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 MARCH 3, 2025

6 GOINGS ON
9 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Jonathan Blitzer on Trump’s chaos at Guantánamo;
metallurgy for awards season; Judy Collins’s poetry;
how to encounter a waterfall; badges for billionaires.
ANNALS OF THE SEA
Julian Lucas 14 The Sunken Place
Diving for history in the wreckage of slave ships.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Patricia Marx 21 You Have Reached the U.S. Government
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Rebecca Mead 22 Flirting with Disaster
Amelia Dimoldenberg subverts the celebrity interview.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Gideon Lewis-Kraus 28 The End of Children
What do falling birth rates mean for the future?
TAKES
Michael Cunningham 37 Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.”
LETTER FROM UKRAINE
Joshua Yaffa 42 Shadow Warrior
The spy behind Kyiv’s boldest covert operations.
FICTION
Joseph O’Neill 54 “Keuka Lake”
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Adam Gopnik 61 The Gilded Age, then and now.
BOOKS
65 Briefly Noted
Maggie Doherty 67 Robert Frost, trickster poet.
MUSICAL EVENTS
Alex Ross 72 Edmond Dédé’s “Morgiane” and the value of diversity.
ON TELEVISION
Inkoo Kang 74 “The White Lotus.”
POEMS
Robert Pinsky 34 “Izzy Kasoff ”
Danielle Legros Georges 58 “To Sew a Freedom Suit”
COVER
Barry Blitt “You’re Fired!”

DRAWINGS Avi Steinberg, Johnny DiNapoli, William Haefeli, Mike Twohy, Patrick McKelvie,
Chris Gural, Emily Flake, Suerynn Lee, Sarah Kempa, Barbara Smaller, Rich North, Teresa Burns Parkhurst,
Ali Solomon, E. S. Glenn, Ken Levine, Sam Gross SPOTS Federica Del Proposto
 CONTRIBUTORS
Gideon Lewis-Kraus (“The End of Chil- Joshua Yaffa (“Shadow Warrior,” p. 42) is
dren,” p. 28) is a staff writer at the mag- a contributing writer and the author of
azine. He is the author of the memoir “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition,
Conversations “A Sense of Direction.” and Compromise in Putin’s Russia.”

that change Julian Lucas (“The Sunken Place,” p. 14),

a staff writer, was a finalist for the Nona
Rebecca Mead (“Flirting with Disas-
ter,” p. 22), a staff writer, most recently
your world. Balakian Citation for Excellence in
Reviewing from the National Book
published the memoir “Home/Land.”

Critics Circle in 2021. Jonathan Blitzer (Comment, p. 9), a staff

writer, is the author of “Everyone Who
Sarah Larson (The Talk of the Town, Is Gone Is Here.”
p. 11) is a staff writer and has been with
the magazine since 2001. Maggie Doherty (Books, p. 67) is the
author of “The Equivalents: A Story of
Robert Pinsky (Poem, p. 34) served as Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation
U.S. Poet Laureate for three terms. His in the 1960s.” She teaches at Harvard
most recent poetry collection is “Prov- University.
erbs of Limbo.”
Joseph O’Neill (Fiction, p. 54) is the au-
Robyn Weintraub (Puzzles & Games thor of “Godwin,” a finalist for the 2024
Dept.), who has been constructing cross- National Book Critics Circle Award.
words since 2010, began creating puz-
zles for The New Yorker in 2020. Danielle Legros Georges (Poem, p. 58),
who died in February, was a poet and
Michael Cunningham (Takes, p. 37) is a translator whose books include “Three
the author of novels including “The Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the
Hours” and “Day,” and the story col- Haiti-Congo Story” and “Blue Flare,”
Join The New Yorker’s lection “A Wild Swan and Other Tales.” a volume of translated Haitian poetry.
editor, David Remnick,
for in-depth interviews
and thought-provoking THIS WEEK IN THE NEW YORKER APP
discussions about politics,
culture, and the arts.

Read Kyle Chayka on distraction and doomscrolling during

the second Trump Administration, and catch his weekly
Infinite Scroll column about Internet culture every Wednesday.
ARIEL DAVIS

Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
 THE MAIL
CUTTING ROOM dium came into view. For British sports
fans, the iconic towers of “the cathedral
Michael Schulman’s piece about Char- of football” were as beloved as Fenway
lotte Zwerin was an important reminder Park’s Green Monster or the ivy-covered
of the overlooked role of women editors walls of Wrigley Field. The stadium
in the history of film (“Charlotte’s Place,” needed to be updated, but the towers
January 27th). The first great documen- could have been incorporated into a new
tary, Dziga Vertov’s silent city-symphony structure. Instead, Foster, who purport-
“Man with a Movie Camera” (1929), slyly edly regarded them as “dead space,” tore
undercuts its title—and its male direc- them down. The new stadium is func-
tor—by observing the painstaking labor tionally adequate, but it is just one more
of its editor, Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov’s example of an architectural establish-
wife. She is shown whirring through the ment that chases after innovation at the
reels, cutting out celluloid strips of scenes, expense of local communities.
and placing them on a light box to fig- Bernard N. Howard
ure out how to rearrange them. The cam- Birmingham, Ala.
era stops, as if in thrall to her, and lin- 1
gers over a few frames, before the image THE GREAT ESCAPE
comes to life again.
Brian Gibson Gary Shteyngart equates Canadians with
Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia capybaras when discussing his devotion
to the animals, but he could have pur-
In 1989, I attended the première of sued the Canadian connection further
Zwerin’s “Thelonious Monk: Straight, (“Capybara, Mon Cœur,” February 3rd).
No Chaser,” at the New York Film Fes- In May, 2016, two capybaras escaped from
tival, with my late husband, the film- Toronto’s High Park Zoo; dubbed Bon-
maker Christian Blackwood. As Schul- nie and Clyde, they spent several weeks
man mentions, Zwerin’s film was edited on the lam in High Park, sometimes frol-
from fourteen hours of footage taken, in icking within plain sight while eluding
the late sixties, for a German TV special capture, even by a Brazilian capybara
that Christian and his brother Michael wrangler. Many Canadians went from
had produced. Christian, a gifted cine- not knowing that such critters existed to
matographer and documentary director, becoming capybara-crazy. Months later,
had followed Monk at home and on tour back behind bars at the zoo (where they
in Europe for more than six months. As still live as star attractions), Bonnie and
I sat in the audience that night, watch- Clyde became parents to three “capy-
ing Charlotte’s brilliant edit of Chris- babies,” a term coined by Toronto’s then
tian’s footage, I could not understand mayor, John Tory. Tens of thousands of
why Christian wasn’t given a co-director Canadians participated in a contest to
credit. Although Zwerin was overshad- name them, resulting in Alex, Geddy, and
owed by the Maysleses, at least they gave Neil, after the members of the beloved
her credit where credit was due. Canadian rock band Rush. Bonnie and
Carolyn Marks Blackwood Clyde’s saga appealed to the Canadian
Staatsburg, N.Y. predilection for rooting for the little guy,
1 central to our sense of national identity.
REMEMBERING WEMBLEY Christine Sharp
Aylesford, Nova Scotia
Ian Parker’s Profile of the architect Nor-
man Foster reminded me of growing up •
as a soccer-mad boy in London (“The Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
Master Builder,” January 27th). When- address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
ever I took the Tube to my school, there [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
was a thrilling moment when the two any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
white towers of the old Wembley Sta- of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
 purported to record the departed). In them we
see hands hovering near a translucent crystal
GOINGS ON ball that transfix, in part because Sepuya lets
them rest in the scale that suits the intimacy of
FEBRUARY 26 – MARCH 4, 2025 the spirit within. For years now, the forty-two-
year-old artist has included a silver globe in
his large-scale color photographs, and it’s back
again here, sometimes representing the act of
seeing itself. Taking the studio as a big theme,
Sepuya uses photography to describe what Ma-
tisse tried to get at in his “Red Studio” (1911):
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. the question of what is the artist’s home? A place
of rest, or repose? And without the artist in the
picture, what does it tell us about his spirit?
The opera “Moby-Dick,” adapted from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, with Sepuya’s studio is a queer space, affording him
the “trance” of artistic creation, maybe with a
music by Jake Heggie, a libretto by Gene Scheer, and direction by Lenny Foglia, little trance music in the background; each pho-
premièred in 2010; now at the Metropolitan Opera (March 3-29), the produc- tograph brings about a heightened conscious-
tion reaches new heights, with sailors climbing masts and ropes that extend up ness.—Hilton Als (Bortolami; through March 1.)
to the rafters. The principal vocalists—including the tenor Stephen Costello, OFF BROADWAY | Bess Wohl’s deft, discursive
as Greenhorn (the stand-in for Ishmael), and Brandon Jovanovich (pictured), memory play “Liberation,” directed by Whitney
as Captain Ahab—and a robust chorus are bolstered by the Met’s orchestra. White, mainly takes place in the nineteen-sev-
enties, in an Ohio rec center, during the weekly
Will the famous whale continue to elude the audience as it has Ahab? “We meeting of a consciousness-raising group.
may see a little bit more of it this time,” Foglia hinted, coyly.—Jane Bua Struggles abound: Lizzie (Susannah Flood)
worries she’s insufficiently radical; Margie (Betsy
Aidem) regrets her marriage; Celeste (Kristo-
lyn Lloyd) compartmentalizes her emotions.
(They almost all hate their bodies, then strip
in a liberatory scene.) Wohl, seemingly using
Flood as her avatar, tells us she’s simultane-
ously paying tribute to her mother—the real
Lizzie—and grieving feminist progress itself.
Wohl admits her own limitations (particularly
on matters of race), and doesn’t offer explicit
solutions. The play implies one, though: every
scene shows the women gathering, week by week,
in person, as the work of solidarity moves over
and through them.—Helen Shaw (Laura Pels;
through March 30.)

DANCE | The annual Flamenco Festival returns

to City Center with a strong lineup of familiar
artists spread across three productions. “Alter
Ego” is a two-hander for Alfonso Losa and Patri-
cia Guerrero. He’s polished, she’s playful; what
happens when they get together? “Muerta de
Amor” is the latest from Manuel Liñán, whose
signature cross-dressing is just the most obvi-
ous sign of his open imagination. He’s backed
by men in black in an exploration of desire
and its absence. The closer is reserved for the
ABOUT TOWN august Eva Yerbabuena, still a wonder. Her
“Yerbagüena (Oscuro Brillante)” is built around
contrasts combined, like the “bright darkness”
INDIE ROCK | As Father John Misty, the singer amalgamation of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, of the subtitle, or the traditional and the avant-
and multi-instrumentalist Josh Tillman stages Part 1” and “Part 2”—lives so dissolutely that garde.—Brian Seibert (City Center; March 6-9.)
albums as little psychodramas. Since his brief his father (Matthews), the king of England,
stint with the band Fleet Foxes, Tillman has openly wishes his son had been switched at birth MOVIES | For her first feature, “L´Homme-Vertige:
built out existential concept records that span with the spitfire soldier Hotspur (James Udom). Tales of a City,” the Guadeloupian filmmaker
folk, big-band jazz, soft rock, and indie pop, with Yet Hal’s shenanigans, pursued in the company Malaury Eloi Paisley returns, after years abroad,
a satirist’s eye for the disturbingly absurd. His of Sir John Falstaff (Jay O. Sanders), that poor to her home town of Pointe-à-Pitre and inter-
sophomore record, “I Love You, Honeybear,” man’s bon vivant, mask aspirations of greatness. views a few fascinating but troubled residents.
which turned ten this month, was a breathtaking Likewise, this production meets the eye humbly, Among them are Eddy, an energetic rapper who’s
ZENITH RICHARDS / COURTESY MET OPERA

and baroque deconstruction of self, but subse- no more than a small stage with two chairs. addicted to crack; Ti Chal, a former revolution-
quent releases have looked outward (and sky- Then, largely through the force of its language— ary activist who, long ago, met Fidel Castro, and
ward), considering nihilism, celebrity, mortality, wisely foregrounded by the director, Eric now lives in a retirement home while battling
divinity, and their intersections. On his album Tucker, and vivified by a cast with several stand- cancer; a grizzled and taciturn poet named Eric;
from last year, “Mahashmashana,” which takes outs, including Udom and Sanders—it grows and Priscilla, a young woman who lives in a
its title from a Sanskrit word for the cremation to encompass a murmuring woods, a raucous housing project that’s being demolished. In
pit, he riffs on the idea of the place where the pub, and the rocky, sometimes treacherous ter- poised and probing images of the cityscape in
universe dies and is reborn, continuing a probing rain of personal ambition.—Dan Stahl (Polonsky decay, Paisley conveys the participants’ grandeur
journey toward spiritual revelation.—Sheldon Shakespeare Center; through March 2.) amid ruins. Above all, she reveals a state of
Pearce (Beacon Theatre; Feb. 26.) mind—people frozen in time by the cold and
ART | In Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s elegant new show, distant grip of metropolitan France on their
OFF BROADWAY | Hal (Elijah Jones), the young “TRANCE,” there are two pictures redolent of lives and their history.—Richard Brody (BAM
protagonist of Dakin Matthews’s “Henry IV”—an nineteenth-century spirit photography (which Cinemas; March 1.)

6 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025

 1
ON AND OFF THE AVENUE
The Penny Lane Is Back
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary
of Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous,” the
director’s stylish semi-autobiographical film
about an aspiring teen-age music critic in the
nineteen-seventies who goes on tour with a
sybaritic rock band. The film remains beloved
for many reasons—including Philip Seymour
Hoffman’s perfect performance as the unsparing
critic Lester Bangs, who dishes out the indeli-
ble advice that “The only true currency in this
bankrupt world is what you share with some-
one else when you’re uncool”—but chief among
them may be the louche, bohemian costumes,
designed by Betsy Heimann. Perhaps the film’s
1
TABLES FOR TWO
expanded to the mainland; New York
got an L&L in 2004 and lost it about a
most iconic piece is a long, green suède coat
with an oversized white shearling collar and
decade later. At last, L&L is back, now matching cuffs worn by Kate Hudson, as the
L&L Hawaiian Barbecue run by the franchisees Henry and Sephra ingénue Penny Lane, a free-spirited moppet
201 Allen St. Engel, siblings from Oahu, with branches
who follows the band around but insists she
is not a groupie. (She prefers the term “band
There’s something ritualistically precise on Allen Street, East Harlem, and, soon, aide.”) Heimann later admitted that she cut up
about the Hawaiian plate lunch. A scoop Bushwick. L&L is a mid-tier fast-food an Urban Outfitters shag rug to make the coat’s
furry trimmings. What began as a unique D.I.Y.
of pale macaroni salad, almost quietly chain and looks every inch of it. As on project has spawned many riffs—and has come
radical in its steadfast, defiant plainness, most fast-food menus, what appear to be roaring back into fashion. The “Penny Lane coat”
nestles next to two scoops of white rice (it a vast number of options are actually just seems to be newly everywhere this season; Dua
Lipa recently stepped out in a Bottega Veneta
must be two, never three, never one). The a few core elements, remixed: teriyaki- burgundy-leather version, Bella Hadid was spot-
rice serves as both a foundation and a me- marinated chicken thighs; kalua pork, ted wearing a tawny suède-and-shearling coat
diator, bridging the creamy blandness of pulled with just a hint of smoke; salty- by Anna Sui this winter, and, over Super Bowl
weekend, Taylor Swift swanned around New Or-
the pasta salad with the blunt-instrument sweet beef ribs cut kalbi-style, crosswise leans in a fluff-lined number by Charlotte Simone,
intensity of the plate lunch’s third and against the bones; big, meaty shrimp a London-based outerwear designer whose vin-
central component, one kind or another tossed in a gorgeously garlicky sauce. tage-inspired faux-fur pieces have become highly
coveted owing to the fact that Simone releases
of salty, savory meat. L&L’s food hits with all the subtlety just three limited drops per year. The next Sim-
The plate lunch’s origins lie in the co- of a sledgehammer, and that’s precisely one drop, which will last only one week online,
lonial plantations of the late nineteenth the point. There are leavening notes: a is on March 26—but, if you can’t wait, you can
find plenty of authentic, pre-owned Penny Lane
century, when agricultural workers— jazzy sliver of cruciferousness from the coats on Etsy and eBay. Nothing is more rock and
Indigenous Hawaiians and people cabbage that comes with the kalua pork, roll, after all, than the real thing.—Rachel Syme
brought in from Japan, China, the Phil- or the sharp whistle of vinegar that runs
ippines, and elsewhere—broke at mid- through the thin, sweet sauce drizzled over
day for easy, cheap meals of rice packed the juicy, panko-crisped chicken katsu
PHOTOGRAPH BY IAN LORING SHIVER FOR THE NEW YORKER (TOP);

up with leftovers. As Hawaii’s economy (my clear favorite of the proteins). Get a
shifted, so did lunch: ersatz food carts musubi or two, which is marvellous, the
sprang up, serving Japanese katsu, Chi- squishy pillow of rice, the ineffable Spam-
nese char siu, Filipino adobo, along with miness of Spam, the sweet smear of teri-
rice and macaroni salad, bland and may- yaki. With the exception of the loco moco
ILLUSTRATION BY MARIE-INES GUL (BOTTOM)

onnaise-y, the indelible influence of the (hamburger patties doused in flavorless

American mainland. The soul of the plate gravy and topped with fried eggs), the
lunch remains unchanged: caloric and rib- plate lunch doesn’t miss—even the maca-
sticking, elevated, through the decades, to roni salad, in its plain, soothing simplicity,
something approximating an icon. is exactly right—it’s a big, brawny meal to
L&L Hawaiian Barbecue began in fuel a hard day’s work, or a long afternoon’s
Honolulu in 1976. After blanketing nap. The portions are enormous, the prices
Hawaii’s islands with some forty-nine reasonable, the flavors straightforward: NEWYORKER.COM/NEWSLETTERS
shops by 1999, the company’s founder, salt, fat, acid, meat. ($6.75-$19.75.) Get expanded versions of Helen Rosner’s reviews,
Eddie Flores, Jr., and his business partner —Helen Rosner plus Goings On, delivered early in your in-box.

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 7

 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT The episode featured all the elements want them coming back,” Trump said
ABOUT-FACE of the new political order. Migrants were of the Venezuelans sent to Guantánamo.
villainized and treated like an existential He offered no evidence. Neither did
he military prison at Guantánamo threat to the country. There was not even Noem, who said that they were “mainly
T Bay, Cuba, has long occupied a
blighted corner of the American legal
a semblance of transparency or account-
ability. Amid the chaos, it was easy to
child pedophiles” who were “trafficking
children, trafficking drugs.”
system. Multiple Administrations have overlook the fact that the Venezuelans But, owing to the work of journalists
tried, and failed, to close the facility, were being returned to a brutal dictator- and lawyers, information slowly trick-
which opened in 2002 and at one point ship; in 2022, Marco Rubio, Trump’s Sec- led out about the detainees. Then, on
held nearly eight hundred terrorism sus- retary of State, said that deporting peo- Thursday, the government acknowledged
pects, commonly called “the worst of the ple there was “a very real death sentence.” that more than fifty of them had no
worst” because of their purported ties to Guantánamo provided the ideal stage criminal record apart from entering the
the attacks of 9/11. Many of them spent for Trump’s brand of political theatre. country unlawfully. One was an asylum
at least a decade there without facing His “mass deportation” agenda is pre- seeker who had passed his preliminary
actual charges or having a trial. All but mised on the idea that all undocumented screening, but had lost his case while
fifteen had finally been released or trans- immigrants are criminals, and that any representing himself before an immi-
ferred when, earlier this month, Don- differences in the labels used to describe gration judge. His sister learned that he
ald Trump added a fresh indignity to them—whether gang members, terror- was in Guantánamo when the Trump
Guantánamo’s dark history. ists, or, to quote Kristi Noem, the Sec- Administration posted photos of the
Over several days, beginning on Feb- retary of Homeland Security, “dirt- first migrants arriving there.
ruary 4th, the government sent a hun- bags”—are merely semantic. “Some of The abruptness of their removal from
dred and seventy-eight Venezuelan mi- them are so bad we don’t even trust the the facility, however, shouldn’t be mis-
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO; SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GETTY

grants apprehended on U.S. soil to the countries to hold them, because we don’t taken for a broader lack of planning.
site. They were held incommunicado; a Trump wants to systematically expand
hundred and twenty-seven of them were the role of the military in his immigra-
in Camp 6, which was once reserved for tion crackdown. Usually, deportations
alleged Al Qaeda combatants. On Feb- are carried out by planes chartered by
ruary 12th, four legal groups, including Immigration and Customs Enforce-
the American Civil Liberties Union, ment (ICE), which can accommodate
filed a lawsuit on behalf of three of the about a hundred and fifty passengers.
Venezuelans. “Remarkably,” the emer- But the Administration has taken to
gency motion noted, “these detainees using military aircraft. These planes are
now have less access to counsel than the smaller, carrying roughly eighty people,
military detainees at Guantánamo who and, as a Reuters analysis pointed out,
have been held under the laws of war the cost per person can be more than
in the aftermath of September 11.” This five times that of a first-class ticket on
past Thursday, before a judge could issue a commercial airline. Late last month,
a ruling, the Trump Administration an- Trump signed a memorandum with the
nounced that it had deported nearly all Departments of Defense and Home-
the Venezuelans to an airbase in Hon- land Security authorizing the transfer
duras. From there, they would be flown of thirty thousand migrants to Guan-
back to Venezuela. tánamo. The plan continues apace. In a
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 9
court filing, an ice official said that the Trump, on his first day in office, though any Venezuelan in the country
base “will temporarily house aliens be- signed a dozen immigration-related ex- might be a member.
fore they are removed,” and that doing ecutive orders, in which he described The only way to counteract such ma-
so is “necessary to complete the ongo- global mass migration as a form of “in- neuvers is to call them out—something
ing removal operations.” Meanwhile, vasion.” According to one order, the that the Democrats have yet to do. The
according to the Times, the Adminis- military has a “well-established role” in President spoke publicly about the Guan-
tration is making preparations to hold repelling “unlawful forays by foreign tánamo plan at a press conference where
thousands of undocumented immigrants nationals.” Another invokes the Alien he signed the first law of his second
at military sites across the U.S. Enemies Act, a remnant of the Alien term: the Laken Riley Act, named for a
There are many logistical impedi- and Sedition Acts of 1798, which could Georgia nursing student murdered by
ments to Trump’s agenda. One is tied allow the Administration to detain and an undocumented Venezuelan immi-
to foreign policy. Planes need a place deport immigrants, including those who grant last year. The law, which requires
to land, and many countries, including are here lawfully, if they were born in the detention of any undocumented per-
Venezuela, have typically refused to re- countries that it considers hostile to the son charged with a misdemeanor, such
ceive deportees. The government claims U.S. That order defines a Venezuelan as shoplifting or minor theft, passed with
that Guantánamo helps it address this gang called Tren de Aragua, Mexican bipartisan votes. Congressional Demo-
challenge. But, at the end of January, cartels, and the Central American street crats and their staffs say privately that,
Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, gang MS-13 as “foreign terrorist orga- on immigration issues, the voters “have
agreed to start accepting deportation nizations.” During Trump’s first term, spoken.” Trump’s promise to execute
flights. Other countries, including Pan- when the majority of migrants at the mass deportations may have helped him
ama, are now receiving migrants from border were Central Americans, he win, but it’s one thing for Americans to
around the world deported by the U.S. turned MS-13 into a byword for mi- support a slogan and quite another for
Given all that, sending the detainees grant crime. Now that Venezuelans are them to face up to the human conse-
to Guantánamo seems more like a the most visible group, he is focussing quences. If Democrats don’t look away,
public-relations stunt than like an op- on Tren de Aragua. The gang is real, maybe the public won’t, either.
erational decision. but the gambit is to make it seem as —Jonathan Blitzer

AWARDS SEASON UPDATE curtains of the John Street Theatre, in Steinbeck estate was having an auction
LOST AND FOUND lower Manhattan. at Bonhams, and the items included the
In the nineteen-forties, in support of plaque he’d won in 1938, for the stage
the war effort, the Circle announced that version of “Of Mice and Men.” Feld-
the prize would be cast in plaster instead man nabbed it for three grand.
of metal. Along the way, the matrix for “I wanted to ‘Jurassic Park’ this,” Feld-
the plaque went missing. Brooks Atkin- man said the other day, at his West Vil-
son, the Circle’s founding president, later lage apartment. He took the subway to
he fresh batch of Oscar statuettes wrote that “the first thing a drama critic Greenpoint, where he was meeting Han-
T that will be handed out in Holly-
wood this weekend are actually New
has to do when he applies for admission
to heaven is to convince St. Peter that
nah and the sculptor Anna Poor, the
artist’s granddaughter. (They’re distantly
York natives—cast in bronze and elec- he is not personally responsible.” For de- related to the Standard & Poor’s Poors,
troplated in gold at a Hudson Valley cades, the group handed out paper scrolls.
foundry called Urban Art Projects. Its current president, the Time Out critic
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, another au- Adam Feldman, used to print them at
gust award, only six years younger than Kinko’s. But “it’s a prestigious old award,
the Academy’s, is being raised from the and it deserves to be something more
dead. The New York Drama Critics’ substantial,” he said.
Circle was founded in 1935, by a frac- Feldman became president in 2005,
tious group of theatre critics who were and, when he discovered a photo of the
outraged over the Pulitzer board’s se- original plaque, he went on a hunt. He
lections, particularly its snub of the play- tried Anderson’s archives—no luck.
wright Maxwell Anderson. The next Then, in 2009, he got an e-mail from
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

