PRICE $8.99 JAN.

13, 2025
 In November 2022 we introduced the Bel Canto. Instantly making haute
horology accessible. This subtly chiming timepiece caused a cacophony.
And enormous demand. (The first 600 sold out in 8 hours.) Asked could
we produce 5,000 annually, our Swiss CEO Jorg Bader Snr replied: “No. But
we’ll find a way.” Because that is our way. Today, our supply chain is as fit
for purpose as the gear chain of the new Bel Canto Classic. Which features
a dressed-up dial. A dialled-down handset. And a gorgeous guilloché
finish, with a precision only achievable (and affordable) using a femto
laser. Outward displays, we like to think, of inward grace.

(Bel Can-)Do your research

christopherward.com
 JANUARY 13, 2025

4 GOINGS ON
7 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Michael Luo on the roots of xenophobia;
playing Joan Baez; defending the Hudson;
wig city; standing still in New York.
ANNALS OF MEDICINE
Dhruv Khullar 12 Still Processing
Why is the American diet so deadly?
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Talib Babb 19 Our New Two-Factor Authentication System
LIFE AND LETTERS
Katy Waldman 20 Love and Theft
Did a best-selling romantasy writer steal stories?
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Jordan Salama 28 The TikTok Trail
How social media is fuelling a wave of migration.
THE POLITICAL SCENE
Peter Hessler 38 A Tale of Two Districts
Lauren Boebert’s survival instincts.
SKETCHBOOK
Paul Rogers 45 “When Picasso Was Arrested for Stealing
the ‘Mona Lisa’”
FICTION
Kanak Kapur 50 “Prophecy”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Ian Buruma 59 Yukio Mishima’s tortured obsessions.
Anthony Gottlieb 64 Will Gottfried Leibniz ever get his due?
67 Briefly Noted
THE ART WORLD
Jackson Arn 68 The secret beauty of mandalas.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Justin Chang 70 “Hard Truths.”
POEMS
Bridget Lowe 42 “Waiting”
Czesław Miłosz 54 “Summer Movies in Central Park”
COVER
Roz Chast “Game Show”

DRAWINGS Ali Solomon, Amy Hwang, Roland High, Adam Douglas Thompson, Oren Bernstein,
William Haefeli, Zachary Kanin, Tom Chitty, P. C. Vey, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Ivan Ehlers, Liana Finck,
Michael Maslin, Joe Dator, Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby, Victoria Roberts SPOTS Roland High
 E
CONTRIBUTORS
T

Peter Hessler (“A Tale of Two Districts,” Katy Waldman (“Love and Theft,”
p. 38) is a staff writer and a former p. 20), a staff writer, has covered books
R

China correspondent for the magazine. and culture for the magazine since 2018.
J His books include “Other Rivers: A She won the 2019 National Book Crit-
E

Chinese Education.” ics Circle prize for reviewing.

K

Dhruv Khullar (“Still Processing,” p. 12), Kanak Kapur (Fiction, p. 50), an Olive B.
a contributing writer, is a practicing O’Connor fellow at Colgate Univer-
S

physician and an associate professor at sity, is at work on her first novel.

Weill Cornell Medical College.
N

Michael Luo (Comment, p. 7) is an ex-

Jordan Salama (“The TikTok Trail,” ecutive editor at The New Yorker. His
I

p. 28), a first-time contributor to The book, “Strangers in the Land: Exclu-

New Yorker, is the author of “Stranger sion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of
in the Desert: A Family Story.” the Chinese in America,” is out in April.

Anthony Gottlieb (Books, p. 64) is Bridget Lowe (Poem, p. 42) wrote the
an author whose next book, “Ludwig poetry collections “My Second Work”
Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age and “At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky.”
of Airplanes,” is due out in October.
Naomi Fry (The Talk of the Town,
Talib Babb (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 19), p. 10), a staff writer, contributes to the
a standup comedian, is a former staff weekly Critic’s Notebook column.
member of “The Late Show with Ste-
phen Colbert.” Czesław Miłosz (Poem, p. 54), who died
in 2004, won the 1980 Nobel Prize in
Jenny Kroik (Sketchpad, p. 11) has been Literature. His book “Poet in the New
contributing humor writing, cartoons, World” is translated, from the Polish,
and covers to the magazine since 2017. by Robert Hass and David Frick.

ANNALS OF INQUIRY

Do Insects Feel Pain?

OCÉANE MULLER

By Shayla Love

Read this digital-only story on the New Yorker app, the best place to find
the latest issue, plus more news, commentary, criticism, and humor.
 THE MAIL
WHAT’S THE BASIS? (The Lede, December 7th, new­
yorker.com/tolentino­on­united­
Jon Lee Anderson, early in his arti­ healthcare­ceo­murder). It is clear
cle about Javier Milei and the eco­ that the way UnitedHealthcare treats
nomic changes he has instituted in many sick Americans—denying them
Argentina, writes that as Milei cam­ lifesaving coverage when they need it
paigned for President the inflation most, as Tolentino describes in her
rate climbed to more than two hun­ article—is the inevitable consequence
dred per cent (“Enemy of the State,” of how health care is financed in the
December 9th). Later on in the arti­ United States. Investors and execu­
cle, he says that under Milei’s admin­ tives are rewarded for delivering the
istration the rate has declined to less least amount of care possible. The U.S.
than three per cent. That would be a spends a staggering eighteen per cent
remarkable achievement indeed, low­ of its G.D.P. on health care, and yet,
ering—in a single year—an inflation compared with equivalently wealthy
rate that’s more than seventy times countries, health outcomes here are,
that of the United States to a rate on by many measures, worse.
par with the current U.S. inf lation Robert Pressberg
rate of 2.7 per cent. In fact, the year­ Newton, Mass.
over­year inflation rate in Argentina 1
in October, 2023, under the previous MUSICAL NOTE
President, was a hundred and forty­
three per cent, and in October of 2024, I was delighted to see Alex Ross
under Milei, it was a hundred and shine his potent and inquisitive
ninety­three per cent—hardly cause spotlight on the brilliant composer
for celebration. and organist Kali Malone (Musical
This is not to say that inflation has Events, December 9th). But it is also
not been reduced in shorter time worth placing Malone in the context
frames. The month­over­month in­ of another movement: the female­
flation rate has been fairly consistent dominated sphere of minimalist, mi­
during the past six months, mostly in crotonal, drone­friendly, alt­temper­
the range of three to four per cent ament, electro­ acoustic, ambient­
per month. If those rates hold steady classical music. (I call it “transcendent
for the next six months, the annual music,” for the effect it has on me.) Be­
inflation rate would be around forty­ fore Malone came Jessica Pavone, Cla­
six per cent—a considerable drop rice Jensen, Catherine Lamb, and Ellen
from previous years, but still about Arkbro, who, as the piece notes, in­
seventeen times the U.S. rate. When spired Malone to study in Stockholm.
discussing inf lation rates, it’s im­ Ross writes astutely about hearing
portant to be consistent in the time echoes of medieval and Renaissance
frame; anything else is misleading polyphony in her music. But there is
with statistics. also the slow minimalism of Morton
Michael Kardauskas Feldman and the manic yet patient
Billerica, Mass. seeking of Italy’s mystic count Gia­
1 cinto Scelsi, in the twentieth century.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT Bill Freimuth
Topanga, Calif.
Jia Tolentino, in her excellent piece
on the national response to the assas­ •
sination of Brian Thompson, the Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, argues address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
that Thompson’s murder is “one symp­ themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
tom of the American appetite for vi­ any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
olence; his line of work is another” of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
 DANCE | Intrafamilial conflict dominates the
Hindu epic “Mahabharata.” Now an episode
GOINGS ON from this tale of warring factions and the strug-
gle for dharma (or righteousness) has become
JANUARY 8 – 14, 2025 the basis for “Children of Dharma,” a dance by
the esteemed Minneapolis-based classical-In-
dian-dance company Ragamala Dance. It’s a
collaboration between a mother-and-daughters
team made up by Aparna, Ranee, and Ashwini
Ramaswamy (all beautiful dancers) and the
scenic designer Willy Cessa, whose projections
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. and lighting elegantly evoke temples, forests,
and ancient sculpture. Ragamala normally spe-
cializes in bharatanatyam, the dominant clas-
The Under the Radar festival—nearly three dozen experimental theatre sical-Indian dance form, but here, in addition,
and dance offerings, Jan. 4-19—administers a series of aesthetic shocks, they have included elements drawn from Khmer
dance, from Cambodia.—Marina Harss (Joyce
like polar-bear plunges for the mind. This year, the theme is resilience: Theatre; Jan. 8-12.)
“The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy” (Fourth Street Theatre; pictured)
reworks Joshua William Gelb’s pandemic-era fable, once live-streamed CLASSICAL | Contorted women with braids over
their eyes, a man in a silver trench coat sur-
from a repurposed closet; the Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani’s rounded by fog, and a masked figure in ski gog-
“Blind Runner” imagines a man helping an unsighted woman race gles with a pixelated neon smile are not usually
against a train (St. Ann’s Warehouse); and the superb puppetry group images conjured by the word “opera.” But the
Prototype Festival has long nullified precon-
Wakka Wakka offers us “Dead as a Dodo” (Baruch College), which starts ceived notions of the genre. With both black-box
with extinction, then makes merriment with the bones.—Helen Shaw and larger-scale productions, mixed-media pre-
sentations and all kinds of music, Prototype con-
firms that the art form is not dust-ridden but un-
deniably forward-leaning. The first run of shows
includes “Black Lodge,” a combination of opera,
dance, rock, and chamber music that drama-
tizes the torturous plight of a writer; “Positive
Vibration Nation,” a rock-guaguancó opera by
the Grammy-nominated Sol Ruiz; and the world
première of “Eat the Document,” an explora-
tion of activism and consequence, based on the
novel by Dana Spiotta.—Jane Bua (Jan. 9-19.)

PROG ROCK | As the front man for the pro-

gressive-rock band black midi, Geordie Greep
helmed one of the more invigorating acts of
the past five years, but in August the London
musician unceremoniously revealed that the
band was “now indefinitely over.” Ten days later,
Greep announced his next move: a solo début,
“The New Sound.” With a title like that, one
would expect a reinvention; instead, the album
feels like a continuation—black midi’s drum-
mer, Morgan Simpson, is a guest, and a couple
songs are retooled from the band’s vaults. If
anything, Greep sounds refreshed. His new
music is possessed by an even more flamboyant
theatricality, channelling post-punk, jazz fusion,
prog, and even show tunes. At Bowery Ballroom,
Greep is supported by fellow-eccentric NNAMDÏ,
an alt-pop singer-songwriter and legion of
ABOUT TOWN one.—Sheldon Pearce (Bowery Ballroom; Jan. 13.)

DANCE | Each January, as international present- OFF BROADWAY |Ken Urban’s “A Guide for the MOVIES | The New York movie year starts off
ers come to town in the market for shows, var- Homesick,” sensitively directed by Shira Mili- with a blast—yes, from the past—with MOMA’s
ious venues offer samplings. The spread from kowsky, is a mirrored two-hander, where both annual series “To Save and Project” (Jan. 9-30),
COURTESY THEATER IN QUARANTINE / SINKING SHIP

New York Live Arts’s Live Artery (Jan. 8-18) actors play double roles. Teddy (McKinley which presents notable new restorations. One
looks particularly promising this year. Faustin Belcher III), a gay, self-aware finance bro, offering, the Czech director Věra Chytilová’s 1982
Linyekula, a clear-eyed Congolese choreogra- brings the jittery Jeremy (Uly Schlesinger) almost romantic comedy “Calamity,” presents
pher, brings “My Body, My Archive,” in which he back to his Amsterdam hotel room. But, in- a young man’s near-misses as emblems of the
mines the stories of women in his family. Miguel stead of a quickie, Teddy gets protestations Soviet-occupied country’s blinkered chaos. The
Gutierrez, whose often humorous and dissenting and Jeremy’s backstory, involving a closeted protagonist abandons university studies and
works are big-hearted and go-for-broke, unveils Ugandan he recently befriended (Belcher again, finds work as a train conductor, for which he is
“Super Nothing,” a quartet about personal in- in a finely demarcated characterization). Jer- manifestly unqualified. Mechanical things fall
terdependence. Milka Djordjevich, in her solo emy learns about Teddy’s straight work crush apart through bureaucratic rigor and the dead
“Bob,” does institutional critique as a gruelling (Schlesinger), and symmetries between each weight of gerontocracy; failed flirtations suggest
workout; Leslie Cuyjet, in her solo “For All Your actor’s two characters become apparent. This the blithe frivolity of hopelessness. When an
Life,” sends up the market for performance as conceit, together with the slow-burn suspense actual catastrophe ensues, Chytilová antically
a life-insurance saleswoman. The drag artist of Teddy and Jeremy opening up to each other, dramatizes, in a scathing set piece, the system’s
Jesse Factor chooses a more dramatic subject to gives the action interest and tenderness that disregard for human life and the desperate cheer
impersonate—Martha Graham—setting her cho- compensate for its straining of credulity.—Dan of its would-be victims.—Richard Brody (“Calam-
reography to tracks by Madonna.—Brian Seibert Stahl (DR2; through Feb. 2.) ity” is also streaming on Criterion Channel.)

4 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025

 1
ON AND OFF THE AVENUE
Zing in the New Year
Anyone who pays attention to the natural
rhythms of the produce aisle knows that the
best citrus fruit blooms in the wintertime;
just as the days start to grow short and dark,
clementines and grapefruits and kumquats
rise like surrogate suns. I have rarely been
able to make it through a New York winter
without ordering a Hail Mary case of Hale
Grove Honeybells ($59.99 for twelve), a rare
breed of knobby Floridian oranges that taste
practically sugar-dipped. Still, when it turns
cold, all I seem to want to eat is marmalade,
preferably piled high on a hot, buttered En-
glish muffin. The funkier and chunkier the
1
BOOK CURRENTS
The first part, famously, is basically a
forty-page description of a housewarm-
better; I like mine bitter, thick, and laced with
wedges of peel that squish like gummy worms
Though perhaps best known for their ing party and everything that happens between the teeth. One particularly addictive
portrayals of desire, Luca Guadagnino’s there. There’s all this food—which, at varietal is “Sunrise” Pixie Tangerine Marmalade,
from the new California brand Marmalade
character-driven dramas also evince an the time, in order to represent the power Grove ($9 for five ounces); it’s zingy, bright,
abiding preoccupation with the customs and culture of the class, was heavily in- and packed with pith. For a more unexpected
of the rich. Recently, Guadagnino—whose fluenced by French cuisine. That brings twist, I encourage seeking out bergamot mar-
malade, made from the green-skinned fruit
latest film, “Queer,” was released in No- us back to Bocuse—I like thinking of that looks like a lime but tastes closer to a
vember—shared a reading list of perennial him as a sort of rabdomante of the codes lemon. Much of it is made in Greece, but
favorites of his, which reflect, as he put of behavior and control which you can you don’t have to travel past your keyboard
to try some; a jar of K. Klonis Bergamot Pre-
it, “how class exerts its own dynamics of find in societies like that of the high serves is just a click away ($13 for sixteen
power, dynamics of control, dynamics of se- bourgeoisie depicted by Mann. ounces). Meanwhile, I discovered perhaps
duction, and dynamics of nurturing.” His the best marmalade I’ve ever eaten, this fall,
at a farmer’s market in the Berkshires. At the
remarks have been edited and condensed. The Man Without a Face stand of Brigid Dorsey, who runs a small jelly-
by Masha Gessen and-preserves business called Les Collines,
The Complete Bocuse This is a beautifully wise book by an I tried her Scots Bitter, made with hand-cut
Seville oranges and Laphroig single-malt
by Paul Bocuse incredible intellectual for whom I have whisky. It was a revelation: sweet, sour, and
This is a recipe book by a gentleman, complete worship. It came out in 2012, smoky, with a hint of charred Lapsang tea.
Paul Bocuse, who is hailed as the great- and it is astounding for the piercing The spread takes two days to make, sells out
quickly, and a twelve-ounce jar costs $32, but
est French chef—or maybe the French wisdom that it shows many years before I find it worth the splurge. Hey, whatever
people would say the greatest chef—of there was a consensus that Vladimir gets you through the season.—Rachel Syme
the twentieth century. He operated in Putin would become the nationalist
and around Lyon, where he was from, autocrat that he is today. To me, the
all his life, and where he had one of the book feels linked to “Buddenbrooks”
BY ANTOINE FLAMEN / GETTY (TOP); CHIARA BRAZZALE (BOTTOM)

longest-standing three-Michelin-star because Putin embodies the dynamic

restaurants. Bocuse made traditional potential of repression as an act: re-
LLUSTRATIONS BY ISABEL SELIGER; SOURCE PHOTOGRAPH

French cuisine, but he did it in a different pressing opponents, repressing freedom

way, making it less heavy and less inedible of speech, repressing thought. And it
for contemporary people. His cooking feels linked to Bocuse, too, because one
was a bridge between an idea of the past, has to think that power eats a lot, and
which came from royalty and then be- power represents itself in the dynamics
came bourgeois cuisine, and modernity. of hosting. I like the idea that, unaware
of it, Bocuse was transmitting ideas
Buddenbrooks about power his whole life—whether
by Thomas Mann it was by hosting dinners in his restau-
This great novel, which Thomas Mann rant or by propagating the cult and
wrote in his early twenties, describes the culture of hosting, and the fascination NEWYORKER.COM/GO
fortunes of one family through four gen- of being within the boundaries of the Sign up to receive the Goings On newsletter,
erations, between 1835 and around 1875. haute bourgeoisie. curated by our writers and editors, in your in-box.

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 5

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 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT borers must either “starve to death, or tween the two countries, making politi-
EXCLUDED they must fall to the level with the Chi- cians in Washington reluctant to impose
nese, or else they must themselves leave restrictions. But, then as now, the nation
resident-elect Donald Trump has the country.” was evenly divided politically, and the
P vowed to begin enacting the anti-
immigrant agenda at the center of his
More than ten thousand people in
California and Nevada joined local
Western states were a strategic prize for
both Republicans and Democrats. Win-
campaign the moment he takes office: “camps” of the Order of Caucasians, an ning them, it seemed clear, rested on re-
mass deportations, a crackdown on peo- organization that aimed to “protect the solving the Chinese question. As a re-
ple “pouring up through Mexico and white man and white civilization.” In sult, in 1882, the U.S.—for the first time
other places,” even the elimination of July, 1877, a rally in San Francisco erupted in its history—closed its gates to a peo-
birthright citizenship. (The fate of high- into days of rioting as mobs rampaged ple because of their race, when Congress
skill immigration is one area of uncer- through the Chinese quarter and van- passed a bill barring Chinese laborers
tainty; a dispute over H-1B visas con- dalized Chinese-owned businesses, from entering the country. (The legisla-
sumed maga world over the holidays.) mostly laundries, across the city. Several tion later became known as the Chinese
The scale of what Trump has promised weeks later, the state senators sent an ur- Exclusion Act.) Immigrants still found
is difficult to fathom and without recent gent message to Congress, warning that ways in, though, so Congress passed pro-
precedent. A century and a half ago, how- white residents up and down the West gressively more onerous laws. Restive
ever, a movement to cast out a different Coast were beginning to feel a “profound residents of dozens of communities across
group of people began to accelerate in sense of dissatisfaction with the situa- the West also banded together to drive
the United States. tion” and there would come a day “when out their Chinese neighbors.
In April, 1876, a California state sen- patience may cease.” Yet the Chinese were not passive vic-
ate committee held a series of hearings A treaty between the U.S. and China tims: in 1892, after a new law required
in Sacramento and San Francisco on the guaranteed the free flow of people be- them to obtain a certificate of residence
“social, moral, and political effect” of Chi- that established their right to be in the
nese immigration. By some estimates, country, leaders of the community orga-
well over a hundred thousand Chinese nized a campaign of resistance. Anti-
were living in the state. Government of- Chinese leaders, in turn, vowed mass de-
ficials, police officers, and civic leaders portations, only for the effort to founder
testified that they represented the dregs when it became clear that the measure
of their native land and were rife with a would be exorbitantly expensive. The
“criminal element”; they lived in crowded, Chinese community managed to persist,
filthy conditions (as one witness put it, but it existed in a kind of permanent
“more like hogs than human beings”); stress position until 1965, when President
they were vectors of disease and licen- Lyndon Johnson signed into law an over-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

tiousness. Perhaps most important, as a haul of the immigration system.

years-long economic depression settled Today, economic anxieties are again
over the country and San Francisco fuelling overtly racist, populist appeals
seethed with thousands of unemployed from politicians. A nimbus of outrage
white men, the witnesses argued that among working-class voters has propelled
Chinese workers drove down wages and the MAGA movement, much like the rage
took jobs away from Americans. A Cal- that drove the anti-Chinese movement.
ifornia pastor proclaimed that white la- Even Trump’s recent assertion that he
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 7
would use executive action to abolish in the East, along with the broader shift The findings are hardly surprising. A
birthright citizenship—scholars dispute to mass production, that were the big- recent study from the Brookings Insti-
whether this would be lawful––has a his- gest factors in the economic travails buf- tution asserts that a surge in immigra-
torical link to the Chinese American ex- feting white workers in California. tion helps to explain the strength of the
perience. In 1898, thirty years after the Other scholarship has similarly sug- U.S. economy since 2022, benefitting
Fourteenth Amendment established the gested that excluding Chinese labor employers who need workers and con-
principle as a way of safeguarding the failed to lift the fortunes of white work- tributing to consumer spending.
rights of formerly enslaved Black Amer- ers. This past fall, a group of economists In the nineteenth century, the Chi-
icans, the Supreme Court upheld it in a released a working paper on the impact nese had few public defenders. John C.
landmark case brought by a native-born of the Chinese Exclusion Act on West- Weatherred, a bank executive in Tacoma,
Chinese American, Wong Kim Ark. ern states. They found that it took a sig- Washington, wrote in his diary on Oc-
One of the tragedies of Chinese ex- nificant toll on the economies of Ari- tober 1, 1885, a month before the Chi-
clusion is that the anger toward the im- zona, California, Idaho, Montana, nese were driven out of his town, that
migrants was likely misplaced. Chinese Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wy- there were a “great many fools on the
workers were not usually in direct com- oming—the states with the largest Chi- anti-Chinese subject” and that he felt
petition with white workers. In an eco- nese populations––until at least 1940. like “taking up for the underdog in the
nomic study published in 1963, the The economists also found “no evidence fight.” He praised “the Chinaman” for
historian Ping Chiu found that in Cal- that the average white worker bene- his “industry, economy & sobriety.” But
ifornia the two groups were mostly strat- fitted from the departure of the Chi- Weatherred and other sympathizers
ified into different labor pools, with the nese” and concluded that the positive mostly kept their feelings to themselves.
Chinese concentrated in lower-wage effects of Chinese immigrants in the As an emboldened Trump Administra-
jobs in agriculture and industries such workforce, including the economies of tion prepares for a new crackdown on
as textile and cigar manufacturing. It scale achieved by their presence, out- immigrants, history offers lessons on the
was competition from more technolog- weighed any employment opportuni- cost of silence.
ically advanced and efficient factories ties that emerged from their absence. —Michael Luo

