture, posed Lee under a golden basketball net. Rea Irvin, meet the ultimate Knicks fan.

    Covers from the Jazz Age hold a glamorous mystique that proved especially enticing. Marilyn Minter adapted Barbara Shermund’s 1925 image of a goddess-like woman in grape-cluster earrings; Minter shot the actor Sadie Sink through glass, creating a dreamy haze. Julian de Miskey’s winking illustration of a soirée of cigarette-smoking swells in top hats and pearls, from 1930—what Great Depression?—was interpreted for a new age of glitter and doom by Alex Prager, featuring the actor and musician Sophie Thatcher and her identical twin, the artist Ellie Thatcher. And Stanley W. Reynolds’s 1926 depiction of a sailor canoodling with his lass struck Collier Schorr as resonant in an era of renewed discrimination against trans service members. In Schorr’s photograph, the duo, played by Julia Garner and Cole Escola, is more ambiguous, more gender-flouting, projecting an air of affectionate defiance. (An extra connection: Garner’s father, the artist Thomas Garner, has illustrated for The New Yorker.)

    Jump ahead a few decades. Charles Saxon, a frequent contributor of New Yorker covers from 1959 until the late eighties, tended to draw besuited businessmen, but in 1974, when he was in his fifties, he rendered a gaggle of young bell-bottomed bohemians, perched at the base of a flagpole as if posing for a group photo. (You can almost smell the pot and patchouli oil.) To re-create the image, Ryan McGinley photographed some friends, including the countercultural comedian Julio Torres, at the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, observing them less as curiosities than as peers. And Camila Falquez, whose subjects have included Zendaya and Kamala Harris, shot the Oscar-winning performer Ariana DeBose as the discerning woman with a magnifying glass drawn by Lorenzo Mattotti in 1999. None of these portraits go for detail-for-detail accuracy. Think of them as an elaborate game of dress-up, a century and change in the making.

    —Michael Schulman

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  • Rivals Rub Shoulders in the World of Competitive Massage

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    Massage has always been part of folk medicine, and it occurred in ancient China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, often in bathhouses. Hippocrates wrote that the physician must be adept at many things, but “assuredly in rubbing”; the eleventh-century Arab philosopher Avicenna wrote about the “friction of preparation” before exercise and the “friction of restoration” after it. But it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century, when the Swedish educator Per Henrik Ling collected, codified, and published exercise and massage techniques from several world traditions, that the art as we know it was born. In 1813, Ling opened the Royal Central Gymnastics Institute, in Stockholm, which also pioneered calisthenics. After Ling’s death, a Dutch student of Swedish medical gymnastics, Johann Georg Mezger, gave massage moves the French names that are still used today—effleurage (stroking), petrissage (kneading), tapotement (tapping), and so on. “Swedish massage” refers to the use of these techniques, though most of the world, including Sweden, calls it “classical massage.” To some, especially in North America, “Swedish” has come to be used as shorthand for a light, relaxing massage (or, derisively in the biz, a “fluff and buff”), in contrast with a more intensive kind, commonly called “deep tissue”—an overly broad and occasionally misleading term that can include many forms of neuromuscular therapy and therapeutic massage, and which may or may not involve firm pressure. Many clients don’t necessarily know the difference, or to what extent massage should cause pain en route to alleviating pain. Tengbjerg, while philosophizing about what clients want and need, had told the group, “When you work the superficial tissue, you can go pretty fast warming up. But the deeper you go the slower you should go. It’s like falling into the ocean—you sink, you sink, and when you’re at the bottom you cannot do things fast.”

    In the United States, massage wasn’t regulated for a long time, and has been used as a cover for sex work; even today, jokes about happy endings persist, something that rankles therapists. So do the terms “massage parlor,” “masseuse,” and “masseur,” which are longtime euphemisms, though laypeople can use them unwittingly. “Phoebe, on ‘Friends,’ kind of destroyed it for us in a way, too, because she called herself a masseuse,” Hoyme told me. “In America, we don’t use that term, because it’s considered a female prostitute.”