year, the Circle gave its inaugural award Caroline Hannah, a design historian at
for Best American Play to Anderson, Bard who was writing her dissertation
for his verse drama “Winterset.” The on Henry Varnum Poor, the artist who
prize was a nickel-bronze plaque with designed the plaque, and was seeking
an intricate relief depicting a 1790 per- more information about it. “I told her
formance of “The Contrast,” the first that I had looked for it, but I hadn’t had
American comedy staged by a profes- any success,” Feldman recalled. In 2023,
sional troupe, framed by the billowing Hannah contacted him again: the John Bill Makky
10 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
but “we didn’t get any of the money,” he predicted. Some things, once they’re Brooks movies, like ‘Blazing Saddles.’”
Anna said. “We were the artist Poors.”) gone, can’t be resurrected. A recent note from her friend Bill Clin-
They convened at Bedi-Makky Art —Michael Schulman ton sat on a table; Collins performed at
Foundry, whose steward, a stout, kindly 1 his inaugural gala in 1993. Once, while
man named Bill Makky, had agreed to WHERE THE TIME GOES DEPT. staying at the White House, Collins
reproduce the plaque in bronze. The TURN, TURN, TURN knocked her travel-coffee setup off the
century-old workshop occupies a brick bathroom sink. “There I was in the mid-
building surrounded by auto shops, with dle of the night, cleaning up coffee
cinder-block walls covered in antique grounds in the Lincoln Bedroom,” she
tools. On one table was a giant human said. “In the morning, they brought me
arm, part of a monument of Father the most wonderful coffee.”
Capodanno bound for Staten Island; in She glided past a sculpture of the Bud-
back was a plaster mold of the head of n March, Judy Collins, the ethereal, dha topped with a Viking helmet and
Martin Luther King, Jr., for a bust that
sits in the Oval Office. The foundry is
Iebrate
blue-eyed folksinging legend, will cel-
her eighty-fifth birthday with a
proceeded into a splendiferous living
room: a mint-green floral diptych, beau-
also responsible for the Iwo Jima me- concert at Town Hall and the release of tifully eerie Walton Ford bird paintings,
morial, the Wall Street bull (“I made a book. “I tell people that I’m eighty-five plants and Tiffany lamps galore, couches
eight of them,” Makky said), and his and it’s the new twenty-seven,” Collins piled with needlepoint pillows (“TOO
weirdest job, “an eighteen-to-twenty- said on a recent morning. Her hair is MUCH OF A GOOD THING IS WONDER-
inch bronze dildo, for Madonna.” now short and white, her vibe eternally FUL”). Two Persian cats exuded fluffy
The Steinbeck plaque was face up in beatific. She showed a visitor around her gravitas. “The white one is Tom Wolfe,
a metal contraption called a casting flask. sunny, colorful, maximalist Upper West and Rachmaninoff is hovering some-
Makky was using a method known as Side apartment, where she has lived for where,” Collins said. She bent to stroke
French-sand casting, which he’d deter- fifty-five years, full of evidence of a ro- Tom Wolfe’s head, then sat on a couch
mined was used for the original plaque— bust and Zelig-like life. In a hallway, a and talked about her new book. She has
possibly at the very same foundry. (The photograph of Collins on the set of “Ses- written several, including a memoir,
Oscars are now made with 3-D print- ame Street,” with the Muppets (“I sang “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes,” from 2011, named
ing and lost-wax casting.) In the cor- an aria with Snuffleupagus”), and gold for the Stephen Stills song about her. (A
ner, he had a vat of silty brown sand and platinum records, framed; in the din- guitar that Stills gave her in 1968 was
from a French riverbed, which the ing room, an Al Hirschfeld portrait of propped against a wall.) The new book
foundry has used and reused for a hun- Collins in “Peer Gynt” at the Delacorte, is a collection of poetry. “I have always
dred years. First, he dusted the plaque in 1969, wide-eyed and looming over tried to write poetry because I can try to
with talcum powder, then sprinkled on Stacy Keach. “I played the long-suffering turn it into songs,” Collins said. “In 2016,
fine sand with a sieve. He layered it with Solveig,” she said. “The songs were by I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to write
more sand, until it looked like a choc- John Morris, who wrote music for Mel ninety poems in ninety days.’ And he
olate sheet cake. “A lot of what I do is
almost like cooking,” he said, as he pat-
ted the sand down with a mallet.
“This is the moment of truth,” Makky
announced, carefully lifting the sand mold
from the plaque: a perfect negative.
“Beautiful,” Poor said, gasping. Makky
would make at least ten molds off the
Steinbeck plaque, then cook them in a
kiln at a thousand degrees, pour in mol-
ten nickel bronze, break the molds off,
and water down the sand for reuse. Come
spring, the Circle will award a playwright
a metal plaque for the first time in eight
decades. “It’s a thrill to see it rejuvenated,”
Poor said, of her grandfather’s creation.
Makky learned his trade from his fa-
ther, a Hungarian immigrant, and is
teaching it to his three sons. But the
foundry, among the last of its kind, may
not survive. Makky can’t afford to buy
out his sister, so he’s planning to sell the
foundry, perhaps as soon as this spring.
“This place is going to be bulldozed,” “Maybe let’s get your misplaced car keys at the end.”
said, ‘Why don’t you write three hun- that it was a song, and that she was re- vertical drop. If it’s more gradual, it
dred and sixty-five poems for the year, cording it the next day. Her version was should be at least twenty feet high.” He
and then you’ll have a whole book at the a hit. Later, she encouraged Cohen to went on, “There are people, like my dad,
end?’ Well, he was right, and that book sing, and he encouraged her to write. who think a waterfall has to be thirty
is ‘Sometimes It’s Heaven.’” Collins’s husband, Louis Nelson, died feet high. I disagree there, but I see where
“I got hooked with songwriting be- suddenly, in December, of cancer; the he’s coming from.”
cause Leonard Cohen said to me, in Buddha in the helmet is for him. “I call Ozboyd is a waterfall wunderkind
1966, ‘I don’t know why you’re not writ- him my Viking angel,” Collins said. “He who has been chronicling waterfalls in
designed the Korean War memorial on Georgia since he was a homeschooled
the Mall. He was a brilliant designer, a teen. At thirteen, he started a hiking
brilliant man, a great partner for forty- blog. At seventeen, he compiled the
six years.” It was a season of striking loss. Georgia Waterfall Database, which lists
Within a few weeks, Collins also lost every qualifying cataract, and, soon af-
her brother, her friend Marshall Brick- terward, began researching a book that
man, and her friend and fellow-folk- he recently published. (He is now twenty-
singer Peter Yarrow. “It was like a mass three.) “Waterfalls of Georgia” makes
exodus,” she said. “Here comes Gabriel the case, Ozboyd said, “that Georgia is
with his horn! Get ready.” In 1992, she just as impressive a waterfall state as
lost her son to suicide, and Joan Rivers, Pennsylvania, and not far off from North
empathizing, called with advice: “She Carolina and New York. We’ll never be
said, ‘I know that you’ll want to cancel Hawaii or Washington, of course.” He
everything, and you can’t do that, be- added, “But Georgia should be known
cause if you cancel you’re not going to for its waterfalls, too.”
get over this.’” A few days later, Collins The book, full of Ozboyd’s splashy
played a show in Palm Springs. “It ab- photography and descriptions, identi-
Judy Collins solutely works,” she said. “You have to fies seven hundred and thirty-five wa-
be focussed. You have to be present. The terfalls across the Peach State, fourteen
ing songs,’” she continued. “So I went work is healing, and being at a certain of which were “undocumented”—a more
home, and I wrote a song called ‘Since place at a certain time.” precise term than “undiscovered”—be-
You’ve Asked.’ And it took me forty Collins seems youthful, despite ev- fore he arrived. (Hunters and fishermen
minutes. That’s how they hook you. And erything. “As long as I can keep my may have encountered them first.) The
then the next song took about five years.” bones,” she said. “I gave up skiing, which waterfaller’s tools: obscure blogs, Goo-
Collins and Cohen had a symbiotic ar- I hate, but I can’t afford a fall.” What gle Earth, lidar data (“a topographic
tistic friendship. “Leonard Cohen was about cross-country skiing? “No! I like map on steroids”), and hundreds of hikes
one of those rare people in the world the thrill of the snowstorm and all the with his dad, a chess master and accor-
who is actually grateful when you make pine trees being filled with snow and dion teacher from Belarus. Ozboyd also
him famous,” she said. They met through me in the middle of it all, just racing benefitted from the legwork of several
their mutual friend Mary Martin. (“Not down a hill. That’s what I want. I don’t other Georgia-waterfall mavens, includ-
the one who flies.”) want the other stuff.” ing a physicist in his late eighties, a man-
“All of Leonard’s friends, a lot of —Sarah Larson ager at a Publix grocery store, and a
them women, were just wild about Leon- 1 charismatic Christian pastor who says
ard,” Collins said. “They thought he GEORGIA POSTCARD “Praise the Lord” every time he sees
was the smartest person they’d ever DR. WATERFALL falling water. “He always chooses the
known. Mary was working for Warner craziest names,” Ozboyd said, of the
Bros., and also for Bob Dylan’s man- pastor. “Like, ‘Breath Away Falls.’ ”
ager, and she and I and Lily Tomlin and Thanks to technology, Ozboyd added,
Jane Wagner used to hang out in the “this is a golden age for waterfall dis-
Village together. Mary would talk about covery and documentation.”
Leonard in a kind of disgusted way— Last year, a friend dubbed Ozboyd
‘He’s so brilliant, and he’s really going hat is a waterfall, exactly? “It can “Dr. Waterfall.” The doctor has a few
nowhere.’ And I said, ‘Why is that?’ And
she said, ‘Because he writes these ob-
W be controversial,” Mark Oleg Oz-
boyd said the other day, in Rabun
advantages: he’s not allergic to poison
ivy, and he likes driving. It took about
scure poems.’” In 1966, Martin told Col- County, Georgia. “There are fifty dif- fifteen thousand miles in his truck and
lins that Cohen wanted to meet her and ferent answers.” Ozboyd leans conser- another fifteen hundred miles on foot
play her his new songs. He came over, vative when it comes to applying the to reach all the falls. He created an Excel
and, Collins recalled, “he said to me, ‘I designation. “A random cascade out in sheet noting ratings for hiking difficulty
can’t play the guitar, and I don’t know the woods is not a waterfall,” he said. and waterfall beauty. He said, “The beauty
if this is a song, and I can’t sing.’ Then “Neither is a little white water. Person- ratings were harder to come up with than
he played me ‘Suzanne.’” She told him ally, I think it needs a ten-foot sheer the difficulty ratings. I decided, I’ll have
12 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
a few tens and a few fours.” Among the SKETCHPAD BY IVAN EHLERS
tens: Angelica Falls, in Rabun County, BILLIONAIRE MERIT BADGES
which he was the first to document. He
named it after his mother.
On a recent Sunday, Dr. Waterfall,
who is tall and bespectacled, took a few
students bushwhacking to Cliff Creek
Falls (beauty: nine; difficulty: eight), one
of his finds, a hundred miles northeast
of Atlanta. He invited along Ken
Steinkamp, a customer-service manager
at a steel company who moonlights as a
waterfaller. “I think I’ve been to around
a hundred,” Steinkamp said. He met Oz-
boyd through a waterfalling Facebook
group. “I didn’t know how old he was at
first,” Steinkamp, who is forty-three, ad-
mitted. “I was reading his stuff, showing
it to my wife, like, ‘Wow, this guy is good.’
Then I found out he was fourteen.”
Steinkamp recalled one of their ear-
liest adventures. “We dropped over the
side of the highway railing,” he said.
“People are driving by, probably think-
ing, like, What are these guys doing?
We just disappeared.” “That was Spoil-
cane Falls,” Ozboyd remembered.
“Beauty rating six, I think. Difficulty
nine.” Steinkamp’s childhood, in Indi-
ana, was basically waterfall-free.
The group trudged down a leaf-
covered drainage, through oaks and
pines, some of which had been toppled
by Hurricane Helene, stopping to ex-
amine a possum skull. After a while,
they arrived at a steep but manageable
drop-off. Ozboyd was navigating from
memory. “Moving through an off-trail
landscape is like a chess game,” he said.
“You have to know your next move.”
The waterfallers plunged downward.
Eventually, they found the waterfall,
whose essential waterfallness was clear.
It made two nearly ninety-degree chuted
turns, dropping forty feet into an emer-
ald pool surrounded by rhododendrons
and gneiss cliffs flecked with quartz.
“Cliffs make any waterfall more inter-
esting,” Ozboyd said. He rock-hopped
around one side of the falls, climbed a
hill, and disappeared into a damp-looking
grotto. A companion pulled himself up
the slippery rocks along the flank of the
falls until he felt its spray. He took a
deep breath. There was a technical term
for what he was doing, Ozboyd told him,
emerging from the cave: “You are being
one with the waterfall.”
—Charles Bethea
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 13
 to the wreck showed me the soot under
ANNALS OF THE SEA our fingernails. Then we swam back to
the dive boat, a creaky, flat-bottomed
rental whose Portuguese name meant
THE SUNKEN PLACE “With Jesus I Will Win.”
On board, preparations were under
What secrets lie in the holds of slave ships? way to disinter the Camargo, a two-
masted brig that sank in 1252. A storm
BY JULIAN LUCAS had buried the ship shortly after its dis-
covery the previous December; now it
was time to clear away the mud. Divers
had spent the morning setting out buoys,
running submarine guidelines, and sur-
veying the site, working creatively with
modest tools. Two men assembled a
dredge from a PVC pipe and a house-
hold grease trap. Another hailed a nearby
megayacht to borrow its “sub-bottom
profiler,” a costly sonar device that ex-
poses buried features. “We’re using the
rich,” he said. “It’s reparations.”
Ten years ago, not one ship that sank
in the Middle Passage had ever been
identified. The African diaspora’s wa-
tery cradle was an archeological blank,
as though the sea had erased all trace of
what the poet Robert Hayden called a
“voyage through death/to life upon these
shores.”Then, in 2015, a Portuguese ship
called the São José was discovered off
the coast of Cape Town. Three years
later, the Clotilda, America’s last known
slave ship, turned up in Alabama’s Mo-
bile River. The most recent find is be-
lieved to be L’Aurore, a French vessel
that sank off the coast of Mozambique
after an attempted uprising. Meanwhile,
in Dakar, researchers are closing in on
n the way down I saw nothing. The grooves and splinters of submerged the Sénégal, which exploded after its
O water was a blur of teal fringed
with rusty shadows, darkening, about
planks. This was the slave ship Camargo,
which carried five hundred souls across
capture by the British Navy, in 1721.
Behind this fleet of revenants is a net-
twenty feet below, to a sickly emerald. I the Atlantic before it burned. work called the Slave Wrecks Project.
followed a rope strung between a buoy It was the sixth of November, and I Coördinated by the Smithsonian—along
and a stake in the seabed, pausing oc- was diving with a group of maritime ar- with George Washington University, the
casionally to pinch my nose and adjust cheologists in Angra dos Reis. A ver- Iziko Museums of South Africa, and the
my sinuses to the pressure. Just beyond dant bay three hours from Rio de Ja- U.S. National Park Service—the S.W.P.
the thermocline, where the temperature neiro, it’s a kind of Brazilian Hamptons, combines maritime archeology with re-
abruptly drops, a hand emerged from where yachts fill the marinas and Vogue parative justice, tourism, and aquatic
the murk and grabbed me by the wrist, once sponsored a party for New Year’s training in Black communities. Its work
dragging me the last few inches to the Eve. But in the nineteenth century it is too new to gauge its impact on schol-
bottom. The silt was as soft as tapioca was mostly plantations—sugarcane near arship, but it has already made a mean-
pudding. It swallowed my hand, then the water and coffee just beyond the ingful contribution to public history. Ar-
my arm and shoulder; the deeper I jagged mountains that ring the area like tifacts from the São José have become a
pushed, the more I suspected that it snaggleteeth. They thrust up around me centerpiece of the Smithsonian’s Na-
might go on forever. Finally, I touched as I resurfaced, pressing a button to in- tional Museum of African American
wood, feeling a chill colder than the flate my scuba kit’s buoyancy-control History and Culture (N.M.A.A.H.C.).
water’s as I ran my fingertips over the device. The researcher who’d guided me The Clotilda inspired a Netflix docu-
mentary and a new museum in Africa-
The Slave Wrecks Project aims to reconnect Black communities to the deep. town, Alabama, and similar hopes are
14 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL KENNEDY
riding on the Camargo in Angra dos in the Caribbean, of water spirits ven- ogy is reliant on funding from govern-
Reis. The enthusiasm reflects an oceanic erated by Senegal’s seafaring Lebu, and ments, few of which wanted to pay for
turn in understandings of heritage among of work by the artist Ayana V. Jackson, the exposure of their historical crimes.
diasporic writers, artists, and scholars, who was inspired to learn diving by the An exception was post-apartheid South
who are increasingly preoccupied with Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya. Created Africa, where Jaco Boshoff, a researcher
what the influential theorist Christina in the nineties by a Detroit electronica at the Iziko Museums, was looking for
Sharpe calls slavery’s “wake.” duo, it imagines a Black Atlantis pop- a Dutch slaver called the Meermin. He
Before my descent, I spoke with Ga- ulated by the water-breathing issue of and Lubkemann joined forces and ex-
brielle Miller, a maritime archeologist women who drowned in the crossing. panded the search to other ships, shut-
at the Smithsonian, whom I found strap- The idea fortified me when I sat on the tling between nautical archives and Cape
ping a stainless-steel knife to her mus- dive boat’s rail and prepared to fall over- Town’s wreck-strewn littoral.
cular calf. A thirty-two-year-old with board. Within the siren call of the For years, both dollars and discover-
cowrie shells in her long box braids and sunken place is an invitation to cour- ies eluded them. Then, in 2008, Boshoff
a pierced septum, she teared up describ- age, Miller suggested: “Our ancestral encountered a scholarly citation about
ing her underwater work. “There was a relationship to water is not one of fear.” a Portuguese ship that sank en route
hush over it, almost like a church,” she from Mozambique to Brazil, carrying
said of her first dive to a slaver’s wreck.
Feeling the Camargo was even more
“ T he slaver is a ghost ship sailing on
the edges of modern conscious-
two hundred Africans to their deaths.
Further research led to the captain’s tes-
uncannily intimate: “The black stayed ness,” Marcus Rediker writes in his har- timony, which indicated a spot under a
on my hands for a long time.” Miller rowing history “The Slave Ship.” The mountain known as Lion’s Head. Soon,
works for the N.M.A.A.H.C. and con- vessels were floating torture chambers Boshoff and his team were diving at
tributed to an ongoing exhibition, “In that devoured more than twelve million what he called “one of the worst wreck
Slavery’s Wake,” which features beads lives, and their finely calibrated cruel- sites I’ve ever worked on.” The archeol-
and shells that enslaved Africans likely ties—lightless holds fetid with vomit and ogists were dashed against the very reefs
carried to Brazil. But she’d rather talk excrement, sick people bound to anchor that had sunk the vessel; one almost
about being in the water than about chains and thrown en masse to waiting drowned. Still worse, the wreck was it-
what divers can retrieve from it. “It’s sharks—fuelled the global economy for self a wreck, having already been stripped
very antiquarian to put all of the em- half a millennium. They left a psychic by treasure hunters in the nineteen-
phasis on a physical object,” she said. imprint so deep that Black people still eighties. (They found human remains,
“The ship is a catalyst.” speak of them in terms of personal ex- which have since disappeared.) Just
Miller started off in terrestrial arche- perience. “I remember on the slave ship, enough remained to identify the vessel:
ology and once worked for the Nez Perce how they brutalized our very souls,” Bob crumpled copper sheathing from the pe-
Tribe in Idaho. But a research trip to Marley sings in “Slave Driver.” riod; iron ballast blocks that were men-
St. Croix, where her family originated, One might have assumed that a hand- tioned in the manifest; and, most cru-
led her to become a scuba diver, and to ful of these vessels, at least eight hun- cially, timber from a tropical hardwood
apply her skills to the histories of her dred of which are known to have wrecked, that grew in Mozambique. By 2015, Bo-
own people. In 2021, Miller enrolled in would have turned up long ago. But shoff and Lubkemann were confident
an S.W.P.-affiliated internship program, those equipped to search for them have enough to announce that they’d found
which she now helps to run. She also lacked incentives to do so. In 1972, com- the São José—the first known wreck of
teaches the basics of maritime archeol- mercial treasure hunters stumbled on a ship that sank during a slaving voyage.
ogy through the Slave Wrecks Project the wreck of the Henrietta Marie, an Their discovery was perfectly timed.
Academy, which works with archeology English ship that sank near the Florida In the early twenty-tens, Lonnie Bunch,
graduate students in Senegal and Mo- Keys after a slaving voyage—and moved the founding director of the soon-to-
zambique. The academy’s two-pronged on as soon as they realized that it wasn’t open N.M.A.A.H.C., was determined
goal is to diversify the ranks of arche- the Spanish galleon they were seeking. to acquire a relic of the Middle Passage.
ologists, a minuscule fraction of whom (It was later excavated.) Maritime ar- “The slave trade was where the mod-
are Black, and to include people from cheologists, meanwhile, largely ignored ern world began,” Bunch, who is now
across the diaspora in the study of its the Middle Passage. Stephen Lubke- the secretary of the Smithsonian, told
history. Yet it’s also a kind of exorcism— mann, a professor at George Washing- me. “I needed to be able to tell that story
an exercise in dispelling history’s haints. ton University, told me, “There were in an intimate way.” After realizing how
“They say that the African diasporic more archeological studies of cogs in few existed, he negotiated a partnership
relationship to water equals ‘trauma,’” bogs in Ireland than of slave ships.” with the S.W.P. and supported its search
Miller told me, alluding to an all too Lubkemann conceived of the S.W.P. for the São José. The museum opened,
familiar tale of Middle Passage drown- in 2003. Slavery wasn’t his field, but he’d in September, 2016, with artifacts from
ings, contaminated taps, and segregated long marvelled that historians, who’d the ship showcased in a subterranean
beaches. It wasn’t exactly false, she con- recently unveiled the monumental Trans- gallery evocative of a slaver’s hold. Bunch
ceded. But didn’t Black people also have Atlantic Slave Trade Database, were so attended a ceremony to honor the São
a privileged connection to the sea? She far ahead of his social-science peers. Be- José’s victims in Mozambique, where
spoke rapturously of coral architecture cause of its expense, maritime archeol- traditional rulers presented him with a
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 15
container of earth to scatter over the was sunk by the British Navy.) A self- British Navy, he torched the ship after
wreck. When a young Mozambican identified Afro-Indigenous Brazilian, unloading its five hundred captives, who
tearfully thanked him for bringing her he co-founded the country’s first orga- were sold to local plantations. Brazilian
kidnapped countrymen home, Bunch nization of Black archeologists. But his authorities arrested several crew mem-
had a revelation: “What we were look- work hardly touched on slavery until he bers, but Gordon managed to escape,
ing for wasn’t about yesterday but today.” was invited to join a yearlong search for disguised in women’s clothes.
the Camargo, which then began appear- He made two more slaving voyages
very morning before diving, and ing in his dreams. Several other arche- before the U.S. Navy finally caught him,
E every evening afterward, the team
excavating the Camargo dined on a local
ologists experienced similar visions, and
he speculated, half playfully, that “Afri-
in 1860. Even then, he likely expected
to go free. Although the international
historian’s back porch. Her mint-green can cosmology” was responsible: “The slave trade had been illegal for decades,
house in Frade, a gated condominium energy of the wreck called all of us.” the ban was hardly ever enforced—es-
on the bay, served as a base for the ex- Nothing so dramatic had befallen pecially not in New York, which Horace
pedition, whose members would relax me. Yet the prospect of coming so close Greeley described as “a nest of slave pi-
around a table near a pool and a tree to an “unknowable” history, which my rates.” Wall Street investors regularly fi-
with fuchsia blossoms. Leaving their own ancestors had survived, did inspire nanced slaving expeditions, and bribery
wetsuits to dry on the patio furniture, me to learn scuba. Just a month earlier, of customs officers and juries was rife.
they’d feast on feijoada and other Bra- I’d enrolled at a hole-in-the-wall school But Gordon was tried by Lincoln’s Jus-
zilian specialties, speaking in a mix of in New York, where the instructor taught tice Department, whose attorneys were
Portuguese, English, French, and Span- me and two white bankers to “maxi- eager to make an example of a brazen
ish that they’d christened “Portuglaisñol.” mize our bottom time.” Surrounded by trafficker as the Civil War got under
Having no common language was no decorative shark plushies, I couldn’t have way. Gordon was convicted and sen-
obstacle to camaraderie. Miller enter- felt farther from the grim story of the tenced to death.
tained the table with the story of the Camargo. I didn’t yet know that Man- The ruling sparked a nationwide ar-
“Notilda,” a wreck mistakenly identified hattan was where its captain financed gument. Was it fair to execute a man
as the Clotilda. I was teased for having his slaving expeditions—and, eventu- for violating a dead-letter law, particu-
studied with the “wrong” dive federa- ally, met an unexpected end. larly when the domestic slave trade was
tion. The expedition’s genial young field Of the thousands of vessels involved perfectly legal in much of the country?
coördinator, Luis Felipe Santos, drew in the Atlantic slave trade, the Camargo Ralph Waldo Emerson lobbied for the
the most laughs, because he couldn’t has two distinctions. It’s the last slaver captain’s execution; Gordon’s wife pre-
pronounce “buoy.” known to have reached Brazil, which sented Mary Todd Lincoln with a rhym-
Santos is a stout thirty-five-year-old outlawed the slave trade, though not ing plea for clemency. The President
tattooed with nautical motifs, orisha slavery, in 1850. And its captain, Nathan- decided to let the captain hang, telling
symbols, and a demon’s head captioned iel Gordon, an American from Port- one petitioner that “any man, who, for
“tropical punk.” He’s a professor of land, Maine, was the only man ever ex- paltry gain and stimulated only by av-
maritime archeology at the Federal Uni- ecuted for slave trafficking in the United arice, can rob Africa of her children to
versity of Bahia and serves as the pres- States. Gordon had absconded with the sell them into interminable bondage, I
ident of AfrOrigens, a nonprofit estab- Camargo while transporting ordinary never will pardon.” After an unsuccess-
lished to find the wrecks of slave ships. merchandise from San Francisco to New ful suicide attempt, Gordon was duly
(Having found the Camargo, they’ve York. He then set a more profitable executed at the Tombs on February 21,
begun surveying near the town of Maricá course for Mozambique, where he pur- 1862. He insisted, from the gallows, that
for the wreck of the Malteza, which chased his human cargo. Pursued by the he was an innocent family man, who’d
never intentionally harmed another
human being in his life.
Yuri Sanada, a filmmaker with an
unruly salt-and-pepper bowl cut, found
the story irresistible. “Nobody knows
more about shipwrecks than I do,” he
told me. “I had my own.” Although he
lacks a degree in archeology, Sanada is
a consummate adventurer who’s done
everything from sailing a replica Phoe-
nician galley across the Atlantic to sal-
vaging his own furniture from the wreck
of the houseboat where he and his wife
lived for twelve years. He read about
Gordon’s misadventures in a 2006 book
by Ron Soodalter and immediately pro-
“I think we should go electric.” posed a film adaptation. He also pitched
the author a daring idea. James Cam- the contraption roared to life. But the During my certification dive, at a flooded
eron had descended to the already dis- hose clogged with debris and popped quarry in eastern Pennsylvania, I’d felt
covered Titanic to research his “Titanic.” off, soaking everyone on deck. Sanada surreally out of place, balking at the vast
Sanada would out-Cameron Cameron grinned ruefully: “One point for the darkness around me as I stared into the
by locating the wreck of the Camargo. pump, zero for the archeologists.” eyes of a bass who’d taken up residence
He teamed up with Gilson Rambelli, In the popular imagination, excavat- in the cockpit of a submerged Cessna.
a maritime archeologist at the Federal ing a shipwreck is like exploring a ruin— Here, though, I could imagine myself
University of Sergipe who had led an an odyssey through a drowned world. surrounded by kindred spirits.
unsuccessful search for the Camargo in The reality is that many shipwrecks are We swam on to the object that San-
the early two-thousands and was trying found in pieces. Looted by salvagers, tos had found earlier. It was barrel-
to renew the effort. (He had come within gnawed at by shipworms, and damaged shaped and about the diameter of my
a few yards.) Rambelli led the campaign, by passing vessels, they become hard to wingspan, with a pocked and pitted tex-
which the S.W.P. agreed to fund and distinguish from anonymous debris. The ture that prompted intrusive thoughts
support beginning in 2022. “We spent difficulty is heightened by zero-visibility of tetanus. For a few seconds, the water
hundreds of hours poking the bottom conditions; ensconced in a turbid bay, cleared enough to see something that
with this big nine-foot iron rod,” Sanada the Camargo had become a puzzle for resembled a cross between a hairball
recalled, as target after target revealed “braille archeology,” the art of forensic and a meteor. It’s what’s called, in mar-
by a magnetometer survey let them down. reconstruction via touch. itime archeology, a “concretion,” which
One day, a passing fisherman boasted “We have to feel for each metre,” forms when an iron object corrodes
that he knew the wreck’s location. “It Miller, back on deck, explained. The ar- in salt water. Ferrous ions precipitate
was the last dive of the last day of the cheologists were using their hands, arms, around its dissolving form, which is pre-
last expedition,” Sanada explained, and and wingspans to map the site. They’d served as though in a mold. The result
they were desperate enough to invite begun by outlining the wreck with is exceedingly fragile and disintegrates
him aboard. He took them to an island twelve numbered stakes, each attached if allowed to dry. But, when X-rayed,
that his father had known as a popular to a buoy on the surface. Then they had concretions yield manifold secrets. The
spawning ground. Yet even he looked run a line between them, using two renowned Canadian maritime archeol-
surprised when a diver resurfaced with other lines to trace the axes of a rough ogist Marc-André Bernier told me that
fragments of charred wood. grid. Now they were digging square- he’s watched cannons, kettles, muskets,
“We came to legitimate something metre test pits in search of distinctive and even a finely wrought scale emerge
that was already legitimate,” Santos said features, which they sketched, by feel, from lumps of “nothing.”
of the discovery, which corroborated on waterproof slates. Eventually, a site Later that day, Bernier led a discus-
local lore about the wreck. He believes plan would emerge from this collabo- sion of the concretion in the historian’s
that archeology can be a tool for jus- rative hallucination, hopefully revealing living room. He clicked through refer-
tice—particularly in Brazil, where the the wreck’s orientation on the bottom. ence images of nineteenth-century brigs
omissions of colonial archives have un- The plan was already beginning as the other archeologists nursed beers
derwritten the displacement of Black to emerge on a sheet of Mylar graph and hazarded hypotheses. Could it be
and Indigenous peoples. Santos’s re- paper—an oval, surrounded by arrows, the anchor? Santos thought it might be
search hadn’t previously focussed on the with a handful of anomalous objects the hatch. Bernier asked Miller about
African diaspora, but he began to feel marked. Santos had found a huge hunk the tubular object that she’d found
an ancestral call. “For me, it’s not about of metal near one end of the site. Miller, nearby. He suspected that it was the
the study of the other,” he told me. “I when she examined it, had felt a smaller hawsepipe, an outlet for the anchor
see myself in the artifact.” one with the tip of her fin, which turned chain. In that case, the bigger object was
out to be hollow and cylindrical. She likely the windlass, a winchlike machine
iller sat cross-legged on a pad- lay face down on deck to show the dis- used to hoist the anchor.
M dleboard and rowed toward the
mountains with slow, deliberate strokes.
tance between the two to Sanada, who
planned to photograph the objects by
Bernier tested his hypothesis the next
day. He dived to the wreck several times
She dipped her face into the water at pressing a clear plastic bag of water and sketched the bigger object, which
intervals; once or twice, she slid herself against them. He invited me to watch; seemed to have two barrels and a shaft
off the board, inhaled sharply, and dived before long, we were feeling our way in between, before resurfacing with a
to the bottom. But there was no sign of along the seafloor, pausing briefly where triumphant announcement. “The widths
the Camargo in the “miasma,” she the two rope axes converged. are the same size, the holes are the same
shouted back to Santos, who tossed her I couldn’t help but think of the cross- size, the shafts are the same size,” he
a plastic-wrapped G.P.S. Soon, the wreck roads: a geometric figure, common said, outlining each shape with his hands.
found, Miller and another archeologist throughout the African diaspora, that “It’s the windlass.” Miller closed her
were descending to it with a dredge, symbolizes the boundary between the eyes and extended her arms like a mys-
which was attached, via fire hose, to a living and the dead. According to cer- tic: “He sees the ship in his mind!”
motor on deck. They signalled with a tain cosmologies, their souls take on the Given how much is known about
stream of bubbles once they were ready guise of marine creatures—an idea that slave ships, it’s fair to ask if excavating
to begin. Sanada yanked a pull cord, and struck me as strangely comforting. them will fundamentally alter conceptions
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 17
of the Middle Passage. Rediker, the his- sage have involved the participation of the quilombo’s oral tradition. Certain as-
torian, praised maritime archeologists Black divers: “If we’re not part of the pects of the narrative had assumed leg-
for retrieving palpable traces of what the ocean, our stories are never told.” endary dimensions. Quilombolas told
enslaved suffered, but doubts that they Abreu that Gordon, fearing discovery,
will learn much from the vessels them- verlooking the bay from the foot- had let most of those aboard the Cam-
selves. “It’s one thing to have plans,” Ber-
nier said of such skepticism. “But a ship
O hills of the Serra do Mar is the
Quilombo Santa Rita do Bracuí. Situ-
argo drown, while archival sources sug-
gested that they’d landed safely. Other
is a living thing.” Most slavers were or- ated between a muddy river and a trop- particulars were almost uncannily precise,
dinary vessels that crews modified en ical forest, it’s a historically Black com- she said: “They knew everything about
route, adding features like the barricado— munity that is home to three hundred slavery, the owner’s will, and the traffic.’ ”
an anti-mutiny fortification—and the and seventy-three families, many of “This was a hidden story,” Marilda
cramped compartments belowdecks whom live in unfinished houses with de Souza Francisco, a former leader of
where captives were stowed. corrugated roofs. The qui- the quilombo, said when I visited. “Now
In Alabama and Mozam- lombo—a term for a rural we want everyone to know.” A subsis-
bique, researchers are exca- settlement established by tence farmer in her sixties, she and other
vating such holds for the first the formerly enslaved—is community members set up a memo-
time and hope to retrieve less than ten minutes from rial to the brig’s victims near her house—
objects that captives smug- the water. Yet it’s practically an airy, low-slung building covered in
gled across the Atlantic. unknown to the area’s more old pink plaster, where dogs barked under
Their ultimate goal is to affluent residents. “Like a the banana and palm trees. A sign on
link these discoveries to lot of people from Rio de her wraparound veranda cites Brazil’s
slavery’s contemporary leg- Janeiro, I had never heard post-dictatorship constitution, which
acy. Studying the São José of them,” the historian Mar- grants “the remaining members of the
has taken researchers to the tha Abreu, who vacationed ancient runaway slave communities”
ruins of its owner’s palace in Lisbon. nearby in her youth, recalled. “I was a ownership of their traditional lands. The
The excavation of L’Aurore is proceed- white person with a white family who provision was ratified in the late nineteen-
ing in tandem with field work in rural came to have pleasure in Angra dos Reis.” eighties, but conservatives allied with
Mozambique; in one village, an oral Abreu, a tiny, ebullient scholar with the country’s agricultural lobby have long
tradition pointed to a ruin on a nearby a high-pitched voice, was the archeolo- impeded its enforcement. Only a hand-
island, which had once been a barracoon. gists’ host. Her father had purchased the ful of the nearly three thousand com-
Members of a Black scuba nonprofit property where they were staying in the munities that have applied for official
called Diving with a Purpose, which nineteen-eighties, when a new highway status have been granted land titles. Fran-
joined the S.W.P. in 2014, recently led was transforming the bay into a tour- cisco hopes that the attention brought
a delegation to Liberia, where they met ism hub. With the assistance of Brazil’s by the Camargo’s discovery will make
with descendants of escapees from the military government, speculators seized hers one of them: “We are in a hurry,
Guerrero, a slave ship that sank in the valuable waterfront land from Black res- but the law is very slow.”
Florida Keys. idents, who retreated to the hills. The quilombolas suffer from unem-
Diving with a Purpose was estab- Their quilombo dates back to the ployment, the illegal destruction of the
lished, in the mid-aughts, to find the eighteen-seventies, when the owner of mangrove swamps where they’ve tradi-
Guerrero, which remains at large. But a sugar plantation bequeathed it to those tionally fished, and the theft of land and
the group’s annual searches have be- he’d enslaved. He was one of the plant- water for wealthier neighborhoods on
come a floating school for Black scuba ers who’d illegally bought Africans from the waterfront. (Their access to the river
divers, including teens from Florida the Camargo, and they’d disembarked was recently blocked.) Last May, Lon-
high schools. “African Americans have on his property, arriving on canoes in nie Bunch visited, bringing a burst of
a particular connectedness to the ocean,” the dead of night as the ship was set attention from government officials, who
Jay Haigler, a lead instructor with the aflame. The aftermath brought Brazil’s had previously neglected these problems.
program, told me. “How the hell did clandestine slave trade to a permanent But the immediate hope is that the Ca-
we get over here? On a goddam boat. end. As police scoured local plantations margo will create jobs and attract tour-
And it wasn’t the Niña, the Pinta, or for the trafficked Africans, a number of ists. AfrOrigens recently constructed a
the Santa Maria.” An affable, musta- their “legitimately” enslaved brethren small base in the quilombo, where it plans
chioed former real-estate developer, ran away. (Some posed as new arrivals to exhibit artifacts from the excavation.
Haigler joined the group after meeting to avoid reënslavement.) The chaos The organization is training young qui-
some Black scuba divers at a wedding. stoked fears of “another Haiti” before it lombolas to scuba dive, with the aim of
Now he has worked on wrecks all over was quashed and forgotten. allowing them to become stewards of
the world, including the Clotilda and When Abreu first visited the Qui- the wreck site.
the downed planes of Tuskegee Airmen lombo Bracuí, in the early two-thousands, Although the excavation has just
in the Mediterranean. To him, it’s not she’d already published an article about begun, there’s also talk of commemora-
an accident that recent breakthroughs the incident—and was shocked to dis- tion. Francisco’s dream is a floating me-
in the archeology of the Middle Pas- cover that its memory had endured in morial to the Camargo. She recently
18 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
watched a documentary about the dis- ning boat tours in the Mobile River. ology” is that communities might ben-
covery of another slave ship, which had Others are receiving free swimming and efit from the excavation of their history;
revived a small town on Alabama’s Gulf scuba lessons through the S.W.P., in the a few years ago, Bolivian Indigenous
Coast. Perhaps it would happen again. hope of eventually visiting the wreck groups sued for salvage rights to a Span-
site. “I just want to touch it,” Evelyn ish treasure galleon, arguing that its un-
ight years after the Camargo’s de- Milton, an I.T. professional who plans precedented haul of gold, silver, and em-
E struction, America’s last slave ship
met an identical fate. Returning from
to earn her scuba certification this spring,
told me. “If I could take a rose, or some
eralds had emerged from mines where
their ancestors were enslaved. But it isn’t
Ouidah, in present-day Benin, the schoo- type of pennant—something all the easy to parlay excavations into repara-
ner Clotilda stole into Alabama’s Mo- ‘-ologists’ think is safe—to leave on the tions. Frazier believes that the effort has
bile River with a hundred and ten Af- ship, as a way to say, ‘Hey, I’m your been hindered by friction between local
ricans—a victory for its owner, Timothy fourth-great-granddaughter. You’re and out-of-state descendants, and be-
Meaher, who’d wagered that he could never going to believe this, but I work tween those groups and non-descendant
defy the country’s slave-trade ban. The from home. Thank you.’” residents who feel excluded from the
captain burned the ship and sank it in Anderson Cooper recently moder- media bonanza. Others feel that the ship
a bayou; the captives, nearly all Yoruba ated an on-air reckoning between the is a distraction from the community that
speakers from the same village, toiled Clotilda Descendants Association and its survivors established.
on plantations for the next five years. two members of the Meaher family, And then there’s the question of what
After the Civil War, a few dozen survi- which still owns a substantial amount to do with the wreck. Initially, Africa-
vors banded together to buy land from of property in and around Africatown, town was abuzz with talk of raising and
Meaher and established a community and has rented it to the very factories exhibiting the Clotilda, like the Vasa
called Africatown. that locals blame for occurrences of can- warship in Stockholm; perhaps it could
The settlement’s recent memory of cer. After the Clotilda was discovered, be a tourist attraction, a memorial, and
enslavement was unique in the United the family sold a plot of land to the an implicit rebuke to conservative law-
States. In the late nineteen-twenties, Zora community for a fraction of its market makers who wanted to erase slavery from
Neale Hurston interviewed one of its value; it has since become a food bank. the state’s textbooks. But this hope was
founders, Cudjo Lewis, née Oluale Kos- During the interview, they also pre- dashed by a recent report from the Al-
sola, who vividly remembered the terror sented one of the descendants, Pat Fra- abama Historical Commission, which
of the crossing. (The sea growled “lak de zier, with a silver-tipped cane that had concluded that the wreck was more frag-
thousand beastes in de bush.”) But the belonged to the enslaver of her great- ile than previously believed, and that
town’s cohesion frayed in the late twen- great-grandparents. It was a set-piece raising it would cost upward of thirty
tieth century as factories shuttered, leav- moment of racial reconciliation. Still, million dollars. The recommended al-
ing behind dangerous pollution, and the Frazier regarded the heirloom skepti- ternative was to rebury the Clotilda in
construction of an interstate highway de- cally, as though she’d expected more. the mud, preserving its archeological in-
molished the historic downtown. Africa- “I thought I was going to see Mont- tegrity for future generations. (Scientists
town’s population plummeted, and its gomery again,” Frazier told me, alluding have already attempted to extract DNA
singular history threatened to fade. Then, to the National Memorial for Peace and from the ship’s bilge.)
in 2018, a local journalist, Ben Raines, lo- Justice, which has revitalized the state’s Many descendants were persuaded.
cated the wreck of the Clotilda, whose capital. The dream of “communal arche- “This community doesn’t even have
identity was confirmed the next year by
archeologists. It was the most intact wreck
of a slave ship ever found.
Africatown was deluged with atten-
tion. A filmmaker interviewed tearful
residents for a documentary, which was
subsequently acquired by the Obamas
and Netflix. National Geographic made
two others; for the second, Clotilda de-
scendants travelled to Benin, where they
confronted the king whose predecessor
had enslaved their ancestors, scattered
soil taken from their graves in Alabama,
and visited the Door of No Return, a
monument that frames the Atlantic. Back
in Africatown, a modest museum, the
Heritage House, opened in 2023, with
fragments of the Clotilda exhibited in
pH-controlled tanks.
Some descendants have begun run- “Rakish angles don’t work for you.”
a grocery store,” Frazier told local ing and hearing how they’d come to the The poet Derek Walcott, in his master-
television, suggesting that thirty million country—even on a museum ship, built piece “Omeros,” describes this emergence
dollars could be put to better use. But to commemorate the famous maritime from anonymity as a kind of grace:
Raines, the ship’s discoverer, sees a missed slave rebellion—was a shock. It deep-
But they crossed, they survived. There is
opportunity to create a global landmark. ened when, as a teen-ager, I took up ge- the epical splendour.
“I hear a lot of people giving up,” he said nealogy and realized that, although I Multiply the rain’s lances, multiply their
of the descendants, many of whom he could trace my white mother’s ancestry ruin,
has taken to the site. Their reluctance across centuries and continents, my Black the grace born from subtraction as the hold’s
hasn’t stopped him from launching a cru- father’s ended, conclusively, with a man iron door
rolled over their eyes like pots left out in
sade to raise the wreck. (He wants to en- named Moses, who’d escaped from slav- the rain,
list Oprah.) “The Clotilda is an interna- ery in Virginia, swam across the Rap- and the bolt rammed home its echo, the
tionally important artifact,” he told me. pahannock River to join the Union Army, way that thunder-
“It’s not up to the descendants what hap- and left whatever he knew of his fore- claps perpetuate their reverberation.
pens to the ship. It belongs to the world.” bears behind.
Darron Patterson—whose ancestor I’d arrived at what the poet Dionne ast May, during a celebration of the
Polee Allen spoke of his yearning for
home until he died, in 1922—wants to
Brand describes as “a rupture in history,
a rupture in the quality of being” that is
L Camargo’s discovery, a young priest
from the quilombo went to sea to bless
build a replica of the Clotilda, which he distinctive to the African diaspora. “We the excavation. A practitioner of can-
envisions facing east, toward Africa. were not from the place where we lived domblé, whose pantheon syncretizes
“Yorubans are very ingenious people,” he and we could not remember where we Catholicism with various African cos-
said. “For my money, if they could have were from or who we were,” she writes mologies, he prayed to the spirits of his
gotten their hands on a boat, they would in “A Map to the Door of No Return,” ancestors and those of others, and pre-
have gotten back home.” He was sur- recalling the childhood realization that pared a tiny ceremonial urn called a
prised when I told him that a similar her own grandfather was ignorant of quartinha as a symbolic coffin for those
project was under construction at the their roots. The title evokes a watery who’d perished on board. He also scat-
other end of the Clotilda’s voyage. The void “where all names were forgotten tered flowers for Iemanjá, orisha of the
Beninese government is building an and all beginnings recast.” sea, as a way to conciliate her for the vi-
enormous heritage-tourism complex in The archeology of slave ships has olation of the Camargo’s voyage.
Ouidah, with a replica slave ship as its such appeal because it promises to fill The priest had learned to dive from
main attraction. Visitors will embark this void. But it can do only so much to the archeologists, who watched from
from a beach near the Door of No Re- turn back time. Clotilda descendants are the dive boat’s stern as he took a giant
turn via small boats, then explore a hold still waiting for DNA from the ship’s step overboard. A few moments later,
crammed with more than three hundred timbers. Residents of the Quilombo he resurfaced, extending his hands to
resin sculptures of captives. Groans and Bracuí were taken aback to learn that receive the quartinha from a man on
rattling chains may play over a speaker many of the Camargo Africans were deck. Then he released the air from his
system; the French company designing dispersed throughout southeastern Bra- vest and dropped to the bottom, cra-
the experience previously worked on a zil—contrary to their oral tradition, in dling the urn as he vanished into the
themed restaurant for children, called which the majority were killed and a murk. He was descending not just into
Pirate’s Paradise. few survivors joined their community. the bay but also into kalunga, the wa-
Memorialization easily curdles into The emphasis on precise continuity tery underworld of Kikongo tradition,
kitsch. There’s also a certain awkward- may be self-defeating. In Brazil, conser- which fused, in the Americas, with mem-
ness in Ouidah marketing such “heri- vative media outlets have attempted to ories of the crossing.
tage” to tourists whose ancestors it sold expose “false” quilombos by casting doubt A few months later, one of the arche-
into slavery. Yet a Beninese tourism of- on their origin stories. In the United ologists descended to the Camargo,
ficial assured me that diaspora histori- States, private reparations initiatives have searching for the buried cable that de-
ans had consulted on the replica, which been repeatedly undercut by debates over marcates its location. Herself a devotee
wouldn’t be “too Disney.” It might even who, exactly, deserves to pay or be paid. of the orishas, she describes herself as a
educate his countrymen about slavery. During one of my Africatown calls, “daughter of Ogum Marinho, whose
“There was something missing after the which I made from the lobby of a hotel point of strength is the bottom of the
Door of No Return,” he insisted. “For in New Orleans, a white man who over- sea.” That day, she struggled to find the
the Beninese, it wasn’t clear why those heard me began shouting that the wreck vessel and wasted precious minutes of
from the diaspora were crying in front of the Clotilda was a “scam” and a “hoax.” air groping in the mud. Suddenly, she
of the ocean.” The obsession with lineage is at odds felt something and froze. It was the
with the solidarity of the Middle Passage, quartinha, with a string of rosary beads
y first memory of the Atlantic which created new forms of kinship. Af- beside it, both sitting on what she soon
M slave trade is of a childhood visit
to the Freedom Schooner Amistad, in
ricans who survived it had a word for
those who travelled with them, whether
realized was the hull. She took a mo-
ment to pray. Then she plunged her hand
Sag Harbor, New York. I was dimly aware or not they came from the same places into the silt and swam on, feeling for the
that I had enslaved ancestors. But see- or spoke the same languages: “shipmate.” line that crossed and circled the wreck. 
20 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
 think you might give a little more if we
SHOUTS & MURMURS told you that the ambassadorships to
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If you believe you are gender­noncon­