THE PICTURES had worried, since at seventeen Baez had she sees that immediately.” Baez recorded
MONICA GOES ELECTRIC! protested an atomic-bomb drill for giv- Dylan’s songs and brought him onstage
ing a false sense of safety, but the direc- at her shows. Within four years, Dylan
tor, James Mangold, assured her, “When eclipsed her in fame, went electric, and
the shit really hits the fan, you would broke her heart.
want to be with your family.” By half past twelve, the guitar shop
Barbaro, who trained as a ballerina, was open. “Do you have any Martins,
got the role after playing a fighter pilot by chance?” Barbaro asked the scruffy
t the stroke of noon one frigid in “Top Gun: Maverick,” and she threw guy behind the counter, who introduced
A weekday, the actress Monica Bar-
baro peered through the door to Chelsea
herself into Baez research. “I was listen-
ing to the music that she listened to, like
himself as Coby.
“Sure do,” he said. “I got a 1949 D-28,
Guitars, the hole-in-the-wall vintage- Odetta, and Harry Belafonte,” she said. at seventeen thousand five hundred
guitar shop on the ground floor of the Barbaro had no guitar experience, but
Chelsea Hotel. No one. “I kept com- the actors’ strike meant that she had lon-
ing here on Sundays, and it’s not open ger to practice her fingerpicking, and
on Sundays,” she said, referring to her she studied Baez’s high, ringing vibrato.
time shooting the Bob Dylan bio-pic By the time Dylan arrived on the
“A Complete Unknown,” in which she New York music scene, a complete un-
plays Joan Baez, opposite Timothée known, Baez was a known. In 1962, she
Chalamet. She asked a hotel doorman was on the cover of Time, the young face
if the place ever opens, and he said that of the folk-music revival. “Her relation-
it’s sometimes more of a “soft open.” ship with fame was a deeply conflicted
“A creative open,” she countered, and one,” Barbaro said.
waited in the lobby. Her relationship with Dylan was con-
Barbaro, a dark-eyed thirty-five-year- flicted, too. They met at Gerde’s Folk
old, wore a blue peacoat and jeans. The City, in Greenwich Village, in 1961, and
hotel, where Dylan lived in the early six- struck up a fraught musical romance.
ties, is also where she spent her first day “In the film, he’s very interesting to her,
of shooting, for a scene in which Baez because she’s receiving all kinds of praise,
runs outside to hail a taxi during the and he’s willing to boldly and kind of
Cuban missile crisis. This attempted es- rudely cut her down to size,” Barbaro
cape was somewhat out of character, she said. “He’s also supremely talented, and Monica Barbaro
8 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
bucks.” He took it down for her and This is great! My subconscious was defi- He was passing beneath the Gover-
asked, “Do you play?” nitely trying to tell me that everything nor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, whose
“Now I do.” She whispered, “I is going to be O.K.” construction he had opposed. He had
shouldn’t admit this publicly, but I re- —Michael Schulman preferred a tunnel, which would have
ally want to get an electric guitar. I’ve 1 been better for the fish, among other
been carrying these finger picks that I DEPT. OF EBBS AND FLOWS reasons because it would have prevented
used for the movie in my pocket ever LION IN WINTER countless rubber particles from raining
since we filmed. It’s like a totem to prove into the river off eroding car tires. “Now
that it happened.” In the film, she plays we know what kind of guy Cuomo was,”
a 1929 Martin 0-45. “Ed Norton”—who he said, referring to Andrew, who spear-
portrays Pete Seeger—“kept stealing it headed the project before resigning in
from me. He was telling me stories about the wake of sexual-harassment charges,
how to keep props. I was, like, ‘Ed, I’m in 2021. “We see that he wanted a mas-
not stealing this guitar!’ ” She played a hree weeks after retiring as the sive erection to name after his daddy
few bars of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice,
It’s All Right,” which Baez recorded live
T boat captain for Riverkeeper, the
environmental organization, John Lip-
and light it up at night.”
Lipscomb hugged the western shore-
in 1963, and which Barbaro and Chala- scomb embarked on a final wintry pa- line, heading south, and noted the large
met both sing in the movie. trol, pro bono. “I’m doing it for the homes, in Grand View-on-Hudson, of
“It’s a very special song,” Coby said. boat,” he said, explaining that the die- some clients from his previous job as a
“It is,” Barbaro agreed. “ ‘Farewell, sel inboard had just been repaired and boatyard manager. One seawall seemed
Angelina,’ too, just crushes me.” She would benefit from running for a few to be disgorging a steady stream of liq-
tried out a jauntier tune, “Mama, You hours before hibernating. “I love this uid into the river, as if connected to a
Been on My Mind.” “Joan sings ‘Daddy, boat. It’s hard for me to leave it. We’ve spigot. Lipscomb idled the engine. A
you been on my mind,’ and it throws spent a lot of time together.” By his man next door was in his yard raking
Dylan off. You can hear it in a record- own accounting, Lipscomb travelled leaves, and Lipscomb called out to in-
ing. I love it.” eighty thousand miles on the Hud- quire. An answer came back: river water
She thanked Coby and went back to son and its tributaries during the past had been getting underneath the neigh-
the hotel lobby. While Barbaro was two and a half decades, or the equiv- bor’s swimming pool and needed to be
working on “A Complete Unknown,” alent of more than three circumnavi- drained daily lest the pool itself float
Baez, at eighty-two, released a book of gations of the Earth, all at a slow and away. Satisfied with the explanation,
drawings, rendered upside-down, some steady speed of five or six knots, with Lipscomb instructed a passenger to
with her nondominant hand. Barbaro the aim of seeing and being seen. “Ev- stand on the rear deck and wave as he
took up drawing, too; she made a pic- eryone calls it the mighty Hudson,” he resumed patrolling. “My style has al-
ture of Chalamet and Mangold watch- said. “And yet it can’t defend itself.” ways been to think about not just the
ing a playback. “You see the world dif-
ferently when you draw,” Barbaro said,
then took out a pad and sketched a pair
of hotel guests with their suitcases.
During filming, she had arranged a
phone call with Baez. When they were
connected, Barbaro nervously gushed
that Baez deserved her own movie. Baez,
as if to wave away her concern, said,
“I’m just in the garden, watching the
birds!” Barbaro had questions: how Baez
had learned guitar, how she came up
with her arrangement for “House of the
Rising Sun.” “She said, ‘Sometimes I
would fall asleep with my guitar in my
bed and wake up in the morning and
keep playing.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, my
God, I’ve done that!’” Afterward, Baez
texted her a drawing of some lavender
cufflinks she had given Dylan. Barbaro
had been having dreams about Baez,
and the phone call settled them. “In
one, we were in a vintage convertible,
driving around the highway,” Barbaro
recalled. “She’s laughing, and I’m, like,
enforcement but about what happens healthy, today, as people like to imag- a relief to me, because as long as it was
after,” he said. “If they say, ‘Fuck that ine. A steward’s work is never finished. going on, it meant I couldn’t get fired
guy,’ basically they’re saying, ‘Fuck en- “Look how the cliffs and the trees are from ‘S.N.L.,’” he said. The first thing
vironmentalists,’ and that’s not good for gray,” Lipscomb said, gazing north. “I love the two wrote together after Mulaney
the river in the long term.” the winter. The nice thing about winter joined the show, a year later, was a par-
Farther south, opposite Irvington, patrols is the marinas have pulled back ody commercial for benzodiazepine.
Lipscomb pointed at a dozen seabirds their docks. Everybody’s closed down for “The voice-over was, like, ‘Ask your
floating near some swirling eddies. “You the year, and it’s like a time machine—es- doctor about this medication. Well, don’t
see the upwelling because the water pecially at dusk, because the lights haven’t ask him, because then he’ll know you
here is almost always salty enough that come on yet. You get to pretend that the want it,’” Mulaney said. “My favorite
the freshwater is lighter, and so it rises, river we’re looking at is the river of one part was when the doctor writes the
like helium,” he said. The freshwater hundred or two hundred years ago.” He prescription and the voice-over goes,
was coming from a sewage-treatment paused a wistful beat. “Except for that ‘Whoa, thirty!’”
pipe down below. As for the birds, gaudy-ass bridge.” Rich chimed in: “That’s sixty halves!”
“they’re not stupid,” he said. “They only —Ben McGrath Mulaney laughed.
go where the grub is.” The grub in this 1 Mulaney and Rich became good
case was likely herring or menhaden. THE BOARDS friends and collaborators, writing to-
“Those fish aren’t stupid, either.” They COLLABORATORS gether often until Rich left “S.N.L.,” in
were eating fecal matter. But, wait, wasn’t 2011. “It was that perfect age of twenty-
the sewage supposed to be “treated” seven, where I would have never said
first? “It’s a mystery,” Lipscomb ac- out loud, ‘I’m gonna really miss you,’”
knowledged, noting that this was the Mulaney said. “The first time we really
only outflow on the river where birds admitted to each other that we wanted
regularly congregated. Repeated inves- to impress each other was in the fall of
tigations of the contaminated Sparkill he other Monday evening, three 2020. I was having all sorts of . . . I was
Creek nearby had failed to find any il-
licit discharging. Lipscomb theorized
T men in their forties were hanging
out on the mezzanine of the Hudson
in a rehabilitation facility, and we were
talking on the phone outside.”
that cracked pipes and waste-line punc- Theatre, in midtown. They were John Rich broke in. “It was, like, ‘So . . . do
tures caused by tree roots in people’s Mulaney, the comedian; Alex Timbers, you ever think about “S.N.L.”?’ ‘Oh,
yards had created what he called “an the Broadway director; and Simon Rich, maybe every single day of my life.’”
underground shit sprinkler.” the writer. The three—two quite tall, one This kind of push and pull toward
The passenger stifled a gag. Batu, a bit shorter, all about equally floppy- intimacy and away from it stands at
a yellow Lab whom people liked to haired—had gathered for the night’s the heart of “All In.” The show con-
call Lipscomb’s first mate, stirred be- performance of “All In,” a limited-run sists of Mulaney and his co-stars, Rich-
neath a blanket on the engine cover. “comedy about love,” which Rich wrote, ard Kind, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and
“We don’t dump our garbage in the Timbers directed, and Mulaney stars Fred Armisen, performing Rich’s ab-
river, but we dump our partially treated in. Timbers, in an olive-green button- surdist, poignant love stories (most of
shit,” Lipscomb went on, citing the down, was examining the pictures on which were previously published in this
approximately four hundred pipes in the wall. “This was when Elvis went magazine). The gaps between the sto-
the city that legally discharge sewage on ‘The Steve Allen Show,’ and Allen
during heavy rainstorms. “What the humiliated him by making him sing
fuck! We walked on the moon, but ‘Hound Dog’ to a dog,” he said, of a
we still need a river to subsidize our large framed photograph of a mournful-
waste? It’s not O.K.” looking young Presley standing beside
Soon they were headed north again, an even more mournful-looking basset
hugging the shore of Westchester, wearing a small top hat.
where Lipscomb grew up, sometimes The Hudson was the first home to
holding a towrope behind his father’s “The Steve Allen Show,” and also to
sailboat—“shark bait,” he joked. Those the “Tonight Show,” back when it was
were the Hudson’s supposed bad days, hosted by Allen and, after him, Jack
when asphalt plants and paper mills Paar. “Then Paar moved to 30 Rock,”
lined the banks. “South of here was a Rich said. He was wearing a V neck
lot where they would burn cars so that and a black puffer coat. “And Carson
the firemen could learn how to put started there in ’62, I think,” Mulaney
them out,” he said, alongside Tarry- added. Mulaney and Rich also got their
town. Now there were luxury condos start at 30 Rock, as young writers on
and a fishing pier under construction. “Saturday Night Live.” Rich was hired
The river was never quite as putrid as in 2007, a season that was mostly taken
people thought, he argued; nor is it as up by a writers’ strike. “The strike was John Mulaney and Simon Rich
10 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
ries are punctuated by the Bengsons, SKETCHPAD BY JENNY KROIK
the married musical duo, who sing songs
from the Magnetic Fields’ 1999 mas-
terwork, “69 Love Songs.” In “All In,”
love is precarious to maintain between
life partners, but also between friends
and siblings. In one piece, Mulaney and
Armisen play crusty pirates who strug-
gle to co-parent a young stowaway; in
another, Kind is a talent agent who
signs the Grim Reaper, played by Ar-
misen, as a client, in order to defer his
own death and continue to care for his
ailing wife; in yet another, Mulaney
and Goldsberry play a toddler and his
baby sister, reimagined as a Raymond
Chandler-style P.I. and the mysterious
dame begging for his help. Through-
out, the actors wear street clothes and
remain seated in armchairs, as if par-
ticipating in a radio play. “We wanted
to put the performers as downstage as
possible, so they’re connected to the
audience, to almost break the prosce-
nium,” Timbers said. (Mulaney and his
co-stars will be swapped out for a ro-
tating group of other performers, in-
cluding Nick Kroll, Lin-Manuel Mi-
randa, and Aidy Bryant.)
The trio decamped to Mulaney’s
A line will immediately Someone will tell you
dressing room, which was a cozy jum-
form behind you. his life story.
ble of books, shopping bags, and framed
pictures of his two young children. It
was almost time to get ready for the
show, which for Mulaney meant little
more than changing from the sweat-
pants and athletic shirt he had on to
the slim suit he wears onstage. “I di-
rect a lot of very elaborate musicals,”
Timbers said. “But here we thought,
Why don’t we take away the costumes
and everything else, and ignite the au-
dience’s imagination?”
Rich smiled. “This reminds me of a
really dismissive thing Lorne Michaels
likes to say when watching a sketch,” he
said. “ ‘The wig is starring.’ Like, you’re
leaning on a funny wig.”
Mulaney winced. “One time, after
watching one of my sketches, he just
looked at me and went, ‘Wig city.’”
“Wig city,” Rich repeated slowly, look-
ing pained.
Timbers added brightly, “And here
there’s no wig! There’s nothing to up-
stage the actors.” Someone will declare you
Rich nodded in agreement. “It’s more a landmark, and people will An owl will land on you
Ricky Jay than Siegfried & Roy,” he said. protest if you try to move and you’ll become a viral
—Naomi Fry from your designated site. birding sensation.
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 11
 and an exercise bike, which he was sup-
ANNALS OF MEDICINE posed to use for an hour a day. “It’s not
as bad as it looks,” he said. His wife took
to visiting him at the end of her shifts.
STILL PROCESSING Once a week, he spent a full twenty-four
hours inside a metabolic chamber, a small
Why is the American diet so deadly? room that measured how his body used
food, air, and water. He was not allowed
BY DHRUV KHULLAR to go outside unsupervised, owing to the
risk that he might sneak a few morsels
of unsanctioned food.
Each day at 9 A.M., 1 P.M., and 6 P.M.,
Raineri was given an enormous meal—
about two thousand calories—and in-
structed to eat as much as he liked.
During the first week, he was offered
minimally processed foods such as salad,
vegetables, and grilled chicken, and he
felt great. But, every Friday, researchers
changed his diet. He was soon eating
calorie-dense, processed foods that, in
his words, “just sat in my stomach”:
chicken nuggets, fries, peanut-butter-
and-jelly sandwiches. He developed
heartburn and began to feel bloated,
sluggish, and irritable.
A few days before Thanksgiving, I
entered the imposing brick building
known as the N.I.H. Clinical Center,
the world’s largest hospital dedicated
to scientific research. I crossed its cav-
ernous atrium, bought a granola bar
(organic expeller-pressed canola oil,
soy lecithin, soluble tapioca fibre) at
an in-house coffee shop, and took a
bite in the elevator. Then I followed
Emma Grindstaff, a research assistant,
to Raineri’s room.
Raineri was sitting in bed, scrolling
through his phone in pale-blue paja-
ntil recently, Guillaume Raineri, a the National Institutes of Health, in mas; biometric activity bands were
U forty-two-year-old man with a bald
head and a bushy goatee, worked as an
Bethesda, Maryland, they moved to
the U.S. The transition was something
wrapped around his waist, wrist, and
ankle. It was almost time for his daily
HVAC technician in Gonesse, a small of a shock. “The food here is differ- “resting-energy-expenditure test,” to
town about ten miles north of Paris. The ent,” he said in a heavy French accent. gauge how his metabolism was chang-
area lends its name to pain de Gonesse, “Bigger portions. Too much salt. Too ing from one diet to the next. Raineri
a bread historically made from wheat much sugar.” He decided to enroll in lay down; Grindstaff dimmed the lights
that was grown locally, milled with a a paid study at his wife’s new work- and fitted what looked like an astro-
special process, and fermented slowly place. It was exploring why the Amer- naut’s helmet around his head. By mea-
to develop flavor. The French élite once ican diet, compared with almost any suring what Raineri breathed in and
savored its crisp yet chewy crust and other, causes people to gain weight and out, a machine could approximate how
its tender, subtly sweet crumb. Raineri develop chronic diseases at such stag- many calories he was burning, and how
would occasionally grab a loaf from a gering rates. “I wanted to know what is many of those calories came from car-
boulangerie after work. He doesn’t con- good for my body,” he told me. bohydrates versus fat. (Breaking down
sider himself a foodie—“but, you know, In November, for four weeks, Raineri fat takes more oxygen than breaking
I’m French,” he told me. moved into a room that featured a nar- down carbs, and research suggests that
After Raineri’s wife got a job at row hospital bed, an austere blue recliner, people metabolize more fat on a less-
processed diet.) A monitor estimated
Studies have linked ultra-processed foods to obesity, depression, and even dementia. that he’d burn around seventeen hun-
12 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 ILLUSTRATION BY ALLAN SANDERS
dred calories if he lay in bed for the prevents food from going bad or being ultra-processed foods—and, if so, why.
rest of the day. contaminated during storage and trans- This is why participants are offered
After the test, Raineri’s extra-large port; it allows more people to eat con- such immense portions and can stop
breakfast was rolled in on a cart. Be- venient and varied meals, even when whenever they want. At one point, Ko-
cause observation can influence a per- particular foods are not in season; and zlosky pulled a tray out of a commer-
son’s eating habits, I was asked to leave. it helps the world feed a growing pop- cial refrigerator. The meal looked as
(You might skip that extra donut if ulation. Walter Willett, a Harvard pro- though it could feed a family of four:
someone’s watching.) He got to work fessor who may be the most cited nu- a tub of salad, a bowl of dressing, a con-
on a veggie omelette, tater tots, and a trition researcher in the world, argues tainer of beans, a cup of salsa, some
jug of milk that contained added fibre. that studies like Hall’s are “worse than shredded cheese, a wild-rice blend, and
worthless—they’re misleading.” (He two pitchers of seltzer. After a meal,

Isuchnentists
the past half century, nutrition sci-
have blamed health conditions
as obesity, diabetes, and heart dis-
prefers to focus on the combinations of
foods that people eat over time, and ad-
vocates for plant-based whole foods
researchers weigh each dish to see how
much has been eaten.
“Is this processed or unprocessed?”
ease on many features of the American and the Mediterranean diet.) I asked.
diet, including sugary beverages and While Raineri was having breakfast, Kozlosky smiled. “Ultra-processed,”
saturated fat. These factors surely con- I went down to a “metabolic kitchen” she said. “Lots of participants can’t tell
tribute to Americans’ uniquely poor in the basement, which looked like a the difference.”
health. But Kevin Hall, the N.I.H. chemistry lab in the back of a restau-
study’s principal investigator, was re- rant. Raineri’s lunch and dinner were he term “ultra-processed food”
searching a possible culprit that wasn’t
named until the twenty-first century:
already being prepared; chicken breasts
sizzled on a stovetop, and the smell of
T was introduced by a Brazilian
epidemiologist named Carlos Monteiro.
ultra-processed food. The problem, Hall fried potatoes made my stomach growl. In the early seventies, Monteiro was
believed, might have less to do with “A lot of chefs like to be creative,” Merel a primary-care doctor in the Ribeira
high levels of sodium or cholesterol than Kozlosky, a woman in a blue baseball Valley, an impoverished part of rural
with industrial techniques and chemi- cap who serves as the kitchen’s direc- Brazil, and he treated many plantation
cal modifications. From this perspec- tor, told me. “What we’re looking for workers with swollen bellies, stunted
tive, homemade jam on pain de Gonesse is people who’re meticulous about fol- growth, and exhaustion. He started to
would be fine; Smucker’s on Wonder lowing instructions.” think that they needed better food, in
Bread would not, even if it contained Hall and his colleagues had devel- larger quantities, more than they needed
less sugar and fat. “The thesis is that oped exacting protocols so that less- medicine. He relocated to São Paulo,
we’ve been focussing too strongly on processed meals would closely match hoping to study malnutrition. Then
the individual nutritional components ultra-processed meals in terms of nu- he learned that around a million Bra-
of food,” Hall told me. “We’re starting trients like salt, sugar, protein, and fat. zilians were growing obese each year.
to learn that processing really matters.” This was meant to isolate the effect of Strangely, a shrinking number of peo-
In recent years, dozens of studies processing. Tomato slices and lettuce ple were buying ingredients that doc-
have linked ultra-processed fare to leaves sat on a scale, which weighed food tors blamed for the obesity epidemic,
health problems such as high blood to the nearest tenth of a gram; a large such as salt, sugar, and oil. The para-
pressure and heart attacks, and also to stopwatch, for keeping track of cook- dox troubled him.
some problems that one might not ex- ing times, ticked nearby. Instructions on In the nineties, many nutrition re-
pect: cancer, anxiety, dementia, early a clipboard explained how much Pacific searchers began to turn their focus away
death. One analysis found that women Foods vegetable broth to add to soups from individual nutrients (antioxidants
who ate the most ultra-processed food A1 through E1, whose salt contents are good, saturated fat is bad) and to-
were fifty per cent more likely to be- ranged from 0.39 grams to 5.61 grams. ward broader dietary patterns. Mon-
come depressed than those who ate the I asked a tall, brown-haired cook teiro developed a theory. Households
least; another found that men who con- which diet he most likes to prepare. that bought less salt weren’t eating less
sumed more had substantially higher “Preparing a day’s worth of ultra- salt. They were no longer cooking. A
rates of colon cancer. (Most of these processed meals might take an hour,” growing share of their meals arrived in
studies controlled for confounding fac- he said. “Unprocessed meals could take a package. “The issue is not food, nor
tors such as income, physical activity, three or four times as long.” He brought nutrients, so much as processing,” he
and other medical conditions.) his knife down forcefully, cleaving a wrote in a landmark 2009 paper. Novel
A focus on a food’s level of process- carrot in two, and continued: “If I’m behavioral and brain-imaging experi-
ing can lead to odd conclusions, how- swamped, I’d rather make the ultra- ments were showing that eating wasn’t
ever. Julie Hess, a research nutritionist processed menu. But if I had to pick always under our conscious control.
at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one to eat for the rest of my life? Un- Monteiro reasoned that something very
has pointed out that “ultra-processed processed, no question.” bad had happened when industrial food
food” puts canned kidney beans and A central question of the study is systems started churning out cheap,
gummy bears into the same category. whether, consciously or unconsciously, convenient, and tempting foods. He ar-
Processing also has some benefits. It participants eat more when they’re given gued that scientists should classify foods
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 13
by their most unnatural ingredients and in a “metabolic ward” that was being trition. If the goal was to minimize pro­
by their means of production. built to study diet and exercise. Some cessing, then a diet that includes butter
Almost all our food is processed in of his early research examined meta­ might be healthier than one that in­
some way, but it matters how and how bolic changes in contestants on NBC’s cludes margarine, and one that includes
much. According to Monteiro’s NOVA “The Biggest Loser,” who’d lost drastic cane sugar might be healthier than one
Food Classification System, Group 1 amounts of weight. After the Brazilian that includes zero­calorie sweeteners.
foods are unprocessed or minimally nutritionists told him about their the­ The occasional whole egg, which con­
processed: nuts, eggs, vegetables, pasta. ory, he designed a trial that he thought tains more than half the daily recom­
Group 2 includes everyday culinary in­ would discredit it. mended dose of cholesterol, might be
gredients: sugars, oils, butter, salt. But­ In a study published in 2019, Hall preferable to packaged liquid eggs,
ter and salt your pasta, and you have a invited twenty people to spend a month which are protein­rich and sometimes
Group 3 food: processed, but not auto­ at the N.I.H. Clinical Center, where cholesterol­ and fat­free, but often con­
matically unhealthy. But add a jar of his team measured how their bodies tain preservatives and emulsifiers.
RAGÚ Alfredo sauce—with its modi­ responded to different types of food.
fied cornstarch, whey­protein concen­ (Many researchers rely instead on sur­ t’s common to think about the obe­
trate, xanthan gum, and disodium phos­
phate—and you’re biting into Group
veys of what people recall eating.) For
two weeks, participants ate a minimally
Inearly
sity epidemic, which contributes to
three million deaths around the
4 ultra­processed fare. The ingredients processed diet, mostly consisting of world every year, in terms of energy im­
of a Group 4 meal tend to be created Group 1 foods such as salmon and balance. Sometime in the middle of the
when foods are refined, bleached, hy­ brown rice; for the other two weeks, twentieth century, the story goes, we
drogenated, fractionated, or extruded— they ate an ultra­processed diet. At least started to consume more calories than
in other words, when whole foods are eighty per cent of the calories came we burned, and thus we gained weight.
broken into components or otherwise from Group 4 foods. There are good reasons to subscribe to
chemically modified. If you can’t make Hall ended up refuting his own hy­ this view; feed virtually any animal extra
it with equipment and ingredients in pothesis. When participants were on food and it will gain weight. But research
your home kitchen, it’s probably ultra­ the ultra­processed diet, they ate five has increasingly complicated the “It’s
processed. (Monteiro’s rubric did not hundred calories more per day and put the calories, stupid” model of obesity.
account for industrially farmed crops on an average of two pounds. They ate Our bodies process carbs differently from
and livestock, whose use food compa­ meals faster; their bodies secreted more fats, for instance; a calorie from corn
nies do not necessarily disclose.) insulin; their blood contained more glu­ leads your body to secrete more insulin
Monteiro’s peers were not immedi­ cose. When participants were on the than a calorie from cheese. Certain food
ately convinced. In the five years after minimally processed diet, they lost about additives seem to activate genes associ­
his 2009 paper, there were essentially two pounds. Researchers observed a rise ated with weight gain, and things like
no scientific studies linking food pro­ in levels of an appetite­suppressing hor­ weight loss and exercise can reset the
cessing to ill health. It wasn’t clear that mone and a decline in one that makes body’s metabolic rate. “The dirty little
his rubric had any more validity than us feel hungry. secret is that no one really knows what
the food pyramid, recommended di­ It wasn’t clear why ultra­processed caused the obesity epidemic,” Dariush
etary plates, or the nutrition traffic lights diets led people to eat more or what ex­ Mozaffarian, a dean at the Tufts School
that are used in the U.K. But, gradu­ actly these foods did to their bodies. of Nutrition Science and Policy, told me.
ally, scientists started to test his theory. Still, a few factors stood out. The first “It’s the biggest change to human biol­
In 2015, Hall, the N.I.H. researcher, at­ was energy density—calories per gram ogy in modern history. But we still don’t
tended a conference on obesity and of food. Dehydration, which increases have a good handle on why.” If anything,
presented research into low­fat and shelf life and lowers transport costs, Americans began consuming slightly
low­carbohydrate diets. After he left makes many ultra­processed foods fewer calories after the turn of the
the podium, some Brazilian nutrition­ (chips, jerky, pork rinds) energy­dense. twenty­first century, according to na­
ists approached him. “ ‘That’s a very The second, hyper­palatability, was a tional survey data, yet rates of obesity
twentieth­century way of thinking,’ ” focus of one of Hall’s collaborators, Tera continued to climb. (Obesity rates in the
he remembers them telling him. “ ‘The Fazzino. Evolution trained us to like U.S. may now be falling, possibly owing
problem is ultra­processed food.’” The sweet, salty, and rich foods because, on to the introduction of GLP­1 drugs such
term sounded nonsensical. Nutrition the most basic level, they help us sur­ as Ozempic, but they remain the high­
is about nutrients, he thought. What vive. Hyper­palatable foods—combi­ est in the industrialized world.)
does processing have to do with it? nations of fat and sugar, or fat and salt, Before reuniting with Raineri, I sat
Hall, who has short salt­and­pepper or salt and carbs—cater to these tastes down with Katherine Maki, a clinician
hair and often wears a lab coat, orig­ but are rare in nature. A grape is high and microbiome researcher who is work­
inally trained as a physicist. He be­ in sugar but low in fat, and I can stop ing with Hall, in the atrium. Maki leads
came fascinated with nutrition after eating after one. A slice of cheesecake what she calls the “poop squad,” which
learning to model diseases at a Sili­ is high in sugar and fat. I must eat it all. analyzes stool samples to understand
con Valley startup; while in a similar In certain areas, these findings de­ how various diets influence the bacteria
role at the N.I.H., he started working fied the logic of earlier theories of nu­ in our gut. (Such studies have been in
14 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
vogue for the past decade or so, although
it has often been difficult to figure out
the separate contributions of thousands
of kinds of bacteria and to put the stud-
ies into clinical practice.) “The foods we
eat leave a bacterial signature inside our
bodies,” Maki said. “We’re getting bet-
ter at decoding that signature.” I bit into
the remains of my granola bar.
One bacterium, B. theta, ordinarily
helps us digest fibre. But if we don’t get
enough fibre—and ninety-five per cent
of Americans don’t—it starts to feed on
mucus instead. “Think of it as eating “I take things one centimetre at a time.”
the lining of your gut,” Maki said. “Not
good from an inflammation standpoint.”
Some of the artificial sweeteners in zero-
• •
calorie sodas and “no-sugar-added” des-
serts, such as saccharin and sucralose, Highly processed diets might reduce and is widely recognized as the most
appear to shift the microbiome in ways the sensitivity of taste receptors, for ex- rigorous examination of the subject so
that impair the body’s handling of sugar. ample, which could mean that we eat far. “It got the most attention of any
The spread of the Western diet has co- more to get the same hit. Taste presum- study I’ll probably ever do,” Hall said.
incided with striking declines in micro- ably evolved to gauge the nutritional It also sparked controversy and oppo-
bial diversity. Some of our gut bacteria content of food, but ultra-processed sition. By necessity, the study was con-
have disappeared altogether. products don’t need to be nutritious to ducted in a highly artificial environ-
There are also bacteria on our skin, taste good. “With a physiological con- ment. Some of its findings might not
and they, too, can be affected by what fusion that barely makes it to the sur- have persisted; in the second week that
we eat (as well as by things like cosmet- face of our conscious experience, we find participants ate an ultra-processed diet,
ics and soaps). The skin microbiome ourselves reaching for another—search- for example, their excess calorie con-
has been linked to increasingly wide- ing for that nutrition that never arrived,” sumption started to fall.
spread conditions such as acne and ec- the physician Chris van Tulleken writes One of the largest studies of ultra-
zema. In November, a study reported in his recent book, “Ultra-Processed processed foods, led by researchers at
that ultra-processed foods may cause People.” Some scientists have proposed Harvard—including Willett, the critic
flares of psoriasis. And so, after break- “taste-bud rehab” to redirect our crav- of Hall’s study—divided ultra-processed
fast, Raineri donned a hospital gown in ings toward healthy options. foods into ten subgroups. (The study was
the Clinical Center’s dermatology wing. In the afternoon, I joined Raineri based on survey data from more than
“When was the last time you show- for a taste test. The aim was to under- two hundred thousand people, rather
ered?” a dermatologist asked him. stand how quickly his preferences than a double-digit number of people
“Yesterday at eleven,” Raineri said. shifted when his diet changed—whether in metabolic chambers.) Its conclusions
“11 A.M. or 11 P.M.?” fries and chicken tenders made his taste were more complicated than Hall’s. Two
“Ah, A.M.,” he said. buds crave more salt, for instance. Rain- types of ultra-processed foods (sugary
The dermatologist seemed satisfied eri sat down at a large table; an opaque sodas and processed meats) increased
that he was sufficiently dirty. She taped shield blocked his view of medicine people’s risk of cardiovascular disease,
several strips to his forehead and under bottles that contained various solutions but three types (breads and cold cereals,
a tattoo on his back. These would mea- of salt and sugar. A nurse poured two certain dairy products such as flavored
sure the amount of fat that his glands solutions into paper cups. Raineri yogurts, and savory snacks) seemed to
secreted on that week’s diet. Then she swished the first in his mouth, appar- decrease their risk. Another five didn’t
swabbed several body parts. I didn’t ently unperturbed, and spit it into a appear to affect it at all. “Some food
need the concept of ultra-processed bright-blue bag. But the second made additives are good, some are bad, most
foods to suspect that last week’s oily him grimace and stick his tongue out, are probably neutral,” Willett told me.
tater tots had produced the pimple on as though he were sitting through the Last month, a committee of twenty nu-
my forehead, but I wondered what other worst wine tasting ever. trition experts released its recommen-
changes they might have wrought. dations for updating the U.S. dietary
Scholars of obesity sometimes point all’s original study, which has been guidelines; it declined to endorse broad
out that since the epidemic began hu-
mans haven’t had time to evolve as a
H cited nearly two thousand times,
was the first randomized trial demon-
limits on ultra-processed foods, calling
the currently available evidence “lim-
species—our food must be to blame. strating that ultra-processed foods dis- ited,” but suggested that people avoid
This is true, but incomplete, because the rupt our metabolic health and lead peo- processed meats.
foods we consume change our biology. ple to overeat. It was hugely influential Talking to skeptics of Monteiro and
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 15
Hall, I found myself vacillating be- products in this or that way is, I think, being tried in Colombia, or market-
tween excitement about the utility of totally misguided,” Gyorgy Scrinis, who ing restrictions, which have been in-
a burgeoning theory and pessimism coined the term “nutritionism” to de- troduced in Chile.
about its seeming futility. “All of this scribe reductive, nutrient-focussed ap- Shortly after I visited the N.I.H.,
research is a colossal waste of money,” proaches to food, told me. The mak- Hall flew to London to present pre-
Alan Levinovitz, a professor at James ers of ultra-processed breakfast cereals liminary findings from the first eigh-
Madison University and the author of can describe their products as “part of teen participants in his study. He told
“Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Good- a balanced breakfast” if they add some the audience that his team was testing
ness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust fibre; Vitamin Water is marketed as a the effects of four diets: one that was
Laws, and Flawed Science,” told me. health drink even though a twenty- minimally processed and three that were
“We already know why populations are ounce bottle contains almost as much ultra-processed but varied in terms of
gaining weight: ubiquitous, cheap, de- sugar as a can of Coke. calorie density and hyper-palatability.
licious, calorie-dense foods.” He called Of course, since no previous theory “Now, the drum roll,” Hall said. The
it “appalling that we’ve turned this into has succeeded in halting or even fully audience laughed as he pulled up a
some kind of research question when explaining the obesity epidemic, we need color-coded slide.
the answer is staring us right in the new ideas. “It’s long past time that the When people were fed an ultra-
face.” He had a point; many of Mon- scientific community seriously consid- processed diet that was calorie-dense
teiro’s recommendations can arguably ered alternate hypotheses,” Mozaffar- and hyper-palatable, they ate around
be summed up with seven words from ian, the Tufts dean, told me. (He thinks a thousand calories more per day than
“In Defense of Food,” the 2008 book that ultra-processed foods have proba- they did on the minimally processed
by Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too bly contributed to rising obesity rates diet. When the team served foods
much. Mostly plants.” and suspects that biological changes— that were calorie-dense but less palat-
Even as more studies bolster Mon- such as alterations in our microbiomes, able, participants still ate about eight
teiro’s theory of ultra-processed foods, metabolisms, and epigenetics—have hundred calories more. But when the
it remains unclear whether any of them played a role, too.) Historically, there team served ultra-processed foods that
will change what we eat. People know have been separate movements against were neither calorie-dense nor hyper-
that Doritos are not so good for them, sugary sodas, fast food, and harmful ad- palatable—for example, liquid eggs, fla-
but more than a billion bags are sold ditives, but a concept like ultra-processed vored yogurt and oatmeal, turkey bacon,
in the U.S. each year. Who, exactly, foods could unify politicians, parents, and and burrito bowls with beans—people
will be moved by the knowledge that public-health professionals around a sin- ate essentially as much as they did on
salty-sweet ultra-processed foods might gle health campaign. Robert F. Kennedy, the minimally processed diet. They even
be worse than merely salty or sweet Jr., who may soon lead the U.S. Depart- lost weight. A murmur rippled through
ones? Our food environments—the ment of Health and Human Services, the crowd. Calorie density, probably the
type and quality of food that pervades has made common cause with some law- feature of food that had the biggest im-
our schools, workplaces, and neighbor- makers by railing against ultra-processed pact on our ancestors’ survival, now
hoods—influence our diets as much as food, pledging to remove it from public seemed to be among the most respon-
our tastes do. And our food environ- schools and limit the use of pesticides, sible for making us overeat. “Weight
ments are shaped by our incomes, our gain is not a necessary component of a
government’s choices, and our desire for highly ultra-processed diet,” Hall con-
convenience, as well as active manipula- cluded. He had, in a sense, refuted his
tion by the food industry, through things hypothesis again.
like marketing campaigns and lobby-
ing for agricultural subsidies. During hile reporting this story, I be-
my medical residency, I often urged
patients with diabetes or heart disease
W came obsessed with checking
nutrition labels, but I don’t think that
to eat healthy foods, only to scrounge I managed a single day without eating
my own dinner from onion rings and an ultra-processed food. I’d order a
chicken tenders in the hospital cafeteria. artificial dyes, and, perhaps more dubi- salad and the dressing would contain
Hall argues that research into ultra- ously, seed oils. “We need to stop feed- preservatives; I’d pick up a parfait and
processed foods, which make up an es- ing our children poison and start feed- would be felled by a sweetener in the
timated two-thirds of the American ing them real, wholesome food again,” granola. My own medical tests border
diet, could prove useful to the very com- he posted on X in November. (Ken- on prediabetes, and I try to cook healthy
panies that manufacture them. “Indus- nedy’s collaborators will need to nav- dinners for my three kids. But I often
try is just as happy to sell you a healthy igate his thicket of unfounded claims acquiesce to their demands for pizza,
version as an unhealthy one,” he told about viruses, vaccines, and wellness saving myself not only time but nego-
me. But Big Food is adept at contort- fads.) Some experts want to eliminate tiations over every broccoli floret (eat
ing nutrition science to promote its agricultural subsidies for corn and soy; four if you’re four, two if you’re two,
products. “The idea that you’re going others have advocated for a tax target- and so on). With fries, I have to nego-
to get companies to reëngineer their ing ultra-processed products, which is tiate with them to stop. In the mo-
16 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
ment, these concessions feel inescap- salt, fat, cholesterol—Nestle’s father died
able and inconsequential. Afterward, of a heart attack. In the late seventies, a
while sitting up in bed with reflux, I Senate committee led by George Mc-
worry about the example I’m setting Govern issued a report calling on peo-
and resolve, again, to do better. ple to consume less dairy and red meat.
On a warm November afternoon, at But, after blowback from industry, the
a cozy French café in lower Manhat- guidance was reworked to emphasize
tan, I met up with a person who, I hoped, nutrients (in this case, saturated fats)
might restore a sense of perspective. instead of foods. “Eating less is very
Marion Nestle, a towering figure in bad for business,” Nestle said. She ar-
American nutrition, is a molecular bi- gues that this act of appeasement cast
ologist and nutritionist who started the a long shadow. “Even today, when peo-
country’s first academic food-studies ple talk about what we need to eat more
program, at N.Y.U., helping to bring of, they talk about food,” she said, her
attention to the roles that culture, cap- voice rising. “But when they talk about
italism, and politics play in what and what we need to eat less of, they switch
how much we eat. (She pronounces her to nutrients!” She pounded the table; a
last name like the verb, not the world’s couple seated next to us glanced over.
largest food-and-beverage company.) How nutrients find their way into
Now in her late eighties, she bounded our bodies matters. Sugar in Skittles
up the stairs to the café entrance, her isn’t the same as sugar in strawberries;
curly gray hair bobbing. At the counter, fish oil in a capsule isn’t fish oil in a
she ordered black tea with whole milk; fish. The third era of nutrition has con-
I got a drip coffee and, as a provoca- sidered dietary patterns more holisti-
tion, a large chocolate-chip cookie. cally. We talk more of the Mediterra-
We sat down at a table, and I placed nean diet and less about the fat in olive
the cookie on a napkin. “Pretty ultra- oil. Nestle believes that Monteiro and
processed, right?” I said. Hall have revolutionized the field by
“Butter, sugar, flour, eggs,” she said. narrowing in on what about our diets
“Actually, I think it’s probably O.K.” leads us to overeat. The theory of ultra-
She broke off a piece and popped it into processed foods “has some frayed edges,”
her mouth. (In other ways, she noted, she told me, but it offers ordinary peo-
cookies are not exactly healthy.) ple a practical way to make decisions
“You’ve got to understand how we about what to eat. “As an organizing
got here,” Nestle said, launching into a principle, it’s invaluable.”
monologue about the evolution of nu- Nestle and I took a sunset stroll, past
trition science. In her telling, the first a street vender selling hot dogs (beef,
era began in the early twentieth cen- salt, sorbitol, potassium lactate), to a
tury, after the discovery of vitamins. nearby grocery store. She jabbed her
During the Second World War, U.S. finger at the nutrition label on a bright-
military leaders were alarmed that many green box of Apple Jacks. “This is where
recruits, having grown up during the it starts,” she told me. “Hydrogenated
Great Depression, couldn’t join the war coconut, modified food starch, degermi-
effort because of conditions caused by nated yellow corn flour, yellow six, red
a lack of nutrients, such as rickets, scurvy, forty, blue one.” She shook her head
anemia, and tooth decay. “That came and said, “Yuck, yuck, yuck! This is what
as a shock, and the military became we’re feeding our kids.”
heavily concerned with nutrition,” she She lifted up a box of Shredded
said. It partnered with the National Wheat. “Now this is the good stuff,” she
Academy of Sciences and the National said. There were two ingredients: whole-
Research Council, which together pub- grain wheat and wheat bran. “I sprin-
lished the first recommended dietary kle a little sugar over it,” she confided
allowances for various nutrients. with a wink. “That way I get to control
Nestle sipped her tea. The second era how much sugar I’m eating—not some
began in the years after the war, she said, corporation.”
when heart disease was emerging as a In the dairy section, Nestle com-
leading killer. In the mid-twentieth cen- pared a whole-fat yogurt (milk, bacte-
tury, around the time that scientists were rial cultures) with a low-fat version
identifying plausible dietary culprits— (milk, bacterial cultures, cornstarch, and
pectin, among other things), whose the smell of his grandmother’s focaccia, heavily processed beans, and cornstarch.
emulsifiers and thickeners improved which he’d dip in steaming tomato Still, the company limits processing by
creaminess and mouthfeel. “See, it can sauce; he later worked at Union Square cooking and immediately freezing pas-
be tricky,” she said. It hadn’t occurred Café. “I still want to make dishes that tas, minimizing the use of additives,
to me that yogurt with more fat could feel like you just ordered them at a fancy and avoiding hydrogenated oils. When
be healthier than yogurt with less. Still, restaurant,” he told me. I described the factory to Nestle, she
Nestle told me, “it matters how ‘ultra’ I followed LaRocca to a part of the said, “Industrial alone does not an ultra-
the ultra-processing is. This yogurt will factory that was producing beef ravioli processed food make. It has to have the
never be a bag of Doritos.” The former for the day. Before entering, we donned purpose of replacing real food . . . and,
was food—it retained the links between hairnets, safety glasses, and disposable usually, to be loaded with additives.”
taste and nutrients which our bodies gowns that reminded me of the early (This doesn’t mean that frozen stuffed
evolved to expect—with some additives. days of the COVID pandemic. I washed pasta—with its high levels of saturated
The latter (corn, vegetable oil, malto- my hands, stomped my feet in white fat, cholesterol, and sodium—should be
dextrin, a string of flavorings and other disinfectant powder, and entered a room eaten for every meal.)
additives) seemed to be substantially that roared like a tarmac. Next door, workers were making the
made up of industrial ingredients and Enormous silver machines glinted sauce for macaroni and cheese. Forty-
only partly made of food. under fluorescent lights. Workers milled pound blocks of Romano cheese sat on
On our way out, we stopped by the about with clipboards and what looked a pallet like bricks. Each one had a bar
bread aisle, and Nestle noted that many like hardhats, as though they were mak- code and would be grated only after a
whole-wheat breads, including a brand ing Toyotas rather than tortellini. A maze work order had been placed. “Pre-
that I’d recently started buying, were of metal pipes crisscrossed overhead, and shredded cheese spoils faster,” LaRocca
ultra-processed. Some used highly pro- LaRocca pointed to one of them, which said. “This way we can avoid preserva-
cessed flours that are cheaper and easier terminated in a car-size funnel that hung tives.” A man pushed a buggy full of
to work with, but are stripped of nutri- from the ceiling. “That’s pumping in grated cheese onto a scale. It appeared
ents such as fibre and minerals. I thought flour from the silos outside,” he explained to clock in at the right weight.
about something that Willett, the Har- over the din. We climbed up to a plat- “It’s not exactly classic Italian,” La-
vard professor, had told me. He and sev- form to get a better look. Rocca admitted. “But people love it.”
eral of his colleagues enjoy the same kind The cone was dumping enriched In another room, LaRocca used both
of whole-grain bread from Trader Joe’s. semolina f lour into a gigantic tank. hands to lift the lid from a cauldron that
“It’s made in a factory,” he’d said. “It’s Thick hoses piped in water and eggs. stretched ten feet into the air. Steam
ultra-processed. But to say it’s unhealthy Dough exited onto a blue conveyor belt; misted off a bubbling yellow lava; a but-
just because of that is frankly ridiculous.” a sheeter pressed it into a three-foot- tery aroma filled my nostrils. “We add
“It’s perfectly possible to make bread wide carpet. Then a metal mold called Asiago,” LaRocca said. “Gives it a nice
that isn’t ultra-processed,” Nestle told a pasta die determined the shape of the aged note.” The vat piped its contents
me. “But it doesn’t last as long.” She ravioli: square, circle, half-moon. Finally, into a sort of vending machine for bags
read from the label of a healthy-looking a piston pumped rhythmically up and of sizzling cheese sauce, which passed
loaf. “DATEM!” she declared, referring down, topping the carpet with dollops through chilled water and into contain-
to diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- of ground beef. Seviroli’s pasta was pro- ers the size of dining tables. A forklift
and diglycerides of fatty acids, an emul- cessed—it probably had to be, to meet ferried some away. I was a little unset-
sifier that helps bread maintain its struc- the punishing scale and cost demands tled, but also astonished. Seviroli pro-
ture. “Forget about it.” of a competitive market. I was trying to duced a nearly unfathomable amount
decide whether it also earned an “ultra.” of food at modest prices—a pound of
few weeks later, I drove an hour and “The price we charge depends on how spinach ravioli goes for six bucks—
A a half east from Manhattan to the
headquarters of Seviroli Foods, one of the
thin the shell is and how much filling is
inside,” LaRocca told me. “The more
with reasonably high-quality ingredi-
ents. It seemed to exist on the bound-
largest pasta manufacturers in the world. delicate or unique the shape, and the ary between ordinarily processed and
Seviroli produces more than seventy-five higher the fill rate, the more it’ll cost ultra-processed, and it made me think
million pounds each year and specializes you.” I watched ravioli slide into a hor- that there was a middle way—one that,
in stuffed pastas such as ravioli and tor- izontal cylinder, where it would be within the practical and economic re-
tellini. Its factory encompasses an en- cooked. Lastly, it was shaken dry and alities of modern society, could keep
tire city block, with separate buildings passed into a freezer that was the size of people fed without making them sick.
devoted to pastas and sauces. a studio apartment. In the forty minutes Back in LaRocca’s kitchen, he fixed
When I arrived, Franco LaRocca, a that the process lasted, the company had me a plate. The macaroni was al dente;
gregarious man who works as the com- made about six thousand pounds of pasta. the creamy cheese melted in my mouth.
pany’s corporate chef and vice-president You could find features of ultra- I finished it quickly but refrained from
of research and development, told me processing if you looked: Seviroli’s cheese asking for more.
that his parents migrated from south- ravioli, for example, is mostly ricotta and “It’s good!” I told him.
ern Italy to Brooklyn in the early sev- enriched semolina flour, but it also con- “Yeah,” he said. “But my daughter
enties. Growing up, he often awoke to tains guar gum, a stabilizer made from prefers Kraft.” 
18 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
 artist, and name of the album that the
SHOUTS & MURMURS song is from.