    But massage has become more mainstream in North America—the realm of the strip mall, where affordable massage franchises have proliferated (Massage Envy, the biggest, has nearly a thousand locations and offers a subscription option), and a pillar of the fitness and wellness industries. (Many insurers cover massage for rehabilitation purposes.) Though new massage therapists can struggle to make ends meet—franchises generally don’t pay well—they are in high demand. “There’s a huge shortage of massage therapists,” Nordstrom, who’s also the training director for the franchise Hand & Stone, told me. In a recent Microsoft study of jobs most likely to be affected by generative A.I., massage therapist was ranked among the lowest, alongside phlebotomist and undertaker; although Tengbjerg recently gave a lecture called “Massage Robots of the Future,” human touch, for now, seems irreplaceable. The stress of the pandemic, in particular, supercharged the industry. There are more than three hundred thousand licensed massage therapists in the U.S., and a 2025 A.M.T.A. poll indicated that the majority of them have pursued the work as a second career.

    In Copenhagen, quite a few competitors confirmed this. Lito Orbase, from Northern California, showed me some meaningful tattoos: a microphone and a guitar, a koi for good luck, and a phoenix. “Phoenix is for, like, changing careers,” he said. “I was working for A. T. & T., a huge company, so they had all these electives, and one of them was massage therapy.” Orbase loved it, and began practicing on friends. Later, A. T. & T. offered him a severance package—enough money to try massaging professionally. “I’ve been doing it ever since,” he said. He took special courses in fascial-stretch therapy, which was developed to treat the mobility concerns of pro athletes. “So I became a Level 3 stretch therapist, and the Raiders”—the N.F.L. team, then of Oakland—“asked if I wanted to work with them. I did for a year, then they moved to Nevada.” Ivan Llundyk, a Ukrainian former E.M.T. who lives in Poland, told me, “After college, I was working in an ambulance helping people, but I didn’t feel like it was a job for my soul.” He ran a hookah bar for a while, then found happiness in massage, where he believes that he can intuit what a client needs. Gabriel Gargari, an American, left his career as an up-and-coming opera singer after going on a retreat in Ibiza and discovering Ke Ala Hoku, or Pathway to the Stars, a form of the Polynesian slow-massage tradition lomilomi. “We got to learn these ancient principles, and walked the way of how a kahuna would be . . . it just opened up something within me that I didn’t know was even possible,” he told me. Lomilomi involves lots of forearm pressure and uses strokes that traverse the entire length of the body at once. Gargari incorporates music from his clients’ ancestral backgrounds into their massage.

    Several of my conversations took place on a walking tour of Copenhagen, early in the conference. People hung out with their countrymen—Team U.S.A. Massage, which Krista Harris started a few years ago to unite the Americans, was especially friendly—and giddily introduced themselves to their competitors. Denmark felt almost comically idyllic. Families and couples strolled around the gorgeous Tivoli Gardens amusement park; parked bikes were left unlocked. (“Everybody already has a bike here,” a local told me.) It was midnight-sun season, when an air of lighthearted jollity reigns, and when open-air trucks full of newly graduated high schoolers, in white sailor-style hats, drive around town, honking and whooping with glee. Locals are sentimental about the happy, drunken teen graduates, who are thanked by strangers for their future contributions to Denmark. Not far from the harbor, young people gathered at CopenHill, a towering Bjarke Ingels-designed waste-to-energy plant, which has a climbing wall on its exterior and a synthetic-grass ski slope down its side. A thirtysomething Danish guy offhandedly told me, “I pay fifty per cent of my income in taxes, and I’d gladly pay more.”

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    Sarah Larson

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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Trump Sends in the National Guard

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    Tourists who came to Washington, D.C., last week—tromping from one Smithsonian collection to another, eating ice cream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—witnessed a bit of history that they surely had not anticipated: the beginning of President Trump’s takeover of the District. At a press conference that Monday, Trump had vowed to bring order to a place that he said was beset by “total lawlessness,” and by “bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.” Within days, D.C.’s police force had been federalized, the National Guard had been mobilized, and hundreds of troops had shown up, many in drab-colored Humvees.