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If you are trying to reach the Depart­ If you are still waiting for Bob to return
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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 21
 her performance as Elphaba, the green-
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS skinned witch in “Wicked.”
Dimoldenberg’s show is shot in fried-
chicken restaurants around the city. In
FLIRTING WITH DISASTER the episodes, which are typically less
than ten minutes long, she unleashes a
“Chicken Shop Date” gives the celebrity interview a screwball spin. fusillade of left-field questions and some-
times interrupts her guest midsentence—
BY REBECCA MEAD techniques designed to elicit an unpre-
dictable exchange. Dimoldenberg began
running through possible approaches to
Erivo with her producer, Liv West. Not-
ing that Erivo had attended drama school,
Dimoldenberg imagined proposing some
absurd theatre exercises: “ ‘Be an inani-
mate object’ might be fun. I could get
her to try to be a water droplet, or some-
thing. A lettuce.” West laughed. Dimol-
denberg scanned her list and read aloud,
“ ‘Have you ever used your acting abi-
lities on a date to pretend like you are
having a good time?’” She then read a
question that would flirtatiously address
Erivo’s queer identity: “ ‘What’s the best
thing about dating a woman?’”
Dimoldenberg continued, “ ‘What’s
the best musical to take someone to right
before a breakup?’ ‘I’m thinking of turn-
ing “Chicken Shop Date” into a musi-
cal—can you help me write the songs?’”
“Perfect,” West said.
Dimoldenberg, who turned thirty-
one in January, celebrated ten years of
hosting “Chicken Shop Date” last year,
proving herself to be one of YouTube’s
more durable entertainers. Nearly three
million people subscribe to the show.
Each episode has the format of a first
date, conducted in the unlikely setting
of an unflatteringly lit fast-food outlet,
rick Lane, in London’s East End, hour and the raw winter weather, she and is freighted hopelessly with the long-
B is famous for its bustling commerce,
from sari shops to graffiti-splashed
was dressed as if for a night at the club,
in an asymmetrical one-sleeved top
ing for enduring love. Dimoldenberg’s
first guest was the British rapper Ghetts,
vintage-clothing stores. At 9 a.m. on made from clingy metallic jersey, and one of the foremost figures in the Lon-
a recent morning, however, nearly all a matching skirt so short that, when don grime scene, who is a decade her
the storefronts were shuttered. One ex- she sat down on a cold metal chair, she senior. The episode, which aired in
ception was Morley’s, a takeout fried- squealed. Swirling around her was a March, 2014, established her disarm-
chicken restaurant, where bright lights team of half a dozen people, who were ingly direct technique. “What would
were shining behind closed glass doors preparing to record a new episode. you say your type is in a girl?” Dimol-
that had been covered with translucent In the background, slushie machines denberg asked. “I like girls with a sense
paper, and a hubbub of voices could be started to whirr, and a pungent vat of of humor,” Ghetts replied. “O.K., so,
heard coming from inside. oil sizzled. Dimoldenberg thumbed me,” Dimoldenberg swiftly retorted,
Seated at a white plastic table in the through a sheaf of pages listing ques- with a straight face, nodding.
center of the small shop was Amelia tions that she’d prepared for the guest On “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimol-
Dimoldenberg, the creator and star of who would soon arrive—the actress denberg plays an exaggerated version of
“Chicken Shop Date,” a popular You- Cynthia Erivo, who’d recently been herself: more awkward, more brusque,
Tube interview show. Despite the early nominated for an Academy Award for more grandiose. Celebrities on the pub-
licity circuit who are accustomed to the
On her YouTube series, Amelia Dimoldenberg pretends to be comically insecure. usual techniques and tricks of interview-
22 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 PHOTOGRAPH BY MAISIE COUSINS
ers—softball questions, fawning com- invested in the most promising-seem- put. Among other things, she launched
pliments—find themselves in a differ- ing encounters. (She hasn’t seriously a YouTube show in which she cooked
ent and disconcerting dynamic. The dated anyone from the show.) alongside guests—the gag being that she
brittle self-confidence of Dimoldenberg’s In the past three years, Dimolden- cannot cook. Most of her income now
character can seem like a mask for a berg has leveraged her “Chicken Shop comes from sources other than “Chicken
painful neediness, and her strategies of Date” fame into a new line of work, as Shop Date,” including her red-carpet
redirection can subvert even the most a red-carpet interviewer—including, last work and one-off appearances or videos.
self-assured of interlocutors. Whenever year, at the Oscars, a role she will reprise But none of these projects has had the
a “date” seems to be going well, she at this year’s ceremony, on March 2nd. resonance or the authenticity of her first
undermines it. After Jack Harlow, the Her f lirty but jarring red-carpet ex- show. Dimoldenberg, being in the happy
American rapper, said that he liked changes with the actor Andrew Garfield position of owning the show outright, is
the phenomenon of community library blew up on social media. “It’s weird what writing and producing a romantic com-
boxes, from which passersby can borrow you do,” Garfield told her at a 2022 event. edy set in what she describes as “the
books at will, Dimoldenberg’s follow- “Weird as in good.” The two ran across ‘Chicken Shop Date’ world.”
up question was “Can you read?” On each other again the following year, at Each episode costs only about six
“Chicken Shop Date,” Dimoldenberg the Golden Globes. After Garfield teased thousand dollars to make, though Di-
courts compliments, then receives them Dimoldenberg that she’d been eying him moldenberg now has three employees—a
with deadpan discomfort. After Ma- “like a capybara in the wild” and ob- creative producer, a social-media man-
halia, the British R. & B. singer, said that served that they had compatible astro- ager, and a personal assistant—on her
Dimoldenberg’s skin looked “amazing,” logical signs, he insisted that he wasn’t payroll. Because “Chicken Shop Date”
Dimoldenberg replied, “Thanks. It’s my interested in her: “I don’t think we should appears just once a month or so, she is
own. It’s my own skin.” explore this!” She replied, “Well, I’m not selective about her guests. “It has to be
Dimoldenberg prepares for each ex- even asking to.” When Garfield even- an organic fit,” Dimoldenberg told me.
change with extensive research, but she tually joined Dimoldenberg at Sam’s “I need to be a fan of them and their
also deftly improvises, and her onscreen Chicken, in northwest London, fan work. If I fancy them, it helps, too. It is
style of flirting is sometimes indistin- anticipation was high, and the pair did a dating show, after all.”
guishable from cutting critique. When not disappoint.
the pop star Ed Sheeran started to play
the ukulele, she told him, “Don’t give up
“Come on, we can own that it’s been
vibey,” Garfield said.
“ I recently found out that I like a Pinot
Noir,” Dimoldenberg said the first
the day job.” At moments, though, her “It’s been vibey to the point where time I met her, as she settled into a low
guests show unexpected vulnerability. you’ve been avoiding me for two years, armchair at the Dean Street Townhouse,
On an episode two years ago, Dimol- because the vibes were too much for you a restaurant in London’s Soho neigh-
denberg asked Central Cee, the British to handle,” Dimoldenberg shot back, in borhood. It was a week into the New
rapper, “How long does it take you to undermining-girl-boss mode. Year, and Dimoldenberg was not ob-
fall in love?,” and he responded with a The ensuing ten-minute battle of serving Dry January, but she had plans
meandering and strangely touching dis- wits had a screwball energy that Pres- for a first date the following evening
course on the unreliability of romantic ton Sturges would have appreciated. with someone who was. She explained,
feeling. “I just think it’s a delusion, innit?” “I’m not going to be who you want “I was Googling ‘Things to do when
he said. “Maybe I’m a bit pessimistic, I me to be in this moment,” Dimolden- you’re sober,’ and I found it so funny. It
don’t know, but if you’re going against berg offered. was, like, ‘An escape room.’ ‘A horse-
the grain, trying to secure something “I’m not asking you to be anything drawn carriage around the park.’ ‘Indoor
rare, I feel like you just have to be a bit but what you are,” Garfield said, shift- rock climbing.’”
deluded.” The episode was “Chicken ing around in his chair. “I’m just hold- So what plan had they settled on?
Shop Date” at its best, offering a sur- ing a mirror up.” “We’re going to go to the pub, obviously,
prising disclosure in which the border “Yeah, and I look good,” Dimolden- and have Diet Cokes.”
between performance and authenticity berg retorted. For “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimol-
was impossible to pinpoint. Later, Garfield asked, “Do you think denberg likes to dress up, usually in an
Dimoldenberg’s interviews have a this”—he gestured toward the cameras outfit that has some interest around the
surreal strangeness reminiscent of the and the mikes—“has fucked up the fact neckline or the arms, given that she and
work of Sacha Baron Cohen, another that we could actually have gone on a her guest are seen only from the rib cage
high-wire, always-in-character come- date at some point, maybe?” up. This evening, she was dressed less
dian. She once asked Beth Mead, the “Yeah, because you’re afraid of it,” Di- flamboyantly, in chic black pants and a
record-holding forward of the Lion- moldenberg said, popping a French fry black top. She ordered roast chicken—
esses, the English women’s soccer team, between perfectly glossed lips. The ep- it’s actually her favorite meal, she said,
“Would you say you are a competitive isode, which aired late last year, has been not just an on-brand choice. “But I have
person?” But the distance between the viewed more than ten million times. to ask what part of the chicken it is, be-
highly capable Dimoldenberg and her In the decade since launching cause I only like breast,” she told me.
“Chicken Shop Date” persona hasn’t “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimoldenberg (On “Chicken Shop Date,” she eats only
stopped her followers from becoming has attempted to diversify her comic out- nuggets and cringes at wings.) When
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 23
 Canadian journalist John Ruskin—who
stuns rappers and other musicians with
his prodigious research into their early
lives, and the New York-based come-
dian Kareem Rahma, who, on his on-
line show “Subway Takes,” invites co-
medians, influencers, or actors to offer
miscellaneous critiques of social mores
while riding mass transit. ( Jeremy O.
Harris: “We should have gatekept being
woke a little bit longer.” Cat Cohen:
“You can’t text someone just ‘hey’ and
say nothing else.”) Like these interview-
ers, Dimoldenberg permits the inter-
viewee to be in on the joke.
But if part of the joke of “Chicken
Shop Date” is Dimoldenberg’s insistence
that every episode really is a date, and
not just another stop on a publicity tour,
part of the show’s success is the degree
to which the encounters generate gen-
uine chemistry. “I don’t know why I
wouldn’t be able to meet someone on
the show—like, that’s how we meet,
right?” she told me. “But I also know
that it’s not real, and that the person I’m
meeting is not going to think that it is.”
Although Dimoldenberg has had one
long-term relationship in the decade of
• • making “Chicken Shop Date,” she is
currently single. (Of her sparks with An-
the waitress came, Dimoldenberg po- it had more staccato energy, and now it’s drew Garfield, she said, briskly, “I don’t
litely asked to have the chicken leg left quite fluid.” These days, Dimoldenberg think it’s going to happen, otherwise I
off the plate, though not before asking is well known enough not just to per- would be going out with him already,
me if I would like it. “I’m not going to form celebrity interviews but to be the wouldn’t I?”) She told me, “Part of me
eat the leg, so I’d rather give it to some- object of them. Last year, she ate chicken thinks that the reason I’ve been single
one else,” she said. with Drew Barrymore on Barrymore’s for so long is because I have this dating
Dimoldenberg’s onscreen character is talk show, and appeared on “Late Night show, and it’s easier for me that I’m sin-
in many ways formed in the editing pro- with Seth Meyers,” where she explained gle, because I’m living the character.” In
cess, which she supervises. Moments of the British art of banter: “British peo- her private life, Dimoldenberg goes on
standoffishness or awkwardness are em- ple, they flirt like they don’t like you. the apps and has friends set her up, with
phasized with jump cuts to her face, the Make someone think that maybe they varying degrees of success. “I go through
camera lingering on her expressive, quiz- actually hate you, and I feel like that’s waves of finding it really hard to meet
zical features. In person, though, Di- how you fall in love.” Having become a people, and then my first thought is ‘I’m
moldenberg is warm, open, and relaxed. public figure in her own right, she plays so unattractive,’” she told me. “When
“My character is equal parts desperate with the equilibrium of mutual celebrity I’m super single, I just go into this place
and uninterested,” she told me. In the for comic ends. On a recent episode, the where I convince myself not that I’m
earliest iteration of the show, the com- actor Paul Mescal asked what kinds of unattractive—like, I know that I’m not—
edy lay in part in the rap-world inter- movies she liked. “I think I’ve seen all but more, like, ‘Every single person thinks
viewees’ amusement at being asked dead- yours,” she told him, then added, conde- I’m ugly, but they’re wrong.’” Sounding
pan, rapid-fire questions by a scrupulously scendingly, “You’ve not done loads.” like a more self-knowing version of her
prepared but apparently clueless girl eat- David Letterman, who began sub- “Chicken Shop Date” identity, she added,
ing fries across the table. (“You have an- verting the celebrity interview more than “I do have good self-confidence, but it
other name, Murkle Man,” she said to forty years ago, is among Dimolden- just manifests in a different way, where
Jammer, a grime artist who was the fourth berg’s obvious precursors. But her clos- I just think people are out to get me.”
guest on her show. “Does that have any- est contemporary peers are not the hosts Most of Dimoldenberg’s guests are
thing to do with Angela Merkel?”) Di- of network television shows but, rather, familiar in advance with the show’s for-
moldenberg told me, “I talk more now— YouTube and TikTok interviewers such mat, though there are exceptions, such
I’m leading the conversation now. Before, as Nardwuar—a character created by the as Cher, who made an appearance in
24 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
early 2024. “She was told to do it by her his head. But I was being somewhat true. ago, Evans appeared on “Chicken Shop
godson, and she nailed it,” Dimolden- And afterward it was, like, ‘People are Date.”The gag was the similarity of their
berg said. (In the episode, Dimolden- really liking this, actually.’” She was think- shticks—“I basically want to date my-
berg confided that she once had a terri- ing of trying something similar with self, in a male form,” Dimoldenberg told
ble kiss with a man who didn’t open his Erivo, whose earlier interviews indicated Evans—but, in fact, the shows are quite
mouth. “English?” Cher asked, with a that she was inclined toward earnestness. different. “Chicken Shop Date” depends
knowing shrug.) When Shania Twain “She seems very sincere—she’s not re- on an audience’s suspension of disbelief
came on, Dimoldenberg arrived at the ally my type,” Dimoldenberg said. “I’m about the date scenario, whereas Evans
restaurant swathed in leopard-print pants excited to have a conversation that shows offers a more conventional interview ex-
and a matching top with a draped hood— her to be funnier than ever—but also, change, albeit with the added possibil-
an outfit impressively similar to the one maybe, we could have some serious chat.” ity of acute digestive distress.
that Twain wore in the video for her 1997 From the start, “Chicken Shop Date”
hit “That Don’t Impress Me Much.”
Twain wrote to me in an e-mail that she
was “not at all prepared for it, in a chicken
IthetfourU.K.—one
is estimated that there are more than
thousand chicken shops across
in every postcode except
has been shot in real chicken shops. “Yes,
it’s a pain, because there are so many
noises, and you’re on the main road, and
shop of all places.” They got along beau- three, according to a 2020 assessment the fryer’s on, and the phone rings—but
tifully, and by the episode’s end the singer by the Financial Times. (The chicken- it’s great,” Dimoldenberg said. When a
was tossing chicken nuggets across the free zones were on far-flung Scottish guest is from London, a shop appropri-
table and Dimoldenberg was attempt- islands.) Although there are a few big ate to his or her neighborhood is cho-
ing to catch them in her mouth. Twain chains, such as Morley’s, which origi- sen; though Dimoldenberg makes ac-
told me, “I’m not sure how the nugget- nated in South London and now has commodations for certain of her guests’
tossing began. With Amelia, these things nearly a hundred outlets all across the dietary requirements—for Eilish, the
just happen.” capital, many are independent busi- nuggets were vegan—she is unwilling to
Initially, Dimoldenberg’s guests were nesses, though they hew to a similar compromise the show’s geographic and
all male; she was reluctant to invite model: laminate countertops, fluores- cultural integrity. (An exception was made
women on the show, for fear that the cent lighting, and food that can be made for Cher, because she’s Cher; her episode
dating conceit would founder. “I was al- quickly, at low cost, in deep fryers. Cu- was shot in Paris, at Chicken Hub, a fast-
ways, like, ‘It’s not going to work with linarily, KFC is the U.S.’s closest paral- food joint in the Tenth Arrondissement.)
a woman—I’m straight,’” she said. But lel to the U.K. chicken shop. But cul- Dimoldenberg’s efforts to land Drake for
she decided that her thinking was too turally—in New York, at least—a better “Chicken Shop Date” have been a run-
literal, and in 2017 she began having comparison might be to the corner piz- ning theme; for years, she has said that
women on. Some of her most popular zeria swiftly doling out slices on paper he will be her very last guest. “We were
episodes have been with female stars, plates to schoolkids, budget-minded meant to film together numerous times,
and Dimoldenberg is as likely to seek parents, and late-night revellers. and for numerous reasons it didn’t hap-
dating advice from them as she is to en- A chicken shop is not what most pen,” she told me. “The last message he
gage in flirting. With Billie Eilish, it people would consider an ideal venue sent me was about me coming to Swe-
was both. “You’re pretty mesmerizing,” for a date, hence the comedy of Dimol- den to film. And I was, like, ‘Well, there’s
Eilish told her. Dimoldenberg punc- denberg’s premise, but it is a space ac- no chicken shops in Sweden.’”
tured the moment with “Your glasses— cessible to a broad swath of London res- Dimoldenberg grew up in northwest
are they real?” idents, and it holds a particularly London, not far from Paddington Sta-
In moving from the chicken shop to cherished place in rap and youth cul- tion. Her mother is a retired librarian;
the red carpet, Dimoldenberg retained ture. Not long after Dimoldenberg her father, a director at a public-relations
her flirtatiousness and shed her clumsi- launched “Chicken Shop Date,” another firm, is a member of the local govern-
ness. “Chicken Shop Date” alums treated London YouTuber, Elijah Quashie, ment, representing the Labour Party.
her like an old friend: Eilish sidled up started his own chicken-shop-based Their home was middle class, but the
to her at the Oscars and gave her a long humor series, “The Pengest Munch”— social environment that Dimoldenberg
squeeze, saying, “I’ve been thinking about “peng” is slang for “good”—in which, in grew up in was economically diverse,
you.” At first, Dimoldenberg tended to the role of Chicken Connoisseur, he re- and she attended local, state-funded
avoid including anything in the final edit views different establishments. (On Val- schools that had students from a wide
of “Chicken Shop Date” that carried a entine’s Day, 2017, Dimoldenberg and range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
whiff of sincerity, on either her part or Quashie collaborated on an episode of Dimoldenberg was one of the few Jew-
that of her guest. “I was always, like, ‘If “Chicken Shop Date” in which they ate ish students in her elementary school.
it’s not funny, it’s not going in,’” she said. together after Dimoldenberg was sup- “When it was show-and-tell, I did
Recent experience, though, has made her posedly stood up by a date.) The pair- Jewish prayers—that was my talent,” she
reconsider. “With Andrew Garfield, I ing of poultry and celebrity is also cen- told me. At home, she was known for
loved that you could feel there was some tral to “Hot Ones,” the American online her creativity—she was always roping
sincerity there, and I kept that in,” she series in which Sean Evans interviews her younger sister into putting on plays—
said. “I was being real. He’s an actor, so famous people while feeding them in- and, as a teen-ager, for her stinging sar-
I didn’t know what was going through creasingly spicy chicken wings. Not long casm. Her mother, Linda Hardman, told
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 25
me, “She’s lovely now, but she could be “Chicken Shop Date” originated not club,” she said. “But I don’t think I would
quite alarming at times—but in a way on YouTube but as a Q. & A. column in be anywhere without The Cut.” When,
that was probably funny if you were the pages of a print magazine, The Cut, in 2018, her former classmate Big Zuu
watching it.” Dimoldenberg attributes produced by members of a youth club appeared on “Chicken Shop Date,” Di-
a prudish tendency to her mom’s influ- that Dimoldenberg attended in her high- moldenberg asked him what law he would
ence. “Like, when we were watching school years. (She joined the club on the like to implement. “It would be that youth
television and people were kissing, my advice of a teacher who knew of her am- clubs have to be built in every area, and
mum would be, like, ‘Oh, look away, ev- bitions to become a fashion-magazine run in an amazing way,” he said.
eryone!’” Dimoldenberg told me. When editor; she had already received a rejec- “Love that,” she replied.
Matty Healy, of the band the 1975, ap- tion letter from Condé Nast, the pub- “It would change the country,” he
peared on “Chicken Shop Date,” three lisher of Vogue and of this magazine, with said, with feeling. This moment of sin-
years ago, and leaned across the table for which she had sought a work placement cerity, unusually, made it to the final edit.
a kiss—the only time a guest has ever at the precocious age of thirteen.) Even “Vote for Zuu,” Dimoldenberg said.
attempted to take things to first base, at in print form, the scenario of a date in a
least on camera—Dimoldenberg ini- chicken shop was already in place, as was few days after the Cynthia Erivo
tially refused, and then gave him a dis-
missive peck on the forehead.
Dimoldenberg’s unnerving technique.
“Do you get fan mail?” she asked the rap-
A episode was shot, I joined Dimol-
denberg at her airy apartment, in Hack-
The very specific territorial allegiance per It’s Nate, one of her first interview ney, in East London, where she was re-
of Londoners to their postcodes was subjects for The Cut. Her follow-up was viewing the footage and making notes
important to the show’s original iden- “Do you get fans that are male?” While for her editor. Typically, Dimoldenberg
tity. When, in an early episode, Dimol- studying at Central St. Martin’s, where records for thirty to forty minutes. In
denberg asked A. J. Tracey, a rapper from she majored in fashion journalism, Di- the early days, the final episodes lasted
Ladbroke Grove, in West London, moldenberg transferred the chicken-shop for three or four minutes; now they can
which part of the city the best girls come concept to YouTube, roping in friends run as long as twelve.
from, his reply—“West, definitely. with video-production skills to help We watched as, onscreen, Dimolden-
Where in London are you from?”— her make it. After graduating, Dimol- berg’s producer, Liv, smeared a patch of
prompted an extended comic prevari- denberg worked as a journalist. She con- green color onto Dimoldenberg’s cheek.
cation on her part: “West. Northwest . . . tributed to various publications that “Why is this green on your face?” Erivo
I’m from West.” The porosity of Lon- would later cover her, such as Vice and inevitably asked. Dimoldenberg paused
don’s social and economic strata among the Guardian, where she wrote about In- the playback on her laptop and typed an
young people was crucial in establish- ternet phenomena (“How a Dog Named instruction to the video editor: “Before
ing the “Chicken Shop Date” premise: Tuna Became Beloved, Rich, and Fa- this, have a shot of me doing nothing.
Tracey knew of Dimoldenberg before mous on Instagram”) and gave cheeky Maybe looking awkward.” She pressed
going on the show because she’d at- advice to young people on how to get a Play to review her response: “Oh, sorry,
tended the same elementary school as start in a desired career (“Don’t eat lunch I’ve just, like, been using a new founda-
a cousin of his, also a rapper, who goes alone in the local cemetery. I did this on tion. I feel like it’s not rubbed in. Has it
by Big Zuu. Tracey’s episode, the sixth one internship. . . . I could have been not rubbed in properly?”
in the series, was unusually combative. mingling instead.”) That bit having landed, the tape con-
At one point, he said that Dimolden- The youth club where Dimoldenberg tinued to roll. Dimoldenberg had read
berg’s face was only “O.K.”; he later in- got her own start has since been shut that Erivo received a Radcliffe Fellow-
structed her to get into a garbage can ship at Harvard. “So, when are you going
in the corner of the shop. “My inten- to start your Ph.D.?” Dimoldenberg
tion was to make her feel as awkward asked. Erivo responded at length: “I’m
as possible, honestly,” Tracey told me hoping in the next couple of years—
recently. “I just wanted to see her get a well, it just depends on when I can get
taste of her own medicine.” (He added, the time to actually be in the place, or
“She didn’t get in the bin.”) Dimolden- if I can convince someone to let me do
berg’s sister, Zoë, who trailed her by a it as I’m moving around.” She went on,
year at school and is now a video pro- “I guess it would be the study of voice
ducer who collaborates behind the scenes and psychology, and how it all works.”
on Dimoldenberg’s red-carpet inter- down, as have many comparable pro- “Wow, it’s fascinating,” Dimolden-
views, told me, “The funniness of the grams, because of cuts to local govern- berg replied.
show at the beginning was kind of Ame- ment funding made by the Conservative Now, in reviewing the footage, Di-
lia as an outsider—that’s how it hinged. government in the twenty-tens. Dimol- moldenberg seemed a bit impatient. Eri-
But, actually, she was an insider, because denberg feels strongly about the value of vo’s response had been full and infor-
it was just people we had connections such institutions, especially for young mative, but not at all funny. Watching
to and people we would meet. That’s people without her cultural capital. “I Dimoldenberg’s face onscreen, it was
how the show is really kind of repre- didn’t even need those services—I was possible to see her calculating in the mo-
sentative of London.” probably the poshest person in the youth ment how to divert the conversation into
26 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
richer comedic territory. Eventually, she “That doesn’t to me sound like you’re
cut Erivo off: “I can sing live on set. I insincere. It sounds like there’s, like,
don’t, because it gives the crew migraines.” nervousness,” Erivo said, gently. The
(When the finished episode dropped, exchange was no longer exactly Dimol-
at the end of the week, Dimoldenberg’s denberg’s “Chicken Shop Date” charac-
migraine was in it but Erivo’s doctoral ter seeking to elicit a usable bit from her
plans went unmentioned.) guest; it was the real Dimoldenberg seek-
As playback continued, Dimolden- ing advice from someone she admired.
berg typed notes to her editor about what Dimoldenberg pressed Pause again
she liked, including a moment when and sighed. “I’m not really good at lis-
Erivo gamely pretended to be a head of tening,” she told me, with a tight laugh.
lettuce, shrugging her shoulders from “In the show, I don’t really listen. When
side to side. Among the material left I’m watching the rushes back, I can see
on the cutting-room floor was an ac- that someone said something, and then
count that Erivo gave of meeting Are- I asked them a completely different ques-
tha Franklin after a performance of the tion, rather than asking a follow-up.” She
musical adaptation of “The Color Pur- paused and considered this. “But it’s kind
ple,” which Erivo starred in on Broad- of created the energy of the show, and
way. The story—Franklin had apprecia- my character.” “Chicken Shop Date” had
tively sung back to her a line from the been built on Dimoldenberg’s character
performance—might have been the lead being so insecure and self-involved that
anecdote in a profile of Erivo that sought any deeper engagement with a guest was
to place her in a lineage of distinguished impossible—or at least impossible to in-
vocalists. But for Dimoldenberg’s pur- clude in the final edit. In reviewing the
poses it was useless: “I just feel like, yeah, Erivo footage, though, Dimoldenberg
it’s interesting, but it doesn’t really have could see the possibility of a different
a place in ‘Chicken Shop Date.’” kind of exchange, one in which self-
More promising was an exchange in sabotage was replaced by a half-real,
which Erivo, who is a marathoner, talked half-comedic pursuit of greater mutual
about the addictive qualities of running. understanding, and even self-knowledge.
“I’m addicted to dates,” Dimolden- The Erivo episode wasn’t Dimolden-
berg replied. berg’s funniest, but it was winning none-
“What’s the end goal?” Erivo asked, theless, with Dimoldenberg striving to
sounding genuinely inquiring. “Do you match Erivo’s empathetic energy, rather
want to fall in love?” than Erivo being obliged to match spiky
“That’s the thing I’m thinking about— wits with Dimoldenberg. Dimolden-
do I even want to fall in love?” Dimol- berg’s plans for her comedy career
denberg replied. “Because, if I actually will eventually require her to retire the
wanted to fall in love, maybe it would “Chicken Shop Date” format, perhaps
have happened by now.” Dimoldenberg sooner than her fans expect. Drake needs
pressed Pause again: this was useful ma- to get a move on. (He certainly could
terial. “I like that, because I’m talking use a viral boost.) Increasingly, Dimol-
about the story arc of the show,” she said. denberg told me, she feels able to inhabit C a
She pressed Play and watched as she a larger emotional space. “Maybe before
turned the conversation back to Erivo. I was scared of being the real me,” she magazi ’s fi s c y
“I feel like you are very good at being said. “It’s easier to hide behind a persona. wi imi - i i
sincere—you have a sincerity about you Or this idea of ‘It’s funnier if you’re a appa , wa c s,
that I run away from in my own life, and character—you’re not funny enough on
I just hide it with flirting,” Dimolden- your own.’” Still, Dimoldenberg’s wist- ags, a m
berg said. “Have you always been able fulness about her former guests—her
to be naturally sincere?” “exes,” as she calls them—is entirely gen-
“I think so,” Erivo said, utterly ear- uine, and it’s also familiar to anyone who
nest. “I think I am actually interested in has ever tried to bond with a stranger
a person, and I think that makes it easy under charged circumstances, and to any-
to be sincere, because I’m actually, like, one who has ever hoped for that bond
listening, and I’m paying attention.” to last. “I always feel really connected to
“See, I do that, I listen,” Dimolden- everyone on the show,” she told me. “I
berg replied, abruptly. “I then think, O.K., think about them all the time. But they
let’s just move on.” probably don’t think about me.” 
 A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE END OF CHILDREN

Birth rates are crashing around the world. What does that mean for our future?
BY GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS

S
ocieties do collapse, sometimes sud- By the time “The Population Bomb” was mographic winter” are commonplace.
denly. Nevertheless, prophets of published, the population-growth rate Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of
doom might keep in mind that had already peaked. For hundreds of Italy, has said that her country is “des-
their darkest predictions have been, on thousands of years, we had gone forth tined to disappear.” One Japanese econ-
the whole, a little premature. In 1968, and multiplied. This epoch was coming omist runs a conceptual clock that counts
Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist, and his to an end. down to his country’s final child: the cur-
largely uncredited wife, Anne, published The “total fertility rate” is a coarse rent readout is January 5, 2720.
a best-seller called “The Population estimate of the number of children an It will take a few years before we can
Bomb.” For centuries, economists had average woman will bear. A population be sure, but it’s possible that 2023 saw
worried that the world’s food supply will be stable if it reproduces at the “re- the world as a whole slump beneath the
could not possibly be expected to keep placement rate,” or about 2.1 babies per replacement threshold for the first time.
pace with the growing mobs of people. mother. (The .1 is the statistical laun- There are a couple of places where fer-
Now there was no postponing our fate. dering of great personal tragedy.) Any- tility remains higher—Central Asia and
“The battle to feed all of humanity is thing above that threshold will theoret- sub-Saharan Africa—but even there the
over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s the ically generate exponential expansion, rates are generally diminishing. Para-
world will undergo famines—hundreds and anything below it will generate ex- noia has ensued. In the past year, hun-
of millions of people are going to starve ponential decay. In 1960, the tiny coun- dreds of men in the Central African
to death.” This was the received wisdom try of Singapore had a fertility rate of Republic have reported the presumably
of the era: a decade earlier, an only slightly almost six. By 1985, it had been brought delusional belief that their genitals have
flippant article in Science estimated that down to 1.6—a rate that threatened to gone missing. In Nigeria, where the fer-
in November, 2026, the global popula- roughly halve its population in two gen- tility rate has fallen from seven to four,
tion would approach infinity. Ehrlich erations. As the economist Nicholas a widely read tabloid blamed a conspir-
prescribed a few sane proposals—the le- Eberstadt told me, “For two decades, acy of perverts in the French intelli-
galization of abortion, investments in the leaders of Singapore said, ‘Oh, un- gence services who had been “using se-
contraception research, and sex educa- controlled fertility has terribly danger- cret nanotechnology innovations to steal
tion—but he also floated the idea of spik- ous consequences, so the rate has to penises from African men in order to
ing the water supply with temporary come down,’ and then, after a semico- reverse the extinction of Europeans un-
sterilants. Americans might protest such lon, without even catching their breath, willing to bear children.”
extreme measures, he allowed, but peo- said, ‘Wait, I mean go up.’” The nation’s The phenomenon exerts a peculiarly
ple in foreign countries should have no leaders launched a promotional cam- deranging force, and until recently Amer-
choice. It was only reasonable that food paign: “Have-Three-or-More (if you icans remained oblivious. In the past two
aid be conditioned on the developing can afford it).” Singaporeans were known decades, however, the American fertility
world’s ability to exhibit civilized re- to be good national sports, but, despite rate has dropped roughly twenty per cent,
straint. Nations that tolerated a free-for- the catchiness of the slogan, they proved to 1.6. The right wing sees depopulation
all of unrepentant copulation—he sin- noncompliant. From one nation to the as a greater threat than climate change.
gled out India—would be left to fend next, the nightmare of too many de- Elon Musk describes it as “the biggest
for themselves. scendants turned into the nightmare of danger civilization faces by far,” and is
“The Population Bomb” transformed too few. In 2007, when Japan’s total fer- trying, in his quiet way, to compensate
regional unease into a global panic. India, tility rate hit 1.3, a conservative govern- on his own. He has sired, at least in a
in less than two years, subjected millions ment minister referred to women as technical sense, thirteenish known chil-
of citizens to compulsory sterilization. “birth-giving machines.” This didn’t go dren, and has reportedly offered the dis-
China rolled out a series of initiatives— over particularly well with anyone, in- pensation of his sperm to friends, em-
culminating in the infamous one-child cluding his wife. ployees, and people he met once at a
policy—that included punitive fines, Today, declining fertility is a near- dinner party. (Musk denies this. Skeptics
obligatory IUD insertions, and unwanted universal phenomenon. Albania, El Sal- of the strategy, though, might recall that
abortions. Ehrlich can hardly be blamed vador, and Nepal, none of them affluent, Genghis Khan, according to legend, had
for the most coercive incarnations of are now below replacement levels. Iran’s more than a thousand offspring.) Vice-
population control. He might, however, fertility rate is half of what it was thirty President J. D. Vance has blamed this
be accused of impeccable comic timing. years ago. Headlines about “Europe’s de- “catastrophic problem” on the “childless
28 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
If current trends hold, every hundred Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren.
ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAÉN THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 29
left.” Liberals more often dismiss the Portents of desolation are everywhere. memorable scene in Alfonso Cuarón’s
issue, not without reason, as scaremon- Middle-aged Koreans remember a time 2006 film, “Children of Men,” a dysto-
gering in service of the Republican as- when children were plentiful. In 1970, a pian vision of a sterile world, a deer
sault on reproductive rights. Some go million Korean babies were born. An bounds through a trash-strewn school
further: a dwindling population is a more average baby-boomer classroom had sev- hallway. Here, dereliction was kept at
environmentally sustainable one. enty or eighty pupils, and schools were bay: the corridors were bright, broom-
Anyone who offers a confident ex- forced to divide their students into morn- swept, and freshly painted. The former
planation of the situation is probably ing and afternoon shifts. It is as though chambers of a departed principal, dusted
wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the these people were residents of a differ- as if in anticipation of parent confer-
most significant decision any individual ent country. In 2023, the number of births ences, were spectral; the empty room
might make with unanswerable questions was just two hundred and thirty thou- next door had a hulking public-address
about our collective fate, so a theory of sand. A baby-formula brand has retooled console, with five microphones set at
fertility is necessarily a theory of every- itself to manufacture muscle-retention varying heights. It was as if everyone
thing—gender, money, politics, culture, smoothies for the elderly. About two had evaporated overnight.
evolution. Eberstadt told me, “The person hundred day-care facilities have been The school administrator, Lee
who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, turned into nursing homes, sometimes Youngmi, efficiently if warily welcomed
not in economics but in literature.” with the same directors, the same rub- me into a main office lined with spotless
The global population is projected to berized play floors, and the same cray- devices—a spiral-binding machine, a
grow for about another half century.Then ons. A rural school has been repurposed laminator—and offered me ginger tea
it will contract. This is unprecedented. as a cat sanctuary. Every Korean has and cookies. When she’d first arrived, ten
Almost nothing else can be said with heard that their population will ineluc- years ago, there were sixty students. But
any certainty. Here and there, however, tably approach zero. Cho Youngtae, a the surrounding town had since drained
are harbingers of potential futures. South celebrity demographer at Seoul National away. The large cattle market, which used
Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is University, said to me, “Ask people on to be candlelit until well after dark, is
the lowest rate of any nation in the world. the street, ‘What is the Korean total fer- gone, as are the brewery, the lumber mill,
It may be the lowest in recorded history. tility rate?’ and they will know!” They the police station, and the post office.
If that trajectory holds, each successive often know to two decimal places. They Parents fought to preserve the school as
generation will be a third the size of its have a celebrity demographer. a center of civic life, but their children
predecessor. Every hundred contempo- Outside of Seoul, children are largely now complained that there was no one
rary Koreans of childbearing age will phantom presences. There are a hundred left to play with. Teachers called the cur-
produce, in total, about twelve grand- and fifty-seven elementary schools that rent group of students, in a reference to
children. The country is an outlier, but had no new enrollees scheduled for 2023. an old Korean superhero cartoon, the
it may not be one for long. As the Ko- That year, the seaside village of Iwon- Eagle Five Brothers. Lee was accustomed
rean political analyst John Lee told me, myeon recorded a single newborn. The to solitude. When she left me in the room,
“We are the canary in the coal mine.” entire town was garlanded with banners she reflexively flicked off the heating.
that congratulated the parents by name The sixth-grade teacher, Kang Woo-