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THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 19
 Another editor wrote,“While the writ-
LIFE AND LETTERS ing is really great and Anna was a very
likable heroine, I worry that there are
not enough new and different elements
LOVE AND THEFT to the story here that would set it apart
from the rest of the novels in the com-
Did a best-selling romantasy novelist steal another writer’s story? petitive paranormal/romance/YA mar-
ket.” By March, 2014, all but one of the
BY KATY WALDMAN publishers had rejected the book, and
Kim and Freeman parted ways. Free-
man withdrew her outstanding submis-
sion from the final publisher, a press
called Entangled.
In 2021, Freeman and her son, now
a senior in high school, stopped at a
bookstore in Santa Barbara on the way
to receive their COVID vaccinations.
Freeman, lingering in the young-adult
section, picked out a book called “Crave,”
by the author Tracy Wolff. She liked
the cover: black with a large, blood-
stained white flower in the center. It re-
minded her of “Twilight.” By the time
she got home, she was already noticing
muscle pain and fever from the vaccine.
She began reading the novel, which was
published by Entangled, and experi-
enced a panic attack, the first she’d had
in five years.
Freeman immediately spotted simi-
larities to her own unpublished book.
The main character was named Grace,
not Anna, and her love interest was a
vampire, not a werewolf, but in both
stories the heroine moves from San
Diego to Alaska after members of her
family are killed in an accident. She lives
Romantasy’s reliance on standardized tropes poses a copyright challenge. with the only two relatives she believes
she has left, both of whom are witches.
n the autumn of 2010, Lynne Free- A few months after she’d finished, A female rival slips her drugs. There’s
Iunpublished
man, a family-law attorney and an
author, put the final touches
in December, 2010, Freeman signed with
an agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, the founder
an intimate moment under the north-
ern lights. In a climactic scene, an evil
on her first novel, “Blue Moon Rising.” of Prospect Agency, a small firm based vampire kidnaps her, and she ends up
The story revolved around a teen-age out of Kim’s home, in New Jersey. Kim, accidentally freeing a different vampire,
girl named Anna who falls in love with a slight woman with a youthful aura and whose return is said to herald the end
a werewolf and learns that she has mag- a bright, clenched smile, struck Free- of the world. (In Freeman’s planned se-
ical powers. It was a fantasy, but it drew man as a kindred spirit—she’d launched quel and Wolff’s actual ones, this vam-
on Freeman’s own experiences growing her own business, just as Freeman had, pire replaces the previous hero as the
up in Alaska. For years, Freeman had and she’d even brief ly attended law main character’s primary love interest.)
been fiddling with the material, imag- school. For the next three years, Free- In addition to what Freeman felt
ining and reimagining characters, re- man and Kim worked together to ex- to be the books’ obvious similarities,
visiting childhood memories. She even pand and refine the manuscript. “Crave,” to her mind, contained details
dreamed about the idea, and kept notes Kim sent pitches of “Blue Moon Ris- that could only have come from her,
on it in a shoebox in her bedroom. In ing” to more than a dozen publishers. from her life. The novel’s opening scene
2002, after becoming pregnant with The results were discouraging. “I thought describes flying in a puddle jumper above
twins, Freeman lost one of the babies the writing, the storytelling, in this the Alaskan landscape. Freeman’s grand-
and gave birth prematurely. Long nights manuscript was simply wonderful,” one father had been a bush pilot: she recalls
lay ahead. She spent them caring for e-mail read, but “we are . . . looking for reminiscing to Kim about what it had
her son and working on her book. things that fall into a newer territory.” been like to go up in his tiny plane. A
20 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 ILLUSTRATION BY MARIA FEDOSEEVA
fantastical chessboard figures early on popularity, offering escape to readers ing, and when I went over the edge the
in “Crave”; a wall-size painting of a fan- stuck at home, often with company that next time, he roared and went with me.”)
tastical chessboard hangs in Freeman’s was harder to view as enchanting under Love scenes in the later books went fur-
office. Wolff’s heroine is revealed to be the circumstances. “The genre really ca- ther, often adding anatomical specific-
a gargoyle. Freeman collects gargoyles— ters to this perspective of, ‘If your life ity. In 2020, Maas’s publishers changed
they guarded the path to the front door were going to be different, if you were up their marketing strategy, causing the
of her former home. plucked out of this reality, what would series to be rehomed in the adult sec-
A Google search revealed that Tracy your dream reality be?,’” Emily Forney, tion. “It birthed this genre of roman-
Wolff was a nom de plume for Tracy an agent who works with young-adult tasy,” Cassandra Clare, the author of the
Deebs, a star client of Freeman’s former and fantasy authors, told me. Roman- best-selling fantasy series “The Mortal
agent, Emily Sylvan Kim. Kim had in- tasy sells a lightly transgressive form of Instruments,” told me, “which to me is
troduced Freeman and Deebs at a Ro- wish fulfillment that holds out the en- books that contain a lot of the tropes
mance Writers of America conference thralling promise of sex with vampires, that make Y.A. popular but also have
in 2012. (Wolff and Kim claim to have manticores, werewolves, and other types explicit sex in them.”
no recollection of this meeting.) The of monsters and shape-shifters. (There’s In some respects, romantasy has the
name Stacy Abrams, which appeared in even a “cheese-shifter” paranormal ro- feel of young people’s literature. The
the acknowledgments section of Wolff’s mance, by the author Ellen Mint, in themes are Pixar-coded—forgiveness,
book, was another pinprick. Abrams was which characters can turn into differ- compassion, overcoming adversity, cel-
the editor who had fielded Freeman’s ent types of cheese.) ebrating difference—with a swoosh of
book submission at Entangled. Freeman In the past several years, the genre has black eyeliner. Cat Clyne, an editor at
grew convinced that Kim and Liz Pel- attained a remarkable fandom. Print sales the Harlequin imprint Canary Street
letier, the publisher and C.E.O. of En- of romance novels more than doubled Press, described the genre as more wel-
tangled, had shared the manuscript of between 2020 and 2023. Meanwhile, the coming than twentieth-century fantasy,
“Blue Moon Rising” with Wolff and used number of romance-focussed bookstores which many readers now see as sexist.
it as the basis for the “Crave” series. in the United States, with whimsical Romantasy “is emotion-positive—it’s
On February 7, 2022, Freeman, who names such as the Ripped Bodice and about communication and falling in love,”
had hired a lawyer, sent a letter threat- Beauty and the Book, has swelled from she told me. “There’s less emphasis on
ening legal action to Kim, Wolff, Entan- two to more than twenty. Romantasy is world-building” and more on represent-
gled, the company’s distributor Macmil- helping to drive that boom. Publishers ing “strong female characters.”
lan, and Universal Studios, which had Weekly reported in October that five of Despite the genre’s egalitarian spirit,
optioned a film project based on the the ten top-selling adult books of 2024 the most prominent romantasy authors
“Crave” books. “I really assumed that were written either by Maas or by her are white. A reductive but not entirely
they would just apologize and fix it,” fellow romantasy icon Rebecca Yarros: spurious industry archetype has emerged,
Freeman said. But, two days later, the the authors, combined, had sold more of temperamentally if not politically con-
Entangled counsel issued an icy response than 3.65 million copies of their novels servative women, often mothers, who
stating that “neither Pelletier nor Wolff in the first nine months of the year. A find in their writing a means to success
ever heard of Freeman, read her ten-year National Endowment for the Arts sur- outside a traditional career path. “Twi-
old manuscript nor were aware of any vey found that the number of Ameri- light,” the precursor to today’s paranor-
details concerning the Freeman work.” cans who reported finishing a single book mal-romance novels, transformed Ste-
The attorney added, “The agent, Kim, in a year declined about six per cent be- phenie Meyer, a Mormon stay-at-home
recalls nothing of this manuscript.” Free- tween 2012 and 2022, but romantasy’s mother of three, into a millionaire. Yar-
man’s allegations were “speculative, un- mostly female readers seem exempt from ros is a mother of six and a military spouse
founded, and easily rebutted as fanciful.” that downturn. They gather at midnight who began writing when her husband
A month later, Freeman filed a copyright- release parties and ardently break down was deployed to Afghanistan. Like Free-
infringement lawsuit. The litigation, their favorite titles on BookTok, a liter- man, Wolff first attempted commercial
which is ongoing, has cost Freeman sev- ary alcove of TikTok, where the hashtag fiction after her son was born prema-
eral hundred thousand dollars and the for Maas’s series, #ACOTAR, has earned turely. Between 2007 and 2018, she pub-
defendants more than a million dollars. more than a billion views. lished more than sixty romance, urban-
Many of these readers are millen- fantasy, and young-adult novels, but
he “Crave” series belongs to a pow- nials who grew up on “Harry Potter” it was not until she wrote a vampire-
T erhouse genre known as “roman-
tasy”—romance plus fantasy. Stories
and “Twilight” and expected more of
the same once adulthood struck. Maas
gargoyle love story that she shot to the
top of the New York Times best-seller
have mingled love and magic for cen- was among the first to acknowledge the list. In April of 2024, Publishers Weekly
turies, but the portmanteau crystallized sexual maturation of her audience. Al- reported that the six-volume “Crave” se-
as a market category during the pan- though “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” ries had sold more than three and a half
demic. Works such as Sarah J. Maas’s published in 2015, featured mild erotic million copies worldwide.
novel “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” content by romance standards, it was All genre fiction (and arguably all fic-
about a nineteen-year-old girl who falls far steamier than most Y.A. (“We moved tion) is patterned on tropes, or received
in love with a fae high lord, surged in together, unending and wild and burn- bits of narrative. But tropes have assumed
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 21
a new importance in the creation and villain) are not legally protectable, al- court; a second suit Ellis filed against
marketing of romantasy. On BookTok, though their selection and arrange- Cain was dismissed.)
users sort and tag titles by trope (#mor- ment might be. The wild proliferation Freeman’s suit rests on hundreds of
allygreymen, #reverseharem, #daggerto- of intensely derivative romantasies has similarities, compiled by Freeman and
thethroat), allowing authors to tune their complicated this picture. The worlds her lawyers, between her own manu-
creative process to the story elements of romance and fantasy have been so scripts and notes and the “Crave” series.
that are getting the most attention on- thoroughly balkanized, the production Taken one by one, few examples seem
line. Entangled, “Crave”’s publisher, gives of content so accelerated, that what one to rise to the level of infringement. The
visitors to its Web site the option to might assume to be tropes—falling in Alaskan setting, which Freeman saw as
browse its selection by tropes such as love with a werewolf or vampire, say— her intellectual property, is surprisingly
“enemies-to-lovers” and “marriage of con- are actually subgenres. Tropes operate common: Pelletier estimates that about
venience.” Entangled editors fill out a at an even more granular level (bounty- ninety-five per cent of vampire novels
form for every work they acquire; on the hunter werewolves, space vampires). take place in Alaska, New Orleans, or
version of the form I viewed, there were And the more specific the trope, the Las Vegas. Gargoyles have joined the
fields in which to specify “tropes,” “para- harder it is to argue that such a thing menagerie of trendy paranormals, owing
normal elements,” “authors similar to,” as an original detail exists. For example, to the “Dark Elements” series, by Jen-
“Heat level” (on a five-point scale from the “dark paranormal romance” subgenre nifer L. Armentrout. Small-plane pi-
“mild” to “scorcher”), and the ratio of ro- mandates physical injury and a brooding, lots are standard issue for romance, a
mance to suspense (from a maximum of inhuman male lead. In 2018, the author genre that loves a man in uniform, and
100/0 to a minimum of 20/80). Addison Cain filed a takedown notice it goes without saying that trysts under
Romantasy’s reliance on tropes poses against the author Zoey Ellis, accus- the aurora borealis are de rigueur. (One
a challenge for questions of copyright. ing her of ripping off Cain’s lupine so- novel memorably features a hunky phy-
Traditionally, the law protects the orig- ciety of aggressive Alphas and submis- sician’s assistant who pleasures the her-
inal expression of ideas, not the ideas sive Omegas. Ellis sued Cain and her oine as “a brigade of ghostly rainbows
themselves. A doctrine named for the then publisher Blushing Books, argu- jostled in the northern sky.”)
French phrase scènes à faire, or “scenes ing that she and Cain were both prac- Other similarities are harder to ex-
that must be done,” holds that the ticing the subgenre of “wolf-kink erot- plain away. In both books, the heroine’s
standard elements of a genre (such as ica,” which is based on open-source fan parents bind her powers with tea; the
a showdown between the hero and the fiction. (Blushing Books settled out of male lead is guilty and grief-stricken
over his older brother’s murder. I scoffed
when I saw that Freeman’s side had
listed “shining white courts” as a simi-
larity, referring to the fact that, in both
works, the heroine is brought to a mar-
ble building with white columns. But
the court scenes have more than archi-
tecture in common. In each, the main
character is transported to a timeless
place presided over by a green-eyed
woman. The heroine feels a sense of be-
longing; she is told that this is the home
of her ancestors. In Wolff’s version of
the scene, there are “thick white can-
dles burning in gold candelabras.” In
Freeman’s, there are “candles flickering
to life in all of the wall sconces.” You
can’t copyright candles any more than
you can copyright marble, or ancestors,
or green-eyed women. But the compo-
sition of these details, the totality of how
the obvious or ordinary beats are strung
together in each, is startling.
To show copyright infringement,
Freeman will have to demonstrate that
“actual copying” occurred and that the
two texts are “substantially similar.” Be-
cause plaintiffs can rarely provide direct
“ Your grandpa’s dead. But it’s reassuring to know he’s evidence of copying, the law allows them
somewhere up there, in that ceiling light.” to prove it circumstantially, by establish-
ing that the defendant had “access” to to be how you want it in a time frame her attorney, that, “unlike some other
the allegedly infringed-upon work, ei- that’s pretty much impossible.”The same traditional publishers, Entangled tends
ther firsthand or through an intermedi- conditions that promote speed can also to work more with its authors at the
ary. A problem for Freeman is that none foster “a pressure toward clickbait,” she ideation stage to try to organically bake
of the 41,569 documents that the defen- added. Authors identify the most irre- in a high concept.” “Crave,” according
dants were compelled to hand over make sistible tropes and reproduce them as ef- to the defense counsel, was “a collabo-
any mention of “Blue Moon Rising.” ficiently as possible. The book blogger rative project with Pelletier providing
And Pelletier and Wolff both assert that and author Jenny Trout told me that, to Wolff in writing the main plot, lo-
they never saw Freeman’s novel or dis- “in romantasy, copycats are common- cation, characters, and scenes, and ac-
cussed it with anyone. Without direct place. Authors are giving the people what tively participating in the editing and
proof of access, Freeman will have to writing process.” On the phone, Pel-
take the weaker position that Wolff had letier, a former software engineer, in-
a “reasonable possibility” of viewing the sisted that her approach isn’t particu-
manuscripts, given her relationship with larly different from those of “publishers
Kim. Another problem for Freeman is in New York.” (Entangled has no phys-
“substantial similarity” itself, a notori- ical office; Pelletier operates out of Aus-
ously slippery standard located some- tin.)“They do the same thing,” she told
where between works that raise suspi- me. “I’ve just been very successful at it.”
cions of copying (probative similarity) Opinion on Pelletier in the industry
and works that are almost identical to is divided. Publishers Weekly named her
other works (striking similarity). The they want, but it’s also like you’re read- its 2024 Person of the Year, citing her
defendants argue that the two books feel ing the same book over and over again.” “out-of-the-box” thinking. The agent
extraordinarily different in tone, pacing, To stand out, Entangled combines a Beth Davey called her “a visionary,
voice, and style. And “if they feel differ- careful attention to the physical look brilliant marketer.” Trout, the author
ent,” Pelletier told me, “then they are.” and feel of its novels—its deluxe edi- and blogger, described Pelletier as
tions, with adornments such as foil and “shady” and characterized Entangled as