    Few tourists, and fewer locals, would recognize the nightmarish place in Trump’s depiction. D.C., like virtually every American city, has crime and homelessness; in 2023, it experienced a notable spike in carjackings. But its problems are long-simmering, not acute. According to Metropolitan Police Department statistics, violent crime is down twenty-six per cent since the same time last year.

    In any case, Trump’s display of federal muscle was concentrated not in the neighborhoods where crime is most prevalent but in the iconic, touristic spots near the White House. Perhaps he envisioned a sort of sequel to the military parade that he staged in June, with made-for-Fox-News visuals: National Guardsmen clustered around the Washington Monument, D.E.A. agents standing outside an upscale bakery in Georgetown. On Fourteenth Street, a lively night-life corridor with a diverse population, men wearing ICE and Homeland Security vests operated a checkpoint at which agents, several with faces covered, pulled over drivers and questioned them. (According to the Washington Post, at least two were detained.) People walking their dogs or heading out on dates stopped to heckle. “Oh, I feel so much safer,” a young woman scoffed. “Fascists, go home!” a guy on a bike shouted.

    Trump’s show of force is an imposition on a citizenry already aware that its democratic self-governance is tenuous. As advocates for D.C. statehood like to point out, the District has some seven hundred thousand residents—more than Wyoming or Vermont—but no right to elect a representative who can vote on legislation in Congress. Until the Home Rule Act of 1973 gave the city limited autonomy, it had no mayor or city council of its own. Even now, laws that the council approves after deliberation and public comment can be tossed out by Congress. This has happened many times over the years, usually with the aim of nullifying progressive legislation. In the eighties and nineties, Congress rejected a law to decriminalize gay sex and blocked the use of public funds for abortion services. This June, the House voted to repeal laws that allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections and that barred the police union from negotiating on disciplinary measures against officers. Two Republican congressmen recently introduced a bill that would revoke home rule altogether, in the interest of having Congress “manage the nation’s capital.”

    An effective plan to improve the lives of D.C. citizens would require detailed policy and a prolonged investment of time and funds—the sorts of things that Trump has zero interest in. What he wants is a redecoration reveal for D.C., as in his paving of the Rose Garden: a makeover heavy on ball gowns and bulletproof vests, light on poor people. “I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.” Advocates for the homeless say that it’s unclear where people will be sent; the city does not have enough beds in local shelters.

    As the week went on, Attorney General Pam Bondi attempted to usurp the authority of the police chief, Pamela Smith, by appointing the head of the D.E.A. as “emergency police commissioner.” The District pushed back, suing the Administration and arguing that its actions were “unnecessary and unlawful.” Americans have long been wary of using the military in local law enforcement, and for good reason. Soldiers generally don’t live in the places they’re dropped into; they don’t know the communities and are less answerable to them. They’re also usually not trained in law enforcement or empowered to make arrests, so using them to fight crime means relying heavily on the power of intimidation. Militarized patrols in city streets are uniquely chilling to the exercise of assembly and free speech.

    An 1878 law known as the Posse Comitatus Act generally restrains the use of the military for such purposes. (Trump’s recent deployment of the National Guard during anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles has been challenged in court.) But the District’s peculiar status makes it easy to use it as a laboratory. In D.C., the President is allowed to send in the National Guard without officially federalizing it. And the Home Rule Act authorizes him to take over the Metropolitan Police in case of “emergency.” Though these Presidential powers do not apply elsewhere, Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, worries that Trump’s recent use of the National Guard will be “desensitizing.”

    At the press conference where Trump announced his plans for D.C., he suggested that other cities could be next. “You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is,” he said. “New York has a problem.” (Baltimore and Oakland he dismissed as too “far gone.”) Days later, James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee, dutifully said that Trump’s “experiment” in D.C. ought to be replicated in “a lot of the Democrat-run cities in America.” There are ways around the Posse Comitatus Act, and Trump seems likely to test them. At a rally in L.A. where Governor Gavin Newsom was speaking last week, a force of Border Patrol agents, some armed with rifles, showed up uninvited. The Washington Post reported that the Administration was considering the creation of a “Domestic Civil Service Quick Disturbance Reaction Force”—hundreds of National Guard troops that could be deployed to cities to quell protests.