Irises,nofSeoul, an endless, futuristic sprawl

Samsung- and LG-fabricated high-
an imminent shortage of people
“on the birth of their lovely baby angel.”
One village in Haenam, a county that
encompasses the southern extremity of
young, a man in his twenties, had a sim-
ilar air of resignation. His two students
had been together since they reached
seems preposterous. The capital city’s the Korean peninsula, last registered a school age. When I asked if they got
metropolitan area, home to twenty-six birth during the 1988 Seoul Olympics. along, he seemed baffled by the ques-
million citizens, or about half of all South Haenam disappears into the sea at a tion: they fought sometimes, sure, but
Koreans, is perhaps the most densely windswept cape called Ttangkkeut, or they didn’t know any other children their
settled region in the industrialized world. “End of the World.” Not far away, there age. “The advantage is that I can be super
When I visited, in November, I was ad- is a school that once had more than a intimate with the students,” he said. “The
vised to withdraw my phone from my thousand elementary-age students. disadvantage is that they cannot learn to
pocket on the metro platform, because When I visited, in November, it had five. socialize in a group setting.” One of his
it would be impossible to do so once on A pastel rainbow brightened the façade, sixth graders was disabled; a special-
board the train. Fuchsia metro seats are and out front was a statue of a singlet- education teacher was retained on his
reserved for pregnant women. Those clad boy with a raised torch; the plinth’s behalf, but the line item was hard to jus-
who aren’t yet showing are awarded spe- inscription read “Physical strength is na- tify. The patterns of the children’s lives
cial medallions as proof of gestation. A tional strength.” A pair of slippers had were unlikely to be upended by the ar-
looping instructional video reminded been left for me at the entryway, beside rival of a strange new kid or the torment
passengers of the proper etiquette. Even a trophy case crowded with bygone glo- of an unapproachable crush. The school
amid the rush-hour crush, these seats ries and a laminated poster that intro- may be closing next year. Kang had loved
were often left vacant. They seemed to duced the names and career aspirations his first teaching job, his own childhood
represent less a practical consideration of the three first graders (policeman, ar- dream. But he didn’t have any friends in
than an act of unanchored faith—like chitect, idol singer) and the two sixth town, either.
a place for Elijah at a Seder table. graders (truck driver, fighter pilot). In a The after-school program was about
30 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
to start. It featured two options: 3-D print-
ing and something Lee called “a new
sport.” She could give me no details on
the new sport, which was played on Tues-
days. In the past, they had offered vol-
leyball, badminton, and soccer, but such
extravagances required a critical mass.
She let me wander the school, which felt
like a museum of childhood artifacts: an
unlit but well-stocked gymnasium, a dark-
ened cafeteria outfitted with a little pro-
scenium stage, enormous forsaken play-
grounds, ballfields gone wild. The only
apparent concession to the demographic
reality was a robotic apparatus for play-
ing Ping-Pong by yourself.
The end of the world is usually dra-
matized as convulsive and feverish, but
population loss is an apocalypse on an
installment plan. At one point in “Chil-
dren of Men,” the protagonist, played by
Clive Owen, regards a private archive of
cultural treasures—Michelangelo’s
“David,” Picasso’s “Guernica”—and turns “Stay ...”
to its proprietor to say, “A hundred years
from now there won’t be one sad fuck to
look at any of this. What keeps you
• •
going?” The man responds, “I just don’t
think about it.” economist Thomas Malthus famously same time, improvements in medicine
observed, the only effective deterrent to and sanitation radically reduced the rate
ysteria about the number of chil- the otherwise consuming “passion be- of childhood mortality. Children became
H dren is often an alibi for hysteria
about who is having them. In the first
tween the sexes” was the fear that one’s
children would starve to death. Fami-
capital assets, and investments in their
education were understood to beget
decades of the Roman Empire, Augus- lies were just large enough to compen- healthy returns. Economists likened this
tus Caesar grew fixated on the decadent sate for the fact that nearly half of all to other consumer durables: as families
urban élite’s apparent refusal to perpet- babies born would never celebrate their get richer, they don’t just keep buying
uate itself. The patrician class, he said, fifth birthday. In about 1805, we crossed cars; they buy nicer ones.
was betraying the country “by render- the threshold of a billion people. That If economic prosperity decreased fer-
ing her barren”; to deny their ancestors had taken the entirety of human history. tility, it seemed intuitive that lower fer-
the immortality of their lineage was an Our next billion took just a hundred and tility should, in turn, increase prosper-
act “worse than murder.” In 9 A.D., he twenty-three years. ity. During the Cold War, population
legislated that high-status men who re- This population explosion coincided, control came to be seen as a kind of
mained single by the age of twenty-five oddly, with a downward fertility drift in master key—a panacea for social and
would forfeit their inheritances. In ad- Europe. The pioneers were French aris- political ills. In a forthcoming book,
dition, the élites were forbidden to marry tocrats: in the interest of consolidating “Toxic Demography,” the scholar Jen-
actors. Their infertility probably owed familial wealth and prestige, the nobil- nifer Sciubba and her co-authors write
less to dalliances with thespians than it ity increasingly delayed marriage, and that American élites believed “popula-
did to the presence of lead in their uten- then sought to limit the number of off- tion growth caused poverty, and poverty
sils, cosmetics, and pipes. Either way, spring who might expect their share of caused communism.” It was in the best
their biological legacies were in fact ex- an inheritance. This made sense. But the interests of the West, leaders such as
tinguished: imperial Roman urbanites practices diffused, through mimicry, to President Lyndon Johnson affirmed, to
left little detectable genetic trace in sub- the lower orders. This made less sense. subsidize the proliferation of birth con-
sequent Europeans. The population as Evolutionary imperatives, it seemed, could trol and sex education. It was unfortu-
a whole, however, was fine. be eclipsed by cultural contagion. nate but apparently unavoidable that the
Aside from the blips of the Mongol By the twentieth century, more ratio- principal instrument of family planning
invasions, the Black Death, and the nal explanations had caught up. An in- was the female body. The president of
Thirty Years’ War, the human number dustrializing economy no longer required Planned Parenthood, an organization
in Eurasia grew steadily, if slowly, for the children to help on the farm. Women founded in alignment with the eugeni-
bulk of the next two millennia. As the were free to enter the workplace. At the cist sympathies of early-twentieth-century
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 31
progressive movements, warned that an anyone that governments might want to ing. It’s the norm not to want kids.” Like
overly precious concern for “individual turn the knob the other way. many Koreans, she dotes on her dog.
women” would impede progress: “We Except, as a Dutch demographer once Finding gifts in Seoul for my two little
dare not lose sight of our goals—to apply dryly put it, “the drive in human popu- soccer fanatics at home required delib-
this method to large populations.” lations to procreate may long have been erate planning—I schlepped all over town
South Korea stood at the vanguard. over-estimated.” When Korea neared re- looking for national-team jerseys in child’s
A decade after the Korean War, the placement, in 1983, its leadership might sizes and had to settle for black-market
country’s per-capita G.D.P. was below have reconsidered its policies. Instead, it knockoffs—but there is a pet depot on
a hundred dollars—less than that of doubled down with a new slogan: “Even practically every block. Last year, stroll-
Haiti. People ate tree bark two are too many.” By 1986, ers for dogs outsold those for babies. She
or boiled grass, and children the Korean fertility rate said, “I’m not saying people value dogs
begged in the streets. After reached 1.6. This remained more than they value children.” She
a military coup in 1961, the stable for about a decade, paused to gesture to the other patrons:
new authoritarian leader- then fell off a cliff. The gov- “But all you have to do is look around.”
ship tied its economic pro- ernment has now devoted
gram to the cultivation of approximately two hundred merican conservatives have become
a citizenry that was smaller
and better educated. It was
and fifty billion dollars to
various pro-natalist efforts,
A preoccupied with foreshadowings
of “civilizational suicide.” A year ago, the
an all-hands-on-deck ap- including cash transfers and Times columnist Ross Douthat, a father
proach to the labor force. parental-leave extensions, to of five, published an opinion piece that
Social workers fanned out no avail. Two years ago, the invoked the Korean example as a “warn-
to rural communities, where they en- legendary feminist legal scholar Joan ing about what’s possible for us.” Amer-
couraged women to have no more than Williams was shown the most recent ica’s birth rate started to slip in 2008,
three children. The government legal- Korean fertility data for a documentary. with the onset of the financial crisis; by
ized contraceptives and pressed for the She drew her hands to her face in open- 2022, the U.S. had caught up, or perhaps
use of IUDs. These initiatives dovetailed mouthed shock—like Edvard Munch’s caught down, with the Korea of the
with an emphasis on ethnic homoge- “Scream”—and the image instantly be- nineteen-eighties. Douthat and others
neity and traditionalist values. Biracial came a meme. see worrisome parallels here: marriage
children of American servicemen, along Korea’s demographic collapse is mostly rates are in retreat; gender polarization
with the children of unwed mothers, taken as a fait accompli. As John Lee, is rising; young people aren’t even hav-
were shipped abroad for adoption, and the political analyst, put it, “They say ing sex for fun, let alone productively;
Korea became known as the world’s South Korea will be extinct in a hun- the meritocracy is a grind; we’re all rot-
largest “exporter” of babies. dred years. Who cares? We’ll all be dead ting in front of our phones. Douthat has
The program was regarded as a by then.” The causes routinely cited in- been circumspect about the issue in a
smashing success. In the span of twenty clude the cost of housing and of child way that MAGA Republicans are not.
years, Korea’s fertility rate went from six care—among the highest in the world. The Trump Administration’s new Trans-
to replacement, a feat described by Asian Very little in Korean society seems to portation Secretary has already instructed
demographers as “one of the most spec- give young people the impression that his department to prioritize “communi-
tacular and fastest declines ever recorded.” child rearing might be rewarding or de- ties with marriage and birth rates higher
A crucial part of this plan was the edu- lightful. I met a stylish twentysomething than the national average.” As the young
cational advancement of women, which news reporter at an airy, silent café in right-wing activist Charlie Kirk put it
the same demographers called “unprec- Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People last summer, “The childless are the ones
edented in the recent history of the hate kids here,” she told me. “They see that are destroying the country.”
world.” Far fewer Koreans came into ex- kids and say, ‘Ugh.’” This ambient re- A childless vacuum, by this account,
istence, but those who did enjoyed a sentment finds an outlet in disdain for is the future liberals want. Kirk’s conser-
similarly improbable rise in their stan- mothers. She said, “People call moms vative compatriots point to such examples
dard of living. Parents who remembered ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a as the young progressive activist David
hunger produced children who could af- little noise, someone will glare at you.” Hogg, who once tweeted that he would
ford cosmetic surgery. She had recently vacationed in Rome, “much rather own a Porsche and have a
Fertility all of a sudden seemed like where adults drank at bars while their Portuguese water dog and golden doo-
a knob that governments could turn at kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people dle” than have children. “Long term it’s
will. It was simply assumed that the “de- would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” cheaper, better for the environment and
mographic transition”—the shift from The online responses to media ac- will never tell you that it hates you or
many deaths and many babies to far fewer counts of the crisis tend to be aggres- ask you to pay for college.” These liberal
of both—would settle naturally around sively cynical: “Just wait, we can go lower caricatures perceive family commitments
the replacement rate. Like a restaurant than that,” or “You can’t just birth the as a drag on “self-actualization,” which
at capacity, our unconscious maître d’s slaves.”The reporter said, “When I write often becomes an excuse for hedonism.
would regulate our numbers on a one-in, about this, I think, Well, what would Conservatives instead call for a rehabil-
one-out basis. It never really occurred to change my mind? The answer is noth- itation of family values. The “trad wives”
32 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
of social media make cornflakes from in Korea. Lee Jun-seok, a thirty-nine- as one pro-natalist told me, is already
scratch and would never let their hus- year-old Harvard graduate who is some- “based.” Pornography and sex work are
bands milk the cows. As the self-described times compared to J. D. Vance, is the illegal, and abortion was decriminalized
“domestic extremist” Peachy Keenan has most popular conservative politician of only a few years ago. A negligible pro-
put it, “The home with the mom and his generation. We met late one Friday portion of Korean babies are born out
dad is the little factory to produce the evening for beer and soju, and our con- of wedlock. Korean men don’t do much
future, like, literally.” Others have reached versation was interrupted every five min- at home, and those who do are often
for more nefarious explanations for lan- utes by drunk revellers who bowed deeply branded “pongpongnam,” a reference to
guishing birth rates.Tucker Carlson made to him and took selfies. In the 2022 Ko- dish soap that means “foamy man.” Pa-
a documentary about “collapsing testos- rean Presidential race, Lee helped mo- ternity leave remains relatively rare, and
terone levels” in America; a far-right in- bilize disaffected young men to turn out men who take it are called “latte papas,”
fluencer known as Raw Egg Nationalist in support of the conservative candidate, as if they’re using the leave as a vacation.
blames endocrine disruptors in perfume. who promised to abolish the gender min- Women fear they are assigned low-level
There is no evidence, however, that the istry, which coördinates the country’s eq- professional tasks in anticipation of their
epidemic is one of infecundity. It may uity policies. His victory, in what some departure from the labor force. As Kim
be wishful to think so: it’s easier to avoid observers called the “incel election,” pre- Jeongmin, the editorial director of the
leaden dishware than it is to reinvigo- figured Trump’s triumph last year. Lee news organization Korea Pro, told me,
rate a society’s desire for children. told me, “When many women get to “In H.R. interviews, women feel pres-
The narrative of moral decay also sits thirty-five, they start bitching about being sured to show that they’re so dedicated
uneasily with the underlying data. In duped by the feminists who told them to their careers that they have no plans
2011, forty-five per cent of American they could have it all. It’s literally impos- to get married.”
pregnancies were unplanned. This has sible for them to meet someone with the The insinuation that women are at
come down dramatically, in large part same socioeconomic status at that point, fault for the demographic crisis has
owing to an astonishing reduction in the so they have to degrade themselves. Now turned gender friction into gender war.
incidence of teen-age pregnancy. Fresh- half of us are unmarried, and I’m part In 2016, the Korean government issued
faced “trad” milkmaids, for their part, do of that.” When I asked about his Amer- a “birth map,” in which, as one blogger
not seem to have more children. Where ican analogue, he said, “J. D. Vance should put it, “They counted fertile women like
female professional ambition once tracked not have been talking in a way that they counted the number of livestock.”
with smaller families, this is no longer stereotyped people.” He paused, then A conservative member of the National
the case: in Tunisia and in southern India, continued, “Although in Korea there’s Assembly recruited his own chorus line
where women make up a very small frac- more of a reality of childless cat ladies.” to demonstrate a novel dance move he
tion of the labor market, fertility has If Koreans aren’t reproducing, it’s not thought might help strengthen women’s
dropped below replacement. Recent re- for lack of traditionalism. Their culture, pelvic floors. Many young women now
search indicates that fertility rates now
trend higher in countries where more
women work. In America, the decline
cuts across demographic groups. Even
Mormons are barely replacing themselves.
Carlson has accused liberals of a plan
to replace native-born Americans with
immigrants. Even if this were true, it
might not be the most provident strat-
egy. Studies have shown that newcom-
ers from high-fertility countries tend to
adopt the reproductive customs of their
host nation within a generation. His-
panic women account for a large share
of America’s recent fertility decline. Only
two communities appear to be maintain-
ing very high fertility: ultra-Orthodox
Jews and some Anabaptist sects. The
economist Robin Hanson’s back-of-the-
envelope calculations suggest that twenty-
third-century America will be dominated
by three hundred million Amish people.
The likeliest version of the Great Re-
placement will see a countryside dotted
everywhere with handsome barns. “I’m just spitballing, but it might be fun if your next play
Fertility decline is a polarizing issue was about a lone skull making his way in the big city.”
flirt with the “4B” mentality, a term for
those who eschew dating, sex, marriage,
and children; some even forgo friend- IZZY KASOFF
ships with men. Yeho, a nineteen-year-
old sophomore at a prominent women’s Who was he, why was he the one assigned
college in Seoul, described the routine To drive me from the house to the cemetery?
misogyny of her male classmates in high
school: boys habitually recited lines The two of us in his Buick or Packard or some
they’d heard in porn, or illegally circu- Colonial make, De Soto, Pontiac, Plymouth.
lated pornographic memes.
She had no interest in dating or chil- I don’t remember who had died, what aunt
dren. She told me, “They might not Or uncle or cousin we were going to bury.
grow up well, or they might fall into an
incel community—and, besides, chil- I don’t know why he spent the hour-long drive
dren aren’t a necessary part of the good Lecturing a twelve-year-old about the faults
life.” Women in her mother’s genera-
tion often regretted the sacrifices they Of Peggy Lee, whose singing he denounced.
had been expected to make, and they I barely knew who she was. Maybe he’d heard
raised their daughters to prioritize their
careers. Yeho’s college has an anony- That I was “musical.” I do remember
mous Reddit-like forum. The basic That was the year new cars were all bright colors:
ground rule, she said, was that “to give
space to feeling good about men and Two-toned vermillion and baby blue, heraldic
relationships is to ignore or minimize Wing shapes with edgy arabesques of chrome.
the dark side. Posts about heterosexual
romance require a trigger warning!”The Some other uncle explained that ten years after
most common such advisory is a de- The war it was to hell with black and khaki,
rogatory portmanteau of the words “love”
and “hate.” In one typical reply, a woman People want spices. On the road to the graveyard,
wrote, “Can you please stop posting Maybe the singer and I both stunk of the present
about dating, it’s secondhand embar-
rassment? Your dick-to-ride-on is not To Izzy Kasoff, who married Dave Pinsky’s sister
special at all, seriously.” And adopted Dave’s daughter when the mother died—

Maybe his grievance was with not death or music

Iandasked around in Seoul about where I
might encounter children in the wild,
was directed to Daechi-dong, an af-
But the great story of it all becoming past.

fluent neighborhood notorious for its —Robert Pinsky

gated high-rise fortresses, luxury S.U.V.s,
and after-school academies, or hagwons.
These institutions have names such as tary schoolers—so colorful, so small— of a police-motorcycle escort. During
Groton, Swaton International, and Emil- awaiting their turn in the elevator. the English-comprehension section,
ton Academy, and each has its own faux Koreans cite the pressures and costs which requires absolute silence, air-traffic
heraldry. The most privileged students of excessive education as a large part of control suspends all takeoffs and landings.
spend their afternoons, evenings, and their reluctance to have children. (Amer- At some hagwons, fifth graders learn
weekends at as many as a dozen differ- ican parents in liberal enclaves might calculus. Elementary students take pre-
ent hagwons. Eighty per cent of Korean share a version of these misgivings.) An med courses. Some focus on sports or
families purchase private education; poor auspicious Korean childhood culminates musical instruments. There’s a Korean
families tend to spend as much on hag- in acceptance to one of Seoul’s three most saying that “a dragon emerges from a
wons as on groceries. Aggregate spend- prestigious universities. Admission is pri- small stream”—that talent can be iden-
ing on educational enrichment exceeds marily based on a student’s performance tified and nurtured in any backwater.
the R. & D. expenditures of Samsung, a on the national collegiate entrance exam, But the political analyst John Lee, who
conglomerate that makes up a fifth of or Suneung, which is administered every was once a hagwon instructor, was du-
the entire Korean economy. At school year on a Thursday in November. The bious about this meritocratic ideal: “I
dismissal, students climb into yellow opening of the stock market is delayed was given a score range for students. If
buses that ferry them from one hagwon that day, and many construction sites are I gave a score that was too high, the par-
to the next. Through the plate-glass win- closed. Bus and metro services are in- ents would think that their children
dow of a building stacked with hagwons, creased to ease traffic congestion. Stu- should be at a ‘better’ hagwon. If I gave
I could see an orderly queue of elemen- dents running late may avail themselves a score that was too low, the parents
34 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
would think, This is wasting my money, rang the doorbell and got it back.” That erwise unimpeachably progressive, pub-
it’s not working.” Some hagwons are ex- city no longer existed: “Now you get lished a book called “What Are Children
tremely selective. As one young woman yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my win- For?” It builds to a thoughtful, nuanced,
said, “If you don’t go to a certain one, dow!’” There’s a special word for noise heavily qualified endorsement of child-
you’re not part of the group.” Histori- between Ioors. Complaints forced Daum bearing as kinda nice. In a scathing re-
cally, at the strictest cram schools, social and his wife, Dani, to leave their previ- view, the writer Moira Donegan observed
interactions were carefully circumscribed. ous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t that ambivalent American women do
Some forbade any conversation between stand your children anymore!” not lack for such counsel. Any leftist who
boys and girls that were not directly re- The day care took the kids outside feels the need to emphasize that babies
lated to study. Hugging, or the exchange every day. They learned about plants and are good, Donegan argues, might not be
of romantic notes, might have resulted animals, and were taught to mark the a leftist after all: “It may be that on some
in bathroom-cleaning duty. seasons with the old festival days. The level, perhaps not always a conscious one,
Four out of five children in Korea use of standard honorifics was discour- the millennial pro-natalists are trying to
today describe school as a “battlefield.” aged, and children spoke to teachers in convince American women that the free-
In 2012, the advocacy group World With- “half speak,” the register ordinarily re- dom they lost with Roe v. Wade was not
out Worries About Private Education served for informal address. The parents worth having.”
helped develop an ad campaign that agreed not to send their children to hag- Given the stakes for reproductive au-
showed a baby bottle full of fried rice, wons for the time being. This ethic of tonomy, Donegan’s reservations are en-
with a caption that read, “Mom! It’s too mutual care had made parenting “less tirely comprehensible. Most left-leaning
early for me.” Curfew laws prohibit hag- scary,” one mother remarked. Still, when Americans are similarly distrustful of
won classes after about 10 or 11 p.m. The their children aged out, they would be the pro-natalist discourse. Leigh Sen-
issue nonetheless remains a society-wide fed to the educational machine. Another derowicz, a feminist demographer at the
prisoner’s dilemma, and even those who mother said, “When they get to normal University of Wisconsin-Madison, told
strenuously object in principle frequently elementary school, the other little kids me, “There is fundamentally no way to
relent in practice. When I visited the ad- are already accustomed to a full-day do this that doesn’t end up treating wom-
vocacy group, one employee told me, “In schedule—they have more stamina, en’s bodies as a tool.” According to the
the macro, everyone understands it’s a they’re used to hagwons—but these kids U.N., countries with pro-natalist poli-
problem, but in the micro, for my fam- are still used to nap time.” cies tend to be less democratic. A baby-
ily, and my kids, I have to do it.” When Hwang Ock-kyeung, the president bonus initiative in Italy’s Piedmont re-
I commented that the children must be of a government-sponsored think tank, gion was given a name and logo that
miserable, he corrected me: “If you don’t told me that changes in policy can’t mend seemed an awful lot like an homage to
send them, the kids feel bad! That’s the a culture that marginalizes children. “My Fascism. Eberstadt, the economist, told
only place they can see their friends, be- own employees tell me their babies look me, “In China, the mechanics are in
cause no one is at the playground.” The alien to them,” she said. “Young people place to say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Wong,
leading cause of death among young Ko- want the government to increase the you can’t Iy on airplanes anymore, be-
reans is suicide. More than one Korean child-care hours, but then the time peo- cause you’re unmarried.’ ” Local Party
described their culture to me as “broken.” ple spend with their children decreases!” officials are already knocking on doors
It is not easy to opt out of the sys- An obsession with social status turns to track menstrual cycles. The Russian
tem. One morning, I met with half a children into tokens of parental achieve- government recently passed a law that
dozen members of an unorthodox day- ment: “Many parents take the subsidies criminalizes “child-free propaganda,” po-
care collective in a neighborhood called and spend more money on extra hag- tentially including the representation of
Hapjeong. This patch of Seoul, they told wons, and that becomes a vicious cycle.” a happily childless couple on television
me, was distinctive for its lack of chain Enhanced professional productivity for or social media.
stores, and they convened at an other- parents, and the ability to enjoy one’s free Some progressives seem fine with
wise empty local bakery; it was next to time, were not just collateral benefits. child-free propaganda. The BirthStrike
a Starbucks, across the street from two She added, “There’s a reason that if you Movement proclaims that “not having
other Starbucks, and catty-corner from go to Daechi-dong you’ll see hagwons children is the single most impactful
a fourth Starbucks. Forty years ago, Seoul and Pilates in the same building.” decision that a person can make to re-
had practically no child care. Some work- verse climate change.” This might seem
ing parents locked their children in their
apartments and hoped for the best. Chil- J ust before Christmas, when a viral
tweet announced a record low for
sensible, but depopulation will hap-
pen far too slowly to alleviate the worst
dren died in house fires. In 2002, a group American fertility, some liberals blew effects of climate change. The chil-
of grassroots organizers formed this com- confetti. One young woman was re- dren who would have traded their own
munal alternative. tweeted twenty-six thousand times for existence for a cooler planet have al-
The current parents were nostalgic writing, “Amazing keep it up every- ready been born. In “What Are Chil-
for their own alleyway childhoods. An body!!!!!!” A comedian urged her follow- dren For?,” Berg and Wiseman suggest
artist named Daum told me that, when ers to “HOLD THE LINE!!!!!” Last year, that such environmental logic provides
he was young, “if you kicked a ball into the philosopher Anastasia Berg and the a cloak of moral legitimacy for personal
someone else’s property, you went and editor Rachel Wiseman, who seem oth- preferences that feel otherwise difficult
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 35
to articulate. One scholar called this the to budgetary concerns. Child care is vir- view that weighs children against ex-
“socio-political weaponization of fertility.” tually free in Vienna and extremely ex- pensive dinners or vacations to Venice—
Liberals are right to point to immi- pensive in Zurich, but the Austrians and as matters of mere preference in a logic
gration as the obvious way to mitigate the Swiss have the same fertility rate. of consumption.
the economic effects of demographic The incidence of childlessness among
contraction. Italy currently has a short- Democrats is significantly higher than
age of nurses, and Germany has a short-
age of plumbers; a baby born today does
it is among Republicans. This appears
in part to be an artifact of educational
Iterednstopped
the southern city of Gangjin, I
at a coffee shop and encoun-
a sign on the entrance that read
nothing to unclog a Düsseldorf sink. polarization. Lower fertility rates seem “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not
Even immigration, however, is a stop- correlated with the perception that at fault. The problem is the parents who
gap measure: by 2100, ninety-seven per proper child development depends upon do not take care of the child.” The doors
cent of the world’s countries are pre- enormous amounts of personal atten- of Korean establishments are frequently
dicted to be below replacement. In the tion. Some economists attribute our re- emblazoned with such prohibitions. The
meantime, pro-immigration policies will cent fertility slide to a generational shift: only children I saw on Seoul’s public
continue to generate nativist backlashes. people who were born in the nineties transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who
Last year, Seoul sponsored a pilot pro- are less likely to remember a time when is by all accounts part of Korea’s first
gram to import a hundred nannies from children were largely left alone. Work- openly lesbian couple with a child, told
the Philippines. The project, despite its ing mothers today devote more time to me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too
lack of ambition, was wildly controver- active child care than stay-at-home deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we
sial. This was perhaps unsurprising: Ko- mothers did in previous generations. think it’s discriminatory. We always call
rean women have been known to berate Mothers with a college degree spend places beforehand to ask if we can bring
their Vietnamese daughters-in-law for about four more hours per week with our daughter.” Children remain welcome
peeling apples in the wrong direction. their children than mothers without one, and visible at malls. The Seoul govern-
American liberals are quick to associate and they are also less likely to live in ment offers a “Multi-Child Happiness
the fear of cultural corrosion with xeno- proximity to extended family. In an econ- Card,” which gives parents discounts at
phobia. But Korea was long a vassal state omy biased in favor of highly skilled em- select amusement parks and theatres.
of China, and then a Japanese colony, ployees, a protracted education followed When it was first introduced, you needed
so the question of civilizational survival by a long career apprenticeship seems three kids to qualify; now you qualify
has a slightly different valence there than like the only way to secure a dependable with two. Daum, the artist, told me, “We
it does here. And even liberals tend to income. But the longer people wait to joke that soon enough they’re going to
get understandably sentimental about, try to form a family, the less likely they give the ‘multiple-kids card’ to house-
say, the loss of linguistic diversity. The are to have one. holds with only one.”
Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch We all might agree that everyone de- It is a poignant irony that among
pointed out to me that fewer than ten serves the financial security to afford Korea’s few child-friendly places are for-
thousand babies were born in Estonia the number of children they desire. The mer schools. In a picturesque river val-
last year. “What will happen to the Es- word “afford,” however, means different ley outside the northern city of Chun-
tonian language?” she asked. “Seriously, things to different people, and in the cheon, an old elementary school has
this is not a far-off thing!” coastal precincts of “achievement cul- been converted into a café and resort
The most sophisticated liberal argu- ture” it has been inflated to encompass that resembles a high-end sanatorium,
ments interpret fertility decline as a individual bedrooms, piano lessons, travel with blond wood and poured concrete.
symptom of more serious underlying lacrosse teams, Russian math, and single- Alongside nostalgic references to the
problems—economic precarity and an origin organic peanut butter. “innocent smiles of children long ago,”
“incomplete” gender revolution. Men For most of human history, having its brochure offers a family photo-shoot
and women alike struggle to provide for children was something the majority of package; the price includes basic retouch-
their families, but the participation of people simply did without thinking too ing, although they promise not to “go
fathers at home has not caught up to much about it. Now it is one compet- overboard.” For families who can’t af-
the participation of mothers at work. A ing alternative among many. The only ford premium coffees, the Seoul govern-
more generous welfare state, and a more overarching explanation for the global ment has repurposed a collection of rural
equitable culture, should therefore pro- fertility decline is that once childbearing schools as family campgrounds.
duce more children. This does not seem is no longer seen as something special— One lies in the mountains not far
to be the case. Finland famously pro- as an obligation to God, to one’s ancestors, from the D.M.Z.; I visited at the tail end
vides all new parents with “baby boxes” or to the future—people will do less of of foliage season. An uneven parking lot
full of useful, high-quality products, and it. It is misogynistic to equate reproduc- had been outfitted with a matrix of black
Sweden has normalized extended pa- tive autonomy with self-indulgence, and tents erected atop low wooden platforms.
rental leave, especially for fathers, and child-free people often devote them- The old cafeteria featured a few game
flexible work hours. The Nordic coun- selves to loving, conscientious caretak- tables. A pink-sweatsuited adolescent
tries are wonderful places to be parents, ing. At the same time, we should be able played a desultory Ping-Pong match
but their fertility rates are lower than to acknowledge that there is something against his uncle. The boy’s father told
our own. These trends are not reducible slightly discomforting about a world me, “We come here with our children so
36 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
 benediction that the living woman
TAKES would have meant as mere domestic
ritual. I wonder sometimes if most
Michael Cunningham on Annie Proulx’s great love stories aren’t also ghost
stories, all the more so as we, tempo-
“Brokeback Mountain” rarily still alive, speak unknowingly
to our loved ones about the ways
in which we’ll come to haunt them:
hen I f irst read “Brokeback Things aren’t going to go well for the off-kilter joke; the snatch of
W Mountain,” Annie Proulx’s
seminal short story about gay cowboys
them. They don’t know that yet, and
neither do we. But, about halfway into
song; the imprecation to go to bed,
for God’s sake.
in love, I wondered how I might carry the story, Proulx abandons her cus- Life is generally all as ordinary as
it with me forever, literally, in the form tomary prose style, which is as coiled the rooms we rent, as the last bottle
of a tattoo. I’d loved countless stories as a rattlesnake and about as senti- of beer when we forgot to buy more
before then but had never before felt mental, in order to cut loose and give on our way home from work. It may,
the urge to actually wear one. the boys their first moment of phys- however, momentarily shed its ordi-
I did not tattoo even a single phrase ical tenderness. Ennis comes up be- nariness if, say, we pick up a maga-
anywhere on my body, although I can hind Jack and holds him: zine, take a swig of that last beer, start
still feel the urge as powerfully, and Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above reading, and, before too much time
mysteriously, as I did in 1997, the year the fire. Ennis’s breath came slow and quiet, has passed, ask ourselves, Is there any
that “Brokeback Mountain” was pub-
lished. The urge is all the more mys-
terious for the fact that although I’m
a gay man, I am now in my early sev-
enties and have never ridden a horse,
and am unlikely to become a cowboy.
I don’t expect ever to fully understand
my desire to hold on to those two
doomed cowboys in the most literal
way possible.
The boys, Ennis del Mar and Jack
Twist, not yet twenty years old, have
taken summer jobs guarding sheep
from coyotes in the Wyoming wil-
derness. Ennis and Jack come from
practically nothing—little money, lit-
tle education, little luck—and are
doing whatever they need to do to
survive until the nothing from which
they emerged sucks them back in October 13, 1997
again. It’s only the two of them up
there on the mountain, with the sheep he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight, way I could render this story and my-
and the constant, watchful hunger of and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, self inseparable, for the rest of my life?
coyotes, waiting for Jack and Ennis the vibrations of the humming like faint elec- Reading can, every once in a while,
tricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was
to drop their guard for the several not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced have an effect like that. You may pick
minutes it’d take to snatch a lamb and until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still us- up the right story on the right night
slice it open, as quick as unzipping a able phrase from the childhood time before his and submit to a playful little shove
sleeping bag. mother died, said, “Time to hit the hay, cow- from the boyfriend you’d almost
As far as we can tell, any attrac- boy. I got a go. Come on, you’re sleepin on stopped waiting for, in a place so re-
your feet like a horse,” and gave Jack a shake,
tion Ennis or Jack may have felt to a push, and went off in the darkness. mote that everything’s possible. You
another man has been repressed right may get yourself the slap of love from
out of existence. What they’ve both Ennis has just repeated to Jack a a dead woman—an invented dead
known of love is punishment for imag- few lines from his long-dead mother, woman, at that—who, as the ghost of
inary crimes, and a local religion that to whom shows of affection did not a ghost, may convince you that you’ll
offers Jesus’ tears of forgiveness in come particularly naturally but whose be back again in the morning, even as
place of affection. And yet, alone to- spirit arises, nevertheless, to deliver a you head out into the darkness. 
gether with only the sheep and the
mountain, they soon fall almost vio- To celebrate its centenary, The New Yorker has invited contributors to revisit notable
lently in love. works from the archive. See the collection at newyorker.com/takes.
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 37
we won’t be bothered by other people’s to be on the order of three hundred thou- private sector now generally accepts
judgment.” Outside, dry brown leaves sand dollars per child. that it must adapt to a world where chil-
blew around in a light rain, and most of One smoggy morning, I visited Oh dren are luxuries. Analysts anticipate a
the families huddled under awnings that Se-hoon, the mayor of Seoul, at his City hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar “silver
had been installed to protect the tents. Hall office, which recalled the captain’s industry” to meet the needs of healthy
One solitary little girl played with a bright deck in a space opera. He has focussed pensioners. One travel agency expects
bird-shaped kite attached to a plastic primarily on the dire shortage of hous- that seniors, in the absence of grandchil-
fishing pole. As I left, I noticed a statue ing in Seoul, a city where almost fifty dren to spoil, will spend their disposable
of a boy with a torch, identical to the per cent of people now live alone. He income on pricier trips. Conglomerates
one I’d seen at the school in Haenem, listed his other initiatives: the Childbirth like Hyundai are planning high-end re-
but considerably the worse for wear. Encouragement Project, which included tirement communities for those who
Countries have tried everything to “eighty-seven subprojects,” and the Mom cannot rely on their families for elder-
reverse demographic collapse. In Hun- and Dad Happiness Project, which com- care. Companies that once catered to the
gary, women with four or more children prised “twenty-eight subprojects.” While mass market will have to pivot to a pre-
gain a lifetime exemption from income the Mayor lectured me, a large screen on mium clientele. Samsung has long relied
tax. In Georgia, the Orthodox Patriarch the far wall ticked through an optimis- on wedding registries for the sales of
offered to personally baptize any baby tic slide show of inverted pyramids and large appliances. Cho, the celebrity de-
born to the parents of more than two other fanciful renderings of urban futur- mographer, praised a recent company
children. Although some nations have ism. When I mentioned that some de- plan to sell a few really fancy refrigera-
stabilized at a low level, there is not a mographers now regard population de- tors in place of many adequate ones. The
single modern example of one that has cline as a phenomenon to be managed new line is called Samsung Bespoke.
managed a sustained recovery from very rather than remediated, he intimated
low fertility to replacement. The world’s that voters were an obstacle to more pro- he United States is nowhere near
most lavishly pro-natalist governments
spend a fortune on incentives and ser-
found adjustments. On my way out, two
of his aides directed my attention to a
T the point of robotic baristas. The
current “crisis” might well go the way of
vices, and have increased the fertility rate lobby café where espresso drinks were the population bomb. The sociologist
by approximately a fifth of a baby per prepared by a robotic barista arm. Philip N. Cohen told me, “If you think
woman. Some observers believe that sub- Some Korean companies pay their you have a model now that predicts birth
sidies could succeed, but they would have employees to have children, but the rates in two hundred years, you’re just
drawing lines on a chart.” Most schol-
ars deem our nascent panic to be coun-
terproductive; in the reassuringly titled
“Decline and Prosper!,” from 2022, the
Norwegian demographer Vegard Skir-
bekk reiterates that “low, but not too
low,” fertility is a good thing. There is,
however, an asterisk attached to this. Two
decades ago, Skirbekk helped contrive a
thought experiment called “the low-
fertility trap hypothesis,” which proposed
the possibility of an unrecoverable down-
ward spiral. Ultra-low fertility meant far
fewer babies, which meant far fewer peo-
ple to have babies, or even to know ba-
bies; this feedback loop could even shift
cultural norms so far that childlessness
would become the default option.
This eventuality had seemed remote.
Then it more or less happened in Korea.
When I asked Skirbekk if other coun-
tries might follow suit, he replied, “Quite
a few, possibly.” Rotkirch, the Finnish
demographer, underscored the notion
that reproductive cues are social. “In a
forthcoming survey, I want to ask, ‘Have
you ever had a baby in your arms?’” she
told me. “I think in Finland it’s a sizable
portion that hasn’t.” These mimetic dy-
“My productivity apps weren’t working, so I hired a goon.” namics play out not just within coun-
tries but between them. Hwang Sun-jae, forward to a society with less competi- the bulk of entrepreneurial activity. For
a sociologist who studies fertility norms, tion—a smaller, gentler world with a Elon Musk and his followers, children
traces the swift dissemination of low fer- greater share of resources for all. In this are technological lottery tickets: we never
tility in part to social media’s role as an picture, the future is exactly the same as know which genetically enhanced baby
accelerant of global monoculture. It has the present, except with fewer people. It might at last invent a functional warp
never been easier to acquaint yourself is just as probable, however, that inequal- drive. One technological pro-natalist told
with the opportunity costs of childbear- ity will increase. As universities close en me, “We do not exist just to consume,
ing—the glamorous destinations unvis- masse, the remainder might prove even and we don’t want the end state of hu-
ited, the faddish foods uneaten. “People more selective. If Korea’s labor force be- manity to be the Villages in Florida.”
once had only local comparisons,” he comes insufficient to produce and dis- The most persuasive aspect of tech-
said. “Now they see other people’s lives— tribute basic goods—a distinct possibil- nological pro-natalism is not what we
in New York City and England and ity by the end of the century—they could might theoretically gain from a larger
France—and they have a sense of relative be hoarded by those of means. The de- population. It is the foreboding of what
deprivation: my life is not good enough.” mographer Dean Spears noted that the we might lose with a diminished one.
The costs of an aging and dimin- more idiosyncratic our needs and desires The evolutionary anthropologist Joseph
ished society feel more abstract. Last the more we rely on the fact that other Henrich has summoned the example of
year, an online sketch portrayed a tra- people share them: “If you need special- the aboriginal Tasmanians, who were cut
ditional Korean first-birthday celebra- ized medical care, you’re less likely to off from mainland Australia about ten
tion in ten years’ time: the World Cup find it in a rural place than in a big city, thousand years ago. Their population
stadium hosts the festivities for a crowd where there are more people who need was too small and too diffuse to preserve
of ten thousand, including the country’s the same sort of thing you need.” If cur- their expertise, and they apparently for-
President. Regular life, in the video, is rent trends continue, in several decades got how to make complex bone tools,
peppered with minor inconveniences: there will be many fewer Koreans, and how to make warm clothing, and even
food orders can take more than ninety virtually all of them will live in metro- how to fish. And sheer numbers are only
minutes. The actual inconveniences politan Seoul—a city-state surrounded part of the story. For a culture to evolve,
might not be as minor. By 2050, Korea’s by wilderness, ruin, and, if they are lucky, it needs a lot of different kinds of peo-
labor force will be about two-thirds of robotic rice cultivation. ple—stubborn, nutty people with out-
its current size, and food delivery might Economic prosperity has long relied landish proposals. The weirdest people
be a thing of the past. Cho advised the on an expanding population to drive around are almost always children.
Nongshim noodle company that it would greater output, increased demand, and Demographers often worry that in-
soon be impossible to hire anyone in new markets. Advocates of degrowth dulging in sci-fi speculation might in-
Busan, Korea’s second-largest city. have pointed out the manifest unsus- advertently prompt governments to adopt
Retirement ages will continue to in- tainability of such intergenerational pyr- draconian measures. Still, the demogra-
crease. Autocratic countries, where pol- amid schemes, but their implosion will pher Leslie Root admitted that she some-
iticians can ignore older voters, might probably not be peaceful. If the bottom times wonders, “Is it possible we actu-
simply deny pensions to the childless. falls out of, say, the Chinese real-estate ally evolved to be too smart for our own
New forms of factionalism could test market—among the largest asset classes good, and we’re just too interested in
the limits of liberal coexistence. Younger in the world—the entire global economy other things to go along with the bull-
workers in social democracies might in- could totter. Iroquois “mourning wars” shit of having to have enough kids to
creasingly resent the taxes they pay for against neighboring tribes—raids to re- perpetuate the species? I don’t know!
entitlement programs that they will never plenish their own numbers with cap- Maybe?” She collected herself, then
themselves receive. Men, especially those tives—intensified in the seventeenth and added, “What’s most interesting to me,
of low status, are currently much less eighteenth centuries, after disease and when I think about what it might be like
likely to have the number of children colonial violence depleted the nation. to maintain a stable human population,
they desire, if they have children at all. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seems to is that there’s a very real possibility that
If this trend continues, every election have been motivated in part by Vladi- we’ll need to reinvent society.”
will be an incel election. In “The Chil- mir Putin’s desire to increase the moth-
dren of Men,” not the film but the orig- erland’s quantity of ethnic Russians. decade ago, a Korean reality pro-
inal novel, by P. D. James, the social order
cannot withstand such a void. Great
In a grotesque way, the “Mad Max”
scenario represents a comforting fantasy.
A gram showcased wealthy celebri-
ties in unattainably idyllic scenes with
Britain is an island of twilit senility over- A steampunk world—with war-making their children. A more realistic portrayal
seen by a strict Warden. Basic infrastruc- vehicles lashed together from old radia- of family life might have been more fruit-
ture is shored up by an immigrant un- tors and Atari circuit boards—is at least ful. Miji and Ho-gil are a shy, attractive,
derclass, and the elderly are chained to a vital one. But a depopulated landscape and slightly unusual couple, the parents
barges that disappear beneath the sea. might actually be characterized by qui- of two boys. Miji, who is thirty-three,
(A few years ago, Yusuke Narita, a Jap- escence. There is an extensive literature studied media in Seoul, and then free-
anese economist at Yale, called upon Jap- that links economic dynamism to youth. lanced for a broadcaster in Gwangju.
anese seniors to perform seppuku.) Young people, who have wilder imagina- Ho-gil, who is thirty-eight, got a job
Many Koreans told me that they look tions and a greater appetite for risk, drive after college at a children’s foundation,
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 39
 ple downstairs was “more forgiving than
most.” Miji and Ho-gil were very happy.
It was easy to imagine having a second.
Regional birth subsidies sometimes
succeed on paper, but these statistics are
artificially inflated by “take and dash”
parents, who move to a place temporar-
ily for the money—as if the entire coun-
try were playing a bizarro version of mu-
sical chairs. In 2023, Gwangju curtailed
the subsidies. But, just as Miji became
pregnant again, Gangjin, a small city
about an hour and a half away, announced
an offer three times as generous. As it
happened, Ho-gil’s parents worked a
farm there. Much of what Miji knew
about the area was gleaned from a reality-
television show about the renovation of
ghost-town houses; her friends found
the prospect of their moving to Gang-
jin inexplicable, even shameful. Still, this
past October, the family relocated.
On a weekday morning, they had me
“ You know how sometimes you say you’re not over to their tidy, spare apartment. One
hungry, but then you see what I’m eating and ask for a of the only adornments on the walls was
bite, and I always let you and I’m never annoyed?” a long-defunct video-intercom console,
its molded curves like a “Star Trek” fos-
sil. The meagre trappings seemed like a
• • defiant statement of their priorities, and
the home was warmed by their togeth-
where the “strict milestones” that govern books about children, and they had a erness. Their younger son, ten-month-
Korean aspirations lost their hold on “very intense debate and discussion.” She old Eun-byul, was a round child dressed
him. He recently saw a report that Korea had no job security, and he told her, “If in a green bib that made him look like
was the only wealthy industrialized na- you’re serious about this, change your a little flower. He had only just begun
tion where the highest personal priority job fast.” She found a position as a mu- to say “Mommy.” They were impressed
was economic improvement rather than seum curator. Ho-gil told me that he by how dissimilar the two boys were—
love. He told me, “In Korean society, we “isn’t interested in moving up the lad- the older one sensitive and introverted,
are educated to have one single goal, but der,” so he wasn’t worried that he’d be the little one active and outgoing. Their
then, once you’re grown up, you don’t penalized for taking time off. But Miji lives are largely isolated. They’re grate-
know what to do with your freedom— seemed more ambivalent: “If you have ful for the region’s rural beauty, but the
you get lost in the world, and you don’t career ambitions, it’s really hard to make closest pediatrician is about a twenty-
know how to have a good life.” the decision to go on leave for children.” minute drive away. Miji said, “If your
They met at a book club in 2036. (She noted that she has been passed over baby isn’t healthy, you can’t live here.”
Miji matter-of-factly characterized her- twice for a promotion.) At the time, They had noticed one neighbor with
self as “the kind of person who is al- Gwangju offered a monthly payment to a baby, and they were hoping that at
ways swayed by other people’s opin- parents of about a hundred and fifty dol- some point they’d say more than “hello.”
ions,” and she was drawn to Ho-gil for lars, on top of a five-hundred-dollar sub- They have otherwise resigned themselves
his independence. After five years of sidy that the federal government paid to the fact that they’ll have few oppor-
living separately, they decided to get each month until the child went to day tunities to meet other parents until school
married. She wanted a large, formal care. For Ho-gil, the money made the begins, when they’ll join a parent group
wedding, but he imagined something prospect thinkable. “All his decisions chat for logistics. The town features three
more intimate, and they compromised. were down to the numbers, and the num- places they can take the kids, including
Miji told me, “I can’t ignore social norms, bers worked out,” Miji said. an indoor playground run by the local
but I have to strike a balance between Their first child, Wooju, was born in district office. They showed me photos
what society wants and his beliefs.” 2022. When they brought him home from of Eun-byul in a little sandbox on a li-
She hoped to have children, but at the hospital, the first thing they did was noleum floor. The town’s one “trendy In-
the time he felt “selfish”—he wasn’t used apologize to their neighbors, warning stagrammable café,” as Miji put it, has
to being around kids and wasn’t sure them that they “might move around and declared itself a no-kids zone.
what to do with them. He read some make noise.” Fortunately, the elderly cou- They seemed pleased for the chance
40 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
to discuss the banalities of rural family Asian financial crisis, in 1997, the econ- sufficient one. But there may neverthe-
life. Miji’s friends weren’t interested in omist Kim Seongeun told me, the top less be something irreducible about the
hearing about it. They told her, “Once scorers on the collegiate entrance exam shared experience of parenthood—a life
the children are older, you’ll come back often went on to Seoul National Uni- in which your fragile heart now seems
to Gwangju for their education.” She’d versity to study physics. When a falter- to beat on the outside of your body. You
attended a hagwon to prepare for the col- ing economy prompted large companies see the guardians of a sleeping child on
lege entrance exam, and she wasn’t in- to fire their scientists, he observed, many the subway and think, These are not just
clined to deny her children the same ad- parents converged on the idea that med- random strangers but fellow-passengers
vantage. Ho-gil had not, and he didn’t icine was a safer path. It didn’t take long with utterly exasperating human beings
think it was necessary. In fact, he wasn’t for the top scorers to become doctors in- for whom they would unequivocally die.
convinced that a college degree was es- stead. Kim wasn’t exempt from the ten- Children have long played a symbolic
sential, which to most Koreans is as rad- dency to hedge his bets: “How can I role in a debate that was carried out far
ical as saying that he didn’t need hot water. place my own son in a small boat?” To over their actual heads. For everyone who
When they do return to their jobs, become a parent at all, I remarked off- saw them as the ultimate affirmation of
they will both face an hour-and-a-half- handedly, was to perceive all boats as too life itself, someone else saw our treat-
long commute each direction. They con- small. He laughed and thought for a mo- ment of them as reason to despair. The
sider that a concern for another day. Ho- ment, then said, “Maybe the low fertil- poet Philip Larkin wrote, “Man hands
gil picked up Eun-byul, who bounced ity rate here is because people are smart. on misery to man./ It deepens like a
on his lap with a contented sigh. He The risk-free asset in a diversified port- coastal shelf./ Get out as early as you
said, “Of course I have doubts, and I folio is zero kid.” He just wasn’t sure what can,/And don’t have any kids yourself.”
wonder what my life would have been to make of it all in the end. He said, “The It didn’t much matter. Most people went
like if I hadn’t chosen to have a family.” low fertility rate is not really good or bad. ahead and had them anyway.
But he’d been wrong to assume, as his We just don’t know.” It seems as if we might now be trans-
friends did, that “fatherhood eats away This is the intellectually responsible forming an old and insoluble philosoph-
at your personal life.” Still, my (male, position. Emotionally, it’s a little evasive. ical conflict into an empirical experiment
unmarried, dog-owning) interpreter, who Rotkirch, the Finnish demographer, re- with real stakes. Sometimes it seems as
told me later that such affectionate be- called a newspaper item in which a young though we’re in a hurry to do so. The
havior was uncommon among Korean woman asked why she should sacrifice fertility-rate culture war wields children
fathers, couldn’t help but ask him, “Aren’t her body and her partnership for a preg- as symbolic extensions of ourselves. Peo-
you bored?” nancy. Such anxieties are a natural pre- ple look to the birth rate as an index of
lude to any vault into the unknown. Still, what is normal, and no one is safe from
here’s a philosophical view, best as- Rotkirch marvelled, “My idea was that the dread of judgment. Conservatives
T sociated with the scholar L. A. Paul,
that the decision to have children is
it just happens and it’s normal to be ner-
vous.” Chang Pilwha, who has been an
with large families fear they are seen as
zoo animals. Liberals without children
fundamentally irrational. A rigorous influential women’s-studies scholar for fear they are seen as selfish careerists or
cost-benefit analysis might produce an forty years, echoed this bewilderment. libertines. This may not just be a conse-
estimate of a child’s expected value, but “Many of my best feminist friends say quence of the fertility decline; it might
the experience is transformative in a be intensifying it. Children could sur-
way that renders the calculation irrele- vive being yoked to the value of human-
vant. You will have made a decision by ity as a whole. It feels much more per-
the lights of a person you will no lon- ilous to treat them as instruments of our
ger be. There’s something inescapably own identities.
patronizing when parents make this ar- Children are variables in our lives. But
gument. I remain unsure if it’s true, yet they are also strange birds of their own.
I’ve heard myself repeat it. For the usual Religious people talk about them as car-
reasons of work-life intractability, writ- riers of the divine spark, technologists as
ing this piece has taken me away from messengers from the future. Secular hu-
my own little boys. When I asked my the best thing they’ve ever done is have manists are content to mumble some-
eight-year-old why someone should a child, and nobody should brand that thing about the imagination. In any case,
have children, he stopped punching his as conservative or liberal,” she said. She they should probably be prevented from
little brother long enough to say, “We’re is apprehensive about what society will sticking their fingers into sockets or set-
excellent company.” look like once fewer and fewer people ting fire to our homes. But we might oth-
The leap-of-faith argument makes are parents. As she put it, “Becoming a erwise trust them to figure out what they
sense only if we, and the society we live mother or a father is a precious process mean, or how to mean it. We might stand
in, remain open to such transformation. of learning to be human, and the lack of before them as models of humility and
In Korea, one graduate student told me, that experience with vulnerability is only ambivalence. It is not fair for us, as indi-
“The standard life course is boring. Sur- going to create more ruthlessness.” vidual parents or as a society, to expect
prises are not virtues. We can imagine Child rearing is not a necessary con- them to bear the weight of our certain-
all of the things until we die.” Before the dition for vulnerability. It’s not even a ties. They are, after all, just children. 
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 41
 LETTER FROM UKRAINE