Ihownhappily
romance, the heroine’s H.E.A., or
ever after, often depends on
smoothly she can adapt to a new
stencilled edges, pop on Bookstagram—
with a strategic, at times unconventional
production process. The house accepts
“a Mickey Mouse operation” pushing
“nice, nonpolitical white ladies who are
good at being pretty in photos and build-
situation. The same might be said for manuscripts from authors with a clear ing parasocial relationships online.” One
publishers of romantasy, who have had concept of what they want to write, but of the more than fifteen writers I spoke
to adjust to an unruly landscape of self- it also works collaboratively on special to for this piece told me that she’d met
publishing that is adjacent to, and in- projects, in which “we are invited into with Pelletier to discuss her finished
creasingly competitive with, mainstream the author’s process from day zero and book, but that Pelletier had urged her
publishing. The reigning principles of continue in that spirit throughout edit- to develop an entirely different, as yet
this indie world are “more” and “faster.” ing,” Pelletier told Publishers Weekly. En- unwritten, story idea, complaining that
Because Amazon’s search algorithm tangled’s biggest romantasy titles, in- “the problem with traditional publish-
appears to favor writers with larger cluding Yarros’s “Empyrean” series, now ing is that they just let writers write what-
backlists, there’s an incentive to flood come from its Red Tower imprint, whose ever they want, and they don’t even think
the platform with titles—and to pad model falls somewhere between that of about what the TikTok hashtag is going
those titles with as many pages as pos- a book packager and that of a traditional to be.” (Through her attorney, Pelletier
sible, as Kindle Unlimited distributes publisher. Book packagers assign teams said she didn’t recall any such conversa-
royalties to the creators with the high- of writers and editors to create content tion and that “Entangled doesn’t rely
est number of pages read. (This has for an outside client, who can request heavily on hashtags when marketing
spawned an epidemic of “page-stuffing,” specific elements, such as “the fae” or books on TikTok.”)
in which authors load their novels with “hockey-themed romance.” Often, the Buried within Pelletier’s deposition
bonus material; authors have also been writers receive a flat fee for their work testimony is an origin story for “Crave.”
accused of using bots to artificially in- (“work for hire”), sign over their I.P. Toward the end of the twenty-tens, she
flate their reader tally.) rights, and are not entitled to royalties. decided that the time had come for a
Although many of the romantasy Packaged titles are relatively safe bets vampire renaissance. A decade had
agents, writers, and editors I spoke to for publishers, offering agility and re- passed since the “Twilight” movies, and
were not concerned about the field’s sponsiveness to subtle changes in mar- she’d read that fads take about ten years
frenetic pace, a few felt that it could be ket demand. Still, many houses want to to cycle back around. She’d also heard
overwhelming. “I think it puts authors avoid the perception of either working that teen-age readers weren’t finding
in an impossible position,” the award- with packagers or packaging themselves, the current wave of paranormal hero-
winning fantasy novelist Holly Black so as to attract prestigious authors and ines relatable enough: the characters
told me. “No one wants to cut corners dodge accusations of predatory contracts. were too sure of themselves, too perfect.
on quality, and so you have to do this Pelletier denies engaging in book Pelletier, whose colleagues describe her
kind of heroic thing to get your book packaging, but acknowledged, through as a gifted trendspotter, wanted a “fish
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 23
out of water” story, one that thrust an in April, 2020. A sequel, “Crush,” fol- child who has panic attacks stemming
ordinary girl into a rarefied world. lowed in September, 2020, and two more, from the loss of her parents. “I was ab-
Early in 2019, an Entangled au- “Covet” and “Court,” appeared in March, solutely channelling some of my own
thor was unable to deliver her book as 2021, and February, 2022. (During her past,” Wolff told me. Her present was
planned, leaving a gap in the schedule. deposition, Wolff explained that she impinging, too. She was falling in love
Wolff and Kim both recalled Pelletier wanted each title to evoke love, a state- with her current partner while she was
needing a writer who could produce ment that confused the lawyer, who asked, writing “Crave”; she suspects that some
good work at a sprint. Wolff is “one “What does court have to do with love?”) of her elation soaked into the story.
of the fastest, but not the fastest writer Entangled was motivated to push the In the “Crave” series, Grace speaks
I’ve ever worked with,” Pelletier said to sequels out swiftly because COVID was in a knowing, casual, Avengers-inflected
me. Abrams reached out to Wolff, who catalyzing book sales. Correspondence tone. Referring to her gargoyle nature,
responded with five pitches, the sec- among Kim, Pelletier, Abrams, and Wolff she says, “I sleep like a stone—pun to-
ond of which featured a sexy, degener- suggests that, in the hectic days and hours tally intended.” Facing down an abom-
ate teen-age monster and a straitlaced before a book deadline, an already col- inable beast: “Yep, we’re all going to
scholarship student. With Abrams as laborative creative process could become die.” The series renders the potentially
an occasional intermediary, Pelletier and an all-out emergency. It was sometimes odd and inward aspects of fantasy sal-
Wolff hammered out a basic story shape. hard to tell who added what. “Love ‘our able—paranormals are just like con-
At the time, Wolff was regaining her tree of trust is just a twig’ did you write temporary humans, with familiar psy-
footing after a difficult period. Her that?” Kim texted Pelletier, about a line chologies, politics, and value systems.
twenty-year marriage had fallen apart in “Crush.” Referring to a different line, They even like the same Top Forty pop
a few years earlier, and divorce was not Pelletier said, “I wrote that sentence, but songs. World-building details, such as
ideal for an author trying to convert I was using Tracy’s voice.” And: “I came the logistics of being a vampire, are left
fantasies of romantic bliss into rent and up with every header but the first chap- unexplained. Dénouements can feel
groceries. Wolff had written paranor- ter lol.” While closing “Court,” which duct-taped together, with jarring omis-
mal fiction before, but love stories were was on a particularly tight schedule, au- sions and convoluted exposition. In the
her O.T.P., her one true pairing. She thor, editor, and agent supplied sentences course of the series, characters learn
was nervous about jumping into the and ideas, all of which swirled together never to underestimate themselves; they
vampire tradition. “I didn’t think I had in the various documents being updated grasp the importance of empathy, for-
anything new to bring to the table,” she in tandem on each of their laptops. Pel- giveness, and friendship; they manifest
told the podcaster Hank Garner in 2020. letier asked Kim, “Tracy wrote that prolific and appealing forms of femi-
But her doubts lifted when the series’ moonstone description?” Kim texted nine power. Most vivid by far are the
heroine, Grace, popped into her head Abrams, “Tracy and I are team speed sex scenes. “Tracy is a romance writer
and started talking. “She was funnier writing new scenes,” and “I’ve stopped at heart,” Pelletier told me.
than I expected,” Wolff told Garner— copy editing because I helped write all Freeman’s manuscript is quieter, more
witty, spirited, a bit sarcastic. In a Q.&A. this.” (The defense said that Kim’s con- internal. Unlike Wolff, she always knew
with the Nerd Daily, Wolff said, “I ac- tribution “was extremely limited and was that fantasy was her genre. She’d im-
tually identify a lot with the heroine, entirely technical.”) mersed herself in Tolkien growing up,
Grace. There’s a lot of me in her, in- Wolff seems to find value in a more and she used to imagine that the peo-
cluding the snarky sense of humor— coöperative workflow. She described her- ple walking around Anchorage were
especially when things get bad.” self to Garner as “one of those weird . . . deer shifters or veela, long-haired maid-
The process of putting out “Crave” very rare extrovert authors” who “loves ens who called down storms from the
was chaotic. Wolff wrote a rough draft to go on writers’ retreats and loves to sky. She wanted her novel to be as awash
in two months, from May to June of meet up at, you know, Barnes & Noble in mysterious possibility as her adoles-
2019, but Pelletier didn’t start editing in and write with their friends.” Like Wolff, cence had been. Her book’s posture to-
earnest until December, several weeks Grace is a team player, the center of a ward the natural world is one of re-
before the book was scheduled to go to big ensemble cast. There are also nur- spectful awe; reading it, you sense a
press. “My editor had a couple of other turing Macy, the “cheerleader” of the deeply ingrained isolation.
projects that she was working on,” Wolff crew, and tough-as-nails Eden. Wolff In “Blue Moon Rising,” Anna is reel-
recalled on Garner’s podcast, “and then told me that she wanted to use her novel ing from the sudden loss of her father
when she came back, she was, like, ‘This to “talk about feminine strength in all and his parents. This struggle is drawn
is good, but’”—Wolff’s voice sped up as its forms.” Her female characters “build from Freeman’s life. When she was four
if to simulate a torrent of feedback—“ ‘you the life that they want, not on the shoul- and a half, she and her mother returned
need to change this, you need to change ders of others, but with others.” from a trip out of state to a completely
this . . . you need to add that.’” The pair bare apartment. Her father had left,
of them revised the manuscript, adding olff is an only child. Her father forcing a split between Freeman and
about fifty thousand words in a week
and a half. Wolff said, “We were so ex-
W died unexpectedly when she
was twenty-two; a few months later,
the paternal side of her family. “I wanted
to write about a heroine who has tre-
hausted . . . the two of us by the end were she suffered her first panic attack. Grace, mendous courage because she has panic
blithering idiots.” The novel came out the “Crave” heroine, is also an only attacks from loss,” Freeman told me.
24 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
“She thinks about loss all the time. It’s
a thorn in her heart.” Shadowy father
figures loom over the story. In one ver-
sion of the manuscript, Anna’s father
is a wise werewolf. In another, he is a
cruel vampire prince.
The female characters are foils and
antagonists to the heroine. Anna feels
judged by her childhood friends: they’ve
been “acting moody and unpredictable,”
she narrates in one draft. “I felt con-
stantly on edge with them.” At home,
the most dramatic conflicts unfold be-
tween Anna and her mother, Marche-
line, who can be warm and loving but
also “controlling,” “obsessive,” “crazed,”
and occasionally violent. “It’s like M is
schizophrenic with her,” Freeman wrote
in one e-mail to Kim, after they had al-
ready been going back and forth about
the manuscript for six months. “Nice
one moment and shredding her ego to
bits in the next.”
Part of the reason Freeman was
drawn to Kim as an agent, at least ini-
tially, was that she seemed to respect
the uniqueness of Freeman’s vision. Ac-
cording to Freeman, Kim praised her
unusual writing voice, which blended
dreamlike imagery with wry humor. “What kind of tea? Oh, whatever you have is fine.”
(“The moon is full overhead, pregnant
with possibilities and none of them
good.”) Kim loved the dramatic setting.
• •
They spoke on the phone for hours,
Freeman says, with Freeman explain- figure you’d want to really wade in those this email is long and perhaps long over-
ing her inspirations, her family and per- final slogging steps and be rewarded due. You deserve honesty from me above
sonal life, and her plans for a larger se- with true greatness!” all else. . . . But the bottom line is you
ries based on “Blue Moon Rising.” In But, as the months dragged on, Free- need to move forward and I need to
Freeman’s recollection, Kim would often man’s hopes began to wilt. No matter move forward too.”
say that she didn’t have such lengthy or how many times she renovated the main In Kim’s recollection, Freeman took
intimate conversations with her other arc, developed a subplot here, updated up less time than some of her other au-
clients. (Kim denies saying this and the lore there, she couldn’t bring the thors—she remembers that Freeman
does not recall any extensive conversa- book to where Kim said it needed to was juggling work and other commit-
tions about Freeman’s personal life.) be. She believes that she sent her agent ments—but Kim did try to make Free-
Freeman was eager to respond to at least forty meaningfully different ver- man feel valued. “Looking back, I feel
Kim’s suggestions. Kim wanted to see sions of her manuscript. She started to very proud of the work that I did with
more strength and agency in Anna, the refer to Kim’s edits as “the hydra,” an her,” Kim told me. “So having that
heroine, and Freeman revised the man- allusion to the many-headed monster thrown back in my face is very sad,” she
uscript so that Anna went to greater that sprouted two new heads every time said. When we spoke, she stressed that
and greater lengths to rescue her were- one was chopped off. she values “each and every one of my
wolf mate. She produced copious notes, In September of 2013, Freeman sent authors so much that it’s just so pain-
chapter synopses, and character descrip- Kim a fresh synopsis of her novel. The ful to think that anyone would think
tions for Kim; she wrote pitches and agent replied in a tone she hadn’t pre- that I would do this to them.”
taglines and letters for Kim to send to viously used. “My comments don’t al- Wolff and Kim were close. Kim’s
editors. Throughout, she says, Kim in- ways seem to lead your book to the next daughter, Eden, was one of “Crave” ’s
sisted that the manuscript was close to level,” she wrote. “I really think you owe first readers, and Wolff named a char-
being ready. In one e-mail, from June, it to yourself to be really certain you are acter Eden in gratitude. Kim’s contribu-
2011, Kim wrote, “You’ve been a real pro putting the best book out there.” At the tions to the “Crave” series sometimes
throughout this revision process so I’d end of the message, she wrote, “I know extended beyond the traditional work
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 25
of even a very hands-on agent. She their own place in the world. “A really eryone’s creativity.” Referring to Free-
helped to create the project’s “bible,” a good writer makes you feel like a book man, Pelletier added, “She doesn’t own
compilation of names, backstories, and is about you,” Kim told me. She sug- heroes in black jeans, as much as she
details that Wolff used to keep tabs on gested that maybe Wolff had performed would like to.”
Grace’s expansive universe. She proposed her job too well: Freeman looked into Black told me, “It’s just true that
plot points: What if two witch charac- the “Crave” series and encountered her there are enough things being written,
ters “are just texting”? What if the mag- own reflection. when you’re working with tropes and
ical portals malfunctioned? When Wolff A paradox of romantasy novels is tradition and folklore, that sometimes
was on deadline for “Court,” Kim sat in that they express the longing to be you hit some of the same things.” But
a Google Doc with her for nineteen unique, but they pour that desire into she dismissed Pelletier’s anxieties about
hours, allegedly to provide moral sup- imitative forms. Many of the genre’s repercussions from the coming verdict,
port. “I want to help you rage finish the tropes are clichés about specialness. saying, “I don’t think it’s going to cre-
rest of this book,” she texted on Octo- When the heroine is discovered to be ate some kind of new standard.” Trout
ber 24, 2021. Then she suggested that secret royalty or the chosen one, read- likewise warned against extrapolating
they get coffee “and crash it out.” ers feel singular, like they are the main too much from a sui-generis situation.
Kim didn’t always evince this level of character. Both Wolff and Freeman em- “The case with ‘Crave’ and ‘Blue Moon
enthusiasm for Freeman. On October phasized to me the deeply intimate ex- Rising’ is not simply about tropes,” she
10, 2013, Kim pitched “Blue Moon Ris- periences that fed into their books— said. “The books are too similar.”
ing” to Liz Pelletier, addressing the En- falling in love, becoming a mother, The defense is right that no one
tangled publisher as “Lynne.” The lan- struggling to accept the loss of a par- could mistake the experience of read-
guage feels boilerplate and impersonal. ent. They lived their tropes. Wolff, a ing “Crave” for the experience of read-
“If you are looking for something unique contemporary romance writer who dove ing “Blue Moon Rising.” Wolff’s story
in young adult paranormal romance,” gamely into vamps-and-shifter lore, is sassy, fun, commercial, and hot. Free-
Kim wrote, “this is something I think was the normal girl in an alien new man’s is raw, ruminative, interior, and
would be a perfect fit for you!” Pelletier world. Freeman was the lost child with possibly unsalable, given the murky vol-
forwarded the pitch—without reading an attunement to nature who comes atility of the family dynamics and the
it, she claims—to Stacy Abrams, who into her power. Maybe these experi- protagonist’s wariness, bordering on
requested the full manuscript on Octo- ences were universal, but they were also hostility, toward other women. What
ber 18th. Kim replied on October 23rd. personal. If it happened to you, how is strange and spiky in one is palatable
“Hi Stacy,” she wrote. “Sorry for the delay. could it not be yours? and familiar in the other. Freeman
Here you go! And aren’t you happy about But life isn’t a romantasy novel. For strews esoteric asides about Egyptian
Tracy? I am!” Abrams agreed that she every Sarah J. Maas, there are thousands mythology, Captain Cook, and the pas-
was happy about Tracy, whose new En- of first-time or self-published writers sage of Celtic artifacts from New Zea-
tangled book was doing well. She also toiling away in obscurity. The promise land to Alaska, which have no coun-
gently noted that Kim had forgotten to of the genre is transformation—reality terpart in the “Crave” series. (Instead,
attach Freeman’s novel to her e-mail. into fiction, vulnerability into strength, there are the singer-songwriter Niall
humans into animals, ordinariness into Horan, Restoration Hardware cata-
n effective romantasy novel con- distinction—but the labor of produc- logues, “Final Destination.”) The mys-
A veys the experience of falling in
love, but it also touches on themes of
ing romantasy rarely changes your life.
Some authors get picked, and many
ticism that pervades “Blue Moon Ris-
ing” is muted in Wolff ’s novels. The
talent and purpose, of becoming who more do not. The outcomes can feel es- sense of phantasmagoria and unreality
you were meant to be. A girl is ordi- pecially arbitrary when everyone is tell- is gone. Many of the details that over-
nary and then she is chosen. Her des- ing more or less the same story. lap are tropes, or close enough. Many
tiny is to wield power beyond imagina- The defendants fear that the suit more are trivial: the color of a charac-
tion. A cold, hard man turns malleable may embolden bad actors to weaponize ter’s eyes, the title—such as “Bloodlet-
in her hands. Those who dislike her are copyright law against talented and suc- ter”—by which she is known.
jealous, those who disagree with her are cessful authors. Pelletier cautioned that But the preponderance of commonal-
evil, and those who try to stop her are she could see why I might be drawn to ities and the sum of how they unfold is
vanquished—righteously. a salacious tale of betrayal, but that the harder to discount. Wolff said that she’d
A decade or so ago, Y.A. readers tele- real story of the lawsuit was the threat been “completely blindsided” and “devas-
graphed their fandom by affiliating with posed by fencing off the creative com- tated” by Freeman’s accusations, and that
types. They picked a Hogwarts house mons, discouraging writers from craft- she “hurt for everybody involved in this
or a Divergent faction to identify with; ing their own narratives of alluring mon- case.” “I didn’t do what I’m accused of,”
they declared for Team Edward (the sters or forbidden love. She spoke about she said. Freeman, who has sold her home
vampire in “Twilight”) or Team Jacob a “well” of shared ideas, imagery, and in Alaska to pay her legal costs, told me
(the werewolf ). But romantasy novels language that irrigates our cultural life that she was fighting in part because she
are more character-driven, and readers and enables our traditions to morph no longer saw herself as unique. “If this
approach them more individualistically. and evolve. “You can’t claim ownership can happen to me,” she said, “it could
They come to the genre concerned about to the well,” she said. “It will stifle ev- happen to somebody else.” 
26 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
 A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE TIKTOK TRAIL

Andean migrants draw others to the U.S. with videos depicting themselves as living the American Dream.
BY JORDAN SALAMA

D
oña Elvira, who lives eleven tance, she could see the snowy peak icano #triste_realidad #des-
thousand feet above sea level of Chimborazo—the closest point pedida #sad #fracesdelavida
in Ecuador, wakes up before on Earth to space. Later, she would #dale #videoviral #familia #ecuador
dawn. These days, the first thing she hike up the western slopes of Tin- #mama_papa #los_extraño_mucho
does is check her phone. Her home kuk Mountain to harvest small chau-
is in the Colta Valley, at the base of cha potatoes on borrowed land. Her But now, Elvira told herself, her
the Chimborazo volcano, and in the phone would stay with her, in a woven daughters had probably adjusted to
early morning the thin air is cold. El- handbag draped over her blue poncho. their new lives, and had maybe even
vira’s hands hurt when she brought As she worked, she thought of her paid off some of their travel debts. In
them out from under the layers of her two eldest daughters, both of whom the TikToks that María and Mer-
wool blankets to open TikTok. The had gone to America. María and Mer- cedes posted after arriving in New
previous day, her twenty-five-year-old cedes, who is twenty-seven, were York, they were always smiling. They
daughter, María, who lives in New happy in New York—weren’t they? In looked beautiful as they showed off
York City, had posted a video of her- August of 2023, the sisters, both of traditional Andean clothes—white
self sitting in a patch of grass, smil- them pregnant, had left their small blouses embroidered with colorful flo-
ing. Ecuadorian- and American-flag farming community to settle with ral patterns, long anaco skirts—against
emojis floated up the screen. “From their husbands in the United States. the backdrop of the city. María and
Ecuador,” a singer on a background (Mercedes also brought along her Mercedes and their small children
track declared. “¡Oye, corazón! This daughter Jhuliana, who is eleven.) posed in a plaza filled with giant video
one’s for you.” Their baby bumps were visible in the screens, in front of a huge American
Elvira, a forty-nine-year-old moth- TikTok videos that they posted from flag hanging in a grand building, and
er of eight and grandmother of five, the airport in Guayaquil; from the beside the river near where they lived.
didn’t use social media before María long trek north through Central They also posted videos of themselves
and another daughter, Mercedes, left America toward the U.S.-Mexico bor- dancing in their bedrooms, where
home. She didn’t even have a smart- der, which they crossed furtively; and half-Ecuadorian, half-American flags
phone until the pandemic, when Ec- from LaGuardia Airport, where they hung on the walls.
uador switched to virtual schooling, landed after f lying from Texas. Of The #sueñoamericano—the Amer-
bringing widespread Internet ser- course, they missed their mother and ican Dream—was mentioned every-
vice to her impoverished area, in the father, their siblings, their small home where in their videos. It was the sub-
mountainous center of the country. She at the bottom of a green hill. Their ject of the song lyrics they danced to
doesn’t post comments on TikTok; she most popular videos—which have and the captions they wrote, and it
hardly knows how to write. Nor does tens of thousands of views—show the was the impulse behind the experience
she read or speak much Spanish—her family sobbing and embracing on the they were now broadcasting to others.
native tongue is Kichwa, an Indige- day they said goodbye. Elvira’s daughters have twenty-two
nous language spoken widely in the thousand followers between them on
upper Andes. Nonetheless, whenever María, January 18, 2024 TikTok, but Elvira knows that she is
one of her daughters posts a video, El- Song: Magaly Tu Flakita del Amor, the most important one of all. Shortly
vira watches it over and over. “Papá Mamá” after daybreak, her phone suddenly lit
She began the day by preparing a Lyrics: “One day I left my parents, the up: María was calling.
steaming pot of oatmeal-and-potato village where I was born, and now I
soup, which would be the family’s find myself very far away, working. . . . wo hours before María called, she
breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She, her
husband, and their remaining children
Mom, don’t worry about me, I’m doing
fine, and soon I’ll come back.”
T had stepped out of her building,
in the Soundview section of the Bronx,
and grandchildren all live together in #lejosdeti #mamá #migrantes and hurried to catch the bus. She had
a two-room adobe house with a dirt #lejosdecasa # # #2024 a job at a cookie factory, and the com-
floor, a hundred yards from the Colta mute was long. At 5 a.m., the streets
Lagoon. By the time she went outside, Mercedes, March 1, 2024 were practically empty and the stars
to let the family’s three cows graze, “ To migrate is to be happy with were still out, so she fast-walked in the
the morning fog had lifted. In the dis- a profound sadness ” #sueñoamer- middle of the street. “Usually, I run,”
28 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GETTY