    At the checkpoint on Fourteenth Street last week, D.C. police officers at least felt compelled to answer residents when they asked what was going on. (“Traffic-safety check,” one said, unconvincingly.) The federal agents just turned their backs. Trump had said at the press conference that his law-and-order enforcers could do “whatever the hell they want.” That’s not true—but it’s truer than it used to be. ♦

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    Margaret Talbot

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  • Saoirse Ronan, Who’s Got a Hit at Telluride, Is Ready to “Get Off Her Arse”

    Saoirse Ronan, Who’s Got a Hit at Telluride, Is Ready to “Get Off Her Arse”

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    Saoirse Ronan has been a working actor for 20 years, but this was her first at the Telluride Film Festival. Back in 2017, Lady Bird premiered at the festival, but Ronanwas filming Mary Queen of Scots.

    So when Vanity Fair sat down with Ronan on Sunday, it was clear she was soaking in how special this mountain festival really is. She had struggled on the first day with the altitude, but was now enjoying the laid-back atmosphere that distinguishes it from other festivals, where talent is often rushing from red carpets to junkets, all the while trying to juggle the crowded, paparazzi-strewn streets. “I’ve never been to a festival like this before where it really does feel like it’s about the films,” she says. “There’s nothing about it that makes you feel like you’re on show – it feels more in line with the experience of actually making a film.”

    While screening her new film The Outrun, Ronan also received a Silver Medallion at the festival this year. She’s one of the youngest actors to ever receive the honor, but, at the age of 30, has had a longer career than most since she started when she was just nine years old. “Now that my personal life has sort of gone on and progressed, it’s given me more of a chance to reflect on this career that I have,” she says. “So I just love that I was getting to kind of celebrate that in a place like this.”

    After breaking out in the 2007 film Atonement, Ronan has grown up on the big screen, blossoming into an indie darling (Brooklyn, Foe) and as a close collaborator with Greta Gerwig, starring in both Lady Bird and Little Women. She’s also grown up in her personal life, marrying actor Jack Lowden this summer. This year, she’ll be seen in both Steve McQueen‘s World War II drama Blitz and the indie The Outrun.

    In The Outrun, Ronan delivers a fierce performance as Rona, a recovering addict who travels back to her childhood home in the windswept Orkney Islands. The film, based on Amy Liptrot‘s memoir of the same name, is directed by Nora Fingscheidt and produced by Ronan and her husband, Lowden.

    Vanity Fair: I heard it was actually your husband that introduced you to Amy Liptrot’s book.

    Saoirse Ronan: Yeah, he had gone to the Orkney Islands probably a year or so before we got together and loved the place, totally fell in love with it. And then we were in lockdown maybe three years after that and he read it for the first time, read it in two days, and as soon as he finished it, he handed it to me and he said, “This is the next role you have to play.” It’s an incredibly personal subject for me as it is for pretty much everyone. I think everyone’s been either directly or indirectly affected by this disease in particular. So it was always a subject that I wanted to explore at some point and I think that was finally the point in my life where I felt strong enough and secure enough to be able to really delve into it and crack it open.

    What was the biggest push back you got from potential financiers?

    The book isn’t very obviously adaptable. Amy is such an incredible writer, and I was struck most by her prose and the way in which she wrote and the kind of poetry that she used without it being pretentious. It still felt very grounded. And that’s beautiful to read, but— because it’s so sort of nonlinear and almost deconstructed in the way it’s presented as a book—to then adapt that into a screenplay, which, for the most part, needs to run in a certain way, that was always going to be difficult. So much of it is memory-based or it’s a thought that she has that’s very, very distant, and then you’ll tap into that for a minute and then you’re out of it again.