SHADOW WARRIOR
How a career spy helped shape his country’s defense against Russia.
BY JOSHUA YAFFA

O
n September 26, 2022, seismic- part, blamed the United Kingdom and
monitoring stations in north- the United States. “The sanctions were
ern Europe picked up signals not enough for the Anglo-Saxons,” Pres-
that resembled small earthquakes—rum- ident Vladimir Putin said. “They moved
blings below the surface of the Baltic on to sabotage.”
Sea detected as far as a thousand miles In January, 2023, four months after
away. Soon after, operators in charge of the attack, German police showed up
the Nord Stream pipelines, two seven- at the offices of a boat-chartering com-
hundred-mile-long underwater conduits pany in Dranske, on the German is-
meant to bring Russian natural gas to land of Rügen, in the Baltic Sea. They
Germany and onward to the rest of Eu- had a warrant to search the Androm-
rope, noticed a sudden drop in pressure. eda, a fifty-foot sailing yacht described
The Danish Air Force dispatched an by Der Spiegel as “not exactly elegant,
F-16 interceptor, which captured images but practical, a bit like a floating sta-
of what was unmistakably a huge gas tion wagon.” The boat had been rented
leak: escaping methane had turned the the previous fall by six people using
water’s surface into a bubbling froth. forged passports, booked via a Polish
In the weeks that followed, under- travel agency with Ukrainian owners,
water drones captured images of wide and paid for by a Ukrainian business-
gashes in the pipelines. Swedish author- man. Investigators suspected that a pho-
ities found blast residue at the scene, and tograph in one of the passports, which
called the rupture an act of “gross sab- ostensibly belonged to a Romanian cit-
otage.” In Germany, which had imported izen named Ştefan Marcu, was that of
more than half of its natural gas from an active-duty Ukrainian soldier. On
Russia, investigators declared that the board the Andromeda, they found traces
explosions represented “an attack on the of HMX, a powerful explosive whose
internal security of the state.” blast signature was consistent with the
Nord Stream was destroyed less than damage at the site.
a year into Russia’s full-scale invasion That March, the Times reported that
of Ukraine. It seemed likely that the U.S. intelligence agencies had reviewed
two events were linked, but it was not evidence indicating that “a pro-Ukrainian
immediately apparent how. Speculation group carried out the attack,” while al-
initially centered on Russia, which had lowing for the possibility that “the op-
experience with undersea operations. eration might have been conducted off
Weeks earlier, Gazprom, the state-owned the books by a proxy force with con-
Russian energy company, had shut down nections to the Ukrainian government.”
Nord Stream 1, claiming that Western The news came as a surprise. Many
sanctions had undermined its ability to experts believed that whoever planted
maintain the pipeline. (Nord Stream 2, the explosives would have needed access
which was completed in 2021, had not to a mini-submarine or a decompression
yet become operational.) Officials in chamber—neither of which a proxy force,
the U.S. and Europe had accused the even one backed by Ukraine, was likely
Kremlin of using energy exports as an to possess. Another reason that Ukraine
economic weapon, and Russian Navy had been ruled out as a possible perpe-
vessels were spotted in nearby waters in trator was the unbelievable political risk:
the days before the attack. But West- a country defending itself from invasion
ern intelligence agencies couldn’t find and desperately reliant on foreign mili-
any other evidence that the Kremlin tary aid could hardly afford to blow up
was responsible. The Kremlin, for its the energy infrastructure of one of its “You look at him and see this absolutely ordinary
42 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
person,” a former collaborator said of Roman Chervinsky. “Then you come to understand who he is and what he’s capable of.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY JULIA KOCHETOVA THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 43
primary Western backers. Still, even as lensky suggested that President Trump where he unravelled a kickback scheme
mounting intelligence pointed to Ukraine, was repeating Russian misinformation, between the agriculture ministry and
it remained unclear who, exactly, had or- Trump lashed out, calling Zelensky a the chair of the village council. He spent
dered or carried out the attack. “A real “dictator” who wants the war to con- the next decade in Kyiv and the sur-
brain-twister,” a high-ranking German tinue to keep the “ ‘gravy train’ going.” rounding region, launching stings to
official said. Chervinsky represents a less visible catch drug traffickers, criminal gangs,
In November, 2023, a suspect emerged. but no less decisive aspect of the con- and corrupt politicians. In the north-
A joint investigation by Der Spiegel and flict, in which a nation facing a superior eastern city of Poltava, he planted lis-
the Washington Post, citing sources in enemy fought back from the shadows. tening devices in a banya and recorded
both “Ukrainian and international se- “If there is a ceasefire, this part of the a gang of police officers discussing un-
curity circles,”identified Roman Chervin- war will only intensify,” Roman Kostenko, der-the-table agreements with local ma-
sky, a former Ukrainian intelligence a special-forces colonel who now serves fiosi. “People didn’t always love Roman,”
officer, as the operation’s alleged lead or- in the Ukrainian parliament, told me. a law-enforcement officer who regularly
ganizer. By then, Chervinsky, who had Chervinsky, for his part, wanted to cor- collaborated with Chervinsky told me.
spent two decades directing secret op- rect the record, both about his past ex- “Not just because he had no tolerance
erations for Ukraine’s intelligence ser- ploits and about what they’ve achieved for corruption but because he could be
vices, including assassinations and mul- for his country. “I’m ready to speak about so set in his principles.”
tiple acts of sabotage, was under house these things, even if it goes against the At the time, the S.B.U. resembled
arrest in a suburb of Kyiv. He had been usual rules of intelligence work,” he said. many other bloated Soviet-legacy bu-
charged in two separate criminal inves- “Ukraine is a full-fledged state—not reaucracies. Corrupt dealings with local
tigations, for extortion and abuse of au- some province of Russia—with the right officials and organized crime were com-
thority, both of which he denies. Nei- to defend itself and to set its own course.” mon. The agency was also thoroughly
ther case, at least formally, had anything compromised by Russian intelligence.
to do with Nord Stream. When I vis- hervinsky grew up in Kamyanets- An assessment from the C.I.A. at the
ited him recently, at his apartment, he
was unequivocal about his involvement
C Podilskyi, a medieval city in west-
ern Ukraine, where his father was a con-
time concluded that in some regional
bureaus, such as Kharkiv, in the north-
in the Nord Stream attack. “I didn’t do struction foreman and his mother east, as many as sixty per cent of the of-
it,” he told me. worked at a grocery store. As a teen- ficers were either working directly for
Chervinsky, who is fifty, with a slight ager, he competed in soccer and target Moscow or otherwise carrying out its
frame and a head of thinning hair, wore shooting. He briefly considered enroll- interests. Valerii Kondratiuk, who held
a loose-fitting polo. An electronic mon- ing in an I.T. program at a local tech- top positions in several Ukrainian in-
itor was affixed to his ankle. He made nical college, but everyone there seemed telligence agencies, told me that many
a pot of tea, and we sat at his kitchen to just sit around and smoke cigarettes. of the S.B.U.’s leadership appointments
table. “You look at him and see this ab- He was sixteen when Ukraine gained were made in consultation with the
solutely ordinary person you could imag- its independence from the Soviet Union, F.S.B., Russia’s security service.
ine standing next to on the bus that in 1991. Not long after, recruiters from In December, 2014, Chervinsky was
morning,” one person who has collabo- the S.B.U., the Ukrainian offshoot of sent to the Donbas, where Ukraine was
rated with him told me. “Then you come fighting Russian-backed militias in what
to understand who he is and what he’s the country then called an “antiterrorist
capable of.” operation.” Since the incursion, many
Recently, the Trump Administration of the S.B.U. officers who had been
has begun negotiating with the Kremlin stationed in occupied territories had
to end the war in Ukraine. Those talks switched sides. Officers who had evac-
have excluded Ukraine itself, prompt- uated to areas controlled by Kyiv often
ing President Volodymyr Zelensky to didn’t want to take part in operations
warn against dealmaking “behind the against their former colleagues. But the
backs of the key subjects.”The conditions front line was porous, with locals trav-
that the Trump Administration envi- the K.G.B., visited his school, and spoke elling back and forth to visit relatives,
sions, which have been spelled out by of a new academy in Kyiv—the first in obtain medical care, and collect pen-
top U.S. officials, have caused alarm in the country to train its own intelligence sions. Chervinsky and his colleagues ex-
Ukraine and Europe: no relinquishment officers. Chervinsky’s father, who had ploited the f low of people to recruit
of all territory taken by Russia since dark memories of the K.G.B., urged agents. “Everyone has a certain hierar-
2014; no NATO membership for Ukraine; him not to apply. “You should know chy of values,” he told me. “For some, it
no U.S. peacekeepers to enforce a cease- this system will, sooner or later, make might be as simple as money. Others
fire. Instead, the emphasis has been on you fire on your own,” he said. Chervin- want drugs and nothing else. And there
big-ticket deals, such as a proposal to sky was accepted as a cadet on his sec- are those who think in terms of justice
grant the U.S. a fifty-per-cent stake in ond attempt. and honesty. You can make your ap-
Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals. (Zelen- As a junior officer, he was sent to proach from any of those angles.”
sky turned down the deal.) After Ze- Kamyanets-Podilskyi, his home town, That year’s Maidan Revolution, in
44 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
Kyiv, followed by Russia’s annexation of
Crimea and its proxy war in the Don-
bas, had reoriented Ukraine’s politics. The
country was turning to the West for sup-
port—and, for the intelligence services,
that meant the C.I.A. “We provided in-
formation on Russia,” Kondratiuk told
me. “When they realized it was often of
better quality than what they were get-
ting from their own officers and agents
in Moscow, their interest in helping us
spiked.” A former U.S. intelligence offi-
cer estimated that the new partnership
effectively doubled the amount of infor-
mation that the U.S. was able to collect
on Russia. In one case, the S.B.U. passed
along the source code used in a Russian
hacking attack, allowing U.S. agencies to
build their own defenses. “That’s tens of
millions of dollars in value right there,”
the former U.S. intelligence officer said.
In early 2015, the C.I.A. agreed to help
fund a new spy outfit within the S.B.U. “ You get in there, you give it a hundred and ten per
called the Fifth Directorate. “The idea cent, and a leftover slice of lasagna and two episodes of your
was to blend counterintelligence with favorite TV show are waiting for you at home.”
special operations,” a U.S. official said.
The C.I.A. provided tactical gear and
communications equipment, and ran • •
training courses for the department’s of-
ficers, most of whom had come of age volved in assassinations of pro-Russian when he got a call to attend to some
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. field commanders. There was no legal urgent business. On an empty stretch
The head of the Fifth Directorate re- framework for targeted killings on in- of road, Dremov’s car exploded, killing
ported to the deputy director of S.B.U., ternationally recognized Ukrainian ter- him and his driver. Dremov had pro-
bypassing the usual layers of bureaucracy. ritory. S.B.U. officers concluded that, moted the establishment of a Cossack-
“If, before, the service was hostage to sta- because Ukraine was at war with ter- run republic within the Russian-occupied
tistics and plans set from above,” one Fifth rorists backed by Russia, the usual rules territories. It was widely assumed that
Directorate officer said, “now we were didn’t apply. “When a state is at peace, he was offed by rivals within his own
freed of all that, with full creative license.” it has one way of dealing with its ene- ranks, perhaps on the orders of Mos-
Chervinsky joined the department mies,” Chervinsky said. “But during war- cow, which had little tolerance for out-
shortly after its founding, and helped time, when your territory is occupied, spoken rebel leaders.
its officers build a network of informants you have to be more forceful.” In reality, the blast had been orches-
and conduct surveillance of militia forces. U.S. policy prohibited C.I.A. officers trated by the S.B.U. Some months ear-
A microphone hidden inside an exten- from having any involvement in such lier, a source on the ground, a local busi-
sion cord in the office of the prosecu- operations. “Officially, the Americans nessman in the Donbas, had told the
tor for the so-called Donetsk People’s were opposed,” Kondratiuk said. But Fifth Directorate about Dremov’s inter-
Republic allowed the department to behind the scenes, he went on, C.I.A. est in cars, especially Range Rovers. The
listen to interrogations of Ukrainian officers often expressed their apprecia- department imported one from Europe,
P.O.W.s. A female officer in a pro- tion: “They would shake our hands and and, once it was in the separatist terri-
Russian militia was duped into placing say, ‘Good work.’” tories, agents placed hidden explosives
a bugged table lamp in the headquarters inside the doorframe. The businessman
of a tank battalion. Another agent whom n December 12, 2015, Pavel Dremov, brought it to the headquarters of Dre-
Chervinsky had recruited from that bat-
talion hid improvised explosives, pro-
O a thirty-nine-year-old bricklayer
who became the commander of a self-
mov’s battalion in Stakhanov, where, as
Chervinsky and his fellow-operatives
vided by the S.B.U., under the tracks of proclaimed Cossack battalion in occu- had hoped, he asked to take it for a drive.
eight tanks parked on a training ground. pied Ukrainian territory, set off for the The businessman handed him the keys.
After the tanks were destroyed, Chervin- town of Pervomaisk in a Range Rover. The next day, the S.B.U., which was re-
sky listened to the stunned reactions of He had got married a week earlier, and motely following the Range Rover’s
commanders inside the headquarters. was still celebrating in his home town movements, triggered the explosion. A
The Fifth Directorate was also in- of Stakhanov, less than ten miles away, Fifth Directorate officer, who in the wake
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 45
of such killings was responsible for writ- Back in Donetsk, the pair took up a was a university student whose parents
ing false statements that blamed the position down the street from Pavlov’s had recently died, and she needed money,
pro-Russian factions, told me that, in entryway. When one of Pavlov’s guards both for her studies and for a persistent
this case, “we didn’t need any P.R.” came outside for a smoke break, the local drug habit. The driver made a proposal:
Chervinsky’s next target was Arsen agent—“He looked like the most peace- he had a client who would pay well—
Pavlov, a former car-wash employee who ful guy, you’d never suspect him of any- was she interested? He brought her to
went by the nom de guerre Motorola. thing,” Chervinsky said—caught the door Tolstykh’s headquarters, where she spent
At the start of the war, Pavlov led a before it closed. He and his partner got the night. A week later, Tolstykh called
group of pro-Russian militants, whom into the elevator shaft and out of the Katerina and asked her to return.
he called the Sparta Battalion, in a siege building without being noticed. A week Before their third meeting, S.B.U.
of the Donetsk airport. He was later later, Pavlov arrived at his building and agents passed her a package, which con-
implicated in the torture and execution walked inside. The agent from Donetsk tained a cell phone and eight hundred
of Ukrainian P.O.W.s, including a cap- called Pavlov’s cell phone and heard, via grams of explosives wrapped in plastic.
tured machine gunner he shot twice in the hidden microphone, that it was ring- Early the next morning, when Tolstykh
the head. “I don’t give a fuck,” he told a ing inside the elevator. Pavlov picked up. got out of bed, Katerina taped the case
reporter from the Kyiv Post. “I kill if I “Is this Arsen Pavlov?” the agent asked. under the bed frame. Chervinsky was
want to. I don’t if I don’t.” “Yes,” Pavlov replied. waiting for her at a makeshift opera-
Chervinsky oversaw a handful of failed “This is the Moskovsky Komsomolets tional base in Ukrainian-held territory.
attempts to assassinate Pavlov. The Fifth newspaper—we’d like to interview you.” The next day, they drove to a spot near
Directorate prepared a crate of poisoned The agent pressed a button, detonating the front line, in range of Russian cell-
vodka, which a middleman was supposed the explosives. S.B.U. officers in Kyiv had phone towers, to conceal their location.
to give to Pavlov and his soldiers. But tapped Pavlov’s wife’s phone, and listened The S.B.U. had tapped Tolstykh’s bed-
when the middleman couldn’t find money in as she frantically called her husband, room; Chervinsky and Katerina listened
that the S.B.U. had buried for him at a who didn’t pick up. for the sound of him turning over in
drop point, he called the soldiers and Afterward, some C.I.A. officers re- bed. Chervinsky pressed a button.
told them not to drink it. (“That was ceived a commemorative patch that read, “That’s it?” Katerina asked. “So quiet.”
stupid,” Chervinsky said. “They detained simply, “Elevator.” But, even in private,
him and threw him in prison.”) Another Chervinsky never acknowledged his role hat spring, Chervinsky was named
time, a local agent hid an antipersonnel
mine near the exit of a hospital where
in Pavlov’s killing. “Oftentimes, inside
secret services, people are eager to claim
T the head of the Fifth Directorate.
He had earned a reputation as an am-
Pavlov regularly received treatment for credit,” a former U.S. intelligence officer bitious, even aggressive, operational chief.
an eye injury. The mine detonated, but said. “They want influence, attention, The S.B.U., meanwhile, was suffering
the shrapnel missed Pavlov’s car—a good promotions—it’s politics, basically.” But its own losses. In the first half of 2017,
thing, in the end, Chervinsky said, be- Chervinsky, the former officer went on, a series of car bombs killed several
cause Pavlov’s wife was in the passenger “didn’t seem to care about any of that. If Ukrainian intelligence officers, includ-
seat. They were both unscathed. we heard about any of these operations, ing one of Chervinsky’s friends in the
Chervinsky had another idea. He had it certainly wasn’t from him.” service. He assumed that the assassina-
enlisted an agent to wear a pizza-deliv- Chervinsky had learned that every tions were the work of the F.S.B., in
ery uniform and to sneak into Pavlov’s target has a vice that lowers their de- Moscow, which enlisted agents in the
building. The agent reported that Pav- fenses, even for a moment. For Mikhail Donbas. “Inside the occupied territo-
lov was usually accompanied by a secu- Tolstykh, the commander of the pro- ries, we felt like we had a good sense of
rity guard who stood watch outside Pav- Russian Somali Battalion—so named who they are and where to find them,”
lov’s apartment, which was on the seventh for the ragtag appearance of its fight- Chervinsky said of Russian intelligence
floor. But there was one place where the ers—that vulnerability was women. Tol- officers. “But, as we should have known,
pair were confined and usually alone: the stykh regularly invited prostitutes to his they were watching us, too.”
elevator. Chervinsky sent two other headquarters in Donetsk, where he also In the summer of 2018, Chervinsky
agents—a Donetsk local and a former kept a bedroom. received a list of people wanted in con-
special-forces soldier—to Chernobyl, The S.B.U. maintained contact with nection with the attack on Malaysia Air-
where, in an abandoned apartment build- several sex workers whom it used in its lines Flight 17, which had been shot out
ing, they practiced the basics of the op- operations. Chervinsky dispatched one of the sky over the Donbas four years
eration: prying open the doors to the of them from Kyiv—I’ll call her Kate- earlier, as it flew from Amsterdam to
elevator shaft, jumping down to the com- rina—to occupied Donetsk in early 2017. Kuala Lumpur, killing all two hundred
partment’s roof, placing an explosive A local taxi-driver typically brought and ninety-eight people on board. A
packet on top and a surveillance micro- women to Tolstykh’s place. The S.B.U. Dutch-led investigation determined that
phone in the ventilation slats, and mak- learned that the driver frequently used Russian-supplied rebel forces fired on
ing a quick exit. The whole sequence amphetamines; not coincidentally, so did the plane, with a Buk anti-aircraft mis-
took about a minute. “They were moti- Katerina. In Donetsk, she caught a se- sile system. Ukrainian investigators had
vated,” Chervinsky said. “They knew ries of rides with the taxi-driver, during been collaborating with the Dutch on a
what they were doing and why.” which she unspooled her cover story: she multiyear effort to locate and detain those
46 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
responsible. To Chervinsky, one name ing a mine. The explosion blew dirt and a month earlier, and one of his central
looked especially promising: Vladimir smoke into the air and flipped him on campaign promises had been to find an
Tsemakh, a Donbas native in his mid-fif- his back. Lying on the ground, he trig- end to the conflict. On September 7th,
ties who had served as the head of air gered another. The second blast sent Tsemakh was among the prisoners in-
defense for Snizhne, a town near where shrapnel up through a gap in his helmet, cluded in the trade, a condition that Ivan
the plane was shot down. into his brain. Another special-forces Bakanov, S.B.U.’s director at the time,
Around that time, a man in a pro-Rus- soldier ran to his partner, detonating a said had been set by Putin himself. Ze-
sian battalion in the Donbas, whom I’ll third mine. Stepan turned back and lensky called the exchange “the first step
call Stepan, got in touch with the S.B.U. dragged Tsemakh several hundred feet to end the war.” The Dutch were disap-
Stepan had initially fled Ukrainian-held across the bridge. Within days, the lead pointed. “People were irritated, even as-
territory after getting into a hit-and-run officer was dead; doctors amputated the tonished,” the team member said. (Tse-
accident. He then fought as a foot sol- leg of the other soldier. makh has denied any involvement in the
dier in a pro-Russian militia but had The remaining operatives took Tse- Malaysia Airlines attack.) Chervinsky
begun to suspect that he was being pre- makh to Kyiv. That afternoon, Chervin- thought that the Zelensky administra-
pared for a kamikaze mission. He de- sky was at the grave site of his friend who tion was overly credulous in its dealings
cided to defect again, this time to the was killed in one of the car bombings with Russia. “All this effort to locate and
Ukrainian side. Chervinsky told him, two years earlier. He got a call from a apprehend this one person,” he said. “And
“We can guarantee your safety, but we subordinate at the Fifth Directorate. “We just like that we let him go.”
have a job for you.” have him,” the voice on the line said. By then, Chervinsky was watching
The following June, Stepan pulled up Ukrainian prosecutors charged Tse- from the sidelines: shortly after Tse-
to Tsemakh’s apartment building in makh with terrorism for his role as a field makh’s detention, he was dismissed as
Snizhne. By then, Tsemakh had left the commander in the pro-Russian militia. the head of the Fifth Directorate and
ranks of rebel fighters and was, in the Dutch investigators were eager to ques- relieved of his duties by the S.B.U.
words of Chervinsky, “an ordinary- tion him about the Malaysia Airlines at- Chervinsky said that he never received
looking older retiree.” The S.B.U. had tack. “A risky, bold action,” a member of an official explanation for his dismissal,
placed a transponder under his car and the Dutch-led investigative team told but Kondratiuk, the former spy chief,
knew his schedule: every morning, he me of Tsemakh’s arrest. “The sort of thing told me, “His competencies suddenly
drove his wife to work at a local techni- we could never have done ourselves.” felt out of vogue.”The war in the Donbas
cal college, then returned home. Stepan At the time, the Ukrainian and Rus- had shifted to a less active phase; for
was waiting for him, and forced his way sian governments were discussing a large- better or for worse, the time of blowing
into Tsemakh’s apartment. “Some peo- scale prisoner swap. Zelensky had been people up in elevators seemed to have
ple in Donetsk want to speak with you,” inaugurated as the President of Ukraine passed. “These people are adventurists
he told him. When Tsemakh refused to
leave, Stepan pistol-whipped him and
stuck a syringe filled with a tranquillizer
into Tsemakh’s leg. “Let’s go,” Stepan
said, holding up Tsemakh, who fell into
a groggy, weak-kneed trance.
The S.B.U. had procured a getaway
car for Stepan, a clunky old Lada, with
a folding wheelchair stored in the trunk.
Fake medical records showed that Ste-
pan’s passenger suffered from a terminal
illness. When they reached the rebel-
controlled checkpoint, Stepan told the
guards that Tsemakh had grown up in
Marinka, a town on the front line, and
wanted to see his childhood home one last
time. The soldiers waved them through.
Four Ukrainian special-forces oper-
atives were waiting for them on the other
side of a pedestrian bridge on the out-
skirts of Marinka. The bridge was crum-
bling and pockmarked by explosions, too
difficult for a wheelchair to navigate. Ste-
pan decided to walk Tsemakh down to
a dry riverbank below.The lead Ukrainian
operative on the other side, a recon of-
ficer, began to approach them, trigger- “I don’t really like him, but he doesn’t shed.”
 Flight 17 was shot down. “We asked them,
‘Do you have combat experience?’ And
they replied, ‘You bet I do!’” Chervinsky
said. “They were building the case file
against themselves.”
What began as an intelligence-gath-
ering operation grew into a plan, code-
named Project Avenue, to interdict and
arrest the fighters and charge them in
Ukraine. Chervinsky brought the list of
mercenaries to his contacts at the S.B.U.
“You can’t just arrest someone and put
them in jail for being a Wagner fighter,”
he said. “There has to be particular crim-
inal conduct, and some evidence prov-
ing it.” Eventually, the list was whittled
down to twenty-eight persons of inter-
est—fighters who had taken part in piv-
otal episodes, such as an attack on a
Ukrainian military helicopter, which
killed a general, and the downing of a
Ukrainian plane carrying forty paratroop-
ers. But there was a problem: Russian
mercenaries were flown directly to Syria
on Russian military aircraft. The ficti-
“Hey, are my glasses at the house?” tious Syria mission would have to be, as
Chervinsky put it, “zeroed out.”
In June, 2020, Milyaev received an
• • e-mail with some tragic news: Sergei
Petrovich had been killed in Syria. Soon
by nature,” Kostenko, the special-forces in, including one from a militia com- after, a man who introduced himself as
officer in parliament, said. “They get mander named Artyom Milyaev, whose Artur Pavlovich called from a Venezu-
bored and frustrated by routine. They nom de guerre was Shaman. elan number to say that he had taken
want more lively work.” Milyaev soon got a call from a Syr- over the project. “Don’t worry,” he told
ian phone number. The man on the other Milyaev. “You and your men won’t be
asyl Burba, a former director of end introduced himself as Sergei Petro- left without work.”
V HUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence
agency, is a barrel-chested career officer
vich, a “curator” from the Russian secu-
rity services. He asked Milyaev if he could
Artur Pavlovich proposed a new mis-
sion. Milyaev and his men were needed
who, like Chervinsky, started out in the recruit fighters for a deployment to Syria, to guard drilling sites in Venezuela for
S.B.U. and ran operations in the Don- where, since 2015, Russia had been de- Rosneft, the Russian state oil company.
bas. In late 2019, he offered Chervinsky ploying mercenaries, mostly from Wag- It was a believable cover story. As Olek-
a job overseeing a unit that blended ner, the private military company, in sup- sandr Zholobetskyi, a former HUR offi-
human intelligence with covert opera- port of President Bashar al-Assad. “We cer who was among the leaders of the
tions. “They say that, for an assassin, his have a lot of tasks,” Sergei Petrovich said. operation, told me, “Is Rosneft a genu-
weapon should be an extension of his “We need people who are ready to go.” ine, well-known company? Do they have
hand,” a former HUR officer said. “For Milyaev soon gathered a group of nearly documented interests abroad, and in Ven-
Roman, that meant something else—his two hundred Russian mercenaries will- ezuela, in particular? And do they have
mind, and how he used it to recruit peo- ing to join the mission. the budget to pay for security contrac-
ple, to bring them over to his side. These Sergei Petrovich told Milyaev to send tors? Yes, yes, and yes.”
agents became an extension of him.” detailed résumés of his team members, The plan was to put the group of mer-
Chervinsky’s new unit had launched with documentation showing their de- cenaries on a commercial flight to Ca-
an operation to gather intelligence on ployments to war zones, including racas, with a connection in Istanbul, and
Russian mercenaries who had taken part Ukraine. Some mentioned Russian med- to force the plane to land as it crossed
in the Donbas war. A source in the als that they’d received for participating over Ukrainian airspace. Flights from
Russian security services—“He loved in the annexation of Crimea or the Bat- Moscow to Istanbul passed over Ukraine
money,” the former HUR officer said— tle of Debaltseve, a bloody fight in the for nearly an hour, but Russia, owing to
had helped the team repurpose a de- winter of 2015. A handful boasted of the COVID pandemic, had cancelled
funct Russian private military company guarding a Buk anti-aircraft missile sys- flights to Turkey. Instead, the mercenar-
to recruit fighters. Applications poured tem in the Donbas around the time that ies would have to travel by bus to Minsk,
48 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
in Belarus, where they could catch a di- Donbas that would take effect that Mon- had happened. A report in Komsomolskaya
rect f light to Istanbul. It would be a day, two days after HUR planned to con- Pravda, citing the Russian secret services,
tighter window: the flight from Minsk duct the operation. Yermak didn’t want noted that the phone numbers from Syria
passed over Ukrainian airspace for only anything to undermine one of Zelen- and Venezuela were fakes, and that the
twenty-eight minutes. sky’s key political initiatives. Burba agreed airline tickets purchased for the group
Chervinsky enlisted the help of a mil- to delay the plan by five days, enough had been booked by a travel agency in
itary official in Ukraine’s air-traffic cen- time for the ceasefire to take hold. The Kyiv.Ten days after the arrests, Lukashenko
ter to learn the rules laid out by the Con- HUR team was nervous. “These guys had was reëlected to a sixth term as President.
vention on International Civil Aviation. prepared themselves to get to work and His victory, which much of the West con-
For Chervinsky’s purposes, there were earn money,” Zholobetskyi said. “Tell- demned as illegitimate, led to wide-scale
two scenarios in which a commercial ing them at the last minute to wait even protests. Lukashenko turned to Putin for
f light could be forced to land before longer risked losing them forever.” a guarantee of security. Belarus handed
reaching its destination: a medical emer- The officers used pandemic travel re- the men over to Russia.
gency or a bomb threat. HUR officers strictions as an excuse for the delay. A Burba was consumed by his suspicion
found an agent willing to board the plane Ukrainian travel agent working with HUR that, before the arrests, an official in Ze-
and take a substance that induced sei- booked rooms for the group at a hotel lensky’s office had tipped off Lukashenko,
zure-like symptoms, and ran a test under in Minsk. Milyaev laid out the rules to perhaps thinking that Belarus could be
the supervision of doctors. “He didn’t his men: no drinking, no leaving the persuaded to hand over the mercenaries
know why he was supposed to do this hotel without approval, and everyone to Ukraine—no complicated sting op-
or who else would be on the plane,” had to eat meals at predesignated times. eration required. Burba wanted to launch
Zholobetskyi said. “We only told him it “Over many months, we led him to think an internal investigation, with polygraphs
was for an important operation.” of himself as their commander,” Chervin- conducted on high-ranking officials, in-
But, in cases of onboard medical sky said. “So it was him, not us, who was cluding Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff.
emergencies, the pilot was in control of in charge of keeping them disciplined.” But he never got a chance: on August 5th,
whether, and where, to land the plane. Two days later, HUR relocated the men he was fired as HUR’s director.
That left a bomb threat. Just after take- to a sanatorium in the woods outside Reports of the failed operation began
off, an agent recruited by HUR would Minsk. “We needed to find a quiet, hid- to appear in the Ukrainian press, where
place a call from inside the Minsk air- den place that could house a large num- it took on the moniker Wagnergate. At
port to Ukraine’s antiterrorism center, ber of people on short notice,” Zholo- first, Yermak denied that such an oper-
reporting that he had overheard two betskyi explained. ation had been attempted. “A fictional
people discussing plans to carry out a Then there was another hiccup. On detective story from beginning to end,”
terrorist attack on board the flight. In July 29th, a day before the mercenaries he said. Zelensky eventually acknowl-
such cases, security agents would con- were supposed to fly to Istanbul, Milyaev edged its existence, but he said, “It was
tact air-traffic control. Ukrainian dis- sent an urgent message to Larisa, his Ros- the idea of other countries, not Ukraine.”
patchers would then be in charge: if they neft contact: he and his men had been Opposition members of parliament, from
ordered the pilot to land in Kyiv, the arrested in Belarus. That morning, a the party of the former President Petro
pilot was required to comply. Once the Ukrainian intelligence officer got a call Poroshenko, accused Zelensky of trea-
plane was on the ground, the passen- son. “If the President was involved in fal-
gers would be led off, and the merce- sifications and lies,” one declared, “this
naries would be arrested. means impeachment.”
HUR officers used black-market pay- A special commission was formed in
ment networks to wire a tranche of funds parliament to investigate the incident—
to Milyaev—fifteen thousand rubles per the first in Ukrainian history to deal with
person—and told him that he and his such highly classified material. Its mem-
men would be meeting a Rosneft em- bers worked inside a specially prepared
ployee named Larisa in Istanbul. “From room, where cell-phone reception was
then on, they were relaxed,” Chervin- blocked. “I hoped this commission could
sky said. “They were certain their con- from a contact in the Belarusian security grow into a proper intelligence-oversight
tracts had started.” services: “Why the hell did we receive an committee,” Mariana Bezuhla, a thirty-
Burba, HUR’s director, has repeatedly order to arrest thirty-three mercenaries?” six-year-old parliamentarian, who chaired
told the story of what he claims hap- the effort, told me. “I now realize there
pened next. He went to Bankova, the yiv and Moscow jockeyed over where was little hope of getting accurate or re-
Presidential-administration building in
Kyiv, to brief Zelensky on Project Ave-
K the men would be sent. Ukrainian
prosecutors, noting that the mercenaries
liable information on what really hap-
pened.” According to the commission’s
nue’s next phase. Zelensky was unable had committed crimes in Ukraine, filed report, released in November, 2021, its
to attend, but his chief of staff, Andriy extradition requests. Zelensky called Alek- members were “unable to clearly estab-
Yermak, told Burba that the operation sandr Lukashenko, the President of Be- lish by whom and at what level in Ukraine
would have to be delayed. Zelensky and larus, to press the case. Russian authorities, the decision to postpone was adopted.”
Putin had agreed to a ceasefire in the meanwhile, were piecing together what In June, 2021, Chervinsky, who was
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 49
then forty-six, left HUR. He was entitled able to admit your mistakes,” the senior TV appearance, Russia launched its full-
to his state pension as a retired officer official said. “If they did that, the oper- scale invasion. Bezuhla and I spoke about
and considered joining an acquaintance’s ation would have ended in a normal, or- the legacy of Wagnergate in the context
private law practice in Kyiv. Like Burba, dinary failure—the kind of thing that of the current war, during which the
he believed that Project Avenue had been happens all the time. Instead, they kept Ukrainian military and the secret ser-
undermined from within. That Decem- pushing and pumped the story into a vices have undertaken far more ambi-
ber, he appeared on a political talk show huge political scandal.” tious operations. In October, 2022, for
in Kyiv. It was the first time that Chervin- Whatever the case, the battle lines example, the S.B.U. hid explosives in rolls
sky had shown his face to the public; a surrounding Wagnergate were clear: of cellophane and shipped the cargo from
man who spent his career in the shad- those who favored a more hawkish pol- Russia to Crimea; a truck, packed with
ows was now in the klieg lights of a tele- icy toward Russia, including powerful the explosives, detonated as it was driv-
vision studio. He said that Project Ave- figures in Poroshenko’s camp, had used ing over the Crimean Bridge, destroy-
nue’s failure was the result of a “betrayal” the incident as a cudgel against Zelen- ing a key overland route that Russia used
and alleged the President’s office had a sky and his team. Kondratiuk, the for- to resupply its troops. Earlier this year,
mole: “I am ninety-nine per cent certain mer spy chief, called Chervinsky “an ex- a HUR source told me, operatives rigged
that this was an act of treason.” tremely talented operative and tactical explosives in a batch of goggles used in
A former U.S. intelligence officer said thinker,” but added, “The tragedy is that drone operations, which middlemen
of Chervinsky and his allies, “When these he didn’t figure out the moment when passed to pro-Russian volunteers, who
guys felt like they were being thrown others began to use him.” The officials donated them to Russian military units.
under the bus, they decided to throw he had upset were vindictive, Kondra- The goggles subsequently exploded in
back.” But a senior official in Ukraine’s tiuk said. “They are always sure to get the faces of Russian drone pilots. Wag-
intelligence apparatus said that the fall- their revenge.” nergate, Bezuhla said, “removed the taboo
out from Wagnergate amounted to “total The scandal, however, proved short- for carrying out crazy operations. Now
silliness.” “In this trade, you have to be lived. Two months after Chervinsky’s we are very crazy.”