Ecuadorian migrants curate their lives on social media much like everyone else. But their posts mask tremendous difficulties.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CHANTAL JAHCHAN THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 29
she told me in Spanish, clutching her encers peddling things related to her artists—such as Ángel Guaraca, who
backpack to her chest. “Three times personal interests—beauty products, sings the hit “El Migrante” and calls
now, crazy men have hissed at me.” Bible verses—but every few swipes himself the Indio Cantor de América—
It was early September, and the air a different kind of video appeared. have even embarked on U.S. tours,
was cool in the predawn dark. María These were short posts made by other stopping in places with large Ecua-
wore a wool knit sweater over a pink Ecuadorian migrants, highlighting dorian communities, such as Queens
T-shirt. This was the first leg of her some aspect of life in the United States. and Brooklyn; Fall River, Massachu-
precisely choreographed journey to I’d seen many similar videos: men on setts; and Danbury, Connecticut.
work, in which she crossed two city the job, filming construction sites or The most popular videos have hun-
boroughs and one state line. “I wake dreds of thousands of views. It is clear
up at ten to four,” she said. “I leave my that users are emulating one another,
house at ten to five. I take the bus at particularly given that certain errors
five-twenty-three, and it drops me off are repeated so often that they be-
somewhere in the city.” She used the come trendy. The emoji of the red-
Spanish words la ciudad to mean Man- white-and-blue Liberian flag is reg-
hattan, as many Latin American mi- ularly used instead of the American
grants in the outer boroughs do. “There, one, and places in the New York area
the van picks up workers to take us to are spelled as they would be pro-
the factory. New Jersey, I think it’s nounced by Spanish-speaking mi-
called. I don’t know where, exactly.” home renovations; mothers and chil- grants. ( Junction Boulevard in Queens
(She told me that the cookie company dren posing in front of the shiny white is called “La Jonson”; Roosevelt Av-
pays workers five hundred dollars a tiles of subway stations; young cou- enue is “La Rusbel.”)
week, and charges them thirteen dol- ples recording themselves doing dance Even the most fraught moments
lars a day for the round-trip van fare trends in American-style bedrooms. I of a journey from South America are
across the George Washington Bridge first started coming across such clips now mined for content, though such
to and from the plant.) last year, when my own TikTok algo- clips are usually uploaded only after
María’s ten-month-old daughter, rithm registered that I was interested users have arrived at their final des-
Ale, was still sleeping when she left in Indigenous Latin American migrant tinations in the United States. “Peo-
the house. A few minutes later, her communities in New York. ple leave quietly,” one of María’s for-
husband would head to a street cor- At first glance, the videos are fairly mer neighbors told me this past
ner where hundreds of migrant men unremarkable. They often feature summer, when I visited the Colta area,
wait each day to get picked up for shaky, low-quality camerawork and which has a population of around
jobs on construction sites. He found use kitschy stock effects that give the thirty thousand. “You don’t know any-
work about half the time. During the people in the clips glittering faces or thing about it until one day they post
day, Ale was watched by their land- puffed-up lips. But overlaid on the with the American flag.” One TikTok
lord, an older Ecuadorian woman who group choreography and the street I saw had been filmed in a remote
rented them a single room in her scenes are grainy, scrapbook-style pho- part of the Andes highlands, and
apartment for eight hundred dollars tographs of relatives still back home showed a large Indigenous family say-
a month. María usually got home first, in Ecuador, to whom the videos are ing goodbye to a relative who was
at around five, in time to prepare din- dedicated. The captions and onscreen leaving. When I clicked to hear the
ner and to put Ale to bed a few hours text are messages to loved ones, often accompanying song, “A Dónde Vas”
later. “That’s the sueño americano, isn’t in poorly written Spanish: “Me duele (“Where Are You Going”), the app
it?” she told me. “Not having much estar lejos mi kerida familia. . . . Dios me showed me a grid of hundreds of sim-
time for my daughter.” los vendida” (“It pains me to be far ilar sendoff scenes set to the same
Two of María’s shift-mates, also Ec- away, my dear family. . . . May God soundtrack. Thousands of videos doc-
uadorian women, were already wait- bless you”), “Tu y yo por100pre juntos ument journeys through the treach-
ing for the bus when she arrived at the los 3 luchemos por nuestro sueños” (“You erous, roadless Darién Gap, a rain-
stop. After taking their seats, they all and I together forever, the three of us, forest zone on the Colombia-Panama
opened their phones to a WhatsApp let’s fight for our dreams”). The clips border; the clips are accompanied by
group chat called Turno 1 (“Shift 1”), almost never use camera sound. In- encouraging comments from loved
where they typed their names and a stead, they are set to chicha music, a ones and strangers. (One such video,
confirmation that they would be work- popular genre of cumbia that com- filmed selfie style by a teen-ager, shows
ing that day. For twenty-five minutes, bines traditional Andean sounds with dozens of exhausted migrants taking
as the bus crossed the South Bronx, techno-psychedelic instrumentals, and a break in the jungle, the forest be-
they rode in silence. is known for lyrics about heartbreak hind them strewn with discarded
I watched as one of the women and migration. Many previously un- clothes and Ecuadorian flags.) Other
seated in front of me began scrolling known chicha artists have become fa- people share the moment they ille-
through TikTok. The algorithm on her mous in recent years because songs of gally crossed the U.S. border; in one
For You page mostly served up influ- theirs have gone viral on TikTok. Some video, a group of migrants wave to
30 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
the camera as they pass through a These migrants, of course, are cu- clean water and electricity, but they
hole in a fence. Yet another popular rating their lives on social media in did have Androids.
trend is to film the moment when roughly the same way that everyone Indigenous people in highland vil-
migrants descend the escalators at an else does. They do not intend to mis- lages are being propelled northward
American airport, marking the end lead; most are simply young adults in by an array of serious problems at
of their journey, and are greeted by their late teens and twenties who seek home. Drought, irregular weather pat-
relatives or friends who have already the gratification of likes and follow- terns, and soil degradation, all likely
settled in the U.S.; these clips are typ- ers, and feel constant pressure to ap- fuelled by climate change, have caused
ically set to dubbed audio from the pear perfect on their profiles. But the mounting crop losses. Ecuador has
Spanish-language version of the Pixar wide gulf between what migrants are been enduring a national economic
movie “Inside Out”: “You did it!” sharing and what they’re actually ex- crisis since the pandemic, and nearly
Once the migrants are in the U.S., periencing—coupled with the near- half of its rural citizens are living in
their accounts tend to follow a simi- endless stream of enticing videos made poverty. At the same time, there has
lar pattern. Migrants begin to show accessible by algorithmic platforms been an explosion of violent crime
themselves living, in real time, the sueño like TikTok—is having powerful con- caused by drug cartels. Although this
americano for which they risked every- sequences for their communities back wave of violence has been felt most
thing. I knew that most of these peo- home, where many people are relative strongly in lowland coastal regions,
ple were now working precarious jobs— newcomers to the mobile Internet. the whole country has suffered; in Au-
indeed, living precarious lives—in the The government of Ecuador, despite gust, 2023, a leading Presidential can-
migrant underworld of New York, the country’s challenging terrain and didate, Fernando Villavicencio, was
which has been unsettled by a surge fragile economy, has been pushing for assassinated in Quito by a hit man.
of more than two hundred thousand universal digital access, and the pro- Eighteen per cent of the migrants
new arrivals since 2022. In this infor- portion of the population using the who have arrived in New York City
mal economy, which touches every bor- Internet has skyrocketed in the past since the spring of 2022 have come
ough and county in the metropolitan few years, rising from sixty-nine per from Ecuador, clearly undeterred by
area, there is widespread unemploy- cent in 2020 to eighty-three per cent frequent policy changes, political stunts,
ment, food insecurity, loneliness, and in 2024. Personal digital devices are and growing anti-migrant rhetoric in
crippling debt. Affordable housing is also becoming more affordable, and the U.S. Whereas struggling farmers
nearly impossible to find, and many everyone from the central highlands might once have first resettled in an
migrants end up renting single rooms I spoke with, both in New York and Ecuadorian city, such as Quito or
in homes or apartments for about a in Ecuador, pointed to the pandemic Guayaquil, they are now taking enor-
thousand dollars a month, which they as the hinge point when smartphones mous leaps of faith, and going tens of
share with relatives or others to fur- and social media became ubiquitous thousands of dollars into debt, by try-
ther defray the cost. The extreme stress in their communities. Some families ing to migrate directly to the United
regularly leads to alcohol abuse, do- still did not have reliable access to States, often without any real concept
mestic violence, and other issues. Such
difficulties, however, are largely left out
of the online picture; whenever sad-
ness or nostalgia is expressed, it is vague
and sweetly sentimental, conforming
to an inspiring narrative of enduring
temporary hardship to achieve future
prosperity. More often, the struggle is
not shown at all.
One young Ecuadorian man, who
came to Queens more than a year ago
from a Kichwa farming community
called Palacio, described the dynamic
to me recently. He talked about “that
place with the screens” where nobody
could afford to live but where everybody
went when they first got to New York
City. He couldn’t remember the name.
“Times Square?” I offered.
“Yes, that’s it,” he said. “People go
there and they make these videos that
are cropped just right to show every-
thing nice, but not the fact that they’re
selling things off to the side.”
of what awaits them when they get ner Expressway. Her infant daughter to people’s fantasies about America.
here—if they get here. fidgeted uncomfortably with a Mickey “There are a lot of cosmopolitan
Like many of the migrants I spoke Mouse headband while her niece Jhu- desires among Indigenous youth,” Ulla
with in New York, María and Mer- liana made friends with a Venezuelan Berg, an anthropologist at Rutgers
cedes said that their decision to leave girl whose mother was sitting nearby. University who studies the transna-
Colta was at least partly influenced “I thought that I was going to be able tional experiences of migrants from
by TikToks they’d seen—videos very to find a job that would allow me to Andean communities, told me. “It’s
similar to the ones they were mak- help my family,” María said. “But it’s been like this for a long time, even be-
ing now. At first, there were indeed not like that at all.” fore these more contemporary social-
reasons to be optimistic about their “You said that money would fall from media platforms.” After immigra-
new lives in America. Mercedes’s older the sky,” Jhuliana muttered under her tion from these communities began,
daughter, Jhuliana, enrolled in elemen- breath, picking at the thick, dirty grass. in the nineteen-sixties, “youth would
tary school, where her teacher was a see peers with migrant parents who
young, bilingual Ecuadorian Ameri-
can man who taught in both English
and Spanish. But even after a year in
Iso nbols
the Ecuadorian highlands, sym-
of the American Dream are
abundant that it can at times seem
would send them sneakers and hoodies
and baseball caps—all of this stuff.”
Today’s migrants are reconstruct-
New York the sisters had barely begun like an obsession. As I travelled along ing these same status symbols online,
to pay off their debts, which collec- narrow roads that snaked deep into and in much more public, far-reach-
tively were tens of thousands of dol- the mountains, I passed farm trucks ing ways. The emojis, the displays of
lars. María was not earning nearly emblazoned with both the Ameri- American clothing and accessories,
enough at the cookie factory, and can and the Ecuadorian flags, slowly the seductive framing of cityscapes,
Mercedes was risking fines for sell- hauling bleating livestock and mesh the placement of shiny cars in the
ing coffee from a cart on the street bags of squirming cuy, or guinea background of videos—this all sug-
in downtown Brooklyn. They won- pigs—a popular food in the Andes. gests a story of triumph. Berg said of
dered if they’d made the right decision. In Colta, I stayed with a family who migrant TikTokers, “If they can pro-
“They said that things would be sold handcrafted ceramic piggy banks duce themselves as somebody who
easy here,” María said one Saturday af- shaped like bald eagles and “PAW has access to all these spaces and are
ternoon in Parque de los Niños, a small Patrol” characters. The U.S. dollar, seen as having relative success abroad,
trash-strewn park wedged into the which has been Ecuador’s national then that also trickles down a little
Bronx River Parkway and the Bruck- currency since 2000, itself adds lustre bit to the social status of the family
and the community.”
Even the delivery of physical re-
mittances, which remain a cornerstone
of transnational migration, is now
broadcast online. In every town cen-
ter I visited in the Ecuadorian Andes,
I came upon money-transfer offices
and courier services offering three-
day package deliveries to various
American destinations. Migrants in
the U.S. send mostly cash and Amer-
ican clothes to Ecuador; in return,
their relatives send all sorts of items,
from medicines to traditional cloth-
ing and food. These gifts are com-
monly shared in “unboxing” videos—a
genre that has long been popular on-
line. Doña Elvira scraped together the
money to send her youngest grand-
daughters gifts of toys, roasted cuy,
and baby clothes when they turned
six months old; Mercedes thanked her
mother with a video on TikTok. “My
daughter loves cuy,” María said, smil-
ing sadly when she told me about the
packages. “I gave her a little bit to try,
and she didn’t want to let it go.”
“I refuse to believe that the conversations I engage in When I visited an Ecuadorian town
are as insipid as the ones I eavesdrop on.” called Guamote, the courier Corpo-
raciones Unidas was one of only a few
businesses open on a Monday, a non-
market day. Women with babies strap-
ped to their backs grilled chicken feet
on a nearby corner. I recalled having
passed the offices of Corporaciones
Unidas along Roosevelt Avenue, in
Queens. A sign outside the Guamote
outpost displayed a detailed list of the
places in New York where Ecuador-
ians have settled widely: not just
neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn,
and the Bronx but also suburbs like
Spring Valley, Ossining, Patchogue,
Peekskill, Port Chester, Tarrytown,
and White Plains. Inside, an older
woman stood at the counter. She was
sending a traditional skirt and blouse
to her daughter, who needed it by that “A dog is a big responsibility—are you prepared for the guilt you’ll
Friday for a party in Spring Valley. feel when I’m the one who ends up taking care of it?”
For a while, the older woman video-
chatted with her daughter in a mix-
ture of Kichwa and Spanish, figuring
• •
out the details. Her two granddaugh-
ters, who were born in the U.S. and the anthropologist, told me. “It is a patron-saint festivals and other cele-
have never met their grandmother in social norm in the Andes, in terms of brations. “The technologies have been
person, kept interrupting the call in kinship and expectations, that you changing, but the need to be in con-
Spanish. The older woman didn’t will take care of your relatives and you tact, and the expectations that peo-
speak Spanish well, so she answered will be in contact with them no mat- ple will continue to be part of these
them in Kichwa. “All of my four chil- ter what,” she said. These values do social groups and families, continue
dren are in Spring Valley now, my not fade easily, even if someone is no matter what,” she said.
grandchildren, too,” the older woman thousands of miles away. “How do In the central highlands, I noticed
told me afterward. Only she and you perform your role as a dutiful that adults and young people alike
her husband were still living in their daughter or a considerate son when used TikTok constantly: taxi-drivers
small farming community, near Gua- you’re abroad?” Berg said. “By per- opened the app when they stopped
mote, and they were thinking about forming these emotions and saying, at red lights, and farmers scrolled
leaving. “After all, what’s left for me ‘I’m missing my mother. My mother through it while trying to fall asleep.
here?” she said. is the most important.’ ” Clips of chicha music drifted out
I continued through the town, past Berg added that, though migrants of storefronts and homes, changing
an empty plaza, an empty basketball from other backgrounds have tradi- every few seconds, after a swipe. Older
court, a nearly empty municipal office. tionally sent letters home to loved women coming from the fields car-
A nearby clothing store sold hoodies ones, writing has never been a pre- ried heavy loads of alfalfa on their
and tracksuits alongside dark anaco ferred mode of emotional expression backs and wore “Brooklyn” sweat-
skirts and white embroidered blouses. for Indigenous people from the Andes. ers under their ponchos. They kept
Displayed most prominently were The legacy of Spanish colonial rule in their phones with them. It felt like
clothes representing specific places the region left a strong negative cul- a place that mostly lived vicariously
in the Midwest: shirts that said “Chi- tural perception of the written word, through the experiences of those who
cago,” varsity-football jackets stitched linking it to powerful bureaucratic au- were elsewhere.
with the yellow “M” of the University thorities; moreover, Kichwa is histor-
of Michigan. A saleswoman told me ically an oral language, written down María, June 17, 2024
that her cousin had recently migrated only in recent centuries, using the “ Dad . . . I’ll always take care
to Indianapolis. “Just like a celebrity Latin alphabet. As a result, migrants of you, even though I’m far away. ”
might wear certain clothes and then have long gravitated toward other
we all want that brand, that’s what’s kinds of communication. “When I
happening here, including with rela- started my research in Peru, in the
tives,” she said. nineteen-nineties, people were send- (Video: Unboxing a courier package
A strong culture of rootedness and ing VHS tapes,” Berg said. The tapes, sent by her mother from Colta, filled
family ties among Indigenous com- not unlike posts on social media today, with hand sanitizer and medicine; a
munities adds to this dynamic, Berg, showed mostly happy occasions, like toddler-size blouse, poncho, and anaco;
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 33
 dren and grandchildren have ended up.
The young men played on the dusty
grass, wearing jerseys with American
and Ecuadorian flags on their sleeves.
The young women socialized along the
sidelines in Spanish, toddlers tugging
at their leggings or the occasional
anaco skirt; switching to Kichwa,
they joked about the elderly Chinese
ladies who came to collect the empty
plastic water bottles that the teams left
on the ground.
Weekdays were consumed by the
search for work in a post-pandemic
economy saturated with informal mi-
grant workers. María was seven months
pregnant when she landed at La-
Guardia, and she wasn’t physically able
to do much. The only job that she could
manage was babysitting another wom-
an’s child, which she did nearly every
day until she gave birth, in November.
Two weeks after her daughter was born,
María started working at the cookie fac-
tory, a more physically demanding job.
“Usually, the mother stays in bed for at
least a month or two,” she told me. “I
didn’t have any money for milk, dia-
pers, nothing, so I had to go back out.”
“Sorry I’m late—I was trying to throw a The debt that María faced was over-
string of dental floss in the garbage.” whelming. Since the moment she ar-
rived, she could think of nothing else.
“My husband and I each have our own
• • debts with different banks in Ecuador,”
María told me. “Including interest, I
and a roasted cuy wrapped in foil, which the way to Flushing Meadows Corona still owe around thirty thousand dol-
her baby samples with delight.) Park, where hundreds of Ecuadorian lars.” Mercedes’s debts were also high.
“ Mamita thank you for your infinite migrants gather every Sunday to play Debt of this scale is common among
love ” soccer and eat street food such as choclo Indigenous migrants from rural Ecua-
#migrantes_latinos #mamita mote—potatoes, corn, and fried pork. dor, where banks and other creditors
The park was about an hour and a half regularly lend individuals tens of thou-
he sisters arrived in New York by public transit from their Soundview sands of dollars so that they can pay
T late in the summer of 2023, and,
like many Andean migrants, they
neighborhood, which is hemmed in on
all sides by roaring highways. The Ec-
coyotes to arrange their passage north.
(Migrants who try to make the jour-
headed for a place in the U.S. where uadorian leagues in Flushing Mead- ney without the guidance of smugglers
they already had relatives. Two cous- ows are so popular that many high- run a much higher risk of being kid-
ins were living in the South Bronx, as land towns have teams, including Colta; napped for ransom by trafficking syn-
was Mercedes’s husband, who had ar- sometimes the teams have to be divided dicates, which control checkpoints
rived there five months earlier. even further when too many new play- along the way north, especially in Mex-
During the sisters’ first few week- ers from one area have recently crossed ico.) A relative staying in Ecuador usu-
ends in the city, they tried to see the the border. If, in Ecuadorian-highland ally co-signs a loan, and is therefore
places that everyone had told them hamlets such as Laime Capulispungo responsible if the migrant does not wire
about. María filmed in Times Square and Palacio, it almost seems like only enough money to cover the loan pay-
on a day when the sky was a cloudless grandparents remain—older farmers ments each month. The creditors can
blue. She recorded the autumn colors living in tiny clusters of adobe homes be aggressive: family homes can be sub-
of the trees along a stretch of Morrison above blustery plots of potatoes, beans, jected to foreclosure, and plots of land
Avenue near the Bruckner Expressway. and grains—all one has to do is go to are sometimes turned over as collat-
Once, before the babies were born, she Flushing Meadows on a Sunday after- eral. When a payment is late, represen-
and Mercedes and Jhuliana went all noon to see where many of their chil- tatives of the creditors send ominous
34 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
WhatsApp voice messages to migrants’ Ecuadorians had clearly shaped her ing a small house in town that they
relatives to pressure them to pay: “What understanding of life in the U.S. When could not afford.
happened to the deposit? It’s the end I asked her where her husband was liv- A few of Manuela’s cousins were,
of the month. You told me you were ing, she said, “La 103.” Many people I like her husband, already in New York,
about to get the deposit. Confirm it spoke with in the highlands seemed to and she followed them on social
for me. . . . You made a commitment know the area around 103rd Street in media. I’d come to know one of her
to pay, and then nothing.” On the main Corona, Queens—home to thousands relatives living in Queens, who sold
road through Colta, right in the town of Ecuadorians—as well as “La Jon- candy and soft drinks on the sub-
center, a large billboard displayed the son” and “La Rusbel,” the neighbor- way—a gruelling way of life that is
red-and-white logo of Daquilema, one hood’s noisy, chaotic thoroughfares. rarely highlighted on TikTok. To
of the most popular financial coöper- Official place-names such as Corona Manuela and her husband, migrating
atives offering loans in the area. or Soundview or Brooklyn were less to New York had seemed like the only
In New York, both María and Mer- familiar to people in Ecuador; more decent option that remained. “If God
cedes carried their newborns in shawls famous now were the landmarks and allows me to get there safely, I hope
strapped to their backs. This was the other emblems of the city which mi- I might find a job, rent a place with
most common way that Indigenous grants posted about, like subway lines, my husband, and be able to send some
people in Ecuador and elsewhere in parks, the place with the screens. Sole- money back to help my family,” she
the Andes carried their children; it dad Chango, a graduate student in lin- said, crying. “And then, eventually, I’ll
was what the sisters had seen all their guistics at M.I.T. who is from Sala- come back to Ecuador.”
lives. One day, Mercedes came home saka, Ecuador, told me that this is a We stood in silence in the cemetery
from selling coffee on the street and matter of cultural norms. “In our for a few minutes. Manuela and her
announced that she would no longer Kichwa language, places are not de- youngest sister picked yellow wildflow-
carry her baby like that, because it scribed in the same way as in many ers and placed them on the tombstones.
marked her as a recent migrant. “Peo- Western cultures and languages,” she Manuela’s mother sat on the ground
ple told me that the police would give explained. “We won’t say, ‘Go to this nearby, and her father paced a bit far-
me more tickets,” Mercedes said. After address.’ It’s more like ‘Next to that ther away. I imagined the funeral pro-
that, the sisters mostly wheeled their four-story red building, there’s a white cession that had arrived here more than
babies around in black strollers. house, and across the street . . .’” A place, two months after the landslide, when
she said, is defined less by its name and the bodies of Manuela’s grandparents
“ M yUnited
husband is already in the
States,” a twenty-two-
more by how to get there.
Manuela, who has a two-year-old
were finally pulled from the rubble—
the family moving slowly up the moun-
year-old woman named Manuela told named Nicole, wore jeans and a long- tain, first by car to Guaylla Grande and
me one afternoon as we stood by the sleeved shirt and spoke in Spanish; then silently on foot to this cliff above
tomb of her grandparents in the ham- her mother and father stood beside her the clouds. The wind made an eerie
let of Guaylla Grande. The cemetery in traditional clothing and spoke in noise as it rustled through the grave-
sat on the edge of a cliff, overlooking Kichwa. Manuela’s parents were born in yard grass. Later, I learned that there
a long valley filled with swift-moving Guaylla Grande, as were her grandpar- was a saying in Kichwa for that sound.
clouds. “He left three months ago. Soon ents and her great-grandparents, along Wayra wakashpa rishpa, shamun y rin.
I’ll follow him.” with everyone else in her family tree for The wind, crying, comes and goes.
“How soon?” I asked. as long as anyone could remember. When Returning along the road that led
“Sometime in July,” Manuela said. It Manuela was around ten years old, her to the cemetery, we stopped in front
was June 26th. “I’ll go with my daugh- parents had decided to move the fam- of a cluster of homes. Manuela’s
ter through the jungle. They say it ily to Alausí, the district seat, in a humid mother, Olimpia, called out in Kichwa.
costs two hundred dollars to book a valley an hour down the mountain, so A few moments later, a very old man
bus ticket to Colombia.” Some peo- that she and her siblings could attend hobbled out of one of the houses and
ple paid more than a thousand dol- secondary school. (Countless other fam- offered me a hard and scratchy hand.
lars to fly to El Salvador or Nicara- ilies have left their ancestral villages in His voice was feeble and high-pitched,
gua, skipping the Darién Gap, but she recent years for the same reason, includ- and he spoke with whistles through
did not have enough money. She said ing Doña Elvira’s, who moved to Colta the spaces in his teeth.
this nonchalantly, as though she were from a similarly remote community when Before I’d left New York, one of
merely choosing to take side roads in- María and Mercedes were young.) Manuela’s cousins in the city, Aidita,
stead of a highway. (Since 2014, hun- Manuela’s maternal grandparents asked me to visit her paternal grand-
dreds of migrants have drowned or followed them to Alausí. But then father, who was still alive. This was
otherwise perished attempting to tra- tragedy struck. On March 26, 2023, him. His name was Jesús. “This is a
verse the Darién Gap.) Manuela had after months of heavy rain, a landslide friend of Aidita’s in the United States,”
seen plenty of TikTok videos posted swept away their home, destroying all Olimpia told Jesús. “He came to visit
by smugglers promoting the journey their possessions and killing Manue- my parents’ tomb and to meet you.”
and promising success. la’s grandparents. A year later, the fam- “Ah, qué bonito.” Jesús didn’t say much
The deluge of content from other ily was penniless and desperate, rent- more than that—“how nice”—in our short
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 35
conversation. I told him that I knew his themselves dancing. “The videos are can afford. “Damn, life is so expensive
granddaughter and great-grandchildren for anyone who wants to watch,” María here,” he complains, in a mixture of
in New York. Because Guaylla Grande is told me, when I asked her if her posts Spanish and Kichwa, while sitting on
a place where cell signals don’t reach re- were meant for anyone in particular. a street corner. “So much ‘sueño ameri-
liably, I asked him if he wanted to send “But mostly I make them to have fun cano,’ ‘sueño americano.’ . . . Now I bet-
them a voice message. He said yes. I and make myself feel better. It takes ter think about the sueño ecuatoriano! ”
held my phone out and pressed Record. away some of the stress of what I’m He says, crying, that he may have to
“Aidita, your grandmother is very going through.” go back home.
sick,” he said into the phone. “We’re Her husband still hadn’t found reg- In Colta, Doña Elvira sensed that
fucked here. I’m just by myself.” He ular work, and some months she had to all wasn’t well with her daughters. She
paused, waiting for a response. take on his share of the rent. Too often, knew it from the few details they shared
“Say, ‘We’re fine,’ ” Olimpia whis- she felt completely alone in this chal- with her on their WhatsApp calls, no
pered to him while I tried to explain lenging new life. It didn’t help that the matter how often they posted mantras
that we were making a recording, not people around María seemed to have it like “Rendirse no es una opción” (“Giv-
a phone call. all together. Her friends at work asked ing up is not an option”). Once, when
But Jesús had nothing more to say. why she didn’t buy more clothes, why Mercedes hadn’t sent back enough
“Thank you, Aidita, for sending the she didn’t paint her nails. “They say, money to cover a debt payment, her
visitor,” he finished. ‘You’re in America now,’” she told me. mother sold off some of the family’s
It felt to her like only she and Mer- animals—calves, chickens, pigs—to
María, October 9, 2024 cedes were struggling. “I tell my par- make up the difference. “I miss them
Song: Solmary Tixi, “Mi Valiente Mi- ents, ‘I’m O.K., I’m O.K.,’ but the truth so much it feels like someone has died,”
grante” is I’m not.” María wiped tears from her Doña Elvira told me as she dug up
[Photograph: María holding her daugh- eyes. “I have debt with two different potatoes on someone else’s land, on
ter Ale and smiling on a sunny day in banks. And everything I make goes to the slopes above her home. After fill-
Times Square] pay rent and debt. Rent, debt. Rent, ing a large white sack, she descended
Lyrics: “To leave home means to leave debt.” She opened her jacket to show past rainbow-colored fields of quinoa
with your feet but never with your me a white T-shirt underneath that to her door, where her youngest daugh-
heart. For my family, for my mom, for read “New York,” in black script. “This ter, Julisa, was waiting. Discarded junk
my siblings, I find myself far away, is the only thing I’ve bought since I and dirty clothes covered the muddy
working day and night. . . . A call or a got here,” she said. “Everything else”— floor. “I want them to come back,” Ju-
message is not the same. . . . Don’t cry. she pointed at her jacket, her leggings, lisa said of her sisters.
Don’t cry.” the baby stroller that had replaced her It was true, María told me, that
shawl—“is donated.” sometimes she thought about return-
all turned to winter, and things Nearly all the Ecuadorian migrants ing to Ecuador. But then she did the
F were not getting easier for María.
“It’s all work, all the time,” she told
I spoke to lived with the shame of feel-
ing that they were sinking, but they
math. If she wasn’t working in Amer-
ica, she could never pay off her thirty-
me when we met up one weekday didn’t communicate this to one an- thousand-dollar debt. When Trump
evening in early October, in Parque other, either because they didn’t want won the election in November, the pos-
de los Niños. The sun their relatives to worry or sibility of deportation became terrify-
was setting, and she was because they didn’t want ingly real for the two sisters. “Trump
shivering in a light zip-up it to seem like they had says that he’s going to send us back to
jacket. She was exhausted failed. The few migrants our country,” Mercedes wrote to me in
from another day on the whom I’ve seen share a a WhatsApp message shortly after the
job, her hands covered in pessimistic post tend to do election. She had applied for asylum,
blisters. “I’m learning how so at a distance, as part of on the basis of her Indigenous identity,
to do the packaging for a smaller trend of TikTok and she was scrambling to find a law-
the cookies, and it’s re- videos that claim to pres- yer before her next hearing at an im-
ally hard,” she said. “But ent “the truth about life migration court. María’s situation was
I got a cleaning shift at here in the United States” worse: she had also applied for asylum,
the factory on Saturdays, in more general terms, usu- but she had never received confirmation
so now I’m working then as well.” ally without much detail about the cre- from U.S. authorities that her mailed
Saturday used to be María’s time ators’ personal situations. In one video, application had been received. The
to relax—it was the only day she could which has received more than four thought of the worst-case scenario was
go out and have fun with baby Ale. hundred thousand views, a TikTok too difficult to bear: If María were ap-
Sunday was filled with laundry and comedian named Tío Ainy, who sati- prehended during a raid at the cookie
errands. She and Ale had been hap- rizes the Indigenous Ecuadorian mi- factory, or if Mercedes were detained
piest on Saturdays, when they would grant experience in New York, wanders while selling coffee on the street with-
go with Mercedes and her children to through the streets of Corona, search- out a permit, what would happen to
the park and record TikTok videos of ing unsuccessfully for a meal that he their babies, who were American citi-
36 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
zens by birth? What would happen to
eleven-year-old Jhuliana, who was not?
(Trump has said that he will press for
the wholesale removal of such families.)
The migrant community—enor-
mous, heterogeneous, and decentral-
ized—is difficult to track collectively,
and, despite the repeated threats from
the incoming Administration, nobody
knows for certain what’s ahead. “Re-
searchers that work on deportation
know that this is not the end of the
migration story,” Berg, the anthropol-
ogist, told me. “A lot of people who
undergo deportation will try to come
back to the United States, knowing the
risks.” Rumors about coming crack-
downs have been circulating on social
media, in shared homes, and in immi-
grant neighborhoods, causing wide-
spread fear. But although a few sa-
tirical videos on TikTok have begun
to parody what it might look like to
pack up and leave now that Trump has
won—one video shows a man walking “He came with the windowsill.”
down the street with a bicycle on his
back, wheeling two suitcases behind
him—most of the ordinary people on
• •
my feed are still posting publicly as if
nothing has changed. Indeed, social blind curves quickly, at times grabbing a day, where smugglers were demand-
media indicates that the exodus from the steering wheel hard with both ing an additional thousand dollars be-
the Andes has only continued. “ ‘Get in hands to maintain control on the nar- fore the two of them would be allowed
now while you can’ is the general senti- row washboard roads. Every few min- to continue to the border. Her husband
ment,” Berg said. A severe drought has utes, cows and burros and their poncho- was looking for more loans to get them
devastated the central highlands this clad guardians suddenly appeared in out. “Nada bien pero Aii boii así mismo es
year; harvests are poor, food prices are the fog, like ghosts. el sueño americano,” she wrote. “I’m not
high, and animals don’t have enough “What do people do when the clouds good at all but I’m keeping on—that’s
grass to feed on. And so people keep come and they can’t see?” I asked. exactly the American Dream.”
pushing north, even as many migrants Manuela said,“We just keep walking.” For nearly two weeks after that, I
in New York become disillusioned with Olimpia said, “All you see is what’s heard nothing. At the end of August,
the American Dream. “I feel empty right in front of you. For a long time, Manuela wrote only to say that she’d
inside,” María said. “Now you start to it’s like that. But it will clear up.” It arrived in New York, and was still
value the little things that you had be- sounded as if she were reassuring her- getting used to the city. Then, on Sep-
fore—my mom’s little plot of land, the self, as the car lurched and swerved in tember 7th, she posted a video to her
sheep. They’re worth so much more.” the dense whiteness. “It always does, TikTok account. The soundtrack was
doesn’t it?” a version of “Te Regalo,” a sad and lovely
María, October 17, 2024 An hour later, we made it to Alausí piano ballad by the Mexican singer-
“Forgive me, MOM, if I haven’t val- and said goodbye. I told Manuela to songwriter Carla Morrison about giv-
ued your company, now I realize how stay in touch, and said that I would ing oneself entirely to another. “I’ll love
Difficult it is to have you far away see her in New York once she got there. you until I die,” Morrison sings. Man-
” She left Ecuador less than a month uela’s TikTok was a montage of pho-
later, at the end of July. tographs of her with her daughter and
n the ride down the mountain I heard from her on WhatsApp in- her husband—the three of them re-
O back to Alausí, the clouds were
so thick that we could see only about
termittently in the weeks that followed.
From Peru: “Do you know how much is
united at last, posing by a Coca-Cola
billboard in Times Square. I under-
five feet ahead of the pickup truck we ten soles in dollars?” From Guatemala: stood that this was her way of announc-
were riding in. “It’s normal for the road “I’m not quite sure where I am.” From ing to the world that she had made it.
to be foggy,” Manuela’s mother, Olim- Mexico: She and her daughter were And for a moment I found myself be-
pia, told us as her husband took the locked without food in a hotel room for lieving that she was O.K. 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 37
 THE POLITICAL SCENE