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    Rebecca Ford

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  • “I Want to Shoot…Now!”: How a New Documentary Captures the Totality of Faye Dunaway

    “I Want to Shoot…Now!”: How a New Documentary Captures the Totality of Faye Dunaway

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    It’s hard to imagine a better environment for the premiere of a documentary about the life and career of Faye Dunaway than the movie-exalting atmosphere that permeates the Cannes Film Festival. Here, the kind of filmmaking that the 83-year-old’s résumé represents (Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Network) reigns eternal. So it was that FAYE, from director Laurent Bouzereau, had its world debut on the Croisette this month attended by a packed audience, followed by solidly glowing reviews. Dunaway was once again in all of her widescreen glory: The film opens with the classic shot of the star beside the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool the morning after her 1977 Oscar victory—“the most famous shot in Hollywood history,” according to the documentary—slouching in a pink satin robe, newspaper headlines at her stiletto-shorn feet, statuette on the table, her face caught in a faraway look that says, according to her, “Is that all there is?”

    “She was the face of the poster not so long ago,” the festival’s director Thierry Frémaux said onstage. “She used to come here just to watch films. And it was something very impressive for audiences to see a star like her.”

    While Dunaway’s onscreen story has been filled with glory, her offscreen life was very different, seemingly written in disappearing ink, as she appeared to fade from the public eye in recent years. Now, here she was standing on a cinema stage again, alongside Bouzereau and her son, Liam O’Neill, to introduce the movie about her life.

    “It’s always an honor to present a film in Cannes,” she said, adding that the documentary was “a role I didn’t have to rehearse.”

    Then the lights went down and the audience could indulge in watching the movie star whose roles almost always came with conflict and turbulence.

    “Are we shooting?” she demands onscreen at the start of FAYE. “C’mon, I’m here! I want to shoot…Now!”

    Dunaway’s return to Cannes to walk the red carpet this year came during a feast of a festival, which featured other vintage names like Francis Ford Coppola (Megalopolis), Elizabeth Taylor (in the documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes), Meryl Streep (opening night honoree), George Lucas (receiving an honorary Palme d’Or), Demi Moore (The Substance), and even Donald Trump (embodied by the actor Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice).

    Dunaway’s appearance was perhaps the most surprising because few stars in the history of cinema have a more mercurial reputation.

    “Oy, vey, what a pain in the ass,” says Chinatown first AD Hawk Koch in the doc, remarking upon Dunaway’s habit of using Blistex—which he says was her “security blanket”—between takes.

    “Faye Dunaway in one word?” asks film historian Annette Insdorf. “Complicated.”

    In a clip included in the film, Johnny Carson asks Bette Davis on The Tonight Show if there is anyone in Hollywood she recalls as particularly difficult.

    “Yes,” Davis replies without missing a beat. “Faye Dunaway. And you can ask anyone else and they will tell you the same thing!”

    Bouzereau balances those kinds of barbs with admiring testimony from Dunaway’s friends, including Sharon Stone and Mickey Rourke.

    And amid all of it comes a revelation: Dunaway was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and suffered from manic depression and alcoholism. “I worked with a group of doctors who analyzed my behavior, who gave me prescriptions for pills they thought would be good for me,” she says in the film. “And that helped. So I am quieter. But throughout my career, people know there were tough times.”

    Bouzereau previously gave the documentary treatment to Natalie Wood and Steven Spielberg (whose production company, Amblin, produced FAYE for HBO, where the doc will stream later this year). How did Bouzereau get the notoriously private Dunaway to tell all before his cameras?

    “My producer/husband Markus Keith and I have enjoyed a friendship with both Faye and her son Liam,” he tells me. “We discussed the documentary over several meals and phone calls. Faye and Liam really liked my previous films—also, when Amblin’s producers (Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey) came on board, that sealed the deal, and we went to HBO with whom we had done two projects.”

    “It took time—and it was based on trust. We all knew this was going to be a challenge, but that’s not unique to Faye,” he continues. “Everyone we’ve ever made a film about always has that same initial reaction.”