n the morning of Russia’s invasion,

O as armored columns bore down on
Kyiv, Chervinsky’s wife, Olha, and their
three children fled to Kamyanets-Po-
dilskyi, where Chervinsky’s mother lived.
That evening, Chervinsky met up with
former colleagues from HUR, some of
whom, like him, had been pushed out
after Project Avenue. Their former col-
leagues in the service helped procure au-
tomatic rifles and antitank mines. “At the
lower levels,” Chervinsky said, “we never
had any misunderstandings.”
The group headed toward Makariv,
a settlement thirty miles west of Kyiv,
where a Russian armored column was
trying to press toward the capital. The
men went on scouting missions to plant
mines on roads and highways where
Russian tanks and other vehicles were
passing. When a Russian convoy trig-
gered the mines, the group opened fire.
“I had been at war,” Chervinsky told
me. “But not like this.”
In the Donbas, he had fought the
enemy at a distance; now he and the oth-
ers were operating in Russian-held ter-
ritory, moving at night, sleeping in the
woods or, when sympathetic locals al-
lowed, in an empty storage shed or an
abandoned house. They regularly came
under fire. The former HUR officer, who
“Honey, wake up, I can’t live with this lie any longer—I was a member of the group, told me,
actually can fold laundry. Really well, in fact.” “Overnight, a bunch of guys who not
long before had been commanders, run- more or less wouldn’t change the mili- ting his wife and their three children out
ning large-scale operations, became or- tary picture for Ukraine,” Bohdan told of the secure military town where they
dinary soldiers, not showering for weeks, me. “But if even one pilot, a member of lived. “I don’t want to have the same story
eating canned meat out of metal tins.” Russia’s military élite, defected in such a as Skripal,” he told Bohdan, referring to
After a month, Chervinsky and a few public way it would be a blow to morale, the former Russian intelligence officer
of the others were invited to join the and a sign for others to consider the same. who, in 2018, was poisoned in the U.K.
S.S.O., the special-operations branch of Not all of them want to bomb cities, after Another pilot wanted to defect not with
the Ukrainian military. They were put all—maybe they’d prefer a million bucks.” his wife—“It’s a complicated relation-
in charge of an effort to prepare popu- Bohdan found a publicly available list ship,” he said—but with his mistress, a
lations in areas at risk of Russian occu- of Russian pilots who had received medals fitness trainer in her twenties. Chervin-
pation for partisan warfare. “Let’s say for flying combat missions sky asked Christo Grozev,
Ukrainian forces retreat from a certain in Syria. He ran the names then a researcher at the
territory,” an officer in the S.S.O. said. through a dark-Web data- open-source-intelligence
“Everything should be set up in ad- base, which generated about outfit Bellingcat, to share a
vance—sources and agents on the ground, a hundred phone numbers trove of Russian cell-phone
hidden weapons and explosives, a sys- and e-mail addresses. Most billing records. Geolocation
tem for coördinating operations.” pilots didn’t answer; oth- data showed that the pilot’s
In early April, the group was assigned ers told Bohdan to get lost. mistress had visited F.S.B.
to the Zaporizhzhia front, in Ukraine’s But several seemed inter- facilities in Moscow. Soon,
southeast. They searched for people in ested. He asked them to both candidates disappeared.
occupied zones who could help their cause, take photos of their aircraft That left Roman No-
from pro-Ukrainian patriots to small- while holding up a piece of senko, a thirty-six-year-old
time criminals. “It may sound pompous,” paper with a number that he dictated who flew fighter jets from a Russian
the former HUR officer told me, “but, after to them—proof that they were really base in Morozovsk, near the southern
two decades of doing this work, we have pilots and still flying combat missions. city of Rostov. Over Signal, Bohdan
a pretty good sense of who the strong- Bohdan brought the idea to HUR. “It’s told him that his wife should leave Rus-
willed people are in any community and impossible,” the senior Ukrainian intel- sia through Belarus. Once she arrived
how to find them.” They divided jobs ligence source said, citing the difficulty in Minsk, Ukrainian agents would pro-
among the residents. “One person per- of flying a plane low enough to evade vide her with a European passport is-
forms a rather meagre task, such as count- Russian radar detection. “You’d have to sued to a false identity. Nosenko, mean-
ing the order in which military supply either be an idiot or incompetent to pro- while, would slip a sedative into his
trains pass through a certain crossing,” pose such a thing.” An officer in the co-pilot’s coffee before takeoff, knock-
the S.S.O. officer said. “And another, who S.B.U. was more receptive. He helped ing him unconscious, and then report
never met or saw the first, goes at night Bohdan communicate with the pilots, to his superiors that his jet was struck
to lay an explosive on the tracks.” who often demanded money for the pho- by Ukrainian anti-aircraft fire. At one
Chervinsky was in touch with col- tos and the videos they sent. The S.B.U. point during the planning phase, ac-
leagues throughout the secret services, officer had previously worked with cording to Yahoo News, Nosenko told
sharing ideas for new operations. “Roman Chervinsky in the Donbas, and he asked Bohdan, “This is like a movie.”
can’t sit still for long,” the former HUR his former colleague to join the effort. But, while Nosenko’s wife was in tran-
officer said. In the spring of 2022, one of “It seemed like a classic PsyOp,” Chervin- sit, Chervinsky and the other operatives
Chervinsky’s contacts at the S.B.U. told sky told me. (The S.B.U. has since said learned an unsettling fact. Phone records
him about a civilian who, on his own ini- that it did not approve the operation.) showed that she had made calls to an
tiative, had begun communicating with Chervinsky approached a Ukrainian F.S.B. counterintelligence officer. “Are
Russian fighter pilots, trying to persuade businessman, who agreed to chip in a you sure this is legit?” Grozev asked
them to defect to Ukraine along with few thousand dollars to pay the Russian Chervinsky. “It looks like a setup.” When
their aircraft. What they needed, the pilots. “Roman is a brilliant saboteur, an Chervinsky asked Nosenko about his
S.B.U. operative said, was money—did assassin of the state,” the businessman, wife’s calls to the F.S.B., Nosenko had
Chervinsky know where to find some? who had worked with Chervinsky on a ready answer: she worked as a military
some previous operations, told me. “I felt psychologist at the same airbase where
hat April, the Ukrainian parliament obligated to help him do what he is ca- he was stationed—a fact that checked
T passed a law declaring that any Rus-
sian serviceman who provided Ukraine
pable of—no questions asked.” Chervin-
sky also got assurances from his contacts
out—and she was in contact with F.S.B.
counterintelligence as part of her nor-
with one of Russia’s more advanced mil- in the military that Ukrainian air-de- mal duties. “You could see that being
itary planes would receive a million dol- fense units would not fire on the target true,” Chervinsky said. But, he added,
lars. An amateur pilot in Kyiv with a aircraft as it made its approach. “it was even more likely a double cross.”
background in I.T. and cybersecurity, who Bohdan had identified three possible The operatives on the Ukrainian side
asked to be called Bohdan, began think- candidates. One of the pilots, who flew instructed Nosenko’s wife to return to
ing about how he might lure Russian air- a long-range bomber on missions to Mar- Moscow and debated what to do next.
men to take up the offer. “One plane iupol, said that he was worried about get- “Maybe he actually shows up,”Chervinsky
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 51
said. “Even if he doesn’t, we don’t lose from the S.B.U., “Chervinsky’s unau- lies for blowing up undersea infrastruc-
anything.” Chervinsky relayed a new thorized actions led to the enemy’s mis- ture in the Baltic Sea.”
plan: Nosenko’s wife would leave Rus- sile attack on the Kanatove airfield.” To In June, German prosecutors issued
sia for Kazakhstan, where a team of many of Chervinsky’s former colleagues, an arrest warrant for a suspect they iden-
agents would be waiting for her. When the criminal charges seemed flimsy. His tified as Volodymyr Z., a diving instruc-
they confirmed her arrival, the operation superior in the S.S.O., a major general tor in his mid-forties who, before the
would commence. “That would show named Viktor Hanuschak, testified that Nord Stream attack, lived in a small town
he’s for real,” Chervinsky said. Nosenko the operation was carried out with the outside Warsaw. Soon after, he crossed
was told a password—a string of num- knowledge and approval of military lead- the Polish-Ukrainian border in a car re-
bers that he should say over a prear- ers, the Air Force, and the S.B.U. When portedly used by the Ukrainian Embassy.
ranged military frequency as he was ap- a prosecutor asked Hanuschak whether As it became clear that the Zelensky ad-
proaching the front line—which would someone could gain access to the Kana- ministration could not simply disavow
signal to Ukrainian anti-aircraft units tove airfield without an order from on any Ukrainian connection, officials in
to hold their fire. A pair of Ukrainian high, he answered, “Are you joking?” Kyiv began to shift their behind-the-
fighter jets would then escort Nosenko Kostenko, the former special-forces scenes messaging: Zelensky himself
to the Kanatove airfield, in southeast- colonel in parliament, told me, “Lots of wasn’t involved, but, if rogue elements
ern Ukraine. Nosenko’s wife was sup- operations don’t work. To prosecute inside the Ukrainian state were to blame,
posed to get to Almaty at two in the Chervinsky because he wanted to harm Ukrainian authorities would help track
morning; by six, Nosenko would take the enemy is like fining a Formula 1 driver them down. At least one journalist told
off in a Su-34 fighter toward Ukraine. for breaking the speed limit.” But the me of an S.B.U. briefing where Chervin-
On July 22, 2022, Chervinsky and case took on political overtones from the sky was named as the organizer of the
three other operatives set up a tempo- outset. Poroshenko, the former President, attack. (The S.B.U. said that this was
rary command center at the Kanatove who still has political ambitions, paid “completely untrue.”)
airfield. The soldiers at the base were Chervinsky’s two-hundred-thousand- Last August, the Wall Street Journal
told that the new arrivals were conduct- dollar bail. Chervinsky, for his part, be- reported that Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then
ing a training mission to prepare for lieves that his arrest was less a legal mat- the chief military officer in Ukraine, had
Russian sabotage. At midnight, Chervin- ter than one of personal animosity, authorized and overseen the plot. Za-
sky spoke with Nosenko, who said that perhaps even payback for how he pub- luzhnyi had “enlisted some of Ukraine’s
his wife had boarded a flight to Almaty. licly broke ranks in the wake of Wag- top special-operations officers with ex-
But a couple of hours later Chervinsky’s nergate. “I’m a convenient target,” he told perience in orchestrating high-risk clan-
contact there said that the wife had not me. “The goal is to discredit me, to make destine missions against Russia to help
landed. “We knew it was over,” Chervin- me look uncontrollable, to find a reason coordinate the attack,” the Journal said.
sky said. At four-thirty, an air-raid siren to go after me.” Chervinsky was the only operative
went off. Chervinsky rushed to a nearby named in the story. One participant told
bomb shelter, where he could hear ex- hat spring, when evidence began to the Journal that the operation, which
plosions ripple across the earth—six
missile strikes in all. After half an hour,
T emerge tying Ukraine to the Nord
Stream attack, Zelensky issued blanket
was said to have cost three hundred
thousand dollars, resembled a “public-
he resurfaced to see blown-out win- denials. “I am President, and I give or- private partnership,” in that it brought
dows, a collapsed roof, and several burn- ders accordingly,” he said in an inter- together wealthy businessmen, active
ing aircraft. The base’s commanding of- view with the media company Axel military officers, former spies, and pri-
ficer, a lieutenant colonel, was dead. Springer. “Nothing of the sort has been vate citizens with useful skills.
Seventeen other soldiers were injured. done by Ukraine. I would never act that Some participants worked on prepa-
“Was Nosenko a double agent from the way.” Even in private, Yermak, Zelen- rations and logistics from Kyiv. Accord-
beginning?” Chervinsky told me. “Or sky’s chief of staff, told German officials ing to a well-placed Ukrainian security
did he turn at some point?” (Nosenko, that the Ukrainian government was not source, this was likely Chervinsky’s
who remains in Russia, could not be involved. “It was so blurred,” the Ger- role—coördinating efforts among var-
reached for comment.) man official said. “It felt like no one ious stakeholders in the military and in-
Within days, the F.S.B. boasted of knew the whole story start to finish.” telligence services. The crew, dispatched
disrupting a Ukrainian operation to lure The murkiness had its advantages. on the Andromeda, was composed of
Russian Air Force pilots to defect. A Last February, Denmark and Sweden civilian divers and active-duty Ukrainian
video report released by the Russian closed their investigations into the ex- soldiers on leave from the front. They
agency featured images of the Ukrainian plosions. A diplomat from one of those set off from Rostock, a German port
chats with the pilots and, in one instance, countries told me that there hadn’t been city on the Baltic Sea, and made a stop
Chervinsky’s own voice. “Our goal is the enough evidence to mount a prosecu- in Sandhamn, in Sweden, before arriv-
plane,” he says. “We’re ready to pay.” tion that would hold up in court, call- ing at their target coördinates, a stretch
The following April, Chervinsky was ing the outcome a “matter of investiga- of open water near the Danish island
arrested by investigators from the S.B.U. tive luck.” After all, the diplomat said, of Bornholm. A little more than two
and charged with abuse of authority. “it could have put us in a position of weeks later, they returned to shore, hav-
According to a statement I received having to point fingers at one of our al- ing finished their supposed pleasure-
52 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
cruise holiday. The source involved in
the initial planning told me that Zelen-
sky might not have been informed of
the operation. Nevertheless, the source
insisted, it was carried out within the
military’s chain of command: “We are
not the types to act out of order.”
The closest to an official comment on
Nord Stream that I managed to secure
came from Kostenko, who sits on the se-
curity committee in the Ukrainian par-
liament. “Everyone who needs to know
the answer to this question knows the
answer, and this answer is enough for
them,” he said. “Our Western partners
understand everything perfectly well.”
A rough outline of a plan to blow up
Nord Stream had been circulating in
Ukrainian security circles for some time.
“Russia lives off of selling raw materi-
als—oil and gas,” the Ukrainian source
familiar with the planning for the Nord
Stream operation said. “It’s what finances
Putin’s aggression and helps him manip-
ulate Europe.” The source added that
Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, is
linked to two private military companies “Let’s see which of our phones has better weather.”
that have deployed fighters to Ukraine.
In the course of my reporting, I
learned that, in early 2022, Chervinsky
• •
was part of a group of people who ap-
proached their C.I.A. contacts with the whom you’re talking to. As a result, the source offered, could simply say, “We will
idea of blowing up Nord Stream. The source said, “going dark is textbook pro- carry out whatever operations we have
C.I.A. officers strongly opposed the pro- cedure for any special operation.” to, in any theatre in the world, in order
posal, and urged the Ukrainians to aban- Despite the initial speculation that to defend the country.” Instead, the of-
don it. “There was a constant flow of the attack required highly specialized ficer went on, “it’s as if the country has
novel, creative ideas,” a U.S. official who equipment, it was a rather simple affair. turned its back” on its own operatives.
worked with Ukraine told me. “Some “For a normal, professionally trained In Kyiv, when I asked Chervinsky
were good, others not so much.” diver, placing an object on an underwa- again about Nord Stream, he said, “Some-
An officer in Ukraine’s military told ter pipeline is no problem,” the source one did a good thing. It must have been
me that a group of operatives—the said. Narrowly speaking, the mission was a difficult decision, but I’m convinced it
source wouldn’t name any of them— a success. The target was destroyed, and, benefitted Ukraine, and the West, too.”
had proposed the same plan to Za- “most importantly, everyone involved I mentioned that I had learned he was
luzhnyi: “It was in the spirit of ‘There’s left the field safe and whole.” In private, among the Ukrainian intelligence oper-
this idea, this possibility. Are we doing a handful of participants, those who were atives who first proposed to the C.I.A.
it or not?’ ” The source said that Za- active-duty soldiers, received awards from the idea of blowing up the pipelines. He
luzhnyi signed off. (Zaluzhnyi has de- the military’s general staff. “On paper, it seemed surprised. “I’m not going to talk
nied any knowledge of the sabotage.) was for something vague, like ‘For the about that,” he said, before adding that
According to this source, Zaluzhnyi defense of Ukraine,’” the source famil- he couldn’t confirm that such a meeting
informed Zelensky of the operation. For iar with the plans told me. “We wanted had taken place. He insisted that his
a while, everything proceeded as planned to show them they are valued.” name had been falsely linked to the op-
until, at a certain point, the source said, The problem, the military officer told eration. “Let them point fingers at me,”
Zelensky gave an order to cancel the me, is that “if you judge them strictly ac- he said. “I’m no better or worse off from
mission. But it was too late. “When you cording to the law, they’re not heroes but all the attention.” He declined to com-
enter the zone of operations, you acti- criminals.” Of course, that is the nature ment further. “I get why people are in-
vate a regime of total silence,” the source of espionage—every country, including terested,” he told me. “The story of Nord
said. A single connection, a ping from the United States, technically breaks the Stream is a compelling mystery. Let peo-
a phone to a cell tower, can be enough laws of foreign nations to execute mis- ple speculate. One day we’ll find out
to give away not only your location but sions in its own interest. Zelensky, the what really happened.” 
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 53
 FICTION

54 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNIE COLLINGE

B
etween the ages of fourteen entity, who has no counterpart in her haskap jam, whatever that is. With a
and fifty-four Nadia does not past or present? conjurer’s flourish of his napkin, he
for a single minute not have When Nadia’s feet drop on her sis- takes a seat. His first sedentary act is
an admirer or a boyfriend or a better ter’s doormat, she perceives that the to place a light kiss on Yolanda’s lips.
half. Then Drew, her husband, disap- mat is saying something. Bonjour Hi, His second is to offer Nadia the salt
pears forever. the mat is saying. and pepper.
Each minute of the next six months “Thank you,” Nadia says.
is a thicket. The thickets contain police
officers, undertakers, insurance agents,
attorneys, claims adjusters, benefits
Iglynthecrisscross
the morning, she drinks coffee at
kitchen window. Runners sin-
the street in black bala-
Yolanda, her younger by six years,
was always the sister with the worse
name, the worse body, the worse ca-
counsellors, human-resources workers, clavas and tight-fitting black tops and reer, the worse life, the one who had
notaries, friends. Unforeseen names— black tights and black gloves. It is a long been lost in a “fuckup labyrinth”
Emmaline Cortez, Omar Eaton, Da- neighborhood of assassins in train- (Yolanda’s description) in New Jer-
lary Mason, Clyde Bender—become ing. The suspicion comes to Nadia sey, where she had a dead-end pharma
very important then very unimport- that her husband was murdered. job and a never-ending on-off thing
ant. Somewhere in there her two That seems unlikely, no? the in- with a married co-worker. Then, about
daughters fly in from and back to their ternal interlocutor asks. a year ago, ever ything suddenly
respective lives, in Chicago and Ashe- Ever ything is unlikely, Nadia changed for the better, as in a stu-
ville. In early January, Nadia emerges replies. pid movie.
from the last thicket. She drives up Drew was reportedly killed on a One evening, over dinner, the vis-
to Montreal. country road near a Finger Lakes town iting Yolanda triumphantly produced
Her consciousness has changed— called Hammondsport. A pickup truck her f irst-ever Canadian passport.
it, the consciousness, has made her swerved across the line and struck his Nadia didn’t understand—until she
more optically alert. She notices, first, car head on. According to the police, remembered that her sister had been
that a beautiful spare brownness has the pickup truck swerved because born (randomly, ridiculously) in a Ca-
befallen the forests; and, second, that its driver was having a cardiac arrest. nadian place called Saskatoon. Within
she could not care less about the brown- This individual—Dwight Bloomer three months Yolanda had sold her
ness of the forests, not even if she was his name—survived both the car- place in Teaneck and bought, all cash,
turned into an orangutan. Orangutans diac arrest and the collision. None of a third-floor walkup in a “charming”
are on her mind because she has been it makes sense to Nadia, including Montreal neighborhood. Drew, who
watching orangutan videos. Farther the fact that Drew was driving on the loved corporate-style humor, said, I
north, the sights—the snowy moun- country road in question. He was didn’t have that on my bingo card.
taintops, the ice cascades, the towers bound, on a work mission, for Roch- Within another two months, Yolanda
on the St. Lawrence—insist on stron- ester. Neither the work mission nor was claiming to have landed herself
ger emotions. These emotions are not the driving directions involved a de- a “fun job in the farm-to-table sec-
in her possession. tour to Hammondsport. tor” and a man friend who was “kind
She does have one encounter with “Maybe he was taking a scenic of farm-to-table himself.” Yolanda
the sublime. It happens in the Adiron- route?” Yolanda, her sister, suggests. sent a picture in which she, unath-
dacks. The dense dark of night has They have sat down for breakfast. letic and unathletic-looking, wobbled
gathered on every side, but in the west, Nadia says, “Yeah—maybe.” on a two-foot-high tightrope strung
above the heights to her left, there is Maybe Drew had taken a scenic between two trees. Her right hand
a peach-colored patch of last light. route, even though scenic routes were was stretched out for balance. Her
Something about the peach light feels not his thing. And maybe Dwight left hand was held up by a muscleman
abnormal—does not conform to the Bloomer, if that was his real name, in an unbuttoned white shirt. Drew
sense of dusk. The light is extraterres- was as blameless as the police report said, I’ll have what she’s having.
trial, she grasps. It has come from far, and the medical report separately Laurent didn’t accompany Yolanda
far, far, far away. The Earth has no light maintained. Maybe his heart attack, to Drew’s funeral. Now here they both
of its own. if it occurred, did occur in the mo- are, in the flesh—the happy couple.
Nadia addresses these thoughts to ments before, and not the moments Their relationship doesn’t add up.
an interlocutor who is nowhere to be after, the crash. Absolutely. A piece of information is missing.
seen. She has only recently become But maybe not. That’s how “maybe” Nadia’s egg has no taste, no mat-
aware of this inner other. Seemingly works. ter how much salt and pepper she
neither male nor female, the other lis- Yolanda’s boyfriend—he is named puts on it.
tens patiently. When it speaks, it does Laurent, as in the saint of the river—
so carefully. It does not take offense. approaches with three egg cups, each efore Yolanda leaves for work she
None of these traits were Drew’s. He
was an unreliable listener, an inter-
containing a soft-boiled egg. He has
already set out a baguette, a tiny jug
B says, “One thing: don’t touch the
jigsaw puzzle.”
rupter, a blurter. He was sensitive to filled with milk, and dishes holding The jigsaw puzzle occupies the
criticism. Who, then, is this internal butter and wild-blueberry jam and card table in the corner of the living
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 55
room. Somebody has made a start on it. on the top floor of which her sister after she’s removed her coat, like she’s
Laurent, Yolanda elaborates, is pos- and her man friend live in the rela- about to chop wood. Nadia likes her
sessive about his puzzles—displeased tionship that will not add up. right away.
if anyone else so much as turns over The three women are shown to a
a single piece. “It’s kind of an O.C.D.
thing of his,” she says. T hat night, the sisters go on foot
to a restaurant. They will be joined
table among tables filled with women.

“Of course,” Nadia says.

Yolanda delivers remarks about the
therapeutic value of jigsaw puzzles
by Yolanda’s best friend in Montreal,
a Frenchwoman whose name is Élise,
or Alise, or maybe Alice, or maybe
T he widow from France speaks
very good English, with an ac-
cent that’s more British than Ameri-
and their importance to even Éloïse. Does it mat- can. She and Yolanda met at a spin
Laurent, this man friend ter which? No. class, Nadia learns. There is some dis-
who is not only a master As they walk along cussion of the spin class. Nadia says,
puzzler but a deep and a tree-lined street, Nadia “Orangutans like to spin. From a rope,
deeply well-read person experiences a powerful I mean. You know—dangling and
who has taught Yolanda feeling, neither agreeable going round and round. They like the
so much, taught her about nor disagreeable, of recur- feeling of dizziness.” Orangutans,
her own body, no less, and rence—as if long ago, once Nadia hears someone say—someone
so on and so forth and ex- upon a time, the two sis- who, it turns out, is herself, as if in ad-
cruciatingly on and on, all ters tramped outdoors just dition to an inner other she now has
while she is standing by like this, side by side in an outer other—orangutans use med-
the front door in her coat the cold in big coats, into icine. “They’ll chew on a leaf to make
and hat and tantalizing Nadia with and out of the soft glow of the street a paste out of it. Then they’ll apply
her unrealized departure. Maybe it’s lanterns, each escorted by a small the paste to a wound.”
Canada, maybe it’s the mimbo, but spook of breath. “That’s amazing,” Yolanda says.
Yolanda is boring, boring, boring, “There are marmots here,” Yolanda “I’ve adopted an orangutan,” Nadia
boring, boring. says. “Under the sidewalks. Under our continues, falsely. The adopted orang-
When Nadia’s sister at last exits, feet. Lots of them. They come out in utan, she narrates, is a little guy whose
Laurent—whose occupation remains the spring.” parents were murdered by poachers.
obscure; it would be wrong to press “Marmots?” He is six months old—a baby. He lives
for details; the guy is obviously un- “Groundhogs, you’d call them,” in an orangutan orphanage on the edge
usual; something shameful is being Yolanda explains as if she’s no lon- of the jungle.
hidden—also absents himself. Nadia ger a U.S. national. “Does he have a name?” Yolanda
is alone. On they walk. The feeling of re- asks.
She is supposed to stay for two currence has gone. “His name is Arnold,” Nadia says.
more nights. That doesn’t seem do- Yolanda discloses that the French- “I chose it. If you adopt a baby, they
able. One more night doesn’t seem woman they’re meeting has also lost let you choose the name.”
doable. her husband. The women talk. For some reason
She steps out. She is wearing Nadia hates being thought of as a the other widow asks how Nadia and
Yolanda’s coat and Yolanda’s snow widow, hates any suggestion that she Drew met. Nadia answers, “In a cigar
boots and Yolanda’s insulated mittens. must identify with other widows, hates bar in Syracuse.” It is the truth, and
Somewhere nearby, she’s heard, is a the very idea of widowhood. But she also it is a joke. Nadia adds, “My date
famous open-air market. Nadia will says nothing. She is caught up in an had stood me up.”
find her way there by intuition. If she awareness of the marmots—of a con- “You never told me that,” Yolanda
doesn’t find her way, whatever. current marmot universe, of a con- exclaims. “Who was the date?”
The sidewalks have been cleared current marmot metaphysics. The Nadia says, “His name was Davy
of snow by little sidewalk snowplows. awareness is visceral—the touch of a O’Connor.”
She walks the length of one block, small clawed internal hand. This is an untruth. There was no
then of another, then of another. When they arrive at the restaurant, date with Davy O’Connor or anyone
At every crossroads, it seems, a child the other widow isn’t there. They wait else. Davy O’Connor, however, is not
holds hands with, or rests in a stroller at the bar. an invented character. He was a boy
pushed by, or sits on a sled towed Nadia notices something odd: the Nadia knew at Michigan. These days,
by, or is ensconced within the coat clientele consists almost completely Nadia has discovered from her online
of, a parent who turns out to be a of pairs and trios and quartets of searches, Davy O’Connor is a lawyer
dad. Where are the mothers? What’s women. Where are the men? Don’t in Yonkers.
going on? they eat out? Nadia is about to men- Meanwhile, the French widow is
It begins to snow. The flakes are tion the mystery to Yolanda when the saying that it took three years after her
as grand and as intricate as shuttle- other widow materializes. She doesn’t own husband’s death before she prop-
cocks. Nadia gives up on her walk. seem French. She is a laughing and erly felt single. She had not expected
She goes back to the red brick triplex solid-looking woman who looks, even it to last so long—the monogamy of
56 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
mourning. Another surprise awaited from the mouth. The two front legs fills Nadia’s wineglass, then Yolanda’s
her: the shocking reality of dating men stuck out at a grotesque angle. In the wineglass. He is sweating. The women
in their fifties and sixties and seven- place of the stomach was an enormous silently wait for him to be gone.
ties. They were, almost without excep- red cavity held open by sticks in the Nadia resumes: “Why was he driv-
tion, bad lovers. shape of a cross. ing a pickup truck? He was driving to
Nadia wants to break in—wants to The widow jumped out of the man’s the Lions Club. That’s what he told
say, This is going to sound weird, but car and started running. There was no- the police—this story about going to
what is your name, exactly? Could you where to go but the neighbor’s front the Lions Club. But nothing had been
write it down for me? Doesn’t it bother garden. On the lawn was one of those picked up by him; nothing was going
you that you have this name that pretend cars for children to pretend to be dropped off. There was no load.
sounds like ten other names? Didn’t drive. Standing next to the car, she So why was he driving a pickup?”
your parents know better than to give called a taxi. Nobody responds, not even the in-
you a name like that?—but the inte- The date remained on his property, ternal interlocutor.
rior other commands her, Just stop, laughing. He yelled that he hadn’t shot Nadia goes on, “His truck weighed
and her exterior self, jumping in, says, the deer—that it had jumped in front six thousand pounds. It’s a death ma-
“Bad lovers how?” of his truck. chine. Why was he driving it? Why
It wasn’t a question, the woodcut- Yolanda says, “What does it matter was he driving a death machine?”
ter widow answers, of the physical. if he hits the deer or if he shoots the The other widow finally says, “Yes,
The bad backs, the bad knees, the pills, deer? He should have warned you what that’s a good question.”
the drugs, the intimate malfunctions— to expect. Weirdo.” “When you start thinking about it,”
such things were to be expected. The Nadia says, “He must have had a says Nadia—the new Nadia, the one
shock came on the level of the men- pickup truck.” who has powers of vision, the essen-
tal, of the psychological. These men The other widow says, “Yes, he did.” tial Nadia—“you realize these killer
were like ruins of men. The most mean- “My husband was killed by a pickup cars are everywhere. Which means
ingful parts of their lives—their mar- truck,” Nadia says. there are killers everywhere. Thousands
riages, their families, their work—had A man appears. It is the waiter. He and thousands of killers, ready to kill.
overwhelmed them. In the place of is a boy, really. He slowly and anxiously They’re almost all of them men, but
maturity, she encountered childish-
ness. In the place of self-confidence
and tenderness, she encountered dis-
appointment and fear and anger—es-
pecially anger.
Her most recent date, the French
widow goes on, presented as a normal
guy. He had good things to say about
his ex-wife, he was proud of his kids,
he had no complaints about his career
in the medical-supply business. Any-
way—twice she and this man went out
to dinner. After the second dinner, he
invited her back to his house.
The three Nadias—internal, exter-
nal, and essential—are listening.
The date lived out in Laval, in the
suburbs. After a drive of more than
half an hour, they came to some
houses. It was night. Dark fields and
dark woods lay beyond the houses.
The date’s house sat atop a knoll. The
car paused at the foot of the knoll
while the garage door slowly rose, ex-
posing a dark grotto. The car climbed
the knoll. Its headlights lit up the ga-
rage interior.
A dead deer hung in the beam of
the headlights. A wire cable, suspended
from a ceiling hook, was attached to
its neck, twisting the head toward the
wall. A long pink tongue protruded “Oh, look, it says this book has more than ten thousand likes.”
some of them are women. I kind of
wonder if I could become a killer, too.
I mean, why not? It’s allowed, right? TO SEW A FREEDOM SUIT
There are so many people I would like
to kill. I wouldn’t enjoy killing them, Take measurements to determine the size of it.
but I’d like to see them dead. I really
would. It would make me so happy. How lavish the jacket and sleeves, the inseam.
You know what I’d do, if I had pow-
ers of invisibility? I would kill people. Appraise from shoulder to shoulder its width.
Bad people. There are so many of them
out there—people who deserve to be Measure neck, chest, waist. Note
killed. Especially in America. In Can-
ada it’s probably different.” Its dimensions on brown paper. Otherwise
Yolanda looks at the other widow
as if it’s her job to say something. In the green field of your imagining.
Before the other widow can speak,
she is interrupted by Nadia, who says When and where you will wear your suit.
to her, “Isn’t hanging up a deer carcass,
like, a venison thing? A meat thing?” Consider. Running
Nadia looks at Yolanda. “You know—a
farm-to-table thing?” An errand in town, as if for another?

(Knowing to hide in plain view as a kind of candor.)

Ithenuntilmimbo
the morning, Nadia stays in bed
she is certain that the sister and
man friend have gone.
When she achieves this certainty, she and the whites, of focussing and fo- ently disjunctive pieces join to form a
makes herself a cup of coffee. It is ice- cussing until one notices, for example, twosome, an entirely gold piece and
cold outside, and there’s nothing to do that certain parts of the tiger fur con- an entirely non-gold piece, say, and so
in this apartment—other than the jig- sist of gradually more tangerine golds, on and so forth, one tiger fragment at
saw puzzle, of course. that the tiger’s irises are uniquely amber, a time, so that there occurs a gradual,
The jigsaw puzzle is a classic tiger- that the darkness of the black fur in ever-growing convergence of the pieces
face thousand-piecer. one part of the puzzle is different from of the jigsaw puzzle, even as the inte-
A task lamp is attached to the nearby its darkness in another part, and it is gration of the puzzle is not the true
bookshelf. Its purpose is to illuminate a question, too, one learns, of becom- purpose of the puzzling. It is not a
the table. One turns on the lamp. One ing attentive to differences and simi- question of revealing the face of the
removes one’s reading glasses from one’s larities of pixelation—color blurriness tiger. It is a question of rapture.
pocket and puts them on. and sharpness, in other words—pro- Hours pass. One takes stock of the
The puzzle’s four edges have been duced by the disuniformity of the pho- jigsaw puzzle. It is more than half com-
completed. The pieces that go into the tographic focus, a question, in short, plete. Laurent, one calculates, will be
body of the puzzle have been placed of seeing more and more and acting back within the hour.
outside the edges and turned right side accordingly, that is, of picking up puz- Undo it all, the inner other com-
up. A few have been sorted into the zle pieces and comparing them inter se, mands. You’ve had your fun. Now put
beginnings of groups. these paperboard amoebas, for corre- all the pieces back as you found them.
Stop right there, the internal en- spondences of shape and agreements Do it now. There’s still time.
tity says. of color, and fitting together one apt One does not heed this other one.
One examines the scene of the and concolorous pair at a time, the One gathers one’s things and flees to
puzzle. One senses, again, one’s al- nectarine with the nectarine, the ba- New York a day early.
tered consciousness—one’s height- nana yellow with the banana yellow,
ened optical powers. One moves closer the unusual outie with the unusual hen Nadia enters the United
to the table.
It is not a question of doing the
innie, and so on, raptly, beginning with
the distinctive, more easily recogniz-
W States, she simultaneously en-
ters night. Soon she is driving on an
puzzle as such. It is a question, rather, able elements of the jigsaw (the very empty road through forests and moun-
of entering a kind of raptor state, of white whiskers; the pinks and the tains devoid of a single particle of il-
hovering and hovering over the puz- peaches of parts of the tiger’s neck fur) lumination except for the white road-
zling table to study the tiger image on and then moving on to subtler, more side posts tipped with small glowing
the lid of the puzzle box, of studying unlikely compatibilities and contigu- reflective spectres.
the shades and the variants of the col- ities, including the rare ecstasy of mak- Out of nowhere comes an alien blaze
ors of the tiger, the oranges and the ing a hybrid or parti-colored pair, in and brilliance. Nadia pulls over. Why
golds and the blacks and the yellows which two wholly unlike and appar- does she feel so happy?
58 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
 Hope everything is OK. It must be so hard.
Love you. Y
Jumping the broom or another revelation
Nadia types back:
Of a grand joy? Which design to espouse?
100%! thanks for the great stay!