A TALE OF TWO DISTRICTS

Lauren Boebert and Colorado’s red-blue divide.
BY PETER HESSLER

O
n Election Night of 2024, ber, 2023, Boebert herself was kicked
shortly before nine o’clock, out of the Buell Theatre, in Denver,
Representative Lauren Boe- after disturbing other audience mem-
bert ascended a small stage at the bers during a musical performance of
Grainhouse, a sports bar in Wind- “Beetlejuice” by vaping, laughing and
sor, Colorado. Windsor, part of the singing loudly, and engaging in mu-
state’s Fourth Congressional Dis- tual groping with her date. Surveil-
trict, is situated on Colorado’s agri- lance video of the incident, which
cultural northern plains, and the bar also showed Boebert giving the fin-
was housed in a massive metal grain ger to an usher as she and her date
bin. A bright-green John Deere 237 were escorted out, quickly went viral.
corn picker stood next to the stage. Three months later, the congress-
Boebert, who had moved to the dis- woman abruptly decided to seek of-
trict earlier in the year, wore a tightly fice for a third term in a part of Col-
fitted blue suit with red lining, a white orado where she had never lived as an
shirt, a pair of silver stiletto heels, and adult. And yet, despite all Boebert’s
a red “Make America Great Again” bad publicity, here she was in Wind-
baseball cap that had been signed on sor, at the age of thirty-seven, poised
the brim in Sharpie by President Don- to become the senior member of Col-
ald Trump. It had been less than two orado’s Republican delegation to the
hours since the Colorado polls had House of Representatives.
closed, and most news organizations “My Democrat opponent just called
would not call the Presidential race and conceded and asked me to up-
until after midnight. But Trisha Cal- hold our democracy,” Boebert said
varese, Boebert’s opponent for a seat from the stage. “And my response was
in the House of Representatives, had ‘I promise you I will uphold Ameri-
already conceded. ca’s constitutional republic! ’ ”
“The swamp, they thought I would The crowd cheered. Next to me, Fred
fail!” Boebert shouted to more than Mahe, the treasurer of the Weld County
two hundred supporters. “But you all Republican Party, shouted, “She’s right!
welcomed me to Windsor, Colorado. She’s right! It’s not a democracy!”
And, rather than failing, I think it’s Mahe wore a baseball cap with
kind of like an A-plus with extra credit an image of Trump raising his fist
with this G.E.D. right here!” after last summer’s assassination at-
Two years earlier, Boebert had tempt. Another man nearby had a
barely won the closest race in the T-shirt that said “I’m Voting for the
nation, defending her seat in Colo- Felon and the Hillbilly.” One middle-
rado’s Third Congressional District aged woman, immaculately dressed
by only five hundred and forty-six in the colors of the American flag,
votes. Then her political prospects, wore a campaign-style button with
which already looked dim, seemed the message “Life’s a Bitch—Don’t
to worsen because of a tumultuous Vote for One.”
personal life. After the 2022 election, Earlier in the evening, several peo-
Boebert got divorced; her ex-husband ple had told me that they worried
was arrested twice for domestic alter- about the possibility of George Soros
cations; and her oldest son, a teen-ager, influencing Colorado’s elections. A
was also arrested, having allegedly par- woman in her sixties, dressed in an
ticipated in a string of vehicle break- “All American Trump Girl” shirt, ex-
ins and credit-card thefts. In Septem- plained that she worked in Boulder, Boebert, after switching districts, prays with
38 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
supporters at a watch party in Windsor, Colorado, in June, 2024.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID WILLIAMS THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 39
a liberal bastion, and she feared This joke—the targeting of some ran to within a block of the restau-
political violence. “If Trump wins random low-profile Republican from rant, where he died from a metham-
tomorrow, Boulder could be a shit an unknown rural district—became a phetamine overdose. Boebert’s first
show,” she said. reality of a different sort when Boe- taste of fame came in September, 2019,
At the end of Boebert’s speech, she bert entered the primary, later that at a Colorado town-hall meeting held
introduced her mother, Shawna, who year. She was thirty-two, with no po- by the Presidential-primary candidate
stood nearby, wearing an American- litical experience, and her family life Beto O’Rourke. O’Rourke had pro-
flag-patterned shawl. “Many of you had often been troubled. Her mother, posed a ban and a buyback program
have heard my life story of being raised a high-school dropout, had given birth for assault rifles, and Boebert, stand-
in a Democrat household,” the con- to her at the age of eighteen, and Boe- ing in the audience, challenged him,
gresswoman said. “And it wasn’t be- bert never knew her biological father. in an exchange that subsequently ap-
cause my mom was liberal. It’s be- She has said that her family some- peared on Fox News. “I was one of
cause she believed the lies. She believed times relied on welfare, and that her the gun-owning Americans that heard
the lies of politicians, and it entrapped mother had a partner who was abusive. your speech and heard what you had
us in a cycle of poverty.” She con- At sixteen, Lauren met the twenty- to say regarding ‘Hell yes, I’m going
cluded, “In 2016, my mom voted for two-year-old man whom she would to take your AR-15s and your AK-47s,’”
Donald J. Trump, and, just like you, eventually marry, Jayson Boebert. Like Boebert said. “Well, I am here to say,
she is ready for him to win his third her mother, Lauren dropped out of ‘Hell no, you’re not.’ ”
Presidential election! God bless you, high school and got pregnant, hav- Few people took Boebert seriously
Windsor! Thank you so much. We’re ing a son at eighteen. when she entered the Republican pri-
gonna fight, fight, fight!” For a while, Lauren was a shift mary. She had little financial support,
manager at a McDonald’s in Rifle. and she didn’t receive her G.E.D. until
auren Boebert’s political career Later, she worked as a pipeline loca- after she declared her candidacy. Tip-
L began in the uniquely challeng-
ing terrain of Colorado’s Third Dis-
tor for a company that drilled for nat-
ural gas, a major local industry. She
ton chose not to spend several hun-
dred thousand dollars of available
trict. To drive from corner to corner began devoting herself to born-again campaign funds in the primary. But
across the district, which is larger than Christianity, and she and Jayson had Boebert proved to be an energetic
the state of Pennsylvania, takes more three more sons. Both parents also candidate, accusing Tipton of being
than ten hours. It encompasses some had police records. In 2004, Jayson soft on immigration and of failing to
of the tallest mountains in the conti- allegedly exposed himself to two support Trump to an adequate de-
nental United States, as well as vast women in a Colorado bowling alley; gree. (In fact, Trump had endorsed
stretches of high desert. In a hard he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge Tipton.) After winning the primary
landscape, geographical features have of petty offense for public indecency handily, Boebert took the seat by six
hard names: Disappointment Valley, and lewd exposure, spending a few percentage points.
Calamity Mesa, Battlement Mesa. days in jail. That same year, an alter- As a first-term congresswoman,
Constituent communities include Silt, cation between the couple resulted in Boebert developed an often cartoonish
Stoner, Sawpit, Slick Rock, Bedrock, a guilty plea for Jayson on a mis- national image. During the campaign,
Marble. Another on-the-nose name demeanor charge for harassment she had said of QAnon, “If this is real,
is Rifle, Boebert’s home town, where with a domestic-violence enhance- it could be really great for our coun-
she used to own a restaurant called ment. After another fight, Lauren was try,” and on January 6th she tweeted,
Shooters Grill, whose waitstaff openly charged with third-degree assault, “Today is 1776.” At a Christian con-
carried firearms. criminal mischief, and underage drink- ference, Boebert joked that Jesus hadn’t
Before Boebert, the district was ing. (The outcomes of these charges had enough AR-15s “to keep his gov-
represented by a Republican named are not known, because juvenile re- ernment from killing him.” She made
Scott Tipton. His greatest moment cords in Colorado are automatically a series of Islamophobic comments
of national publicity may have come sealed.) A few years later, during the about Representative Ilhan Omar, re-
in January, 2019, when, during a financial crisis, the couple lost their ferring to her during a speech on the
federal-government shutdown, the home in a foreclosure. House floor as “the Jihad Squad mem-
Onion ran a headline: “Poll Finds In 2013, Lauren and Jayson opened ber from Minnesota.” In 2022, when
1005 of Americans Blame Shutdown Shooters Grill. Boebert has claimed a same-sex-marriage bill passed in the
Entirely on Colorado Representative that she encouraged staff to arm them- House, Boebert opposed it, explain-
Scott Tipton.” A photograph featured selves after a man was beaten to death ing that it was part of a progressive
the fifth-term congressman wearing outside the restaurant. But nobody cause that “undermined masculinity.”
a blue suit, a blue tie, and a gentle, has been able to find records of a mur- That year, during the State of the
slightly hangdog expression. A fic- der that matches Boebert’s descrip- Union address, she heckled President
tional Pew Research pollster was tion. The Colorado Sun reported, in Biden while he talked about support-
quoted: “As far as the American peo- the only such incident it could turn ing veterans who suffered from med-
ple are concerned, Tipton and Tip- up, that a man had been involved in ical problems.
ton alone owns this shutdown.” a fight elsewhere in Rifle, and then These various controversies helped
40 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
establish Boebert as a national figure,
and her hard-right image seemed to
be effective for fund-raising. In 2022,
as she ran for reëlection, seventy-seven
per cent of her itemized contributions
came from outside the district, accord-
ing to an Aspen Journalism analy-
sis of data from the Federal Election
Commission. But the congresswoman
presented herself very differently to
local constituents. “I’m straight out of
Rifle, running a restaurant with my
four little boys and with my G.E.D.,”
she said at a dinner in Ouray, a for-
mer mining town. At events in Colo-
rado, Boebert’s message tended to be
more personal, and she seemed less
intent on attracting attention with
extreme statements. She preached
a kind of bootstraps politics. “I fi-
nally said, Enough is enough,” she
told the audience at another event
outside Denver, describing her deci-
sion to run for office. “I can’t sit on
the sofa and be mad anymore. That
is getting me nowhere.”
At the dinner in Ouray, in Octo-
ber, 2023, Boebert had arrived holding
her six-month-old grandson, Josiah.
She was thirty-six; her own mother,
at the age of fifty-four, had become a
great-grandmother. “He came to me
at seventeen,” Boebert said of her old-
est son. “He said, ‘Mom, I’m going to
have a baby.’ ” She continued, “And I
said, ‘Well, what are you guys going • •
to do?’ And he said, ‘Mom, I told you.
We’re going to have a baby.’ ” no prof ile to somebody who is She made the club. She started with
The room broke into applause. “He almost internationally known,” John nothing, and she made it. But what
later told me it’s hereditary in our Rodriguez, who had edited Pulp, about her wants to help the America
family to have your first at eighteen,” an arts-and-culture news magazine that keeps other people down?”
Boebert said. “That’s not exactly how in Pueblo, the largest city in the
district, told me. “You have to give
it works, but, you know. . . .” The au-
dience laughed, and she said, “I’m so
proud of them for choosing life.”
her credit.”
The Third District includes some
Ibacknthatcertain respects, the rural region
produced Boebert is a throw-
to a time when Colorado was
Boebert is petite—even in cow- of the poorest counties in the West, deeply red, sometimes notoriously so.
boy boots in Ouray, she stood barely and Rodriguez noted that a history In 1992, more than fifty-three per cent
five feet tall. At every event that I of adversity was part of Boebert’s ap- of the state’s voters approved Amend-
attended, she spoke without notes, peal. “She had a hard family life,” he ment 2, which excluded gays and les-
often with a high level of detail. “She’s said. “And she found a community bians from anti-discrimination laws.
more sophisticated than a lot of peo- that loves her. But it leads to this be- The U.S. Supreme Court eventually
ple think,” Eli Bremer, a prominent havior, and then everybody on the struck down the amendment, but for
Colorado Springs politician who other side hates her.” He continued, a while Colorado was nicknamed “the
described himself as “an old-school “I don’t feel bad for her. She said ter- hate state.”
Republican,” told me. Even constit- rible things about Arabs, about other The amendment helped galvanize
uents who were horrified by Boe- minority groups.” He went on, “But a small group of wealthy progressive
bert sometimes acknowledged her she’s an interesting case. Why does political operatives. Some were gay
charisma. “You go from Tipton to she feel this need to put down people themselves, including Tim Gill, a
Boebert, from somebody who had who are trying to do what she’s doing? University of Colorado graduate and
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 41
a computer-software entrepreneur,
and Jared Polis, who founded a series
of successful tech endeavors while he WAITING
was in his twenties. Gill and Polis
were advised by Ted Trimpa, a polit- My first great love was a drunk. Her long dark hair
ical strategist who, having grown up falling over my face. But even that is made up.
closeted in a small town in Kansas,
understood the way conservatives My mother wore her hair short. She used to cut it
thought. Along with other wealthy herself. A shaggy bob that did not flatter. The truth is
progressives, these men figured out
how to use money effectively in the my first great love grew up beside me like a wild sister
wake of a series of campaign-finance prone to putting her head down on the kitchen table
reforms that included the McCain-
Feingold Act of 2002. in the middle of dinner, saying she wanted her own
This history is described in “The room, that she was going to run away. I was the one
Blueprint: How the Democrats Won
Colorado,” a book by Adam Schrager whose job it was to beg her to stay. I’d sit at the edge
and Rob Witwer that was published in of her bed and touch the hem of her bathrobe
2010. The McCain-Feingold Act and
other reforms restricted the amount with my small hand. At night I looked for the big hand
of money that candidates and parties reaching down to me. I waited for a little rope ladder
could raise from individual donors.
One unintended outcome, though, was to fall through a cloud. Why is this my life? she’d cry
that political power shifted toward in- but it wasn’t a question and I wasn’t an answer.
dependent nonprofits that were often
able to hide their funding sources. In —Bridget Lowe
Colorado, Gill, Polis, and others de-
veloped a network of nonprofits, and
they helped pioneer the way that such America, and he still holds the office. worked as hard as any candidate I’ve
organizations could be used in cam- No Republican has won a statewide seen,” Huttner said. Discipline was
paigns. They focussed on down-ballot election in Colorado since 2016. also critical. “We knew we were not
races, running moderate candidates Boebert’s rise could be seen as a re- going to out-tweet her or make more
rather than playing to the liberal base. action to the dominance of liberal Den- extreme remarks,” Huttner said. “And
They also targeted homophobic Re- ver. Her seat in the Third District, we knew we had to be moderate on
publican lawmakers and, in a number where fewer than twenty-five per cent oil-and-gas issues. The liberals here
of instances, were successful in getting of voters are registered Democrats, had in Denver bash the fracking, and we
them voted out of office. been considered safe for Republicans. didn’t want to take the bait.”
In 2004, when George W. Bush But, in 2022, a Democratic challenger In August, 2022, Frisch came to
won reëlection, Colorado was among named Adam Frisch decided to run Ridgway, the small town in the Third
the few bright spots for Democrats. as a moderate, basing his campaign on District where I live. I attended an
That November, they f lipped both the notion that Boebert was neglect- event at a local cattle ranch called the
houses of the Colorado state legisla- ing her constituents. Frisch contacted Double D, where he spoke to a gath-
ture, along with a U.S. Senate seat Michael Huttner, a Boulder-based po- ering of about ninety people. At fifty-
and a seat in the House of Represen- litical consultant who had managed four, he had the trim build of a for-
tatives. They benefitted from demo- Polis’s first campaign. Huttner agreed mer marathoner, and he conveyed a
graphic changes—more than a mil- that Boebert might be vulnerable to a calm, controlled energy. He empha-
lion people had moved into Colorado moderate opponent, because the Third sized that the Democratic Party needed
in the nineties—but strategic think- District, like Colorado as a whole, in- to do better in the two thousand Amer-
ing and large financial resources were cludes large numbers of unaffiliated ican counties that are considered rural.
also critical. The first time that Polis voters. But Huttner doubted that In 1996, Bill Clinton won more than
ran for office, in 2000, he poured more Frisch, who appeared to have retired half of these counties; in 2012, Barack
than a million dollars of his own for- at a young age after a career in finance, Obama won only seventeen per cent.
tune into a campaign for an unpaid would put in the effort. “I pretty much By 2020, when Joe Biden ran, the fig-
position on the Colorado State Board assumed he wasn’t going to run,” Hut- ure had fallen to ten per cent.
of Education. Polis’s Republican op- tner told me. He thought the choice Frisch acknowledged that his back-
ponent spent roughly ten thousand would be too easy: “Skiing every day ground was unconventional for a rural
dollars and lost by ninety votes. In versus going to Montrose to talk to candidate. He is Jewish, and he grew
2019, Polis became the first openly old people.” up in Minneapolis, the son of an
gay man to be elected governor in But Frisch surprised him. “He obstetrician who worked in clinics that
42 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
were often targeted by anti-abortion Frisch decided to concede in a video We sat in a café not far from the
activists. As a young man, Frisch was statement. He asked people to stop chairlift to the Aspen Mountain Ski
a Wall Street currency trader, but after sending contributions: “Please save Resort. A woman with her leg in a cast
9/11 he left the financial world. He your money for your groceries.” stopped by. “I’m so happy you’re doing
moved to Colorado, where he met his Less than two weeks later, I met this,” she said to Frisch. “Every time I
wife, Katy, who had also had a suc- with Frisch in Aspen, and I asked if get a little money, I throw it your way.”
cessful career in business. They reared the announcement might have been Frisch thanked her and asked about
two children in the ski town of Aspen, premature. “The politically expedient the leg.
where, at one point, the family bought thing would have been to keep my “I broke my ankle on the last day of
a nineteen-foot Jayco camper to use mouth shut and keep generating the uphilling,” she said.
on vacations. For the congressional money,” he told me. But he believed “It’s always the last day of the sea-
race, Frisch wrapped the camper in a that the concession had impressed son,” Frisch said.
large sign that read “Beat Boebert.” some conservative voters who dislike She repeated it like a mantra: “It’s
He began hauling it on long trips greedy politicians. By then, Frisch had always the last day of the season.”
around the district behind his red Ford already registered with the Federal That year, Frisch continued driv-
F-150 pickup truck, accompanied by Election Commission for the 2024 race, ing around the district, and periodi-
his sixteen-year-old son, Felix. Frisch’s although he hadn’t yet formally com- cally I met him at campaign events. I
previous political experience was mod- mitted to running again. He thought noticed that he avoided talking di-
est: a total of eight years on the Aspen that Boebert would probably face a rectly about his opponent, and that he
City Council. competitive primary. “I’ll be shocked if never mentioned her personal prob-
In a district of loaded names, Aspen there’s not a serious Republican chal- lems or her lack of formal education.
is probably the worst home town for any lenger to Boebert who is a normal Re- “I give her credit for going from her
candidate. Western Colorado’s voting publican,” he said. upbringing to a member of Congress,”
patterns often correspond with eleva- Frisch’s year of driving had con- he told me. “I wish it had been done
tion: relatively low-lying communities, vinced him that something was chang- in a more positive way instead of bring-
many of which depend on agricul- ing in rural areas. “I thought Trump- ing that angertainment. But she rep-
ture, energy extraction, or construction, ism was peaking a year ago,” he told me resents a lot of people who just feel
tend to be conservative, whereas scat- that November. “People want the cir- left out of the deal.”
tered pockets of blue are found in high- cus to stop.” He continued, “I wouldn’t Frisch often used that word—“an-
altitude towns that attract outdoor hob- be surprised if Trump doesn’t even gertainment”—to refer to Boebert’s be-
byists, remote workers, and the inde- run in 2024.” havior without going into details. He
pendently wealthy. During that 2022 believed that Democrats generally un-
election season, one Boebert flyer that n February, 2023, Frisch announced derestimated the emotional side of the
arrived at my home began, “Democrat
Aspen Adam: Up on his mountain . . .
IDistrict
that he would run again. The Third
was considered to be one of
working-class perspective. “Pride and
dignity trump pocketbook issues,” he
looking down at the rest of us.” The the few places in rural America where told me. He publicly opposed Biden’s
mailer listed Frisch’s house as being the Democratic Party had a chance student-loan-forgiveness program, be-
worth $9,785,900. to flip a seat, and in the first quar- lieving that it wasn’t focussed on peo-
Boebert seemed to take her victory ter of that year he outraised Boebert ple who truly needed help. He often
for granted, holding relatively few referred to the importance of con-
campaign events. Meanwhile, Frisch, trolling illegal immigration, and he
who had provided much of the initial visited the southern border in order
funding for his race, drove more than to talk to law-enforcement officials.
twenty-four thousand miles in the “Just because you hear it on Fox News
Ford F-150. Some polls indicated that doesn’t mean that it’s not true,” Frisch
the margin between Frisch and Boe- said during a meeting last summer with
bert was narrowing, but Boebert re- liberal voters in Ridgway.
mained the overwhelming favorite At that meeting, a local business
until Election Day. The week after the owner warned Frisch that his occa-
vote, the race was still too close to call, by nearly a million dollars. I visited sionally negative comments might
and Frisch and Boebert both attended Aspen that spring, as Trump’s can- undermine Democratic morale. Frisch
the new-member orientation at the didacy was gaining strength, and re- countered that Democrats were out
Capitol. By the time Frisch returned minded Frisch about his prediction. of touch with farmers, energy work-
to Aspen, in mid-November, he had “Some of us need to eat some humble ers, and others whom he described
received close to a million dollars in pie,” he said. He referred to the Repub- as producers rather than consumers.
new online donations. The tiny gap licans’ poor performance in the 2022 “Every once in a while I get talking
between the two candidates—.17 per midterms: “I thought that, after the points from the national Party,” he said.
cent—was well within the range of colossal losses, the base would have re- “And I got one three weeks ago, and
state law for a mandatory recount. But alized we’re not winning with this guy.” it said, If you are going to talk about
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 43
the farm bill, talk about it as a nutri- which were at fund-raisers that were come law. In the district, Boebert’s
tion bill. To me, that’s a perfect exam- called Lincoln Day dinners. Lincoln speeches often focussed on legislation,
ple, that the Democratic Party sees a Day is f luid; there’s no set date for undoubtedly because opponents like
farm bill as a consumer-oriented bill, such events, which are scheduled by Frisch and Andrews had targeted her
whereas I see it as related to the pro- local branches of the Republican Party. weak record in Congress. Andrews had
ducers. We need to figure out a way The first one I went to, in Ouray, was also described Boebert’s situation as a
as a Party to treat people with more on October 7th, with more than fifty simple math problem: having won the
respect who are producing.” people in attendance. Boebert began last election by the barest of margins,
her speech by referring to that day’s she couldn’t afford more bad press.
risch had been wrong about Trump attacks in Israel. “We need to cry out It was two months after the Hotch-
F not running, but he was right about
primary challengers to Boebert. In
for safety, for angels to protect them,
and for God’s will to be done in Is-
kiss dinner that Boebert abruptly an-
nounced, in a video posted to Face-
2023, Jeff Hurd, a moderate Republi- rael,” she said. Then she embarked book, that she would not seek reëlection
can lawyer from Grand Junction, de- on a long description of the Holman in the Third District. “And the Aspen
clared his candidacy, as did Russ An- rule, an obscure guideline that allows donors, George Soros, and Hollywood
drews, an engineer and a financial House members to amend appropria- actors that are trying to buy the seat,
adviser from Carbondale. Andrews tions bills on the floor. “I hope it’s not well, they can go pound sand,” she said,
hosts a conservative radio show, and he too wonky and boring for you,” she although she had relied significantly
had endorsed Boebert twice in the past. told the audience. Afterward, an auc- more on out-of-district funding than
“But, that being said, she kind of tioneer sold four guns that were signed Frisch had. In public, the congress-
ignored the district,” Andrews told by the congresswoman. A Kimber .45 woman claimed that she was moving
me last March, when we met near his handgun went for $1,776, to great ap- across Colorado for family reasons, but
home. He echoed a common criti- plause. Boebert never mentioned the reportedly an internal poll had shown
cism that Boebert had prioritized na- “Beetlejuice” scandal. plummeting support. When she called
tional fame over local issues. During A week later, she attended another Andrews to inform him that she was
her first term, she did not introduce Lincoln Day dinner in the small farm- switching districts, she acknowledged
a single bill that made it out of com- ing community of Hotchkiss, in Delta her electoral challenges. “The first thing
mittee. “She brought back 1.1 billion County. Organizers began by auction- she told me when she called was ‘Hey,
fewer dollars to the district in 2022 ing off an AR-15 that had been en- you’ve been telling me for eight months
than the average Colorado district,” graved with the words “Don’t Tread on that the math didn’t work, and we fi-
Andrews said. He believed that Boe- Me.” Lincoln Day is also fluid in its nally agreed,’” Andrews said.
bert was too rigid in her ideological sense of history: here in Hotchkiss, a The week after Boebert’s announce-
commitment to small government. “I slogan that had been embraced by the ment, she was involved in an alterca-
think that she truly believed that if Confederacy had been engraved on a tion with her ex-husband at a restau-
she left a billion dollars back in D.C. semi-automatic weapon and then sold rant in Silt. Jayson was charged with
that that’s money that would never at an event honoring the first Ameri- disorderly conduct, third-degree tres-
get spent,” he said. “But of course it can President to get shot in office. pass, and obstruction of a peace offi-
did. It got spent in New York, in Chi- After Boebert was introduced, she cer. Three days later, he was arrested
cago, in San Francisco. But this is an finally addressed the theatre incident. again, this time for assaulting one of
impoverished district, and we need “Now, this month we’ve had some stuff their sons and for possessing a gun
every nickel we can get.” happen,” she said to an audience of while drunk. (He pleaded guilty to a
Andrews described Boebert as a more than a hundred. “In all honesty lesser misdemeanor.)
friend. “Lauren’s had a really tough and humble sincerity, for any burdens The next time I saw Boebert at a
life,” he said. “I mean, she’s kind of the that my actions brought on you in Delta Lincoln Day dinner, it was in Elbert
American Dream. She made a bad County, I apologize.” She continued, County, on the eastern plains, in June,
choice, I think, with who she chose to “I just wanted to apologize to you di- 2024. “Now I’m a flatlander,” she had
marry, and I don’t think he’s been a rectly. Not on a Facebook post, not in begun saying in stump speeches, after
good actor.” a tweet, not talking to Jesse Watters. moving with her children to Wind-
In August, 2022, the Boeberts were But to you who elected me.” The room sor. At the dinner, I asked her about
living in Silt when their neighbors fell silent. Boebert transitioned to a switching districts. “Unfortunately, it’s
called 911 to report that Jayson had been description of having worked at Mc- been very publicly documented the
driving recklessly, damaging property, Donald’s, and then she talked about things that we were going through
and threatening people, and was “prob- lawmaking. “I have seven bills that and experiencing at home,” she told
ably drunk.” The next year, in April, have been passed out of committee me. “I wanted as much separation from
Lauren filed for divorce, and then, a that need to come to the floor,” she that as possible.”
few months later, she was kicked out of said. In fact, only three bills sponsored When I brought up the theatre in-
the Buell Theatre. That fall, I attended by Boebert were currently waiting for cident, she bristled. “More ‘Beetlejuice,’
two of Boebert’s first post-“Beetlejuice” House votes after having been reported great,” she said. But she answered my
appearances in the district, both of out of committee; none has yet be- questions. At one point, I asked if she
44 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
SKETCHBOOK BY PAUL ROGERS

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 45

thought that her identity as a woman rarely referred to anything as an issue Trump himself. But Boebert’s mind-
had made the criticism especially harsh, specific to women, with the exception set was much closer to the psychology
because I was curious to see whether of certain MAGA ideological priorities, of the white working poor. A history
she would use that as a defense. But such as the Violence Against Women of suffering was key to her identity, but
she responded with an awkward joke. by Illegal Aliens Act, which Boebert it seemed equally important to her that
“I definitely believe that this is the co-sponsored. (The bill passed in the she not speak about any damage or re-
hardest any Republican has been crit- House but didn’t make it out of com- veal any weakness. This was part of the
icized for a night at the theatre,” she mittee in the Senate.) From the police challenge that Frisch talked about—
said. “We’re at a Lincoln Day dinner record alone, it was clear that Boebert pride and dignity mattered, even when
here, and he had a theatre incident, had been exposed to a significant de- people’s circumstances and behavior
ended a little differently.” She laughed gree of domestic violence, but she never happened to be undignified.
and then became serious. “Folks were mentioned this as a formative experi-
hard on me. Maybe some of it right- ence or as a pressing social problem. fter Boebert left the Third Dis-
fully so.” She continued, “I never want
to burden anyone, especially the peo-
Her proposed solutions for Colorado—
fewer government regulations, more
A trict, Jeff Hurd handily won the
Republican primary there. Hurd grew
ple that have elected me and trusted fracking, less welfare—were always up in Grand Junction, the district’s
me and that I represent. I never want connected to an ideal of self-sufficiency. second-largest city, and he attended
to burden them with my issues.” At the top, the national MAGA move- Notre Dame, where he decided to be-
One point of consistency in the var- ment was full of opportunists, mostly come a priest and a college professor.
ious life stories that Boebert told on male, some of whom had been pol- In 2002, as a postulant who was pre-
the campaign trail was that she didn’t ished by Ivy League degrees: J. D. paring to enter the seminary, he went
present herself as a victim. She also Vance, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, to a conference in Slovakia, where he
met a young law student named Bar-
bora. He began sending her long let-
ters. “For some reason, she wasn’t get-
ting all the letters I was writing her,” he
told me. “Her post lady bundled up all
the letters and sent them back. I fool-
ishly had put down my return address.”
One day, Hurd’s superior at the semi-
nary called him in for a meeting, and
the letters were stacked on his desk.
“He said, ‘We need to talk,’” Hurd ex-
plained. “And that was right.”
Hurd told me this last spring, not
long after we first met, in his new,
sparsely furnished campaign office in
a Grand Junction strip mall. The space
had previously belonged to a Jenny
Craig franchise that had gone out of
business in the wake of Ozempic. Hurd
talked about meeting Barbora, who is
now his wife, as a roundabout way of
explaining that he hadn’t had a long-
time goal of becoming a politician.
After the couple married, Hurd stud-
ied law at the University of Denver
and Columbia University, and then
worked as a corporate lawyer in Man-
hattan. Eventually, he and Barbora set-
tled in Grand Junction, where they
were rearing five children. He had never
run for office before.
A few days later, I accompanied Hurd
while he campaigned in the small city
of Durango. He had a gentle air that
couldn’t have been more different from
Lauren Boebert’s public demeanor. “If
“And here, of course, are the parental controls.” the voters decide not, that’s O.K.,” he
told a group of citizens who had gath- conservative members. But, over time, ing. “She would talk to somebody near
ered in a private home north of town. he had stayed the same while the Re- me on the floor, but we wouldn’t make
“I don’t have to be in Congress.” He publican Party entered, in his descrip- eye contact,” he said. I asked if he was
told another attendee that his favorite tion, “the MAGA world.” In Novem- planning to vote for her in November.
writer was Marcus Aurelius. “He wrote ber, 2023, Buck announced that he “She hasn’t asked,” he said.
a book called ‘Meditations,’” Hurd said. would not seek reëlection. “Our na- “Will you support Trump in this
“It was things he was writing to him- tion is on a collision course with re- election?”
self, about how to live virtuously.” ality,” he said in a video statement. Buck smiled. “He hasn’t asked, either.”
In downtown Durango, he stopped “Too many Republican leaders are
in shops and restaurants. A manager at lying to America, claiming that the ven before moving to Windsor,
a framing store described herself as a
pro-business conservative. She asked,
2020 election was stolen.”
Buck decided to leave Congress
E Boebert had been characterized
by a kind of political homelessness.
“So, what’s your choice for President?” rather than finish his term, triggering Her profile was built primarily through
“I’m staying out of the race for Pres- a special election. Local Republican social media and on the national stage,
ident,” Hurd said. “People want you to leaders supported a stand-in candidate whereas her personal local connections
say which tribe you’re in, and I want to named Greg Lopez, who promised to were often weak. “She burns bridges,
focus on my district.” serve out the rest of the term and not unfortunately,” one Republican woman,
Later, I asked Hurd whether he had run again. This cleared the way for who has known Boebert for years, told
voted for Trump in the past, and Boebert to enter the primary without me. During Boebert’s first two suc-
whether he would vote for him in No- resigning her seat. cessful congressional campaigns, she
vember, and he declined to answer both Initially, there were media reports never came close to winning her home
questions. He also wouldn’t say if he that Boebert might have trouble in the county, Garfield. When I visited Rifle
had ever voted for Boebert. Originally, primary. But throughout the spring she this October, it was easy to find echoes
Hurd had been recruited to run by Re- travelled frequently across her new dis- of Boebert but hard to get people to
publican leaders across the state who trict. Her speeches continued to focus comment about her. At McDonald’s,
had been dismayed by the congress- on legislative issues, criticizing omni- a woman behind the counter said that
woman. Both Frisch and Hurd de- bus bills, for example, as opaque and she had worked there with Boebert
scribed themselves as reluctant politi- wasteful. Attempts by other candidates years ago. “I was in high school with
cians, and they often talked about the to highlight her personal failings gen- Lauren,” she said, before declining to
same issues: inflation, immigration, the erally didn’t work, in part because those say more. (“Very challenging for me,”
need to support Colorado’s oil-and- candidates had plenty of problems of she texted later, when I asked again if
gas industry. They also shared a cere- their own. At the first Republican de- she would meet.)
bral quality. “I can see those two sit- bate, the moderator asked the candidates Rif le High School had no com-
ting down in a restaurant for lunch and if they had ever been arrested, and six memoration of its most famous for-
having a great conversation,” Jerry Son- of the nine people onstage raised their mer student. Theresa Hamilton, the
nenberg, a sixty-six-year-old Republi- hands. The audience cheered, and Boe- director of communications for the
can politician and cattle rancher in bert high-fived Trent Leisy, a county- school district, answered my questions
eastern Colorado, told me. Over time, council member who in 2016 had been in a terse but professional manner. “Any
I recognized this as part of the strange arrested for causing injury to a child, time you have a political figure that
power of Lauren Boebert. Somehow, a charge that was dismissed when he creates some controversy, sometimes
her sheer presence had taken these two pleaded guilty to harassment. it’s a little difficult to navigate,” she
decent middle-aged men, transformed Boebert’s strongest competitor was told me. I asked Hamilton if Rifle High
them into politicians, and sent them Jerry Sonnenberg, who had had a long School had ever asked Boebert to at-
off to battle across the wilds of west- career in the state House and Senate. tend an event.
ern Colorado. Sonnenberg’s arrest was pretty minor— “Not that I’m aware of,” she said.
he said that it had something to do In downtown Rifle, Shooters Grill,

Ibynsuing
her new district, Boebert was pur-
a seat that had been vacated
Ken Buck in March of 2024. Buck
with bail and a speeding ticket, many
years ago. In the current climate, this
may have bolstered his image as a tra-
which had had a series of controver-
sies related to Boebert’s refusal to com-
ply with COVID-19 policies, closed in
lives in Windsor, the flatlander town ditional conservative. On the day of 2022. These days, the space is occupied
that Boebert turned up in after leav- the primary, Sonnenberg told me that by a Mexican restaurant called Tapa-
ing the mountains. I visited him at his he expected to finish a distant second, tios. I stopped by in October; a man-
home, where he told me that Boebert’s and he acknowledged that Boebert had ager nervously claimed that Boebert’s
switch had surprised him. “She didn’t campaigned effectively. “She painted restaurant had been situated some-
ask for my input,” he said. herself as a fighter, someone who will where else. But next door, at the Trades-
Buck, who was first elected to Con- defend the district,” he said. man Pawnshop, a clerk confirmed the
gress in 2014, as part of the Tea Party When I visited Buck, he told me location. “Nobody likes to talk about
movement, was once considered to be that during his final weeks in Congress it,” he said.
among the House’s most radically he and Boebert had stopped interact- The only person on the block
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 47
 she maintained her vitriolic national
image, but at local events she portrayed
herself as a responsible legislator. As
the election approached, she shifted
closer to the former President. In Oc-
tober, she was featured alongside Trump
at a vehemently anti-immigration rally
in Aurora, a Denver suburb. The event
came in the wake of repeated false
claims by Trump that Venezuelan gangs
had taken over an Aurora apartment
building. At the rally, Boebert told the
crowd, “Our back yard is looking like
an episode of ‘Narcos’!”
Such comments may have been
aimed at pleasing Trump rather than
the voters in Boebert’s new district,
which includes only a tiny part of Au-
rora. Trisha Calvarese, her Democratic
opponent, had grown up in the Fourth
District, and she was exactly Boebert’s
age—they were born the same week
in 1986. “As a millennial, who is our
spokeswoman? It’s people like Boe-
bert,” Calvarese told me. “As a mil-
lennial, I’m sad about that.”
Despite Calvarese’s being a first-
time candidate in a heavily red dis-
trict, her campaign attracted signifi-
“Maybe we’re following up too soon and need to cant donations. She told me that she
let the editorial process run its course.” had adopted many of Adam Frisch’s
strategies, including running ads that
targeted Boebert’s weak legislative re-
• • cord. In May, the congresswoman had
tried to take credit for a fifty-one-
who was willing to comment was a ing Trump, as were most of her friends. million-dollar bridge project in her
twenty-two-year-old named Maria “I think he’s going to get the economy original district when, in fact, three
Ramirez, who was drinking a mar- good again,” she said. years earlier she had joined a hundred
garita at Jalisco Grill, another Mexi- and ninety-nine other Republicans to
can restaurant, across the street from
Boebert’s old place. Ramirez is an
American citizen, having been born
Imanynpolitics
2016 and 2017, when I reported on
in western Colorado, I saw
examples of politicians and ac-
vote against the bill that funded it.
The day before the election, I met
with Heather Graham, a Republican
in the U.S., but she spent most of tivists imitating Trump’s behavior. They who last January had been elected
her childhood in Mexico before re- often came across as abrasive and angry, mayor of Pueblo, the largest city in
turning to Colorado. She said that which appeared to galvanize their sup- the district that Boebert still repre-
her friends in the immigrant com- porters. This time, though, many con- sented. “Since I’ve been the mayor, I
munity had opposed Boebert in the servatives struck me as reluctant Trump have not spoken to Congresswoman
last election. voters. “I wish he had not run,” one Boebert, not one single time,” Gra-
“She didn’t like illegal people,” Republican woman, who had voted ham told me, explaining that her only
Ramirez said. “When it was COVID for him in 2016 and 2020, told me. “I contact had been with Boebert’s staff.
time, everyone was closed and she was think a lot of us feel that way, but we’re “Every other U.S. senator in Colo-
open. She said she needed to feed her just going to pull the handle for him, rado, attorney general, governor—
family. My friends said, ‘That’s why because we don’t like the alternative.” every single person either came here
we’re here, to feed our families.’ ” One problem with Trumpism in to see me or reached out.”
But Ramirez didn’t have the same Colorado was that it worked poorly at Graham described herself as “the
reaction to Trump’s anti-immigrant the local level, where politicians needed MAGA mayor,” because she was a ded-
rhetoric in the current Presidential to win allies in order to get things done. icated Trumpist, but in October she
election. In 2020, she had voted for Boebert’s strategy seemed to be to try endorsed Frisch. “You can be a fan of
Biden, but this year she was support- to have it both ways: on social media, Adam Frisch and Donald Trump,”
48 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
she told me. She said that she liked a lot of time that could be spent on already here, I’m going to have to see
Hurd personally, but she had been meeting people. I’ve done a good job the outlines of his proposals.”
impressed by Frisch’s moderate posi- of it. But I also would have liked to In the various November postmor-
tions. In her endorsement, she noted make sure that I was out.” tems, experts lambasted the Dem-
that Frisch had spent more than a ocratic Party for failing to listen to
hundred and thirty days campaign- n the end, Lauren Boebert won in working-class and rural people. But it
ing in Pueblo.
Last summer, Frisch ran ads that
Itwelve
her new district by a little less than
points. Two years earlier, Ken
was hard to imagine a candidate who
had been more focussed on those vot-
highlighted Hurd’s refusal to say Buck had won by twenty-four points. At ers than Adam Frisch. He was careful
whether he would vote for Trump. the Grainhouse, in Windsor, after Boe- to respect people without much edu-
But he soon dropped the issue, which bert’s victory speech, I asked if she was cation; he broke with the Democrats
didn’t matter to anybody I talked to. In concerned about the diminished margin. on key positions; he had earned the
late September, when Frisch and Hurd “No,” she said. “Ken Buck’s race was endorsement of the MAGA mayor in
participated in a debate in Grand Junc- not something where Democrats wanted the largest city in his district. He had
tion, Trump’s name was never men- to spend money. We were outspent five driven a pickup truck the equivalent
tioned. Both candidates seemed de- to one. It is more expensive to sell a lie of a third of the way to the moon.
termined to separate themselves from than it is to share the truth.” She con- The final payoff, though, was minimal:
national figures. Frisch noted that he tinued, “My opponent was spending in the district, Frisch outperformed
had been among the first Democratic millions of dark-money dollars on all Kamala Harris by only about f ive
congressional candidates in the country of the airwaves.” percentage points.
to call for Biden to step aside. “If there Drew Sexton, Boebert’s campaign “We could have solved the Colo-
was a get-stuff-done party, I’d be in the manager, told me that he was satisfied. rado water problem, and cured cancer,
get-stuff-done party,” he said. Hurd, “I know that there are races that were and had ten million dollars more, and
meanwhile, looked intent on establish- a lot closer than this one that could use it wasn’t going to change the result,”
ing how little he had in common with four million dollars,” he said. “And so Frisch told me, a week after the elec-
Boebert. “A reporter once said I’m as that’s going to be a question for Dem- tion. He said that voters had been too
exciting as a bread sandwich,” he said ocrats. Do they want to keep hate- rigidly committed to their tribes. Dem-
during the debate. “That’s O.K. Rural donating against Lauren?” ocrats continued to lose ground across
Colorado doesn’t need excitement.” When I spoke with Calvarese, she rural America, where Harris won eight
The night before the election, Frisch hadn’t decided whether she would per cent of the counties.
held a final rally in Pueblo. The city is run again. A number of people told In an election of many hard iro-
almost four hours from his home, and me that the district was so red that nies, “Beetlejuice” may have been a
a local named Jeff Woods told me that Boebert might be vulnerable only to stroke of good fortune for Colorado
he had hosted Frisch and his son for a Republican challenger, but Calva- Republicans. The fallout had forced
more than thirty nights during the past rese still believed that a Democrat Boebert to move to a safer district,
two years. “I’ve kept a room in my home could win. “Her strategy was to get allowing her former seat to be pro-
for Adam and Felix,” he said. out of Dodge and go to another place tected by a more moderate Republi-
After the rally, Frisch and Felix where people don’t know can. “If ‘Beetlejuice’ hadn’t
picked up some pizza at a nearby food her,” she said. “But peo- happened, she would have
court. They planned to drive the Ford ple are going to find out stayed,” Frisch told me. “I
F-150 another eight hours on Election about her.” think we would have come
Day. The truck’s total mileage in the In the district that Boe- out ahead.”
course of the two campaigns would bert had abandoned, Hurd He said that a number
top seventy-seven thousand. defeated Frisch by 4.98 of people had suggested
“Some say it’s better just to stay points. “I look at this as a that he move to the Fourth
home,” Felix said. mandate election,” Hurd District and run against
“That’s how it is with many candi- told me. “We will be held Boebert in 2026. An image
dates,” Adam said. “They are told to accountable in two years.” immediately came to mind:
sit in a room for forty hours a week As a Republican who pre- Frisch, Buck, and Boebert,
and fund-raise.” ferred to talk about Marcus Aurelius all of them neighbors on the vast flat-
The next afternoon, I called Hurd, rather than about Trump, Hurd lands of Windsor. But Frisch dismissed
who described himself as cautiously seemed likely to have his stoicism the possibility. “Would it be great if
optimistic. When I asked if there was challenged in the coming term. He Lauren Boebert was not in Congress
anything he wished he had done acknowledged concerns about tariffs, anymore?” he said. “Yes, but it’s not my
differently, he unknowingly echoed and Trump’s talk of expelling eleven lifelong mission.” He didn’t know if he
his opponent. million immigrants. “Certainly, we would ever run for office again, but he
“I think I could have done a better need to get illegal immigration under planned to get back in the Ford. “We’ll
job of showing that I was engaged and control,” he said. “When it comes to probably drive around the district
active,” he said. “Raising money takes how to deal with the people who are thanking people,” he said. 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 49
 FICTION