    And so Dunaway sat for four separate interview sessions over a year, and the demons and difficulties from her past arose once again in what Deadline reviewer Pete Hammond called “a surprising, forthright and honest account of someone, as it is put in the film, who ‘started out as a normal person wanting to be famous, and ended up as a famous person wanting to be normal.’”

    Dunaway sits on a couch onscreen beside her son, who shows her a series of old photographs from a scrapbook that elicit a flood of memories.

    “Faye is perhaps someone that I have created,” she says in the documentary, explaining the difference between the life she was born into, as Dorothy Faye Dunaway, a cheerleader and beauty pageant contestant from the small town of Bascom, Florida who moved to New York in hopes of a career on the stage, and the global movie star she became. “It’s a persona that is related very much to my work, that’s specific to my career. That’s the actress, I suppose.”

    Then it was on to the roles: from The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968 to Supergirl in 1984, with so many classics in between, all befitting the widescreen where these movies were shown.

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    Mark Seal

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  • An Open Letter, an Editor’s Ouster, and the Ongoing Fight for the Future of Artforum

    An Open Letter, an Editor’s Ouster, and the Ongoing Fight for the Future of Artforum

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    Artforum editor in chief David Velasco was in Paris last month when an email landed in his inbox. It was an open letter, already signed by thousands in the arts community. “We support Palestinian liberation and call for an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes,” it stated. It was a little over a week after Hamas militants had ambushed civilians in an assault on southern Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking another 200 hostage. Israel’s ensuing shelling of the Gaza Strip was underway. “We are witnessing the unfolding of a genocide,” the letter read. It contained no reference to the October 7 attacks.

    As the missive found Velasco, Artforum’s editors had been mulling how the magazine, which he took over in 2017, should enter into the impassioned discourse that has surrounded the conflict. An essay would reflect just a single voice, but this open letter had already been endorsed by so many in the Artforum universe. There were artists who have appeared on the cover, cultural icons from different worlds—producer and musician Brian Eno, designer Martin Margiela, poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten, and musician Jarvis Cocker—and many, many writers for Artforum, both freelance and staffers. Velasco signed it as well.

    After a few days of deliberation with some staffers, including the online editors who would be responsible for posting the story, it went up on Artforum’s website on October 19 at 5:29 p.m. ET, with the headline, “An Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations.” The lead image was a 2021 work by the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir that consisted of a refugee tent with the names of villages overrun by Israeli troops in the 1948 war.

    Then the floodgates opened. The days that followed saw the publication of an opposing open letter signed by a number of art world heavyweights; reactions from a number of nervous, off put, or offended advertisers; defections from the original letter by famous artists and curators; the sacking of Velasco for an alleged breach of protocol; an uproar from staffers who quit in protest; and a hundreds-deep list of writers who have vowed not to write for Artforum again. There are undoubtedly much more serious ramifications of the Israel-Hamas war than the fate of a 70-something-year-old critical journal. But as the conflict continues to unfold, America’s most respected art publication has also now become an emblem of the cultural arguments raging around it. Whether Artforum will make it out, stature intact, is currently an open question.

    Velasco became the editor in chief during another crisis. In 2017, former publisher Knight Landesman, a ubiquitous presence on the art circuit for both his neon-shock suits and his Champagne-soaked brunches at his lower Broadway loft, was accused of sexual harassment by a number of women and sued by a former staffer alleging similar complaints. (Landesman did not publicly comment on the allegations at the time they were reported. A judge dismissed the staffer’s suit in 2019. She later settled with the magazine after appealing the earlier ruling.) The allegations against Landesman prompted editor in chief Michelle Kuo to step down. Velasco, who had been running Artforum.com, took over.

    The art world came to appreciate the Velasco era of the magazine, which expanded its purview while still maintaining prestige and, crucially, a sales team that could secure ads from the world’s most important galleries. Over time The Artforum Ad has become something of a product itself, sometimes personally designed by the artist of the show it advertised. Many subscribers read the magazine specifically for the ads, to know when shows are opening, and get excited for a spree of vernissage.