Three-piece with jacket and pants ideal for winter? The bartender turns on green, white,
and gold Christmas lights. What are
Vest for keeping cool where there is you doing? Nadia is asked, by herself.
What Nadia knows is this: in Ann
No winter? Dress of preposterous number Arbor, Davy O’Connor was the boy
on campus with beautiful long hair,
Of buttons? Make the pattern. Choose the clever, dreamy, strolling boy, the
boy who was amiable to all but also
Your fabric. Pin the paper blueprint to your so quietly arrogant that he could, at
no cost to himself, be amiable to all,
Cloth. Cut along the edges of the paper the boy who dreamily strolled from
class to class and A to A, who went
Pattern pieces, then cut again along the flanks amiably from one sought-after girl to
another, one of them Nadia: for four
Of your green field’s imagining. days they were entangled, as students
are, unclearly. After graduation, ev-
—Danielle Legros Georges (1964-2025) eryone faced facts and put their noses
to the grindstone and learned hard
truths. Not Davy O’Connor. He em-
The cop car stops thirty yards dis- “Yes,” Nadia says. Beatriz was reluc- barked on a series of adventures and
tant, twinkling like a spaceship. Af- tant to schedule a meeting with Davy special projects that reportedly took
ter a delay, its traveller emerges. His O’Connor. We don’t do speeding cases him from the Yukon to Borneo and
slowly approaching silhouette—he in person, she told Nadia. Nadia re- finally deposited him in an upstate
wears a wide-brimmed trooper’s hat— plied, It’s not just speeding. There’s New York cabin without electricity
is visible in the side-view mirror. something else—a sensitive matter. but with a beautiful wife. Nadia’s
Nadia lowers the window. Freezing Beatriz now says, “So: I’m afraid thought, on hearing about the cabin,
air penetrates the cabin, as does a black that Mr. O’Connor is in court. It’s un- was, He’ll get his comeuppance soon
glove. She hands the glove her driv- clear when or if he’ll return.” enough, after which she paid no fur-
er’s license. “I’ve come all this way,” Nadia says. ther mind to Davy O’Connor. So why
“Do you know why I pulled you “Yes. I’m so sorry.” is she in Yonkers?
over?” the cop asks. “I’ll go grab a coffee,” Nadia says.
Hi Beatriz! Update?
Nadia answers him with a smile. “Do you have a number I can text
The cop looks left and right, as if you at?” Beatriz responds by entering the
somebody might be watching. It’s drizzling when Nadia steps out. bar. She’s nearsighted; it takes her a
When he returns with the speed- She spies, among the dreary office moment to identify Nadia. “Hey! I
ing ticket, Nadia says, “Ninety-one buildings lining the street, a lime-green wanted to tell you in person: David
miles an hour? My goodness.” door. She goes through it and enters a won’t be back today.” Her umbrella
He stoops down and touches tiny Irish-themed corner of the galaxy. violently contracts. “The speeding
the brim of his hat. “Farewell, ma’am,” She has not been in a joint like this in ticket? He says he can turn it into a
he says. years, certainly not at four o’clock in ticket for an unattended motor vehi-
His transporter rockets away and the afternoon. cle. That’ll save you six points on your
upward. Either it climbs a steep moun- She orders an Irish coffee, a drink license. He’ll do it remotely. No need
tainside, or it soars into the atmo- she’s never had before. She texts Beatriz: for a meeting.”
sphere—the dark permits no distinc- Davy O’Connor has definitively
Hi this is Nadia! I’m in the Dunmanway
tion. The scarlet and blue and yellow pub, lmk if DO returns thx given Nadia the brushoff. She ought
lights dart, dart, dart and disappear. to feel humiliated. Instead, she feels
She already knows her next move. Instantly there’s an incoming text— relief and an unaccountable power.
Two weeks later, Nadia is in the not from Beatriz but from Yolanda: “O.K.,” she says, laughing.
Yonkers office of David O’Connor, Esq. Beatriz doesn’t move. She stands
A woman—attractive, in her for- Hi, it was great seeing you. One crazy lit- there, greenly lit up by a huge elec-
tle thing. L has finished his puzzle but seems
ties—approaches her. “I’m Beatriz,” she to be missing a piece. He wants me to ask if tronic shamrock, seemingly on the
says. “I work with Mr. O’Connor. We by any chance you saw it around lol. So that’s verge of saying something important.
spoke on the phone.” what I’m doing lol It comes to Nadia that Beatriz fears
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 59
her as a rival for Davy O’Connor. and I’m also experienced, I’m a grand- Beatriz grips the puzzle piece. “I
To put it another way: Beatriz is an mother, you know, and Nadia says, You need a logo. This can be my logo.”
admirer. look amazing, Davy’s lucky to have Nadia doesn’t send Beatriz her de-
“How about a drink?” Nadia says. you, and Beatriz says, I think I make ceased husband’s e-mails. Nor does she
him happy, and Nadia says, I am sure send her the police report or the cor-
“A blast“That’s
from the past?”
what he called you,”
you do. I can’t tell you how happy that
makes me, that Davy is happy.
oner’s report or the insurance paper-
work. She does not contact Beatriz at
Beatriz says. Then Nadia says, “You know what all. Nor does Beatriz contact Nadia.
Nadia, pleased, tells Beatriz, We I’d like to be? An assassin.”
dated in college for about five min- “You mean like a hit man?” hen it is springtime. Groundhogs
utes, literally, but I never got a spark
out of him, zip, and honestly there’s
“Not a hit man—not a killer for hire.
I mean killing bad guys for the sake of
T come out of the ground at Ham-
mondsport. The reflections on Keuka
still no spark, to which Beatriz says, it. Pro bono. Like a vocation. God, I’d Lake grow greener and greener. When
So why’d you come here, if there’s no love that. If I had the power to be in- the lake warms, smallmouth bass swim
spark? and Nadia replies, Honestly, I visible, that’s how I’d use it: to take out toward shallower water to spawn. Early-
don’t know; I’m very disoriented right bad, powerful people who are making morning sportsmen easily fish them
now; and, look, it is true that I need the world horrible. Really evil people, there on the fly. The beeches and the
to talk to an attorney, a street-smart people who had it coming. Just imag- black-locust trees display white flow-
attorney, not about speeding but about ine how good that would feel. Oh, man.” ers. Then it is summer. Children jump
a private matter, and Beatriz says, Beatriz says, “Yeah, that would be from a jetty and hurriedly swim back
What’s it about, this private matter? satisfying.” to the jetty and jump again. Anglers
And so, as Beatriz listens with sym- They laugh loudly, drink from their fishing for trout drift in small craft on
pathetic little nods and frowns, Nadia beers. Then Nadia says, “You know the lake’s deeper waters. The lake came
again tells the story of Drew’s inex- what would be great? To be able to into existence ten thousand years ago
plicable detour into Finger Lakes coun- point at someone and say, ‘See that when a long upland of ice withdrew.
try, tells of his killing at the hands of guy? That’s a guy who’s never had a At the lakeside ice-cream stand, lines
one Dwight Bloomer, with his lethal comeuppance.’ I’m talking about a good ceaselessly form and re-form. Visitors
pickup truck and convenient heart at- guy. A good guy whose feet have never eat thousands of fall-colored slices of
tack, and tells of the authorities’ bi- touched the ground. A guy who has pizza. Thunder comes with great cam-
zarrely rapid agreement that Drew’s lived up in the trees, the way an orang- era flashes made by the former god,
death was wholly accidental and its utan lives, up in the canopy, jumping now photographer, Thor. Crafters—
consequences wholly resolvable by the around from tree to tree. Orangutans quilters, jewellers, potters, leatherwork-
writing of checks to cover, first, fu- are tree dwellers. It’s part of what makes ers, floral artists, and candlemakers—
neral costs; second, the replacement them special. They almost never come come to Hammondsport; crafts fans
value of Drew’s wrecked car; and, third, down to the ground.” McKenna Poole, Morgan Albalos, Fred
the value of Drew’s life-insurance pol- Beatriz says, “So—am I hired?” Aesoph, Madalynn Cast, Rashaad
icy. One minute these teams of pro- Nadia says, “What are your fees?” Jamal, and Dominic Groeder come to
fessionals were all over the case; the Beatriz hesitates for less than a sec- see the craftwork. Then the blue of the
next minute, bam, they were gone. ond. “Seventy-five dollars an hour. Plus sky over Keuka Lake clarifies and in-
What was the rush? Since when did expenses.” tensifies, then the reflections of the fo-
lawyers settle things so easily? Some- Nadia listens for an inner voice of liage on the lake go yellow and red and
thing was off. That was her strong feel- counsel. There is no inner voice of coun- copper and purple. People come by car
ing at the time. Something was not sel. In Beatriz’s company, there are no to take pictures of the leaves. Then the
right. Nadia still feels that way, she other Nadias. cars go. Then the leaves fall and then
tells Beatriz. “You’re hired,” the one Nadia says. snow falls and then, after two very cold
“You wanted closure,” Beatriz sug- Beatriz’s hands rise to her mouth. weeks, ice forms thickly on the lake.
gests. “What you got wasn’t closure.” Then she reaches into her bag and takes Snow gathers on the ice. The water
“What I want,” Nadia says, “is a pri- out a pen and a yellow legal pad. She under the ice goes quiet and dark. Then
vate detective.” writes something down. She says, “I’m a bright hole appears in the ice, and
“A private detective? What for?” going to need all the documents. And into the water enters a little fall of light.
“To get to the bottom of it—all I’m going to need his e-mails, texts.” Fish go toward the light. One is all at
of it.” “Yes,” Nadia says. once lifted lightward and cannot
Beatriz ref lects. Then she looks “I’m going to need to go on a site breathe at all. Then the same one, again
Nadia in the eye and says, I’m not a visit. You know, to—” all at once, is back in the water and can
licensed investigator, but it’s a field I’ve “Yes,” Nadia says. She has retrieved hurry away from the light and breathe
always wanted to get into, I can do the an object from her pocket. again in the dark. 
work, and Nadia replies, The impor- “What’s this?” Beatriz says.
tant thing is that you’re smart and de- “It’s for your new career,” Nadia says. NEWYORKER.COM/FICTION
termined, to which Beatriz says, I am, “For luck.” Sign up to get author interviews in your in-box.

60 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025

 THE CRITICS

A CRITIC AT LARGE

GILDED
Plutocrats and anarchists, now and then.

BY ADAM GOPNIK

hen, in the nineteen-nineties, peo- of overabundance and nouveau-riche ex- What we didn’t anticipate was that
W ple decided that we were living
in a new Gilded Age, the meaning was
cess. It referred mostly to the Veblenian
side of American life: status competition
our new Gilded Age would become even
more like its precursor—not only in the
plain. The term, borrowed from the 1873 through showy objects, from the cloud- seeming concentration of overwhelm-
Mark Twain novel of the same name—a level duplexes of the New York skyline ing wealth into fewer and fewer hands
mediocre book by a great writer with a to the Met Gala. Perhaps not enough but in the gravitation toward a plutocracy.
memorable title, like Anthony Trollope’s attention was paid to the original con- In the industrial age, the totemic figures
“The Way We Live Now”—indicated cept, which implied a contrast between were Frick and Morgan and Rockefeller;
an efflorescence of wealth and display, the truly golden and the merely gilded. in our post-industrial era, they are Bezos

More than a century before Musk and Mangione, Henry James captured something about the romance of revolution.
ILLUSTRATION BY LA BOCA THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 61
and Musk and Zuckerberg. During that published account of his return, “The Son and Brother.” The new New York
first Gilded Age—if we imagine it run- American Scene.” Inevitably, the job is he saw rising around him was, to his mind,
ning from the eighteen-seventies to given over more to paraphrase and gloss uglier and coarser. But this holds true for
1910—a counter cast of characters had a than to original narrative. We miss James’s everyone in every period, even when the
glamorous appeal of their own. These mature prose, the tension between end- New York we cherished in our youth was
were the anarchists, whose isolated but less fuss and decisive lucidity, the beau- roundly condemned in its day as uglier
highly publicized acts of individual re- tiful Whistlerian fog that somehow lifts and coarser than any that had ever been
taliation were intended as inspirational just long enough to show us things ex- before. For those of us who first got to
melodramatic theatre rather than as ac- actly as they are. Because the fog some- know New York in the “Taxi Driver” hell-
tual revolutionary politics. In these years, times turns out to be the actual trans- scape of the nineteen-seventies, the city
anarchists claimed the lives of a French mitter of illumination—the clarity rising was also irresistibly full of artistic explo-
President, an American President, an from within the confusions—any sim- sions in neighborhoods like SoHo, while
Italian king, and a Russian tsar, and threw ple summary or attempt to distill objec- the last sweet renaissance of American
bombs at several American tycoons. tive lessons betrays his mind. James was swing was blooming beautifully in the
Whether or not Luigi Mangione’s re- a racist of a sort, while also an advocate still-cheap supper clubs. Now with all
cent alleged murder of a helpless insur- for the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois. He these things vanished, along with the
ance executive on a cold New York morn- could be anti-immigrant and vestigially bookstores and repertory cinemas, the
ing belongs to this tradition, its affect antisemitic; his visit to Ellis Island and city seems impoverished and disfigured.
and effect certainly evoke the past, with the Lower East Side is one of the more James remembered Fourteenth Street
the curly-haired Ivy-educated youth con- disagreeable things in all his writing. and Barnum’s museum in its heyday and
ferring, in the realm of social media, an (The “denizens of the New York Ghetto, could see no point in the new Fifth Av-
improbable aura of martyrdom and pur- heaped as thick as the splinters on the enue. This is a cycle that never ends.
pose on what otherwise would have table of a glass-blower, had each, like the
seemed a sordid act. fine glass particle, his or her individual hough James never uses the term
How to make sense of their age and
ours, one Gilded Age long gone and one
share of the whole hard glitter of Israel.”)
But he was too intelligent not to recog-
T “plutocrat,” plutocratic America is
what he was examining. To what extent
now getting stripped of its shine? Henry nize that the energy and purpose of the were his plutocrats like ours? The Gilded
James—famous for his timidity, his fas- new New Yorkers would eventually over- Age plutocrats made their money in steel
tidiousness, his suspicion of anything whelm that of his class and kind. (Carnegie), oil (Rockefeller), mining
meretricious or gaudy—might seem an It is easy to become impatient with (Frick), and railroads (Vanderbilt), but
unusual figure to lead this investigation, James, since the beautiful confusions in the main their business models were
but he does just that in Peter Brooks’s sometimes recede to reveal simple hy- not so different from those of their coun-
new book, “Henry James Comes Home” pocrisies. James (and Brooks after him) terparts today. Musk makes most of his
(New York Review). Brooks tells the rasps indignant at the “cottages” built in money in hard industrial goods, mainly
story of James’s return to America in Newport by members of the nouveau cars and satellites, while losing money
1904 and his observations of the coun- regime—he was thinking of Vanderbilt on the digital-media front—just as that
try, after his happy childhood in pre- and Whitney. But James rhapsodized other carmaker, Henry Ford, futilely
Civil War New York and his sojourns in about the stately homes of England, poured money into his antisemitic news-
Paris and London. The study is a com- which differed mainly in having been paper, the Dearborn Independent. Bezos,
panion piece to a volume that Brooks, built centuries instead of minutes be- meanwhile, made much of his money by
an emeritus professor at Yale, wrote al- fore. “Of all the great things that the finding new ways for consumers to shop
most two decades ago, the wonderful English have invented and made part for more goods more efficiently while
“Henry James Goes to Paris.”That book of the credit of the national character,” forcing smaller retailers out of business,
sought to understand why James, an abid- he wrote, “the most perfect . . . is the exactly like Wanamaker and Woolworth
ing Francophile and a prescient admirer well-appointed, well-administered, well- in their day.
of French modernism, could not make filled country house.” England, not just Yet real differences persist. The typ-
a home for himself in Paris in the America, was full of newly ascendant ical plutocrat who built the America,
eighteen-seventies. Brooks offered, on plutocrats, something that James him- and particularly the New York, that James
James’s behalf, some finely wrought spec- self acknowledged at the beginning of visited was a businessman with almost
ulations about the deceptively open na- “The Portrait of a Lady,” when a lov- absolute freedom to act, and his politi-
ture of Parisian intellectual life which ingly detailed country house turns out cal power was enormous. (It is worth re-
remain true to this day. to be the recent acquisition of a man calling that Hitler’s constant insult to
This book is not as good as that one, with a freshly minted fortune. James had the democratic governments of Britain
in part because it is more narrowly mor- a weakness for new money that bought and America was that they were simply
alistic, with too much tut-tutting about old houses, rather than new money that screens for predatory plutocrats.) Yet
New York as it was, and in part because, built its own. these men’s behavior was tightly circum-
where the Parisian story had to be ex- And then James had loved the New scribed, at least in appearance. The plu-
tracted from letters and novels, this story York of his childhood, which he beauti- tocrats of the first Gilded Age were
is one that James himself laid out in a fully detailed in his memoir “Notes of a mostly content to influence from a dis-
62 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
tance, through intermediaries. For one
thing, they were busy and living far away
from Washington, at a time when that
still mattered. For another, discretion
had political advantages. When J. P. Mor-
gan met with President Grover Cleve-
land in 1895, to discuss a deal to supply
the government with gold while enrich-
ing Morgan’s syndicate with government-
issued bonds, it was a scandal that contri-
buted to Cleveland’s ouster the following
year. Bezos and Musk have made a bet
that increasing their economic power re-
quires increasing their political power, in
a fairly direct way.
There is another difference between
their plutocrats then and ours today. Our “O.K., I’ll eat decaying organic matter with you, but it’s not a date.”
plutocrats despise the arts as an emblem
of the cautious, encumbering ancien ré-
gime they reject. But James’s plutocrats
• •
respected art, even if their motive was
just to buy their way into the upper tion, Alexander Cassatt, was among the while Bezos clearly was on his way to
classes, and they did this by collecting most interesting men of the time. the older role—the purchase of the
the Old Masters or by opening libraries Brother to the great painter Mary (she Washington Post was a classic pluto-
or building concert halls. The history of was the rare American who, unlike cratic gesture, the billionaire saving an
Gilded Age philanthropy is genuinely James, did enter inner Parisian circles American institution—when the new
remarkable, and although it is easy to in the eighteen-seventies), and one of reality caught up with him. Where the
dismiss Rockefeller’s motivation for start- the first collectors of French Impres- plutocrats of the first Gilded Age built
ing the University of Chicago or Frick’s sionist painting in America, he was both the New York we love, our own pluto-
reason for collecting Bellini as the empty an engineer and an aesthete, combin- cratic class has scarcely built a monu-
acts of aging villains—arthritis produc- ing an appreciation for the less visible ment or public building of beauty.
ing altruism—they did ennoble the pub- work of public good with the unmissa-
lic realm. It is no accident that our great ble acts of plutocratic ostentation. While veryone likes anarchists. When
concert hall is called Carnegie, nor that,
stuck in traffic round one of our great-
building the old Penn Station in the
image of the Baths of Caracalla, in Rome,
E Charlie Chaplin called the Marx
Brothers “anarchists,” it was taken as high
est public spaces, Grand Central Termi- he was also responsible for the construc- praise. Insert an anarchist philosopher
nal, we halt in front of a statue of Cor- tion of the railroad tunnels under the into a play and he will walk away with
nelius Vanderbilt. Hudson on which we still depend—as the action. Indeed, in Tom Stoppard’s
Indeed, to a first approximation, the wholly admirable a modern Medici as “The Coast of Utopia,” the anarchist Ba-
most notable examples of New York ar- one can hope to find. kunin, played by Ethan Hawke on Broad-
chitecture are plutocratic projects from Today’s plutocrat, on the other hand, way, always upstaged the actual hero of
the first Gilded Age or its aftermath, sees the cultural élite as part of the bur- the play, the liberal Herzen. Bakunin’s
whether the Metropolitan Museum of densome past. One prophetic peculiarity character was not merely more leonine;
Art or the first great skyscrapers, most of Donald Trump’s rise in New York was he was more lovable.The anarchist Emma
of which are associated with individuals his scanting of any philanthropic role— Goldman’s autobiography remains read
like Woolworth. They are triumphs of those who did fill that role, as he felt nearly a century after its first appearance
the capitalist imagination as much as the acutely, had rejected him. Almost uniquely and is one of the golden books of its
Gothic cathedral is of the Catholic imag- among New York real-estate tycoons, he time—in its novelistic detailing and his-
ination, and no less for it. One need only never served on the board of any impor- torical sweep, it’s a superior “Reds.”
visit the Met’s newly reinstalled American tant cultural institution—at least until Meanwhile, the memoirs of the hum-
Wing to delight in the restored Gilded he staged a coup at the Kennedy Cen- bler Fabian politicians of the day are left
Age interiors—the La Farge and Tiffany ter. There will be no Trump museums, to the dry dust of secondhand book-
glass pieces are ineffable objects of del- except those devoted to his glory. stores. Anarchists were fierce but some-
icate beauty, as poetic in their way as the This turn away from patronage has how funny. In the silent-movie era, they
marriage chests that we are asked to ad- been gradual, evolutionary, and partial. were still so much a part of the fabric of
mire in Medici Florence. Plutocrats they David Geffen could still play the clas- American life, or at least of its mythol-
may have been; philistines they were not. sic plutocratic part a decade ago, using ogy, that a Billy West comedy centered
Some are too easily forgotten. The a fortune that he’d made in entertain- on the pitching back and forth of anar-
grand master and manager of Penn Sta- ment to sustain the permanence of art, chist bombs, those bowling balls with lit
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 63
fuses, and Buster Keaton innocently someone important, though Hyacinth to which all the same the world is less
turned the same kind of bomb into a isn’t sure who. The princess is a philan- impracticable and life more tolerable.”
cigarette lighter in his film “Cops.” thropist who has taken a subversive At one level, the novel is a simple saga
This despite the reality that what the turn, and whose purpose is to elevate of a hero’s choice: pursuing beauty with
Gilded Age anarchists mostly did was Hyacinth, whom she flirts with with- the princess in a Venice of the mind or
kill people, or try to, and mostly point- out ever consummating the affair. James advancing democracy with the anarchist
lessly. The Haymarket anarchists in Chi- is quite tough-minded about the lim- Muniment through the murder of a
cago in the eighteen-nineties may not its of radical chic. To the princess, “it’s stranger. As Muniment instructs him,
all have been directly responsible for the an amusement, like any other,” Hya- the assassination will be a purely theat-
bombs that killed seven policemen on a cinth’s anarchist minder, Paul Muni- rical action: it will be helpful to the dem-
fateful day, but at least one of them had ment, says dismissively, and we are meant ocrats that “the classes that keep them
certainly built the bombs. Leon Czolgosz, to think he’s right. down shall be admonished from time to
who shot President William McKinley, Though the novel is European rather time that they have a very definite and
in Buffalo, was inspired in part by Emma than American in setting, what is re- very determined intention of doing so.”
Goldman, who later wrote in his defense. markable and universal is the connec- The anarchist act is meant as an orna-
And Goldman herself—under the cru- tion drawn between the aestheticism of mental admonishment, not as an actual
cial influence of the anarchist philoso- Hyacinth’s nature and the magnetism accomplishment.
pher Johann Most, who impressed on that anarchism holds for him. Much of Yet as the novel moves along, and the
her the anarchist ideal of “propaganda the novel is taken up by Hyacinth wait- target chosen for Hyacinth by his anar-
of the deed”—worked hard on a plan to ing to learn what his mission is while chist superiors—an unnamed duke—
kill Frick, sending her lover, Alexander discussing with the princess the neces- hovers into view, the tangle of motives
Berkman, off to Pittsburgh with a re- sity of some mission. Hyacinth is drawn becomes subtler. We see that the appeal
volver that he didn’t know how to use. to the propaganda of the deed not for of the anarchists is essentially churchlike,
Neither Goldman nor Berkman knew any specific purpose but because it is the akin to the appeal of Catholicism in par-
anyone in the labor unions that were fulfillment of the romantic ideal. With allel nineteenth-century novels and lives,
striking against Frick, nor ever asked Marxism tainted by its aggressive ma- rooted in the seductiveness of mystery
them if his assassination would be help- terialism, and mere democratic social- and of obedience. “I was hanging about
ful to their cause. (It wasn’t; it only helped ism so mere, anarchism could be imag- outside on the steps of the temple, among
turn popular opinion against the unions.) ined as a series of defiant spiritual acts. the loafers and the gossips, but now I
But few remember the organizers who This is both the contradiction and the have been in the innermost sanctuary,”
in the same period helped build the appeal of Goldman’s memoirs. Famous Hyacinth says of his assignment, and the
American union movement, while Emma for her love of dancing and celebration language is ironic only because it itali-
Goldman’s name still rings. and her rejection of the puritanical side cizes the original religious spirit so well:
Why is this so? Henry James, once of the Marxist inheritance, she saw no “I have seen the holy of holies.” Just as
again, explored the allure of anarchy in contradiction between that sensuality the Catholic Church would hold a per-
what may be his finest Gilded Age novel, and random acts of violence directed verse appeal to the decadents of the pe-
“The Princess Casamassima”—this one against the plutocrats. They were both riod, eventually drawing in figures as
a major book by a great author with a steps in the same dance. seemingly resistant as Oscar Wilde and
hard-to-remember title. Published in Hyacinth has a harder time reconcil- Aubrey Beardsley, anarchism held out a
1886, it tells the story of a young man, ing his political convictions with his in- similar enchantment at the other end of
improbably named Hyacinth Robinson, creasing love of beautiful objects, a strug- the political spectrum. Catholicism of-
who becomes entangled in an almost gle that culminates in a trip to Venice fers ritual without the tedium of ratio-
love affair with a radical-chic aristocrat, in which he writes to the princess and nality; anarchism offers revolutionary ac-
the princess of the title. It’s notable that bemoans, in a voice improbably like tion against inequality without the taint
the names of the characters in this book James’s own, the contradiction between of materialism, the prospect of personal
about violence and poverty are pure, the beauty he loves and the social creed gain. Anarchist violence is an unworldly
high James: Hyacinth Robinson, Paul to which he is committed: “There are action, a protest against fallen existence
Muniment, Christina Light (the prin- things I shall be too sorry to see you itself on behalf of the possibility of a beau-
cess), Lady Aurora Langrish—these are touch, even you with your hands divine; tiful life, rather than an act of practical
meant to key us into the fact that this and—shall I tell you le fond de ma pensée, and therefore mundane consequence. In-
is thoroughly stylized fiction, less a re- as you used to say?—I feel myself capa- deed, the future that Hyacinth thinks will
alist novel than an allegory of anarchism ble of fighting for them.” He means “the be secured by the anarchist assassinations
and its temptations. monuments and treasures of art, the is comically innocent: a “vision of soci-
Hyacinth has a dark background (his great palaces and properties, the con- eties where, in splendid rooms, with smiles
mother has murdered his father and is quests of learning and taste, the general and soft voices, distinguished men, with
now in prison), and he has become in- fabric of civilization as we know it, based women who were both proud and gen-
volved with an anarchist philosopher if you will upon all the despotisms, the tle, talked of art, literature and history.”
named Hoffendahl, who has entrusted cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies This double nature, both appealing
him with a nebulous plan to assassinate and the rapacities of the past, but thanks in its sweetness of soul and alarming in
64 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
its lack of realism about what a program
of public murder can achieve, is central
to the first Gilded Age’s anarchist phi- BRIEFLY NOTED
losophy. Prince Kropotkin’s famous con-
densation of anarchist beliefs, “The Con- The World After Gaza, by Pankaj Mishra (Penguin Press). This
quest of Bread,” is notable today for its swirling intellectual history places the Israeli regime’s invo-
techno-optimism. The world has been cation of the Holocaust to justify its assault on Gaza in a
conquered, agriculture is amazing, we provocative global context. Noting that, “for an overwhelm-
can do anything now: “The wild plants, ing majority of the world’s population,” decolonization—
which yielded nought but acrid berries, rather than the Holocaust—was “the central event of the
or uneatable roots, have been transformed twentieth century,” Mishra draws parallels between militant
into succulent vegetables or trees cov- Zionists, Hindu nationalists, and even white supremacists,
ered with delicious fruits. Thousands of stressing the way that “siege mentalities come to be mutually
highways and railroads furrow the earth intensifying.” He fears that the “survivalist psychosis” of Is-
and pierce the mountains.” (In the same rael’s leaders may portend “the future of a bankrupt and ex-
spirit, the Futurist leader Filippo Tom- hausted world.” Instead, he urges, we must seek “affiliations
maso Marinetti proclaimed, in the first that cut across politically defined borders” and a recognition
decade of the twentieth century, “Com- of “indivisible suffering” and shared humanity.
bustion engines and rubber tires are di-
vine!”) Yet this complacent optimism sat Cold Kitchen, by Caroline Eden (Bloomsbury). Primarily un-
side by side with an apocalyptic appe- folding in the kitchen of an Edinburgh apartment, this cozy
tite for random assassination, the pro- memoir offers rich descriptions of international foods stored
paganda of the deed. Anarchists offered in the pantry and cooking on the stove. But “a kitchen is a por-
a perpetually moving Möbius strip, en- tal,” Eden writes. These domestic scenes spark recollections of
couraging violent acts and dreaming of visits to Central Asia—Istanbul, Riga, Siberia—and each chap-
abundant dinners, shooting emperors in ter closes with a recipe for a now familiar dish. In the book’s
the back while dancing in their hallways. strongest moments, Eden gestures toward the political signif-
It is perhaps unsurprising to find that icance of her culinary escapades abroad. At a café in Poland,
the ideology of anarchism is anarchic. she reflects on the legacy of the Second World War; in Kyr-
What is surprising is to find it so hardy gyzstan, she ventures out for clover dumplings in the after-
and contagious. For, as our plutocrats be- math of protests there. In so doing, she asserts that food can
come ever more like oligarchs, the phi- be as valuable as a place’s “history, architecture and civic life.”
losophy that they embrace is ever more
anarchic—with the same mixture of tech- Victorian Psycho, by Virginia Feito (Liveright). Winifred, the
nological utopianism and technological protagonist of this Victorian-era grotesque, takes a position
apocalypticism. Today’s fascination with as a governess at an English manor. The lady of the house,
destruction and disruption is continu- Mrs. Pounds, has instructed her to cultivate “good moral char-
ous with the passion of the anarchists. acter” in her children, but Winifred senses “a Darkness” in
Musk and Mangione bear a striking sty- Mrs. Pounds, one that she herself shares: it “rests within my
listic resemblance, that combination of rib-cage, a jailed animal grown listless with domestication.”
rakishness and slightly deranged inten- Vandalism and lechery are among the milder affronts that
sity, the weird self-satisfaction of the occur on Winifred’s watch, and her narration, though som-
crooked smile—the troll, in the Internet bre, sparkles. “It fascinates me,” Winifred reflects, “that hu-
sense, who looks like a terrorist and a mans have the capacity to mortally wound one another at
boy-band member at the same time. will, but for the most part, choose not to.”
How is it that we have plutocrats
who play the role of anarchists? Bil- Code Noir, by Canisia Lubrin (Soft Skull). This collection of
lionaires want to burn down the sys- “fictions”—many too strange to be called stories—is filled with
tem that gave them their billions—even disappearances, deaths, and gnomic pronouncements. Lubrin,
though recently arrived immigrants of a St. Lucian-born Canadian poet, writes that “the murderers
the kind who fathered certain startups in this draft are those who write the laws,” referring to the tit-
would have a much harder time creat- ular seventeenth-century French edict that governed the traf-
ing businesses in systems with no rule fic and ownership of Black people. Text from these regulations
of law, where you have to grow up know- appears between Lubrin’s pieces, hauntingly drawn over by the
ing who the bosses are and must pay artist Torkwase Dyson. The collection displays tremendous sty-
them bribes from the beginning. The listic breadth: one work simply describes seventeen dogs, an-
biggest plutocrats of the first Gilded other features a mathematically gifted conch shell, and others
Age, for all their brutalities, played an are closer to poetry, with only a few plotless lines. The over-all
essentially stabilizing role from behind effect is a dizzying, disorienting view of “history’s wide grave.”
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 65
the scenes—the Cardinal Richelieu role, herit the mantle of religious martyrdom, tory of humankind, while our own age,
the wise banker in the background. A while those who act practically to improve despite its persistent inequities, is at least
role that J. P. Morgan helped perfect, a system are dismissed as impotent pro- as astonishing in the global expansion of
it’s a billionaire fantasy of benevolence ceduralists—is visible in the continued prosperity. The common people of 1900
which runs right through a mytholog- appeal of the anarchist imagination. were far wealthier than the common peo-
ical figure like Bruce Wayne. Whatever it is they’re accomplishing, ple of 1860. But they were not wrong to
But Musk, like Trump, is a Joker, with they’re not just holding lunches. Spend- sense that they were not participating
the comedy and tragedy masks flipping ing our lives captivated by glittering fa- adequately in the prosperity. As Tocque-
deliriously around. G. K. Chesterton’s çades and hypnotic spectacles, we dream ville demonstrated long ago, we grade
great Gilded Age anarchist novel of 1908, of the one decisive act that will break us our well-being on a curve. Rising expec-
“The Man Who Was Thursday,” defined from our chains, even if, in fact, it forges tations, not mass immiseration, produce
this doubleness. All the anarchists in a only another link within them. It is a revolutionary sentiments. If we feel our-
hyper-powerful ring that is the secret en- permanent move in our modernity. selves victims of injustice and inequality,
gine of Europe are secretly policemen— the practical effect is that we are.
or is it that the secret policemen are ac- he first Gilded Age, though its in- To say that America is, across the
tually indoctrinated anarchists? Both are
true. Chesterton was officially against an-
T justices were remedied in part by the
Progressive movement, was suspended de-
quintiles, an incredibly wealthy nation
and that, on the whole, it has been a well-
archism, of course, but he was against it cisively only with the arrival of the Great run nation is almost taboo. We point to
in a way that fully accepted its allure; the War, and what is so ominous about that obvious deficiencies, from one political
anarchist’s hatred of bourgeois material- conclusion is that the victims believed, side or the other: we don’t build enough
ism is so obviously attractive, so close to even before it began, that the war would housing in big cities, we don’t pay work-
the holy, that, though evil, it is irresist- be the ultimate act of creative destruction, ers enough, everyone should have health
ible. The appetite for romantic destruc- a weapon against decadent materialism. care. Or: the family is collapsing, what’s
tion is the flip side of the desire for au- People in Britain, France, and Germany become of our subways, why can’t we
thoritarian order, and, like the Joker’s were convinced that their countries, along stop the shoplifters? All of these are prob-
merry grin and sadistic grimace, one comes with Europe itself, would be better off if lems open to, so to speak, lunchtime solu-
right after the other so quickly that they they burned everything down, cleared out tions, but we dream instead of all-night
can’t be told apart. (It is also significant the rot, and started over. What they got fires. We want to burn the system down,
that steampunk, the projection of today’s was suffering and destruction on a scale it seems, in part because it works too well
concerns into an imaginary world of late- that still staggers the imagination. for people we don’t like.
nineteenth-century technology, is the sig- At the time, the cleansing-fire credo Every modern age is known by the
nature surrealism of our time.) was slower spreading to America, where medievalism it spawns. The first Gilded
Then, as now, the real work of reform the war came later and cost much less, Age swooned over the melancholy maid-
was done in large part from the ground and, indeed, ushered in something like ens and poesy-minded, grail-seeking
up, via the creation of unglamorous or- yet another Gilded Age, the Jazz Age of Galahads of Tennyson’s “Idylls of the
ganizations like local Rotary Clubs, the twenties, built on cheap credit and King,” and so it is perhaps striking that
which, as the political scientist Robert with its own cast of tycoon characters. our own medievalist saga, the “Game of
Putnam has pointed out, amassed enor- (Throughout that decade, the Secretary Thrones” cycle on television, with its
mous social capital for progressive causes of the Treasury was Andrew Mellon, spinoff and its knockoffs, is notably more
by . . . holding lunches. Meanwhile, the who had assembled a banking empire brutal and less aesthetic than any that
glamorous forces of resistance had largely and who, like his father, was a business has come before. When the most beau-
absorbed the tastes of their supposed op- partner of Frick’s.) We have lived within tiful church in King’s Landing blows up,
posites in the plutocratic caste. They ex- the insulation of the abundance that all we see is Queen Cersei, celebrating
pected the people to admire wild and began then and, despite the Depression sneeringly with a glass of wine. The same
ostentatious assassinations in the same that soon followed, became a nearly per- brutal philistinism of the new Gilded
way that people admired the jewel- manent part of the American condition. Age as we have come to know it—that
studded shirt front of Diamond Jim If the outcome of this new Gilded of Trumpism, as of the Putinism it ad-
Brady. Mangione, after all, has been Age seems likely to be dark, it is perhaps mires—is essential to its ideology: there
charged with shooting an unarmed because we have fallen into the trap that is only power and domination, dragons
stranger in the back, just as James’s Hy- Europe fell into in 1914, the belief that and destruction, and anything more is
acinth is expected to do, and his public by burning down flawed institutions we a fool’s deception. Hierarchies of power
aura is clearly tied to our longing for can somehow relight a charismatic glow. are intrinsic to human societies, no doubt,
clear, clean acts of assertion on the part They didn’t, and we won’t. The real rid- and sometimes the best we can hope for
of vaguely defined purposes—what an dle of the Gilded Age, then and now, is is that those on top become devoted to
earlier generation would have celebrated that, by objective historical standards, a higher ideal of education or common
as existential actions, however self- both times were as close to golden as any welfare or simple beauty. Without that
defeating or cruel. age can get. The onset of the first Gilded impulse, we live in a truly barren time.
This Gilded Age rule—that those Age corresponds to the greatest uptick Golden is better than gilded, but even
who act violently against individuals in- in common prosperity in the known his- gilt is better than iron. 
66 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
 not the ones dead,” swiftly move on. Some
BOOKS of Frost’s poems have the lilting quality
of lullabies; others seem to deliver their
morals in unambiguous terms. “I took
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN the one less traveled by,” declares the
speaker of “The Road Not Taken,” per-
The many guises of Robert Frost. haps Frost’s most famous poem, after
meeting a fork in the path. “And that
BY MAGGIE DOHERTY has made all the difference.” His were,
and still are, poems for everyone: school-
children, casual readers, the makers of
greeting cards. One doesn’t need to be
versed in the literary tradition to read a
poem by Frost—only, as one poem goes,
to be “versed in country things.”
But, as with most aspects of Frost’s
persona, his simplicity was a pose, an act,
one that concealed its opposite. Frost
was very much a man of letters, a clas-
sicist and, alongside his future wife, Eli-
nor, a co-valedictorian of his high school,
in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was
steeped in the literary tradition, as well
as in philosophy and psychology (he was
a big fan of William James). Ambitious
and competitive, he orchestrated posi-
tive reviews of his early work and be-
came enraged about negative reviews of
later collections. A failed poultry farmer
and a listless homesteader, he never quite
fit in with the country people who pop-
ulate his poems.
The poems, too, are deceptive. A Frost
verse may be written in plain language,
but it is tonally ambiguous and open to
competing interpretations. Take “Stop-
ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,”
from 1923, which ends like this:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
obert Frost presented himself as a to tell stories. His ideal days, he said,
R simple man. Not for him the liter-
ary circles of London or the stilted din-
were spent in the countryside, going on
long, solitary walks or chatting with his
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