50 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 ILLUSTRATION BY SOMNATH BHATT

T
he night of Dev’s twenty- “Next, you lot will be drinking the if he’d been pointed and laughed at.
second birthday, he was invited Prime Minister’s piss,” Dev said. “You Sometimes this was actually the case.
to sit with the elders after din- believe any nonsense you hear.” Now Dev wondered if Tiger already
ner. The summons was conveyed by “You definitely need to start drink- knew of his fate, or if he would blast
Bhakti Bai, the maid, who called Dev ing someone’s piss,” his father said, through the door, briefcase in hand,
into the kitchen once the dinner plates leaving no beat for the room’s laugh- wagging a finger at Dev, who was at
had been cleared, and placed in his ter. “This idiot got a degree only be- that moment considering whether to
hands a tray of glasses filled with water. cause I bribed the dean’s entire family. betray him.
“They’ve asked for you,” she said. Every cousin and third cousin of his “You must have heard him say that
Dev glanced at the tray of crystal he in Bombay I’ve had to take to dinner!” he’s not very happy at the company,”
was holding. It was time for things to Here, the men were allowed to laugh. Dev said. “I mean, this was never what
open, he thought, windows and doors. Dev shook his head gamely, letting the he wanted to do with his life.”
His head swam with the onion stink hard sounds of his uncles’ voices make To create the illusion of truth, Dev
of the kitchen. Then there was a force him once more a child confined to his stood and poured himself a cup of tea.
at his back, pushing him toward the bed, parsing the deep rumble beyond Tiger did not appear at the door, a por-
blazing chatter beyond the doorway. his door, picturing the flat completely tal quickly closing.
“Be good now,” Bhakti Bai said. dark except for this one glowing, boom- “Well, if he’s unhappy . . . ,” an uncle
In the living room, the graying heads ing room. How he had loved imagin- said.
of Dev’s uncles turned right to left in ing the men breaking out the ruby- The men exchanged thoughtful
conversation, their words crude and fast, shaded rum that sat in the cabinet and looks at this new information, slurp-
heavy with the consonants of money laughing with all their bad teeth, as if ing their tea. This went on for a few
talk. “Four lakhs!” his grandfather said, they hadn’t spent every dinner of his minutes, until Dev’s grandfather urged
and it sounded as if he were calling for life as absolutely and untouchably sober the men to a decision with what looked
an assassination. Dev set the tray on as headstones. This was how they pre- like an accidental knock of his cane.
the coffee table and took a seat, wel- pared a son of the house to shoulder “O.K.,” his father said, the word re-
coming the noise. Countless nights he responsibility, he thought. They used peated by another relative, then another.
had lingered in his socks behind the the oldest trick in the book: the trick A voice called for Bhakti Bai to
main wall of the living room, listen- of making a child believe there was bring out the open bottle of Blue Label
ing to the men. Standing there, he’d something thrilling occurring in the along with six glasses. Again came her
been invisible to his uncles but obvi- house at the very moment that he was measured footsteps, and with them
ous to Bhakti Bai, who would click her ordered to go to bed. Dev’s first encounter with the impos-
tongue in irritation at the room’s ris- Beyond the walls now, he knew that sible, leathery taste of whiskey. He tried
ing volume, the inevitable trumpeting his mother would be comforting his to contain his reaction to the flavor
of men without women. little brother, just as she used to creep but couldn’t keep from gagging behind
“I’ve heard it before,” Dev’s father said quietly along the hall to check on Dev. his hand when no one was watching.
now. “Cow urine has healing properties. “Let’s see what Dev thinks,” his
In ancient times, they used to drink it.” grandfather said, sitting up straighter ev was in the office six days a week.
“Yes, yes, just a splash in your morning
chai and it’s a wonder,” an uncle agreed.
in his seat. “We’ve spoken in the past
of Tiger’s incompetence, and I think
D The family business was real es-
tate. For Dev, this meant meetings at
The men roared at the silliness, or it wise to encourage his move abroad, development sites all over Bombay, and
perhaps the seriousness, of the idea. so that he can leave the business and the crossing of items off checklists—
Dev wasn’t sure. He channelled his do something of his own. I am speak- running water, fire extinguisher, func-
own endorsement into an ambivalent ing too honestly, perhaps, but his care- tional lock, windows that opened. “Ay,
up-down of his right foot. His pres- lessness with the property in Cuffe Pa- come see this tap,” someone would yell,
ence did not appear to have been noted, rade has seriously set us back.” and Dev would become one of two
and he wondered whether they had de- “I’ve mentioned it before,” his father bodies before a mirror, watching brown-
cided in advance to ignore him. Sitting said. “Dev can easily take over for Tiger.” ish water sputter from a silver mouth.
beside his father, Dev took comfort in The uncles nodded in agreement. The office had a low ceiling, which
the sound of Bhakti Bai preparing the Inside Dev, something sank and meant that Dev had to duck each time
nightly tea and biscuits. When she fi- then rose. He wasn’t sure why his older he walked through a doorway. To avoid
nally emerged to see Dev among the brother wasn’t at the meeting to de- this minor annoyance, he remained
men, he knew, her tray would give a fend himself. Dev was used to Tiger seated for most of the day. Over time,
rattle, and the old woman, who had giving him a devilish nudge and smirk the sitting became a nuisance for his
fed and bathed him as an infant, would every night after dinner, as he saun- back, which had grown tender and
send him a wink of good luck. tered into the room while Dev and his tight. He developed a slight hunch, for
“Devansh,” his father said, in greet- younger brother waited outside, unin- which he chastised himself meanly
ing or annoyance, or both. vited. How infuriating he’d found Ti- whenever he passed his own reflection.
Then came the tray, the sweet clamor ger’s air of superiority. Each time his Look at you! Ugly thing! Horrible liar!
of cups and saucers. brother glanced at him, Dev felt as A chiropractor recommended that
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 51
he begin taking daily walks on his by dripping red medicine on his shirt he had accused his brother of feeling.
lunch break. and spinning a story about his older Dev found there was little pleasure to
It saddened Dev to think how ex- brother’s violent rages. Now Tiger had be had from his labor, and the few lib-
citing it had all been at first, the belt, found a way to move to America, and erties he was given did not make up
the tucked-in shirt, the steel tiffins that all that remained of him in the flat for the lack of time he had to himself.
were sent after him for lunch and din- was a silver-framed photograph from Even the money, which he was never
ner. Bhakti Bai had teasingly started the day he left: shirt buttoned to the allowed to touch directly, had become
calling him “sir.” This was only after collar, suitcase in hand, staring in- as elusive and abstract as a philosophy.
she ran a dishevelling hand through tently from the entrance to the air- The uncles had asked him to trust that
his neatly parted hair, clicking her port. Nights when Dev returned home he would be supported for his hard
tongue at the sight of him, saying that from work late, the photograph often work. They told him there was no rea-
he looked more and more like his fa- jarred him. It sat on the entry con- son for a boy his age to have access to
ther every day. But it was the slog of sole beside a bowl of fresh marigolds, money of that sort.
work that had made Dev grow up. His a little shrine created by his mother, “This was never what I wanted to
exhaustion had vaporized his image of as though there had been a war, and do with my life,” Dev would com-
himself as a child. As a boy, he’d lived Tiger, once handsome and capable, plain to Bhakti Bai once his uncles
with a big, unmovable frown pasted had been found amid the rubble. Since had returned to their respective flats
across his face, a frown of marble and that day, no one had heard from him. to sleep. The line came to him each
pride, for he was always being bested The ironic hand of the universe had time he had had to force a key into a
in some competition for his uncles’ done its work; these days, it was Dev stiff new lock or flush a toilet to in-
attention and trying to win it back who suffered from all the resentment sure that it worked. He wanted more
than anything to hold his earnings,
to measure them against his misery.
“Why?” he asked her. “Why do they
behave this way?”
“So they can keep you under their
roof forever,” she said definitively. “Not
roof, sorry. Foot. Under their foot.”

ome days, Dev would find notes

SScrawled
from Bhakti Bai in his tiff in.
in her neat, blockish hand
were bizarre truisms like Humility is
the most honorable dress for a man. Un-
less he is going swimming.
He knew she put them there to make
him laugh.
Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but make
sure to curse your grandfather when you
fall and die.
I had no shoes and complained until I
saw a man with no cucumber.
Dev saved these notes in a drawer
in his desk. A reminder of the com-
fort that awaited him if he managed
to cross the threshold of his office door
at a reasonable hour and return to the
silence of his family’s apartment.
There were weekly meetings in his
grandfather’s office on the top floor,
which all male family members were
expected to attend. At these meet-
ings, Dev’s grandfather would give
the group an overview of the mis-
takes made that week, followed by a
stern pronouncement that such mis-
takes ought not to be repeated. “Am
I making myself clear?” the old man
“I need a better advocate, Craig.” would ask.
 In Dev’s one-year tenure, these mis- had revealed something so personal a few years. She recalled consoling her
takes had seemed to grow in serious- about herself without his prompting. mother as she removed the warm gold
ness. Fudged numbers on balance She had been in love once, he thought, hoops from her ears, the bangles from
sheets, apartments rented without turning over the fact. And she uses her wrists. Her mother handed the
smoke alarms, and one summer night, the loo. She was in love once, and in jewelry over to a liquidator in exchange
while Dev slept, a newly renovated her lover’s flat she would use the loo. for cash. They had been well off once,
high-rise in Pali Hill went up in flames. He held the cigarette still as she she said, but her father’s death had
What fire does not destroy, it makes leaned toward him with her lighter. also spelled the death of their com-
very crispy. “Cocksucking,” he said from behind forts. At the liquidator’s shop, Jagriti
Dev understood that he was not the a thin cloud of smoke. “It’s the family had watched her mother’s hands go
only one suffering through the hours limp in her lap. Her mother’s hands
at work. The accidents were evidence were pale and soft, she said, like two
of how difficult it was for everyone to small animals shorn of their fur. She
live under someone’s foot. had never before seen her mother with-
After the weekly meetings, Dev out gold on her fingers.
would walk around Ballard Estate to “Understood?” she asked.
straighten out his back. He liked to see Dev nodded.
other young professionals taking their The modern Indian woman, Jag-
smoke breaks against the old build- riti said, was no better. The modern
ings, and the chaatwala who always woman had grown up seeing these
called to him in greeting, though he business. I didn’t have much of a choice. mothers, how helpless they became if
had never once visited the stall. So you can’t hold it against me.” their husbands vanished, like dolls with
Yearning for a cigarette one Fri- From the high shot of her laugh, plastic eyes glued open in shock. The
day, he approached a group of women, he could tell that he had surprised her. daughters of women like that believed
whom he guessed to be his age or a they’d be safe if they avoided their
little older, drinking coffee out of ce- er name was Jagriti. mothers’ prisons—love and mother-
ramic mugs in the street. He recog-
nized the logo on the mugs as that
H She had come to Bombay to
work at the fashion magazine. She al-
hood. Jagriti had grown up believing
that girls who wanted babies were idi-
of the fashion magazine that rented ready had an M.B.A., which she had ots. For years, she had refused to hold
the floor above his office. One of the paid for, she liked to remind Dev, all the children of her friends, thinking
girls, dressed in a red kurta and jeans, by herself. She worked in accounting, that she looked intellectual and supe-
brought a lighter to the cigarette be- but the office was open plan, so she rior when she swatted a baby away, or
tween her lips. was able to sit close enough to the continued with her conversation while
“Can I have one of those?” he asked stylists and writers to be dazzled by a child wailed in her friend’s lap. But
her. their new clothes and convent-school she knew now that this was the reaction
She did not smile or even move a English. She was twenty-seven to Dev’s of a woman who had been too afraid to
hand to her pack, which he saw sitting twenty-three. imagine something better for herself.
in her open purse. Early on, Jagriti made it clear to She admitted that, these days, when
“Who do you work for?” she asked. Dev what kind of woman she was not. she woke up, she sometimes longed
“Shetty and Sons.” Her theory of womanhood was a cake to greet a small thing wriggling in a
“And you’re one of the sons?” with two halves. The first half con- cot beside her. But she wanted to do
“Grandson,” he said. “But I won’t be cerned the women of their parents’ it all differently, with less misery. She
there long.” generation—demure, without opin- wanted to have a baby without enter-
He thought she must have liked ions, bright-skinned beauties loung- ing the prison of motherhood. She had
his answer, because only then did she ing on daybeds with nothing to say, yet to figure it all out, but she knew
hold out the pack for him to take a like pampered pets. These women had that one day she would have to de-
cigarette. been told that their primary concern cide. This was how a life was made:
“Your family—real cocksuckers,” was the upkeep of the home. The ba- a woman woke up and decided. But
she said. “My ex lived in one of your bies, the décor, the maids and their she would decide in her own time, she
buildings, and one day the bloody toi- gossip. Jagriti would not become one said, and, if Dev wanted to rush any
let flooded the whole flat. When he of these women, she said. No long of her decisions, he could go off and
asked your father or whoever to come robes, no being forced to wear a bra hang himself right now.
and fix it, they didn’t send anyone for in her own living room out of concern “Understood?”
eleven days. We had to just live like for what the in-laws said, no alien- Dev nodded.
that, begging each morning to piss in ation from the machinery that pumped He tried to grasp her ideas, to val-
the neighbor’s flat.” the household with money. idate them. He had been the type of
Dev listened, amused. He was glad When her father died, Jagriti said, man to notice the world and its be-
to hear someone else criticize his he left her mother in so much debt haviors but never to examine these im-
workplace but even gladder that she that they’d had to live in ashrams for ages in the light, extracting his own
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 53
 SUMMER MOVIES IN CENTRAL PARK
For Juliusz Kronski in Paris

In the dim light on the trampled grasses An errant fire will often burn right through
Girls lie still with soldiers in their arms. The rosy stains on bedsheets.
Until the image alters: dark glance
Of a shoulder, an unbuttoned blouse. Whoever enters the human microcosmos
Where marvels are performed should know
Trees spring from the ancient bedrock That it delivers, serenely, on a daily basis,
And the sprays of leaves fall like chords. The retributions of a malignant fate.
When nature becomes a theatre,
The silvery machinery of the skyline shifts. They don’t hear this. As if the fresh earth
Had brought forth the first palm after the flood,
The summits of the abstract city quiver Trembling, they enter the quiet groves of sex
Under murky rainbows in the humid air. And simply give themselves to each other.
Honeycombs of metal, or stalactites,
Divide the distance into sheer domains. And yet even here, in the middle of Manhattan,
I could see how, at a warning sound,
··· Their faces blanch in the glare of the screen
And sudden fright weakens their legs.
I remember a field where the radiance
Of the burning city colors the dry wormwood Here, in the line of cars along 5th Avenue,
And crickets play, red from the glow, I see how the ambassador’s limousine glides
Through which an army of smoke marches. Past the white masts on which various flags
Of fictitious color sway in a mild breeze.
The water rushing along the road flutters
The dress on the corpse of a woman, The poor envoys. Their labors are great,
As the city descends long days and nights As they, eyes asquint, compose a holy covenant
Into legend, which won’t compensate for its disasters. With duplicitous ink, or the pact
Between the Athenians and the Lacedemonians.
This memory contains a warning for those
Who spend their nights on soft couches: And what sort of power was granted to us,

desires and opinions, the way Jagriti she said. Did he know any Dylan? When she finished the song, she
had. It was clear to him that she was Dev shook his head. waited a moment, watching him. He
much smarter than he was, that he “Uncultured,” she declared. Then, thought maybe she was waiting for
would have to read all the books on in the quick voice she used when she him to say it. He closed his book.
her shelves to become something like was teaching him something, she said, “I love that song,” he said. “I love
her equal, and he decided to start that “He was very popular in America in how you play.”
very night, packing a hardback by Adri- the sixties.” She looked down at her strings, as
enne Rich into his briefcase for his The song was called “Mama, You if she had understood what went un-
lunch break the next day. Been on My Mind.” As Jagriti played, said. The drop of sweat had fallen.
an easy thought came to Dev, an idea “That’s it?”
n Saturdays, while Dev worked, washing over his mind without resis- No, no, there was more: he wanted
O Jagriti took guitar lessons. Sun-
day mornings, before breakfast, he read,
tance. He loved her. He imagined the
melodrama of telling her after her ser-
to say that he would never need her
forgiveness, never say an unforgivable
leaning against the pillows in Jagri- enade, the sure cadence of his voice, thing, never make her remove the gold
ti’s bed, while she practiced the song the usual boldness of her expression— from her wrists and ears, never die,
she had learned the day before. On a would she even be surprised? All the never leave her on her own, though
rainy Sunday that Dev would remem- while, his eyes locked upon a curling even if he did—he knew she would in-
ber as the beginning of their days to- hair stuck to the blanket on her bed. terrupt—she would be absolutely fine.
gether, he watched from above the From her pubic area, he mused, and He’d felt it all in him since that morn-
open spine of his book as Jagriti po- continued to watch her strum; a drop ing; no, even earlier. He was thinking
sitioned her guitar between her arms. of sweat prepared to dive from the like a poet: I loved you from the first
She sat on a footstool wearing a white high bridge of her nose. O.K., he cigarette, he wanted to say.
camisole and a pair of tube socks. She thought, he was an adult, he was in “What do you want me to say?” he
was about to play a Bob Dylan song, love, and he would tell her. asked.
54 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
 Juliusz, when we foresaw the fate It is this honor, Juliusz, that is granted us:
Of our native realm, which was to be brought To resurrect new forms, forged of gold.
Under the militarized feet of foreign powers. In spite of the leisurely pace of change,
To mix valiant drinks for the future.
We had barely mourned in our secret hearts
That Europe, mother of arts and sciences Greet the Parisian streets for me, please,
With its old wisdom and bloody cobblestones, And the fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens.
As we placed it on the scales opposite the new faith. Likewise the Seine where, to this day, I can see
The Cathedral’s arches and the sleeping boats.
Looking calmly at force, we know that the ones
Who want to rule the world will pass away I don’t know whether Montaigne’s monument
And we know that it isn’t always necessary Still stands, whose white marble lips
To live by the knife and the submachine gun. A girl, as a joke, has painted blush red,
And run off, lowering her head in laughter.
We know that the ingenuity of our weapons
Is disastrous, that the whirlwind shreds banners, There are, according to the Greek philosophers,
And that the heirs to the glory of the Greek name Seven stages to the journey. We may not be familiar
(But glory, our heritage from Greece) With them all, so let this wandering road
Will last as long as humankind lasts. Through the ashes of war be your chosen path.

And that this age of darkness will pass the way winters And receive as a gift an afternoon’s description
Pass when strong sap rises under the brittle bark. Of this excessively proud land
The smile of the Sophists, as in papal Rome, And with it my hope that books will preserve
Will knock the pen from the hand of the Inquisitors. This little drawing of Central Park.

Just as once upon a time books were brought Washington, D.C., 1948
From Constantinople to the northern lands, —Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004)
The voices of wise men in the wild lands
Will become a source of creative power. (Translated, from the Polish, by Robert Hass and David Frick.)

“Don’t take that tone with me,” she “Who is the groom?” the astrolo- ful covers. Folded within the books were
said. “You think I can’t see what you’re ger asked. sheets of blank paper on which the as-
thinking?” “I am,” Dev said. trologer drew checkerboard-like struc-
He pulled the collar of his T-shirt “Sit, sit,” the astrologer said. “All of tures as the men watched. He wrote
up to dab at the sweat that had damp- you, sit.” small notations in each of the squares,
ened the back of his neck. “Tell me Seated, Dev felt he was seeing his his face preserved in the scowl he had
then. What am I thinking?” own life through the astrologer’s eyes. worn at the front door, revealing noth-
“You’re thinking of making me a He saw the silk sofas the color of tof- ing. On the second piece of paper, Dev
bride, aren’t you?” fee, the intricately carved silver sculp- saw that the astrologer’s pencil had
His limbs utterly rigid, he watched tures that Bhakti Bai polished weekly, noted Jagriti’s name and the time of
as she placed her guitar carefully against the flag-size painting on which the eyes her birth—a detail that Dev had faith-
its stand before climbing, knee by knee, of visitors rested when they did not want fully collected and delivered to his fa-
to where he waited for her, in bed. to look at one another. On the canvas, ther the week before.
two fat children watched as a third, blue- He and the men of his family had
he astrologer was a gaunt man in skinned comrade gleefully stole melted been seated almost precisely the way
T office wear. He slipped off his
shoes at the door, then groaned as he
butter from a pot. All these hoarded
souvenirs, familiar as banana peels, the
they were now when Dev had an-
nounced his intention to propose. The
descended to his knees to sit cross- peels of Dev’s heart—how well he knew men had raised their glasses to his news,
legged on the floor. their chips and stains, these artifacts that and then Dev’s father had spoken. First,
Once he seemed comfortable, the had watched him his entire life. What they would consult the family astrolo-
astrologer looked up at the men’s faces, could this man in his starched shirt tell ger, he said, and only if the man ap-
searching, Dev thought, for a face shin- him that he did not already know? proved of the match would Dev be al-
ing with love. He felt his cheeks begin The astrologer had brought with lowed to go through with the proposal.
to collect heat. He wanted to be known. him a stack of thick books with color- Dev hadn’t thought that his father
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 55
 mainly middle-aged men in clothing
of another trade, khaki police wear or
white-collared shirts, would amble in
after the Narcotics Anonymous meet-
ings with their fresh textbooks.
Earlier that week, in the moments
between the astrologer’s verdict and
his exit from the apartment, Dev had
grown curious about the extent of the
man’s involvement in his family’s life.
He followed him out to the parking lot
and spotted him in his car. He knocked
on the car window tearfully, his hands
joined to indicate his sincerity.
“How long has my family been con-
sulting you?” he asked, when the man
had rolled down his window.
The man laughed. “Long, long time.
I saw you when you were just born.”
“What’re you doing? The next trash pickup There had been more than two de-
isn’t for another two million years.” cades of predictions, consultations for
every decision, big or small: when to ad-
vertise the new building in Churchgate;
• • when to absorb the next son into the
business; when to purchase new land;
was serious, or that his parents even The astrologer cleared his throat, when to hire a new accountant; who
believed in such things. All he’d known and the sound rattled through Dev. would die first; what would kill each
of astrology until that moment was He stood up. one of them; diseases; suicides; deaths
that a holy man had blessed him the “I don’t advise that you go through before fifty; grandchildren; whether the
day he was born, assuring his mother with this match,” the astrologer said, children would marry well; whether
that he would have a long, happy life. plopping closed each of his books. the grandchildren would marry well.
He had never questioned how the as- “Major issue with the girl.” Before the astrologer was skilled
trologer had derived this information, “What issue?” his father asked. enough to offer his own readings, Dev’s
or what right the man had had to lead “She will not have a son?” his grand- family had consulted the man’s father.
Dev’s mother to believe him. But the father asked. Even theirs was a family business, the
symphonic nod of heads that had fol- “I cannot say. It is against my ethics.” astrologer said.
lowed his father’s pronouncement told The astrologer stood, too, meeting Evenings, Jagriti and Dev would
him that his family’s belief in astrol- Dev’s eyes. “Please take your time to discuss their learnings.
ogy was genuine. Here was another think,” he said, his warm hand on Dev’s On the days when they were over-
ritual that had been withheld from him shoulder. “Do not rush. The boy some- come with gloom, they would consider
and his brothers until they were old times acts without thinking.” the other couples they knew, all these
enough, it seemed. “We won’t take a risk,” his father said. marriages that had been approved but
“All O.K., boss?” his father asked now. This seemed to appease the astrol- still were miserable.
The astrologer nodded. oger, who shot Dev a weak glance. “My parents had sex only three times.
They spent an hour watching as Then the man was at the door, ac- To reproduce,” Dev said.
the man flipped through his books, cepting a weary handshake from Dev’s “Once, my father was trying to throw
made markings, added and subtracted grandfather. Dev could no longer stand. a hot iron at my mother,” Jagriti said.
numbers from a score of thirty-six, On the couch, he brought a finger of “To defend her, I pushed the needle
the significance of which went unex- whiskey to his lips. At the sound of the end of a safety pin right into his stom-
plained. Time found its way inside Dev door closing, Dev slung back his drink. ach, where I thought the testicles were.”
as he waited, pushing against his skin, “Bhakti Bai’s marriage was ap-
humming along his bones, extracting hat weekend, Dev and Jagriti picked proved by an astrologer, too. When
whatever appetite he’d carried before
the day began. His stomach was now
T up the books at Crossword. They
wanted to know what the astrologer
she was nine.”
Jagriti shook her head. What a cruel
small and vestigial, a flat stone. It was had seen. The only way to find out was country, he knew she was thinking.
a longer hour than after the dinner on to study the practice themselves. There were combinations of plan-
Dev’s twenty-second birthday, when They signed up for an astrology ets, houses, and times that supposedly
he’d waited in the kitchen, hands in course offered after hours at an old determined how one’s life unfolded.
his pockets, hoping to be invited in. church near Ballard Estate. Students, On their first day of class, the teacher
56 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
asked them to accept that no one could came from Jagriti’s guitar repertoire never have children. Immediately, Dev
change what was going to happen in of Dylan tracks. knew that this was what the astrolo-
their lives. They could control only their Jagriti took Dev’s wrist between her ger had seen.
reactions to it. hands. She traced a finger around the Now the ocean grew louder. Dev felt
“These things are set in stone. De- dial of his watch. “I want you to marry a drop of rain on the back of his neck.
cided by God,” the teacher said. “But me,” she said. He thought of a note Bhakti Bai had
sometimes a door opens, and we act in The night before, they had stayed up left in his tiffin soon after he had met
a way that is contradictory to our charts. late trying to read their own charts. It Jagriti. God sends a woman into your life
This we also call God.” was something their astrology teacher to see if you have any balls. A sudden
Neither of them fully believed in the had warned them against doing. He drizzle speckled the rocks below them.
things they learned, at first. They won- had compared it to the hypochondria Slowly, with all the obedience and
dered whether the classes were teach- often experienced by first-year medi- tenderness he could muster, Dev pushed
ing them not how to predict events but cal students, who diagnose themselves aside the hair that fell over Jagriti’s ear,
how to prepare their minds for inevi- with every new illness they learn about. and kissed it.
table pain. Every prediction they made In Jagriti’s bedroom, both of them
stomach-down on her lilac sheets, they
for the sample charts was dismal. Chil-
dren died, parents died, rich men lost
their fortunes, poor men became poorer.
had started by searching her chart for
the major events of her life. The death
Ito tand
was a courthouse marriage, unfussy
full of sun. Dev asked Bhakti Bai
be their witness, and Jagriti, dressed
The world was structured to produce of her father, her mother’s sudden pov- in a sparkling ivory sari she had bor-
mostly unfortunate stories. But the grav- erty, Jagriti’s master’s degree. It was all rowed from the clothes closet at the
ity of these lessons slowly forced a new there. Next, they looked for planetary fashion magazine, invited her mother
levity into their lives. They felt as if a placements with unknown meanings. down from Nashik. As she signed her
layer of magic had descended on ev- The first unknown—a Saturn in her name, Jagriti began to laugh, and Dev
erything that had once seemed so se- fourth house—revealed that she would decided, from her giddy look, that she
rious. Jagriti said that it was their duty, run a tight ship at home. She would be was thinking about him naked. He’d
while they were still alive, to clutch the the accountant there, too, ruling with used the company card to book them a
small moments of joy they were lucky an iron fist. They had laughed about room at the Oberoi hotel for the week-
enough to get. this, the idea of her asking Dev what end, to celebrate. They had plans to go
lollipop he had purchased with a miss- right to bed in the middle of the after-
n Jagriti’s thirtieth birthday, she ing five rupees. noon, clinking cool glasses of gin-and-
O insisted that they skip astrology
class and go, instead, on a walk to Ma-
The second unknown—a complex
configuration of planets in her eighth
tonic. It was all settled before lunchtime.
The following night, Dev sat down
rine Drive. It had been one of the only house—suggested that Jagriti would to dinner with his family, a letter
private places for them to go when
they first met. They would sit on the
ledge, their feet dangling over the rocks,
listening to the gray water. They would
laugh at the other young couples with
nowhere else to go, saying sweetie-this
and honey-that. It had been the loca-
tion of their first kiss and, later, the
first place they had got carried away
enough, hands between legs, that they
had decided, with a look, to take their
activities to Jagriti’s place.
Jagriti’s birthday fell on a colder day
than usual, though Bombay rarely
called for more than a light sweater.
Dev rolled down the cuffs of his shirt
to keep warm. He tried to sit up
straight on the ledge, wrapping an arm
around Jagriti in her soft new pash-
mina shawl, a gift she had received
from her mother up in Nashik. It was
nine in the evening, and the crowd of
lovers on the rocks had thinned to only
one or two sets of writhing bodies.
“What are you thinking about, “I’m just checking to see if your kid is playing
Bobby?” Dev asked. The nickname with all the crap I brought him.”
from Bhakti Bai in his breast pocket. Hours later, Devansh Shetty, a free her hair damp and curled with sweat,
man, his eyes rubbed raw, slogged up Dev drew out his daughter’s chart on
Dev Baba, my darling boy— It is not that
I will tell anyone what you have done but you to Nariman Point on foot, until he felt a piece of paper. He didn’t want to
must know what kind of people your parents the cold air from the open door of the know much, just that she would have
are. They could strip you of everything, leave Oberoi hotel. Inside, a suited man was a life. He placed the planets in the
you penniless. Just look at your older brother. playing something jazzy and unmelo- relevant houses. He and Jagriti had
He was made to leave a pauper after years of dious on the piano. Children and high- already made it through one open
hard work. Let his story be a warning to you.
They throw away their children too easily— heeled women lingered to listen. Dev window. Now he wanted to see the
that is why the children themselves never look took a seat at the lobby bar and ordered universe permit another.
back. It is true that you have gone and mar- himself some celebratory whiskey. Nurses and doctors rushed past him
ried a girl nobody approved of. It is not worth When the waiter offered him an extra in the hallway, unfazed by the sight of
bickering about why they disapproved. I’m sure napkin, he understood that he’d forgot- a man in distress. Hunched over a chair,
it was more than just the astrology. It was her
age, her dead father, her poor mother. That is ten to wipe his tears before he came in. Dev studied the sky as it had been
how they are—only one misplaced mole and “Thank you, boss,” he said. three hours earlier, the moment his
they consider a person unworthy. You have two The pianist bowed his head for ap- daughter was born. Mars in her first
options—you either ask for their forgiveness plause and began another tune. This one house, Venus in her second. A temper,
and forever accept the hand they will play in was more luxurious, major-keyed, bit- he thought. A girl with a temper. But
your life or ask for the money you have earned
and go on to make your own life with your tersweetly slow. Dev asked the waiter if would she live to exercise it? Wild with
wife. I know that you youngsters think India he could find him a pen and some paper. worry about the accuracy of his read-
has changed and we are getting so modern now ing, Dev called the family astrologer
but these changes you see on the television Bhakti Bai, to confirm his prediction. He paced
and in your books have not spread to the in- Bobby and I will be forever grateful to you.
As you suggested, I decided to ask to leave the the hallway as the man’s phone rang.
side of families. I send you all my blessings
but you will need to free yourself. company. You know, I really do regret what I When the astrologer’s voice finally
did to Tiger. I missed hearing him in the house broke through the speaker, tears welled
Dev intended to take Bhakti Bai’s when I came home from work. He was always in Dev’s eyes.
advice—to ask for his wages and leave laughing with you in the kitchen, forcing you Their daughter would live a long
to add too much sugar and butter to every-
the family business. He didn’t know thing. I’m sure he misses you. and healthy life, the astrologer said.
what he wanted to do next, but he They told me I would not be given any She would be a real talker. She would
trusted that an idea would come to him compensation for the time I worked at the never shut up.
soon enough. He knew that his father company. They said it is family money and I The phone still at his ear, Dev
and his uncles would not miss him, for have earned into the collective pot. If I chose crouched to the floor, his head cra-
to leave, I would leave with nothing. They want
his younger brother was now nearly to make an example of me, I suppose. dled in the crook of his elbow. In the
twenty-two. He imagined a seamless Bobby will handle things until I get back room behind him, Jagriti slept. He
trade, one son for another. on my feet. I am indebted to you, always. went back in and took a seat beside
For dinner that night, Bhakti Bai his wife, holding her calloused finger-
had prepared Dev’s favorites. Steaming s the years passed, they moved tips in his hands.
butter chicken with a dollop of heavy
cream in the middle and a pot of black
A farther out of the city, where real
estate was cheaper. Developers were hen my parents were alive, they
dal, thick with too much ghee, just as
she’d made it when he was a child.
building new complexes with gyms
and indoor swimming pools, in Kan-
W thought that they had dodged
the harsh hand of fate. The problem
Sitting at the dining table with his divali and in Santacruz. Jagriti and with stories is that a good one can con-
uncles and his parents, Dev began to Dev moved to one such building, where vince you of anything.
see the men’s faces as weathered and the amenities included an indoor play- I was fourteen when my mother died.
bitter, like old flowers. He found that it ground for children. For a long time, my father believed it
was his father’s face he disliked the most, Jagriti went into labor eight weeks was her early death that the astrologer
with his purple lips and fleshy earlobes. early. She drove herself to the hospi- had foreseen—that my mother, as a
For once, he knew for certain that he tal, not wanting to wait for Dev, who novice, had misread her birth chart.
wanted to be nothing like any of them. would be returning from work in the With time, my father learned to
After dinner, he immediately took city. She told him this later, when they live with his grief. He went for long
his seat on the couch, having already were finally together in the hospital. walks in the park. He learned to play
told the men that he wanted to hold The doctor on call had confirmed that the guitar. He died peacefully in his
a meeting. As he waited for them to something was wrong, and she was sleep. By then, he had become an ad-
settle into their places, his little brother rushed to emergency surgery. vocate of not having answers. I was
entered the room and quietly sat be- By the time Dev got to the hospi- forbidden to read any of his astrology
side him on the bronze sofa. tal, the baby was already born. She books; in the end, he gave them to a
“I have something to ask of you,” was premature, the size of his out- local charity shop. 
Dev said to the room. He spoke stretched palm, covered with wires
steadily, confident within the heat of and held in a plastic box that was sup- NEWYORKER.COM/FICTION
his decision. posed to keep her alive. As Jagriti slept, Sign up to get author interviews in your in-box.