    At times under Velasco, Artforum found itself at the center of the cultural conversation, rare in an era of ADHD-addled attention spans and a splintering monoculture. These moments often came via the magazine’s willingness to insert itself into the discourse. In 2018, the magazine published an essay by Nan Goldin, accompanied by a series of photos, about her addiction to painkillers. The package spurred a full-on movement against the makers of OxyContin that would eventually scrape the Sackler name off museums worldwide. The next year, Artforum ran “The Tear Gas Biennial,” jointly written by Tobi Haslett, Ciarán Finlayson, and Hannah Black. The piece argued that artists in the 2019 Whitney Biennial should resign in protest of the museum’s vice board chair, Warren Kanders, whose portfolio included Defense Technology, a company that produces law enforcement tools, including tear gas. Eight artists pulled out. Kanders resigned from the board a week later.

    Five years into Velasco’s tenure as editor in chief came a surprise announcement. Artforum, which had been chiefly owned by publisher Anthony Korner for decades, would be sold to Penske Media Company, the stable of brand-name magazines run by the auto-services heir turned media mogul Jay Penske. It was an intriguing move, as Penske already owned a bunch of other art titles, including Art in America and ARTnews. But this was his style. After buying the Hollywood news site Deadline, he went on to build a mini monopoly by buying entertainment trades The Hollywood Reporter and Variety.

    The Artforum team was optimistic about the sale. The deal closed in December 2022, and at holiday parties that month, Velasco made the rounds radiating positivity, citing encouraging chats with the PMC brass that showed faith in their independent vision. In many ways, ARTnews was thriving under Penske, who bought the magazine four years earlier and allowed it to run mostly under its previous leadership. (I worked at ARTnews from 2015 to 2017, when it was owned by the collector Peter Brant.)

    It seemed like Artforum could thrive as well. Veteran staffer Danielle McConnell would stay on as the sole publisher following Korner’s divestment. (He remained on the masthead as publisher emeritus.) Kate Koza, who started as a marketing director at sister publication Bookforum in 2014 before switching to Artforum in 2017, would be associate publisher. There was a public outcry when PMC shuttered Bookforum upon completion of the acquisition, but at the flagship, it seemed like everything was working out swimmingly. A few months after the purchase, I attended an Artforum dinner in Chicago, during that city’s contemporary art fair. Among magazine staffers from the New York office were representatives from the biggest local museums, galleries, and private collections in town— not to mention the director of Expo Chicago, Tony Karman, the Energizer Bunny-esque forever-champion of the Chicago art scene. The mood was ecstatic. The Artforum Brand, I realized, was a big draw, especially in places like The Second City. It was a wonderful night of great food and plentiful wine at Publican Quality Meats in the West Loop. And there was no indication that there was anything but mutual admiration between the people hosting the dinner: the publisher, McConnell, and the editor, Velasco.

    After receiving the open letter last month, Velasco deliberated with several other editors, a source said, without identifying the editors by name. Another source, who is close to the situation at Artforum, explained that the primary points of contact in the debate had been the senior editors for the website, Zack Hatfield and Chloe Wyma. (Neither Hatfield nor Wyma responded to my requests for comment.) The magazine’s print-web divide is fairly firmly delineated and the top brass under Velasco—the managing editor and two executive editors—aren’t usually consulted before an article is published on the website.

    “This is on the web, so this is for the web editors, and that’s how we always do it,” the latter Artforum source explained. “The senior editors for print are never consulted for the web. That’s just not how it works.”

    After the letter was published, things got heated quickly. In addition to omitting mention of the October 7 attacks, the piece uses several terms—including “genocide” and “Palestinian liberation”—that have become flashpoints in public debate. The Artforum account on X posted a link, which was taken down soon after—even though the letter still appeared on the website. Then people started taking their names off the letter. Among those to withdraw their support were artists Peter Doig, Joan Jonas, Tomás Saraceno, and Katharina Grosse.

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    Nate Freeman

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