ner parties of Brahmin Boston. Nor was farmer neighbors, appreciating the pat- Are these lines said gratefully or rue-
he at home in academia. He dropped terns and tones of their speech. fully? Is the speaker appreciating a peace-
out of college twice, citing a need for in- The simplicity of his life informed ful winter scene or barely suppressing a
dependence, and although he spent his his work. Ascending to fame at a time death wish? One could ask similar ques-
middle and later years teaching at uni- when Anglo-American poetry was grow- tions about “The Road Not Taken”:
versities, he was constantly fleeing them, ing increasingly difficult and obscure, How sincere is our speaker, who imag-
retreating to farms in rural New En- Frost set himself apart. A lyric poet in- ines his future self “telling this with a
gland. He didn’t read book reviews—or spired by Longfellow, he described the sigh”? Has his choice of road made any
so he claimed—and he didn’t write them, hard lives of country folk—a war widow, difference at all? It’s tempting to under-
preferring instead to let his poems find a hired man—and the hard landscapes stand the poem as ironical—a “cunning
RAY FISHER / GETTY

their natural audience, which turned out that they worked to tame. In “ ‘Out, nugget of nihilism,” as Dan Chiasson
to be a wide one. He mocked literary Out—,’” a poem from 1916, a boy loses wrote in this magazine—but, as soon
critics and shunned intellectual debate, his hand to a buzz saw and dies, perhaps as you do, its rousing ending and tri-
though he was a great talker and loved from shock; his family, “since they/Were umphant “I” urge you to consider that
it may well be in earnest.
In poetry and in life, Frost was a trickster, saying one thing and meaning another. To read Frost is to wonder which
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 67
parts of a poem to take seriously—and standing of the poems, then uses the pressions and his jealous rages, such that
to sense his presence over your shoulder, poems to enhance our understanding reviewers declared Frost to be “a mon-
laughing at your mistakes. “I like to of the life. The result is a thorough, el- ster of egotism” and “a mean-spirited
fool . . . to be mischievous,” he told the egant, and, at times, surprising study megalomaniac.” In the decades since,
critic Richard Poirier in an interview, in of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably critics and biographers have pushed back
1960, for The Paris Review. One could, complex poet and a compelling but on this dim view of Frost. William H.
he suggested, “unsay everything I said, complicated man. Pritchard, in “Robert Frost: A Literary
nearly.” By his own account, he operated Plunkett is not the first critic to trou- Life Reconsidered,” from 1993, which has
by “suggestiveness and double entendre ble the popular conception of Frost as long been the gold-standard biography
and hinting”; he never said anything a wise woodsman dispensing comfort for many Frost enthusiasts, emphasized
outright, and, if he seemed to, then sus- and inspiration. Astute readers have the poet’s ingenuity and playfulness, both
picion was warranted. In both his po- been challenging the naïve interpreta- in his work and in his life. Even when
etry and his personal life, Frost was a tion of Frost’s work for decades. The ef- Frost was boastful or inconsiderate,
trickster, saying one thing and almost fort could be said to have started with Pritchard suggested, one couldn’t help
always meaning another, and perhaps Lionel Trilling, who, at a party for Frost’s but appreciate his cleverness.
another still. He was like the playful boy eighty-fifth birthday, declared the guest Plunkett, like Pritchard, admires Frost
described in the lovely poem “Birches” of honor to be “anything but” a writer in all his guises. Throughout, he stresses
(1915), bending tree branches beyond who “reassures us by affirmation of old the poet’s multiplicity, his ability to ex-
recognition, then letting them snap back virtues, simplicities, pieties and ways of hibit opposing attitudes in the same
to their natural state, all for his own feeling.” Frost was, rather, “a terrifying poem, sometimes in the same line. In-
amusement. As readers of his poetry, poet” and “a tragic poet.” (Frost, listen- terpreting “The Pasture,” an early poem,
we’re just along for the ride. ing in the audience, appeared non- Plunkett shows how its refrain—“You
plussed.) Trilling was channelling the come too”—can be understood “in at
he critic Adam Plunkett expertly poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who, for least four ways at once,” as “a suggestion,
T teases out the many meanings of
Frost’s poems in “Love and Need: The
years, had urged readers to turn away
from Frost’s sentimental poems and
an insistence, a command, a plain state-
ment.” Recognizing all possible mean-
Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry” (Farrar, consult instead the writer’s darker, spik- ings, Plunkett argues, allows us to access
Straus & Giroux). Blending biography ier efforts, such as “Provide, Provide,” a “a mind in its nakedness weighing how
and criticism, Plunkett shows how the sardonic paean to success, and “Ac- it means to use the phrase, why it means
circumstances of Frost’s peripatetic life quainted with the Night,” as lonely a to use it, and what it wants and needs of
gave rise to some of his most success- poem as there ever was. you.” To read the line simply as a benign
ful poems. As in the best critical biog- Frost’s first major biographer, Law- invitation—or, conversely, as a straight-
raphies, Plunkett does not merely track rance Thompson, seemed to take his cue forward command—is to miss the point:
down real-world inspiration for a given from such critics. In a three-volume bi- the poem is exploring the different ways
work. Rather, he brings together Frost’s ography published after Frost’s death in that people connect, rather than insist-
personal life, literary sources, and pub- 1963,Thompson emphasized Frost’s dark- ing on one kind of intimacy.
lication history to enrich our under- ness, detailing the poet’s frequent de- “Love and Need”—which takes its
title from Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in
Mud Time,” from 1934—proceeds in
loosely chronological fashion, taking us
from love poems that Frost wrote for Eli-
nor during their courtship to later poems
such as “The Gift Outright,” which an
eighty-six-year-old Frost recited at John
F. Kennedy’s Inauguration. (Kennedy
went on to eulogize Frost at Amherst
College, noting that many readers “pre-
ferred to ignore his darker truths,” just
weeks before the President’s assassina-
tion.) Frost was born in San Francisco
in 1874, moved across the country follow-
ing the death of his dissolute, larger-than-
life father, and made a series of homes in
mill towns north of Boston with his
mother, who was a schoolteacher, and his
younger sister. He came to poetry in high
school—his first poem, “La Noche Triste,”
composed when he was a sophomore,
“It’s become extremely important that you sign those papers.” was inspired by a book about the Aztec
Empire—and published the lyric “My Land,” didn’t come with a set of footnotes. when I can get these into strained re-
Butterfly” in The Independent in 1894. A At times, Plunkett’s painstaking ef- lation,” he wrote. “I like to drag and
long fallow period followed, during which forts to track each poem’s influences can break the intonation across the meter
he married, raised four children, tried his be tiresome. My appreciation of the ex- as waves first comb and then break stum-
hand at farming, and taught high school, quisite late sonnet “The Silken Tent” did bling on the shingle.”
all the while writing poems but publish- not increase upon learning that it bor- That “strained relation” is what we
ing very few. In 1912, he moved his fam- rows an image from the seventeenth-cen- find in a poem like “Home Burial,” which
ily to England, where he met Ezra Pound, tury poet Robert Herrick’s “The Brace- appeared in Frost’s acclaimed second col-
who championed his work. Frost’s first let to Julia.” But, more often, Plunkett’s lection, “North of Boston,” from 1914.
book, “A Boy’s Will,” was published in work pays off. Many know that “The The poem, one of Frost’s finest, com-
1913. At thirty-nine, he finally had a taste Road Not Taken” was written for the prises a dialogue between a husband and
of literary success. English poet Edward Thomas, Frost’s wife who have recently buried a child in
In Plunkett’s hands, “A Boy’s Will,” close friend, a romantic and an idealist, a small graveyard near their home. The
sometimes seen as one of Frost’s less im- who, walking with Frost, often dithered husband, a loquacious man, wants to talk
pressive collections, becomes newly in- about what path to take. But it’s less well about the loss; his wife thinks he doesn’t
triguing. (In a generally positive review, known that Frost was inspired by a poem know how to talk about it and tries to
Pound called the book “a bit raw.”) Plun- by Emerson, “Étienne de la Boéce,” about leave the house when he broaches the
kett reveals the book to be a “spiritual Montaigne’s relationship with a close topic. Frost captures the friction between
autobiography” modelled on Tennyson’s friend. With these sources in mind, we the couple:
poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (1850), read the poem’s tone and aims differ-
“Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s
which commemorates the poet’s friend ently: Frost may be mocking Thomas’s lost?”
Arthur Henry Hallam. There are strik- indecisiveness, but he is also legitimat-
ing similarities between Frost’s collec- ing the dilemma of choice. The poem is “Not you! Oh, where’s my hat? Oh, I don’t
tion and Tennyson’s poem; many of skeptical of the idea of life-defining ac- need it!
Frost’s poems refer directly to a corre- tions but not entirely cynical, Plunkett I must get out of here. I must get air.
I don’t know rightly whether any man can.”
sponding canto in Tennyson’s work. The concludes; it is “not a denial of epiphanic
difference is that Frost’s poems are self-realization but a questioning of it.” “Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time.
mourning not a friend but the pastoral Situating the poem within a tradition Listen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.”
life the poet has left behind, and mourn- softens its bite. He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.
ing, too, his eldest child, Elliott, who died In tracking Frost’s influences, Plun- “There’s something I should like to ask you,
dear.”
at age three, of cholera, in 1900. “Though kett shows just how invested Frost was
not a literal story of mourning, A Boy’s in the literary tradition—how the poet “You don’t know how to ask it.”
Will suffuses its every texture in an at- had, despite his protestations, led a “lit-
mosphere of mourning,” Plunkett writes. erary life.” Unlike those who obeyed the “Help me, then.”
“The poems are tinged throughout with modernist imperative to “make it new”
Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.
a sense of amorphous loss, the other side by inventing poetic styles and forms,
of which is a depth of gratitude.” Frost stuck with the templates available The dialogue is both realist, full of
The connections Plunkett draws be- to him but changed them in subtle ways. the ejaculations and repetitions that char-
tween Frost’s lyric poems and their lit- He didn’t slavishly imitate the poets he acterize human speech, and poetic, with
erary influences are valuable, particularly admired but, rather, riffed on them. This only the occasional anapest interrupting
for anyone taken in by Frost’s aw-shucks approach produced, in Plunkett’s esti- the poem’s iambic pentameter. So much
persona. Though Frost sometimes dis- mation, “the greatest achievements of remains unsaid between the couple; the
avowed his literary education—“I haven’t Frost’s lyric style: to contain the grow- wife’s gestures—her hand on the latch—
had a very literary life,” he told Poirier ing complexity of his poetry in forms say more than her words. The poem ends
in the Paris Review interview—he was that were no more difficult than those abruptly, with the wife halfway out the
an avid reader of poetry and the owner preceding them, that were in most in- door and the husband threatening to
of several well-thumbed poetry anthol- stances simpler, belying the turbulence bring her back “by force.” There is no
ogies, which he regarded as superior to one is made to feel under the surface.” epiphany and no resolution, only a rup-
any literary magazine. (Too many crit- ture that even the husband’s eloquence
ics in the latter.) He used canonical poems
to inspire his own.The early poem “Flow-
er-Gathering” is patterned on “Carpe
W hat accounts for this turbulence?
Frost offered one answer in a let-
ter from 1914, in which he described the
can’t heal.
“Home Burial” doesn’t appear in
“Love and Need,” nor do some of the
Diem,” a love song from Shakespeare’s unusual rhythm of his poems. He pre- better-known poems from “North of
“Twelfth Night,” and the late poem “The ferred to write in regular meter, usually Boston,” including “Mending Wall” and
Wind and the Rain” owes something to “the very regular pre-established accent “After Apple-Picking.” On the whole,
Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” Frost’s and measure of blank verse,” but he also Plunkett gives the collection short shrift,
range of references was as impressive as worked to incorporate “the very irreg- perhaps because it is Frost’s most orig-
that of any modernist poet—though his ular accent and measure” of human inal book and thus his least indebted to
poems, unlike T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste speech. “I am never more pleased than the literary tradition. Though there are
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 69
precedents for Frost’s dialogue poems— namely, to shore up Frost’s reputation as his efforts, at times, seem defensive of
Virgil’s Eclogues, Browning’s dramatic superior to his rival’s—rather than a the poet. When you admire your sub-
monologues—they are nonetheless dis- poem, like so many of his greatest, that ject, as Plunkett does, it can be tempt-
tinctive and hard to pin down. They are captures the world as it is. ing to dismiss his failings, to argue that
somehow both fiction and poetry, at once the creator of great art has simply been
evidently crafted and seemingly tran- oughly half of “Love and Need” misunderstood.
scribed. “It speaks, and it is poetry,” Frost’s
friend Edward Thomas wrote in a re-
R dwells on Frost’s later decades, a dif-
ficult period for the poet, and Plunkett
Frost, to his credit, seemed to accept
his dark side; he knew it powered his
view. He rightly observed that “North focusses more on biography than on crit- poetry. When aspiring poets asked him
of Boston” was “one of the most revolu- icism. In 1934, Frost lost his favorite child, about his sources of inspiration, he told
tionary books of modern times.” Marjorie, to a postpartum infection. Four them, “It’s mostly animus.” He wanted
When Frost returned from England, years later, Elinor died of a heart attack to best his rivals—Eliot, Amy Lowell,
in 1915, he was pleased to see that he’d while the couple was wintering in Flor- Edwin Arlington Robinson—or, at the
become a public figure in absentia. The ida. Frost had been known to complain very least, impress them. He succeeded
New Republic, a recent addition to the to friends about Elinor—she “has never in every case. At a formal dinner in Lon-
magazine world, carried both a poem of been of any earthly use to me,” he con- don, in 1957, Eliot toasted Frost as “the
his and a positive review of “North of fided to the poet Louis Untermeyer— most eminent, the most distinguished . . .
Boston,” by the critic and poet Amy Low- and had at times felt oppressed by her Anglo-American poet now living,” to
ell. More positive reviews followed, as sullenness. (In one poem, he figured his the latter’s great satisfaction.
did dinner invitations, magazine com- wife as “my sorrow.”) Elinor, for her part, A younger generation of American
missions, and a teaching opportunity at sometimes resembled the wife in “Home poets seemed to enjoy Frost in all his
Amherst College. It was the beginning Burial”: sad, taciturn, determined to keep opacity. In the summer of 1947, Robert
of a swift and irreversible ascent. In the her distance from her husband. But the Lowell and Theodore Roethke visited
decades that followed, universities com- two had been together for decades, and the older poet for lunch at his new home
peted over Frost, young people flocked without her Frost was at sea. “I shall be in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Frost
to him, and statesmen solicited his opin- all right in public, but I can’t tell you how talked in riddles, as he was wont to do,
ions on world affairs. His books sold well, I’m going to behave when I am alone,” speaking obliquely of poets who poured
even those which were reviewed tepidly, he wrote to a friend. out their words noisily, in contrast to the
and he was frequently invited to lecture Put simply, he behaved badly. He writer whose pour was smooth. (It’s not
and to read. By 1939, his publisher could drank far more and acted erratically. He clear if his guests realized he was criti-
describe him as “the best-loved poet in became infatuated with Kay Morrison, cizing them.) “I’ve got a devil in me,” he
America without a question.” He won a a married woman twenty-four years his joked to a friend when the lunch was
Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times— junior, whom he employed as a secre- over. Lowell, as if picking up somehow
the only poet ever to do so. tary, and he badgered her to leave her on Frost’s self-characterization, praised
Becoming a public figure, one called husband. He had strained relations with his host in a letter as “a marvelous devil
on to perform himself to audiences na- his grown children—one of whom died of a man.”
tionwide, affected Frost’s style. Plunkett by suicide, despite Frost’s belated at- A devil and a sage, a trickster and a
describes the change as “a shift in rela- tempts to help him—and insulted old teacher, a farm owner incapable of farm-
tive emphasis from experience to reflec- friends. To the critic Bernard DeVoto, ing, a professor without a college degree:
tion,” and he thinks the results were a longtime friend who fell out with Frost Frost was always two incompatible things
mixed. “At their undramatic best,” he during this period, the great poet ap- at once. He had a doubleness at the very
writes, Frost’s “reflective lyrics would em- peared nothing short of “evil,” a selfish heart of him, and he put his contradic-
body ideas and impressions with an el- and domineering man who ruined the tions into his poetry. “You do throw peo-
egant compactness unmatched in his lives of others. ple off track in your poems again and
earlier work.” One thinks of “Nothing This was “Frost in his third act,” as again,”Thompson, the biographer, wrote
Gold Can Stay” (1923), a tight, gemlike Plunkett calls it, a man who, in private, in a letter to the poet, not without ad-
poem that muses on impermanence. But seemed far different from the benevo- miration. Frost’s poetry matched who he
“at its worst,” Plunkett writes, Frost’s new lent sage he played in public. Plunkett was in life: a man who, in Thompson’s
style amounted to “versified thinking argues that too much emphasis has been words, had “a tendency to play hide-and-
rather than poetry unfolding in its own placed on this version of Frost, “this sto- seek around a half-truth,” throwing
movements of thought.” A poem such ryteller driven in the early years after friends and acquaintances off the scent.
as “New Hampshire” (1923), which, ac- his wife’s death to extremes of grief and More than sixty years after his death,
cording to Plunkett, Frost wrote in “a self-laceration.” He thus works to ex- Frost remains a cipher; it’s hard to think
spirit of reactive pique” after Eliot pub- plain away Frost’s confessed shortcom- of a better-known poet who is more dif-
lished “The Waste Land,” is long, loose, ings as a husband and a father. He also ficult to know. “I maintain my mystery
and undramatic; it lacks the force of notes that the poet’s affair with Morri- for no one to pluck the heart out,” Frost
“Home Burial,” in part because its char- son was never substantiated and points once wrote. In that respect, and in so
acters don’t come alive. It is a poem writ- out the various biases of those who tes- many others, he achieved what he set
ten to do something in the world— tified to it. Plunkett aims to be fair, but out to do. 
70 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025
 Tales from

A two-week film festival celebrating the

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Featuring screenings of “Brokeback Mountain,”
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February 21st to March 6th,

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 Fleming, Ben Folds, Issa Rae, and oth-
MUSICAL EVENTS ers have cut ties with the center. The re-
mainder of the classical world appears,

A BELATED DÉBUT
at first glance, relatively unaffected. But,
as 2725-26 seasons are announced in the
coming weeks, subscribers might look
An 1887 opera by the Black composer Edmond Dédé finally appears onstage. to see whether progressive programming
is being quietly rolled back. Will opera
BY ALEX ROSS companies become nervous about polit-
ically pointed works? Will Trump-
friendly artists get a boost? Will formerly
disgraced Russian performers return to
American halls? Will solidarity with
Ukrainians dissipate?
Because orchestras, opera houses, and
festivals rely almost entirely on private
funding, they ought to be in a position
to resist Trump’s stabs at Stalinist con-
trol. The question, though, is whether
even the slightest hint of trouble—a com-
mission for a transgender composer that
annoys a reactionary board member, a
Latino-oriented series that receives
closely monitored N.E.A. funding—will
trigger what Timothy Snyder calls an-
ticipatory obedience. In more than a few
cases, organizations seemingly launched
diversity programs not out of a commit-
ted belief but out of a fear of being chas-
tised on social media. Now fear could
push them in the opposite direction. This
dire moment in American history is forc-
ing a test of character. As Thomas Mann
said, in another fraught period, there is
no escaping politics in the arts.

couple of weeks after the Inaugu-

The orchestration, heavy on winds and brass, is especially distinctive. A ration, I attended a concert perfor-
mance of Edmond Dédé’s opera “Mor-
n the wake of the murder of George “great replacement” proved unfounded. giane” at the Clarice Smith Performing
Iheavals
Floyd, in 2727, and the cultural up-
that ensued, classical-music or-
A 2724 report by the Institute for Com-
poser Diversity showed that seventy-six
Arts Center, at the University of Mary-
land, just outside Washington. Dédé was
ganizations began including more com- per cent of works played at American a Black composer born in 1827 in New
posers of color in their programs. The orchestras were still by Caucasian males. Orleans. In 1855, he immigrated to France,
Philadelphia Orchestra recorded the Furthermore, only sixteen per cent of where he made his way as a composer
symphonies of the early-twentieth- pieces by underrepresented composers and conductor. “Morgiane,” which he
century Black composer Florence Price. lasted longer than twenty minutes—ev- completed in 1887, was intended to be his
The National Symphony did the same idence that administrators were making breakthrough, but no one took it up. The
for the modernist George Walker. The token gestures of inclusion while saving score resurfaced in 2778, in the collec-
Metropolitan Opera presented two works the prime spots for the usual suspects. tions of Houghton Library, at Harvard.
by Terence Blanchard. Jessie Montgom- Those who scowled at such modest The Washington-based company Opera
ery, Carlos Simon, Huang Ruo, and other steps in programming are presumably Lafayette and the New Orleans group
nonwhite composers benefitted from an hailing the Trump regime’s ugly crusade OperaCréole came together to bring
upsurge of performances. These initia- against D.E.I., which has broadened into “Morgiane” to life; its first outing was
tives elicited predictable backlash from an assault on decades of civil-rights prog- at St. Louis Cathedral, in New Orleans,
musty corners of the Internet, where it ress. President Donald Trump has in January. “Morgiane” displays sufficient
was said that D.E.I. radicals were pro- crowned himself the chairman of the inspiration that it would have merited
moting mediocrities and trashing the Kennedy Center and complained about attention no matter who had com-
canon. Yet apprehensions of a classical its “wokey” events. As a result, Renée posed it. With Dédé’s personal story in
72 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 ILLUSTRATION BY JAN ROBERT DÜNNWELLER
mind, the undertaking became essential. Nothing in “Morgiane” betrays the
The little that is known of Dédé is awkwardness of a first-time composer.
gathered in Sally McKee’s 2017 book, The melodies exude charm; the harmonic
“The Exile’s Song,” alongside vivid evo- design mirrors the changing moods of
cations of the social and artistic worlds the plot; the climaxes are surely plotted.
through which he moved. In New Or- Gounod and Massenet are clear influ-
leans, he was shaped by a culturally flour- ences, but Mozart and Offenbach are
ishing Black population, with its mani- also present. Dédé indulges in jangling Intelligent
fold Haitian connections. He also had percussion but avoids crude, exoticizing
the advantage of growing up in what was gestures. One allusion jumped out at me. political
then America’s opera capital; the genre In the prelude to the fourth act, set in
had yet to find a stable home in New
York. The Théâtre d’Orléans hosted a
the Sultan’s prison, cellos and bassoons
play an upward line that resembles the
conversation.
polished opera troupe that presented the lyrical second theme of Beethoven’s Vi- (For once.)
latest French works, as well as Mozart olin Concerto. Given Beethoven’s asso-
and other classics. And, though New Or- ciations with revolutionary liberation,
leans theatres were segregated, Black this seems a deliberate nod.
opera lovers enthusiastically filled the Particularly distinctive is the orches-
upper tiers. We don’t know whether Dédé tration, which makes heavy use of winds
attended the opera in his youth, but and brass. Dédé’s father, Basile, played
“Morgiane” gives the impression that he clarinet in New Orleans, and that sound
was steeped in the art form from an early may have mixed with opera in his son’s
age. He knows all the tricks. ears. When Morgiane furnishes proof to
Deteriorating conditions for people the Sultan that Amine is his daughter,
of color in New Orleans likely precipi- she sings a lullaby-like arietta in A major,
tated Dédé’s decision to seek his for- and a solo horn accompanies her with
tunes abroad. After failing to gain ad- sympathetic reserve, first intoning the
mittance to the Paris Conservatory—he single note E and then unfolding a win-
was too old to do so—he attended classes some countermelody. Here and else-
as an auditor, studying with Fromental where, the intermingling of voices and
Halévy, the composer of “La Juive.” Dédé instruments is masterly.
later moved to Bordeaux, where he first Mary Elizabeth Williams, a soprano
took a job conducting at the Grand- with a strong lower extension, was mes-
Théâtre and then supervised more pop- merizing in the title role, her superb dic- Tune in three times a
ular fare at cafés-concerts, or music halls. tion giving emotional edge to a some- week as The New Yorker’s
In 1893, he briefly returned to New Or- times wooden text. Kenneth Kellogg
leans, where he felt ill at ease. He died brought an almost Wagnerian weight to writers and editors unpack
in Paris in 1901. Scattered glimpses of the Sultan. Chauncey Packer, Joshua the latest news from
his personality suggest a man of impos- Conyers, Jonathan Woody, and Nicole
ing presence and intelligence. Cabell gave persuasive accounts of the
Washington—and what it
The libretto of “Morgiane,” by a Bor- other roles. Singers from OperaCréole means for the country.
deaux journalist named Louis Brunet, constituted the chorus. Patrick Dupre
tells a not especially compelling story in- Quigley conducted expertly, though I Available wherever
spired by “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” wished at times for more zest and bite you get your podcasts.
As the opera begins, a young woman in the playing. Let’s hope that an opera
named Amine is marrying Ali, while her house with lavish resources—whether in
mother, Morgiane, and her stepfather, the United States or France—soon gives
Hassan, look on. Then Amine is kid- “Morgiane” a full staging.
napped by a functionary of a Persian sul- The year Dédé died, Louis Armstrong
tan—shades of Mozart’s “Abduction from was born. Givonna Joseph, the co-founder
the Seraglio.” Ali, Morgiane, and Has- of OperaCréole, noted in a pre-perfor-
san disguise themselves as entertainers mance discussion that Armstrong had Scan to listen.
and infiltrate the Sultan’s court. Eventu- adored opera. Legends of Dédé’s French
ally, Morgiane reveals that the Sultan is, career circulated in New Orleans, and
in fact, Amine’s father. The Sultan re- the young Armstrong might have heard
pents and sets her free. The choice to sit- them. When the jazz titan echoed col-
uate the action entirely in a mythical oratura in his improvisations, he was not
Middle East mitigates the Orientalism borrowing from a foreign source: opera To find all of The New Yorker’s podcasts,
of the piece; there is really no Other here. belonged to him as it belonged to all.  visit newyorker.com/podcasts.
 clams up when pressed by his much
ON TELEVISION younger girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou
Wood), about why they’ve come to the
island; his decision is eventually ex-
TOURIST TRAP plained via a tragic backstory so un-
convincing that I thought he was mess-
“The White Lotus,” on HBO. ing with the hotel employee he disclosed
it to. The most straightforward ratio-
BY INKOO KANG nale is that of the Ratliff clan, a South-
ern family of five with only one func-
tioning moral compass among them.
The middle child, Piper (Sarah Cath-
erine Hook), hopes to interview a re-
nowned Buddhist monk for her col-
lege thesis, which becomes the occasion
for their stay at the wellness-oriented
White Lotus Thailand— though she
herself derides the place as “a Disney-
land for rich bohemians from Malibu
in their Lululemon yoga pants.” Her
comment is a dig at another group of
guests: a trio of fortysomethings on a
girls’ trip who seem into the resort’s
carefully curated atmosphere of mind-
fulness until, suddenly, they’re not.
At this point in the show’s award-
laden run, it almost goes without say-
ing that its creator, Mike White, glam-
orizes the lodgings as avidly as his most
grounded characters scorn them. One
guest is led through a personalized med-
itation session by a hotel staffer in a
glass-walled hut, behind which lies a
sun-kissed tropical grove that evokes
both the wildness of nature and how it
can be tamed for the enjoyment of the
über-rich. You can practically smell the
bespoke scent that might have been
spritzed into the lobbies of each of the
international chain’s locations, a bou-
iven the number of murders that Faced with one of these long-term res- quet that’s soft, sophisticated, and un-
G have taken place at White Lotus
resorts since the HBO series began, in
idents, Timothy recalls an ominous
adage: “Anyone who moves to Thailand
mistakably synthetic.
There’s something similar at work in
2021, one wonders why visitors continue is either looking for something or hid- the third season, a promiscuous appli-
to flock to them. It’s clear that at least ing from something.” cation of the formula that yields dimin-
some of the guests at their Thailand This season of “The White Lotus” ishing returns. It isn’t just the charac-
property—the setting of the third sea- continues the tradition set by the pre- ters who seem a bit lost in Thailand;
son, which premièred on February 16th— vious two, opening with a dead body White does, too. The showrunner has
haven’t done their research: Timothy at a luxury destination, then flashing spoken of his interest in exploring spir-
Ratliff ( Jason Isaacs), a compulsively back a week, with the implicit promise ituality tourism, a bout of which kicked
plugged-in finance guy, only learns of of a murder mystery in reverse: who off his previous HBO series, “Enlight-
the hotel’s phone-free “digital detox” pol- dies, and how? It also introduces fresh ened.” But the first six episodes of the
icy when he and his family arrive. But questions about what each guest is hid- season’s eight—the portion allotted for
being at “the antipodal, opposite end of ing or seeking. Not all of their motives review—scarcely touch on Eastern re-
the Earth,” initially a torment to him, is are persuasive. Rick (Walton Goggins), ligion, framing Piper’s interest therein
exactly the appeal for other travellers. a middle-aged man who spreads mis- predominantly as a threat to her mother,
Some of them decide to stay forever. ery wherever he goes, at first simply Victoria (Parker Posey), and her way of
life. (The Ratliff matriarch, whose fa-
“The White Lotus” offers a murder mystery in reverse: who dies, and how? vorite pastimes are popping lorazepam
74 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 ILLUSTRATION BY MAX GUTHER
and obsessively assessing the “decency” actually kill her if she stepped out of line. early on that they are “a normal family,”
of those around her, tells her daughter The season as a whole feels trapped and the most interesting thing about
that she can’t be a Buddhist: “Honey, between tones: not quite dark enough them is the repression necessary to ap-
you’re not from China.”) The only other to confront what happens in a country pear so unremarkable. Though she’s sur-
theological commentary we get is from where foreigners can buy nearly any- rounded by loved ones, Victoria seems
Victoria’s obnoxious firstborn, Saxon thing they want for the right price, nor just as vulnerable as the lonely Tanya
(Patrick Schwarzenegger), who declares frothy enough to simply showcase the was; her arrogance and knee-jerk con-
that Buddhism is for cowards. “They’re baroque weirdness of the wealthy. Rick tempt have made her blind to the ac-
afraid,” he says, summing up his view has dragged Chelsea to Thailand for a tual dangers to her household and vi-
of their credo as “Don’t get attached, preposterous act of personal vengeance, cious to anyone outside it. (Posey makes
don’t have desires, don’t even try.” and seems to be in a completely differ- her character painfully recognizable but
Season 3 isn’t without its spiky ob- ent show than the three blond girl- no more sympathetic for it; predictably,
servations, especially of the dynamics friends, who’ve known each other since she’s also an excellent vehicle for White’s
of Western jet-setters in Southeast Asia. childhood but spend most of their time withering one-liners.) While Victoria
Victoria exemplifies the kind of inter- drinking in twos while gossiping cru- catastrophizes about her daughter’s
national traveller who’s utterly oblivi- elly about the absent third. All three— search for an alternative value system,
ous to her offensiveness, at one point one a successful actress in L.A. (Mi- Saxon—an all too believable alt-right
confusing Thailand for Taiwan, and an chelle Monaghan), one a stressed-out nightmare with an unhealthy interest
early scene mocks so-called L.B.H.s— lawyer in New York (Carrie Coon), one in both of his siblings’ sex lives—tutors
Losers Back Home—the unlovely, well- an increasingly conservative socialite in his younger brother, Lochlan (Sam
off white men who descend on the re- Austin (Leslie Bibb)—are written with Nivola), in a puerile, hookup-centric,
gion to attract the kind of women who a surprising shallowness, especially con- empathy-free masculinity. When the
wouldn’t look at them twice in their na- sidering White’s other female creations. pair are alone in their shared room, Saxon
tive countries. Accordingly, the season (It’s also disappointing that White, strips down and speculates about their
is rife with transactional relationships. whose own friendships with Hollywood sister. “She’s pretty hot,” he muses, “but
Chelsea, a gold-digger with a heart of actresses are well known, offers so lit- I don’t think she’s ever been laid before.”
gold, seems capable of charming every- tle insight into the effort that it takes This repression is primed to be punc-
one except her own foul-tempered part- to maintain relationships across differ- tured as soon as they land, and it’s not
ner. Her new friend Chloe (Charlotte entials of fame and fortune.) He brings Saxon or Victoria but the Ratliff pater-
Le Bon) is a former model who’s con- back Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda, a put- familias who cracks first. On the verge
vinced herself that she’s caught a good- upon masseuse from Season 1 who was of being exposed for his role in some
enough prize in Greg ( Jon Gries), the promised the opportunity of a lifetime substantial financial crimes, Timothy
older man who married—and then mur- by Tanya after a few rejuvenating ses- hands over all of his devices and begins
dered—the hapless heiress Tanya ( Jen- sions and discarded just as quickly. He to down his wife’s pills. No one is in
nifer Coolidge) in Season 2. (Why he also casts the Thai K-pop star Lisa as more urgent need of the Buddha’s teach-
feels comfortable setting foot inside a an aspirational hotel employee in a sweet, ings—“Don’t get attached, don’t have
White Lotus property after that inci- low-simmer romance with a fellow staff desires, don’t even try”—than a man
dent is another mystery; his paper-thin member (Tayme Thapthimthong). But whose wants have doomed his family.
disguise is that he now goes by Gary.) they mostly serve as reminders that But it doesn’t occur to him that the
When Chelsea complains that Rick’s White is much better at writing nasty solution to his distress may be staring
chronic wretchedness has sucked the air characters than nice ones. him in the face. What we get instead
out of their relationship, Chloe replies, By default, then, the Ratliffs emerge is rather Christian: a Boschian vision
with a smile, that she believes Gary could as the figures to follow. Victoria boasts of nudity and woe. 
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2025 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 3, 2025 75

 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Ellis Rosen,
must be received by Sunday, March 2nd. The finalists in the February 10th contest appear below.
We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the March 17th issue. Anyone age
thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”
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THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“It’s the camera crew that worries me.”

Chris Abernethy, Corona, Calif.

“Let’s just cut to the chase.” “It’s a whale song. It doesn’t need to make sense.”
Ryan Ulrich, North Arlington, N.J. Nathan Keker, Oakland, Calif.

“ You definitely turned off ‘share location’?”

Hugo Gabriel Bennett, Nashville, Tenn.
 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

13 14 15

THE 16 17

CROSSWORD 18 19 20

21 22 23
A beginner-friendly puzzle.
24 25 26 27 28

BY ROBYN WEINTRAUB
29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37
ACROSS
1 Like Bashful 38 39 40 41
4 Bird that delivers babies, in folklore
9 Bringing up the rear 42 43 44 45

13 Soothing botanical
46 47 48 49 50
14 Beauty-industry metaphor for the
optimism that cosmetics represent 51 52 53 54
16 Michael of “Superbad”
55 56 57 58
17 Twenty-four-hour markdown
18 University of Maryland athlete
59 60
20 Sends blue messages on an iPhone?
21 Person who might shout “¡Goooool!” or 61 62 63
“Going . . . going . . . gone!”
24 Marsupial pal of Pooh
DOWN 41 What unleavened bread doesn’t do
25 Reason for some flight cancellations Warren who starred in “Dick Tracy”
1 “To ___, perchance to dream”: Hamlet 44
26 Procedure done at a hundred to a 2 Typical Wes Craven flick 46 Sulks
hundred and twenty b.p.m.
3 Not just for a season or two 47 Not sure which way to turn
29 Check from the I.R.S. ___ rehearsal
4 Makes some purchases 48
32 Beats co-founder Dr. ___ 5 Health potions of old 49 Aired again, as a TV show
33 It gets a new ring annually 6 Easy job for a detective 50 Abound (with)
34 One-eyed Norse god 7 Like London’s iconic phone booths and 51 Undrinkable contents of a certain coffee-
35 “I wish I could ___ that!” (response to a double-decker buses shop cup
cringeworthy video) 8 Automaker owned by Hyundai 52 Penne ___ vodka
37 Hydrant hookup 9 Eye-surgery tool 53 Try to extinguish a birthday candle
10 Cleaning product that shares its name 56 Number of towers in a Tolkien title
38 Far from tongue-burningly spicy
with a Trojan War hero 57 Chest bone
39 “I’ll pass”
11 Mineral that’s put on pretzels and icy roads
40 Camera stand
12 “___ bien!” (“Very good!,” in French) Solution to the February 10th puzzle:
42 Bank-lobby fixture 13 Talent-show routines A L O N G L A M P R P M S
43 Word before soda or sandwich 15 Financial landmark on Wall St. M E T H U S E L A H A L E C
45 Co.-name ender 19 Lots and lots P O O L N O O D L E G A M E
E N O S O N A T A S Y O N
46 Parochial-school attire that’s a challenge 22 Feeling yesterday’s workout, perhaps
R O L O S K I P I T
to iron 23 Chirp E V E N T S T R A I N E R S
51 Forbidden by polite society 26 Pattern in a field sometimes attributed S I X T E E N T O N S
54 Unburdened by worries to aliens T H E M U N S T E R S

55 Provide art for a picture book, say 27 Mexican coin T O O B A D S O S A D

R E P R E S S E D M E L T S
58 Measure of land area 28 Vibrating part of a clarinet
I M B E A T R E A P
29 Capital of Italy, to the locals
59 Unexpected developments in a story N P R M R R O B O T S P A
30 How to make a long story short? G U A M E A R L Y R I S E R
60 Shut forcefully
31 ___ cap (antiquated form of schoolroom U R S A E S C A L A T O R S
61 Woodworkers’ tools punishment) P A S T S H A M M O R S E
62 Follows orders 33 “Heads up!” Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
63 Number of Canadian provinces 36 Simba’s childhood best friend newyorker.com/crossword
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