58 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025

 THE CRITICS
SVEN SIMON / CAMERA PRESS / REDUX

BOOKS

DEATH CULT
Yukio Mishima’s tortured obsessions were his making—and his unmaking.

BY IAN BURUMA

once owned a photograph of Yukio new volume of his work, “Voices of the
Idressed
Mishima squatting in the snow,
in nothing but a skimpy white
Fallen Heroes: And Other Stories”
(Vintage International), edited by Ste-
gentle-looking lips were closed tight. His face
seemed just like a young soldier’s prepared
for battle.
loincloth, brandishing a long samurai phen Dodd. After a young man is pos-
sword. Mishima’s torso is buffed from sessed in a séance by the spirits of ka- This was the countenance that
years of bodybuilding, his legs almost mikaze pilots: Mishima adopted in many photographs
spindly by comparison. The expression His usual rather weak features had taken on taken of him in the sixties. A man who
on his face is perfectly described in one a manly, resolute look. His eyebrows were had been turned down by the Impe-
of the Mishima tales that appear in a drawn together, his gaze was sharp, even his rial Japanese Army during the Second

The idea that aesthetic perfection can be immortalized only through destruction runs throughout Mishima’s work.
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 59
World War for being too sickly had least as a kind of bloody protest—in Nathan. The words “beautiful” and
transformed himself into a beefcake, materialist, pacifist, Americanized post- “death” each appear more than fifty
often pictured nude, or nearly so, and war Japan—against the denial of his times in the collection. As in Noh plays,
with a sword in hand, desperately try- country’s heroic past. This is no doubt which Mishima loved, the spirits of
ing to look fierce. Some of these im- how Mishima would have liked us to the dead often haunt the living. A hip-
ages were stranger than the one I remember his final coup de théâtre. ster imagines his death in a disused
owned. The fashion photographer Marguerite Yourcenar, who wrote an mock-Gothic church; a fancier of pea-
Kishin Shinoyama took a series of pic- interesting book titled “Mishima: A cocks wishes to kill his beloved birds
tures, in 1970, that came to be known Vision of the Void” (1980), took him because “peacock killing was not a rup-
as “The Death of a Man.” In one image, at his word. To her, Mishima was a true ture but the sensual intertwining of
the novelist has a hatchet in his skull; rebel responding to a modern Japanese beauty and destruction”; a couple is
in others, he is drowning in mud, or malaise. Most Japanese at the time did stabbed to death because “they were
has been run over by a cement truck, not see it that way. They were shocked, beautiful and real.” And then there are
or—posed like St. Sebastian—has been baffled, and horrified by his act. those spirits of kamikaze pilots who
tied to a tree and pierced by arrows. John Nathan, a translator of Mishima vent their anger in a séance because
The Shinoyama photographs were and the author of “Mishima: A Biog- they feel that modern Japan has be-
taken just months before Mishima, ac- raphy” (1974), maintained, plausibly, trayed their ideals.
companied by members of his private that the writer’s suicide must be un- There is nothing uniquely Japanese
army of ultra-right Emperor-worship- derstood in the light of his aesthetic about the aesthetic fetishizing of vi-
pers, entered a military base in Tokyo, imagination. A combination of death olence and death. Mishima, like many
hoping to stir up an imperialist coup. and eroticism saturates almost all of other twentieth-century Japanese writ-
When the soldiers, instead of rising up, Mishima’s novels, short stories, and ers—Junichiro Tanizaki, for exam-
jeered at him, Mishima killed himself plays, as well as his short film “Patri- ple—was greatly influenced by West-
in the classic samurai fashion: perform- otism,” from 1966, in which Mishima, ern artists and novelists. As a bookish
ing hara-kiri, or seppuku (as the Japa- portraying a radical military officer in youngster, he was an avid reader of
nese more commonly call it), by plung- the nineteen-thirties, engages in an ag- Wilde and Rilke. In Mishima’s auto-
ing a sword into his abdomen before a onizingly slow seppuku, accompanied biographical novel, “Confessions of a
uniformed disciple sliced his head off. by Richard Wagner’s “Liebestod.” Mask” (1949), perhaps his best work,
Quite a few famous writers have taken he, or his narrator, describes how he
their own lives. None have done so in eath and beauty, or, more precisely, experienced his first ejaculation as he
such a theatrical fashion.
One might see Mishima’s violent
D the beauty of death, are certainly
leitmotifs in the Vintage collection of
gazed at a reproduction of Guido Re-
ni’s painting of St. Sebastian’s martyr-
end as an extreme but still traditional Mishima’s short stories, which features dom. (He then cites the German sex-
expression of Japanese culture, or at various translators and a preface by ologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s remark
that images of the saint hold a par-
ticular attraction to gay men, and
surmises that “the inverted and the
sadistic impulses are inextricably en-
tangled with each other.”) Along with
many members of the Japanese art
scene in the fifties and sixties, Mishima
was an admirer of French decadent
literature, not least Raymond Radi-
guet’s posthumous novel “Le Bal du
Comte d’Orgel” (1924). In a wonder-
ful episode of Edward R. Murrow’s
television talk show “Small World,”
which aired in 1960, we see Mishima
in conversation with a rather inebri-
ated Tennessee Williams, holding forth
on the exquisite bloodiness of Eliza-
bethan drama.
Nor is there anything uniquely Jap-
anese about a literary figure who wishes
to be a man of action. Ernest Hem-
ingway’s suicide lacked the flamboy-
ance of Mishima’s, but the American
writer was also obsessively engaged in
“Age ain’t nothing but some letters.” displays of masculinity. The Italian
poet Gabriele D’Annunzio offers an one day be like his crush: a tough that swiftly loses its bloom. Not for
even closer model for Mishima’s po- guy who speaks in rough masculine nothing was “cherry blossom” used to
litical fantasies of martial sacrifice and slang and exudes an air of effortless, refer to kamikaze pilots during the
exalted nationalism. An exponent of unthinking virility. Coarse working war. In Mishima’s novel “Forbidden
decadent literature, D’Annunzio, too, men glimpsed in the street inspire his Colors,” published in 1951, an aging
raised an army, in 1919, and even tried early erotic reveries, culminating in and embittered writer loathes his ug-
to establish an independent state in a what he calls his “evil habit.” During liness and physical decay. He mentors
part of what is now Croatia. (Mishima, the war, when Tokyo is the target of and manipulates a witless but stun-
aptly enough, supervised a Japanese devastating bombing raids and other ningly beautiful young gay man, as an
translation of D’Annunzio’s play “The boys of his age are drafted into the instrument of his vengeance against
Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.”) But women. In the youth’s beauty lie “all
none of these men turned suicidal the dreams of the ugly writer’s young
imaginings into a deadly work of per- days.” The writer also reflects on ar-
formance art. So, if culture and poli- tistic expression and physical action.
tics are not enough to explain Mishi- There is only one thing, the writer
ma’s extraordinary actions, what was muses, in which “expression and ac-
it that possessed him to kill himself in tion might be possible simultane-
this manner? ously. . . . That is death.”
Mishima began to work on his own
o understand Mishima—as a writer, physical beauty in 1955, when, at thirty,
T a poseur, and a self-destructive
man of action—one must consider his
Army to die for the Emperor, he fan-
tasizes about perishing splendidly,
he started lifting weights. A photo-
graph taken of him a year earlier, sit-
childhood, which is described in de- but is terrified every time the air-raid ting on the f loor of his book-lined
tail in “Confessions of a Mask” and in alarm sounds. study, depicts a pale, thin, intense, al-
biographies by Nathan and by Henry The odd thing, given Mishima’s later most pretty young man. But now he
Scott Stokes, the author of “The Life ultranationalism, is that he appeared resolved to look more like the school
and Death of Yukio Mishima” (1974). to be relatively unfazed by Japan’s de- bully of his youth. For the next fif-
Mishima, a frail, effeminate child, grew feat and the American occupation that teen years, Mishima, who travelled a
up in the clutches of his possessive followed. Actual on-the-ground poli- great deal, worked out in gyms wher-
grandmother Natsu, a proud aristo- tics weren’t his thing, perhaps not even ever he happened to be in the world.
crat who felt she had married beneath when he came into his revolutionary The arms bulged; the torso and face
her station. She would not allow her phase. In his first novel, “Thieves” hardened. His oddly proportioned fig-
delicate grandson to consort with other (1948), he delves deeply into his death- ure was much photographed, and he
boys. Mishima played with girls’ toys soaked fantasy world. A young man enjoyed showing himself off as a dying
in the hothouse of his grandmother’s and woman, each rejected by a yearned- action hero in yakuza movies, and as
room, which he rarely left and where for lover, decide to kill themselves to- a human sculpture in a film version
he later withdrew into a world of gether on their wedding night. The of a play of his, “Black Lizard” (1968),
books, mooning over stories of hand- suicide pact is the ultimate expression starring the cross-dressing chanson-
some knights, Christian saints, and of their longing for their lost loves, and nier Akihiro Maruyama as a shape-
noble princes, all dying glorious deaths. yet it’s a longing that Mishima de- shifting jewel thief.
Entranced by a picture of Joan of Arc, scribes as an illusion, a cultivated act Mishima’s physical exertions were
he was horrified to find out that she of self-deception. The idea that aes- in line with much that went on in the
wasn’t a man—a rude disturbance of thetic perfection can be realized only Japanese avant-garde during the six-
his fantasy life. by destroying it before decay sets in ties. Theatre artists rebelled against the
In “Confessions of a Mask,” Mishima runs through all his works. “Just before Westernized high culture that had been
subjects his sentimental education to a the pinnacle when time must be cut adopted in Japan since the eighteen-
kind of poetic psychoanalysis. The only short is the pinnacle of physical beauty,” seventies. Both wartime Japanese pro-
companions that the boy, Kimitake he writes in “The Decay of the Angel,” paganda and American-inf luenced
(Mishima’s real first name), is allowed a novel that was the fourth of a tetral- postwar rhetoric about capitalism and
by his grandmother are three female ogy titled “The Sea of Fertility” and democracy had made artists of Mishi-
cousins. They play a “game of war” in was handed in literally on the day of ma’s generation skeptical about lan-
which Kimitake is the one to suffer his own death. guage. They turned to raw physical ex-
a violent death. In middle school, he Again, this sentiment would have pression to find a way back to earthy,
falls hopelessly in love with an ath- been understood by Wagner and other sensual Japanese dramatic traditions
letic, not very bright bully named Romantics. But there is also a Japa- that had been buried under layers of
Omi. Still too fragile to take part in nese tradition, much influenced by the Western and Japanese high-mindedness.
swimming lessons and other hearty Buddhist notion of impermanence, Although his later political extremism
pursuits, Kimitake admires Omi at a that delights in the f leetingness of was not exactly fashionable in artistic
distance, dreaming that he, too, might beauty, as with the cherry blossom circles, Mishima worked closely with
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 61
artists such as the Butoh dancer Tatsumi timents. Isao, the beautiful young hero ter of his work, his life, and his death.
Hijikata, who loosely adapted “Forbid- in “Runaway Horses” (1969)—the sec- His demise was immediately followed
den Colors” as a bawdy dance perfor- ond novel of the series “The Sea of by the voluntary death of his favor-
mance, in 1959, featuring, among other Fertility”—is a right-wing terrorist ite acolyte, a handsome provincial
things, a young man suffocating a live fired up by illusions of reviving the di- student—rather like Isao in “Run-
chicken between his thighs. vine spirit of imperial Japan by mur- away Horses”—named Morita, and
There was a permanent tension in dering corrupt businessmen and poli- so Henry Scott Stokes argues in his
Mishima between his longing for phys- ticians. The rebellion fails, and Isao biography that the whole thing should
ical action and his literary ambition. dies by seppuku: “The instant that the be seen as a lovers’ suicide. This might
Despite his forays into gangster pic- blade tore open his flesh, the bright be carrying things too far—we don’t
tures, he never rejected high culture. disk of the sun soared up and exploded know whether they were lovers—but
More than most other writers of his behind his eyelids.” In “Voices of the Mishima did tell a visitor, in 1970, that
generation, he knew the classical Jap- Fallen Heroes,” a short story published he considered seppuku to be the “ul-
anese tradition well; he even wrote fine three years earlier, we hear the spirits timate masturbation.”
modern Noh plays and works for the of real-life radical soldiers who staged After the event, Mishima’s mother
Kabuki theatre. At a teach-in with rad- an aborted coup in 1936, with the aim stated that her son had done what he
ical left-wing students in 1968, he de- of installing the Emperor as a sacred had always wanted to do. And Mishima
clared that he had once believed in the generalissimo. They convey their hor- had long insisted that he wanted to die
supreme importance of art. But, he ror at what postwar Japan has become: for a noble cause. In a 1966 interview
said, “there was something inside me “A passionate and heroic spirit has van- on NHK television, the national broad-
that couldn’t be satisfied with art alone. ished. / Our blood is tainted and stag- casting network, he lamented that it
It occurred to me that what I needed nant with ‘peace.’ / The pure blood that was impossible to die a heroic death
was action with which to move my should spurt forth has quite dried up.” in modern times, and said that he felt
spirit. . . . I realized I would have to What the fallen heroes resent goes he had been born in the wrong age. He
move my body first.” He didn’t just beyond the greed for “foreign gold” and was petrified by the thought of dying
want to be remembered as a great the “ugly lusts” of modern life. They of cancer or some other disease whose
writer; he wanted to be remembered had been willing to die for their divine senselessness disgusted him. The pros-
as a physical embodiment of the sa- Emperor, and they felt deceived when pect of his body’s slow decline fright-
murai tradition. the Emperor, in a rare intervention, or- ened him just as much. In an essay
One of his favorite books was “Haga- dered the rebellion to be put down. written in 1966, he sees something
kure,” an eighteenth-century guide to Like the kamikaze pilots in the same “tragic” in how certain writers continue
the Bushido, the way of the warrior, story, whose deaths lost their sacred showing off their virility even in their
written at a time of peace, when there meaning once Emperor Hirohito re- late works. He mentions Hemingway
was no call for military action. The nounced his divinity after the war, and Norman Mailer as examples, but,
contents of the treatise could be de- the plotters in 1936 worshipped not a he writes, “I shudder when I think of
scribed as a form of dan- man but a deity. Mishima myself.” What Mishima set out to do
dyism for idle samurai, and was quite aware that their in his final decade was to devise a cause
Mishima was a modern reverence was based on a to die for, a cause that had historical
samurai dandy. He loved beautiful illusion, just like precedents but was still a figment of
the legend of the Chinese the lost loves of the sui- his richly morbid imagination.
general whose face was so cidal couple in “Thieves.” There remains something contra-
beautiful that he disguised The chorus of kamikaze dictory about the cause he adopted. A
it in battle under a fero- spirits in the story ask, man who chose to die as an emperor-
cious mask. (It makes an “Even if the past ages were worshipping ultranationalist, intent on
appearance in one of the ‘a false conception,’ and the protecting his country against West-
stories in the new Vintage present age is true, why did ernization, Mishima lived much of his
collection.) But what most not His Majesty, even if life in the Western manner, loved Eu-
appealed to Mishima about “Haga- only by himself, deign to guard that ropean culture, often dressed like an
kure” was its basic message: “The Way bitter, painful, false conception for the American hipster, had many Western
of the Samurai is found in death.” sake of those who had died?” friends, and craved fame in the West.
A natural inference is that Mishima (He’d been distressed, in 1968, when
iven Mishima’s decision to build was himself prepared to die for an il- the Nobel Prize in Literature went not
G his own private army and to sac-
rifice his life for the greater glory of an
lusion. He had no hope, in 1970, of
persuading the Japanese armed forces
to him but to Yasunari Kawabata.)
Mishima’s choice of a samurai sui-
imaginary imperial Japan, one might to rise up against the democratic gov- cide was almost a pastiche of Japanese
interpret his attraction to the samurai ernment and restore the Emperor to tradition, a Kabuki fantasy, another il-
death cult as the result of his political his former divine status. But he had lusion. In his seppuku, he found the
convictions. Some of his late writings been cultivating illusions all his life. perfect confluence of his erotic preoc-
do indeed contain strong political sen- His erotic dream world was at the cen- cupations, his search for an honorable
62 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
death, his aesthetic ideal of destroying
a thing of beauty (in this case, his own
body) before it decays, and his love of
drama. Despite his claim that the sword
was superior to the pen, he died more
as an artist than as a political activist.
There’s a reason that the Japanese didn’t
take his politics seriously.

SDiderious or not, however, Mishima’s

political posturing was extreme.
it taint his work? It’s tempting to
brush aside the question. Other great
writers have had extreme political
views. Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote
poems about the glory of war and
physical ruthlessness, calling for a “rev-
olution of the body.” Louis-Ferdinand
Céline wrote odious antisemitic pam-
phlets and supported fascism, but
these activities did not mar his mas-
terpiece, “Journey to the End of the
Night” (1932), which was misanthropic
but not fascistic. Antisemitic sentiments
slipped into some of T. S. Eliot’s work,
and one of the most egregious examples,
“Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein
with a Cigar” (1920), is still considered “Oops, I forgot my selfie stick.”
a great poem.
Mishima’s morbid eroticism gave
his best novels their peculiar power.
• •
His ideal of beauty destroyed is ele-
gantly rendered in “The Temple of is the longest story in the Vintage col- of the author’s own death, almost as if
the Golden Pavilion” (1956), in which lection and provides the book’s title, Mishima and his disciple Morita were
a young Buddhist acolyte is so ob- but it is compromised by its political breaking the fourth wall, but the film
sessed with the fading beauty of the sentiments, which are overwrought and remains a fantasy, an illusion, an artis-
gilded temple in Kyoto that he sets it absurd. The same is true of passages in tic exercise. The actual details of Mishi-
on fire. (The novel was based on a real “The Sea of Fertility,” with their exul- ma’s suicide—in the office of a military
case of arson in 1950, when a novice tation of unthinking action and sacri- commander who was tied to a chair—
monk burned down the Golden Pa- ficial death. Then, there is “Patriotism,” took place in another realm.
vilion; it exists now as a carefully re- published in 1961, about the officer who The final act was theatrical, to be
constructed replica.) The pathos of dies by seppuku out of loyalty to the sure, but hardly a work of art. In fact,
the young author trying to go straight young fanatics of 1936 who failed in it was messy and brutish. Morita tried
by pretending to be in love with a their military coup. His devoted wife to take off his master’s head with a
young woman, while fantasizing about then pushes a dagger into her throat. sword, but made a botch of it; another
beautiful men tortured to death, lifts Marguerite Yourcenar deemed this “one disciple had to finish the job. Then
“Confessions of a Mask” above mere of the most remarkable stories Mishima Morita failed to disembowel himself
kinkiness into a wonderful expression ever wrote,” and judges the short-film before he, too, was decapitated. And
of emotional complexity. (Mishima version that Mishima directed and so one of the greatest Japanese writers
himself chose to wear a mask in 1958, starred in to be “more beautiful and of the twentieth century ended his life
when he married a respectable woman even more overwhelming than the story in a pool of blood, with his severed
named Yoko Sugiyama, with whom it epitomizes.” head plonked onto the floor next to
he had two children.) It’s hard to share her rapturous re- that of a deluded disciple. The real trag-
The real trouble started in the six- sponse. The endless double suicide, edy of Mishima lies not in the bathetic,
ties, when Mishima not only took up though gory and hard to watch, is too blood-soaked spectacle of his death,
a political cause but also politicized his macabre to be truly moving, and set- nor in the humiliating failure of his ef-
literary work. This was when his ba- ting it to Wagner’s “Liebestod” gives fort to inspire revolution, but in the
roque aesthetic vision could curdle into the scene a strong whiff of camp. way his aesthetic vision finally collapsed
kitsch. “Voices of the Fallen Heroes” Yourcenar called this work a rehearsal under the weight of his fantasies. 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 63
 God had surely done all the relevant
BOOKS sums. So, Leibniz insisted, we may rest
assured that any imagined world that
might seem happier than our own would
THE BEST OF THEM actually have been worse over all.
This cheery train of thought gave
His was a genius for the ages. Will Gottfried Leibniz ever get his due? Voltaire plenty to work with. In his
tale, the young Candide is expelled
BY ANTHONY GOTTLIEB from a baronial castle in Westphalia
and subjected to a procession of col-
orful and violent disasters around
the globe, often in the company of an
equally battered tutor, Dr. Pangloss.
Pangloss remains upbeat and contented
throughout, convinced that all is for
the best, because “Leibniz cannot have
been wrong.” The good doctor is adept
at spinning any setback into a hidden
blessing. Even the syphilis that afflicts
him is ultimately a good thing, because,
from the New World, Columbus
brought not only that disease but also
chocolate. Pangloss triumphantly in-
fers that without syphilis there would
have been no chocolate.
Voltaire took an excusable liberty
in “Candide.” The real Leibniz almost
always refrained from spelling out Pan-
glossian excuses for particular evils. He
kept his theory safely abstract; Voltaire
brought it comically down to earth.
And the best-of-all-possible-worlds
thesis had another self-protective fea-
ture that Voltaire’s satire ignores. It re-
ferred not to our planet at some spe-
cific stage in its history but to the whole
universe considered throughout eter-
nity. The claim wasn’t that everything
was fine and dandy in the here and
now. According to Leibniz, it is up to
ottfried Leibniz was not the first some of which would make him the us to make our corner of the world a
G philosopher to think that we live
in the best of all possible worlds. He
godfather of the digital age. But he will
never quite live down Voltaire’s ridicule.
better place, and to help bring about
the optimal universe that God has
may have been the unluckiest, suffer- Leibniz was too logical about God. made achievable.
ing the posthumous fate of being skew- Like some ancient Stoics, he reasoned Leibniz lived at a splendid time to
ered in the best of all possible parodies, that, if God is omnipotent and good, do plenty of good, or so he thought.
Voltaire’s “Candide” (1759). When Vol- ours has to be the best of all possible The latest advances in knowledge and
taire was writing, four decades after worlds, because if a better world had technology, he wrote in the sixteen-
Leibniz’s death, the German polymath been feasible God would have made nineties, could soon make people “in-
was renowned for his work in several that one instead. All our sufferings must comparably happier.” His role, he be-
sciences, philosophy, history, law, and, therefore be lesser evils that somehow lieved, was to spread news of useful
especially, mathematics—he and New- serve to bring about a greater good. discoveries, to make some discoveries
ton had, independently, invented cal- This solves the age-old puzzle of why himself, and to persuade rulers to ex-
culus, but it’s Leibniz’s notation that’s God lets bad things happen. “I cannot ploit them for the benefit of mankind.
still used today. Over the years, Leib- show you this in detail,” Leibniz con- Indeed, two new biographies of him—
niz’s reputation continued to grow as ceded, because no finite mind can see Audrey Borowski’s “Leibniz in His
more unpublished work came to light, all the connections between events. But World: The Making of a Savant ”
(Princeton) and Michael Kempe’s “The
No subject—math, physics, religion, law, history—eluded the scholar’s mastery. Best of All Possible Worlds: A Life of
64 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 ILLUSTRATION BY ZHENYA OLIINYK
Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days” (Nor- was confident he could solve that prob- another project, one that proved a big-
ton)—show that Leibniz never stopped lem and keep everyone happy by con- ger boon than any amount of efficiently
trying to improve the world, albeit cocting a synthesis of the new think- extracted silver. The Hanoverian dukes
mostly from his desk. ing and the old. were an offshoot of a junior branch of
Paris was the place to be, Leibniz the Welf dynasty, whose long history
eibniz was born in 1646 and grew felt, but after four busy years there he Leibniz was commissioned to write.
L up among bookish Lutherans in
Leipzig. At the age of eight, he was let
had failed to get a suitable position and
was forced to leave. The best job on
He never finished this compendious
work—there was always a fascinating
loose in the library of his late father, a offer was as a court counsellor and li- new morsel to add—but his relentless
professor of moral philosophy, and a brarian in Hanover, working for Duke archival digging helped the duchy make
part of Leibniz never left. Nobody has Johann Friedrich, the first of three Ha- its case for promotion to an electorate
ever “read as much, studied as much, noverian dukes to employ him. (The of the Holy Roman Empire.
meditated more, and written more than third ascended the British throne as Medieval history, metaphysics, and
Leibniz,” Diderot reflected in his En- George I, in 1714.) Leibniz spent the geology were not nearly enough to keep
cyclopédie. The first entry in Leibniz’s rest of his life at least nominally serv- Leibniz busy in early 1686. In January,
own list of his early writings is a three- ing the Hanoverians, but his mind was he wrote an article exposing what he
hundred-verse Latin poem that he com- often elsewhere, as, indeed, was his body. took to be a notable blunder in Des-
posed in a day at the age of thirteen. He seemed to be constantly in touch cartes’s physics. Descartes regarded force
At around the same time, he presented with everyone: his literary remains in- as the product of mass and velocity,
his teachers with some improvements clude fifteen thousand letters written whereas Leibniz argued that it was bet-
to Aristotle’s logic. Only a smidgen of to some thirteen hundred people. And ter seen as mass times the square of ve-
Leibniz’s incessant output was pub- he was usually juggling an armful of locity. This move brought Leibniz close
lished in his lifetime, and there is much projects that he kept aloft all at once. to the modern notion of kinetic energy.
still to come. Scholars speculate that it One feat of juggling took place in In April, he began writing a hundred-
will be at least another half century early 1686, when Leibniz was thirty- page “Examination of the Christian Re-
until a comprehensive edition of his nine and had been working for the Ha- ligion,” and not long afterward he com-
outpourings, in an estimated hundred noverians for a decade. He was in Zel- posed his most substantial treatise on
and thirty volumes, is complete. lerfeld, a mining town in the Harz logic. It contained a pioneering algebra
Just before his fifteenth birthday, Mountains, in northern Germany, writ- of propositions, similar to the logical
Leibniz began his university studies, ing a summary of a treatise he’d com- calculus invented in the mid-nineteenth
and he emerged five years later with a posed on metaphysics. This was to be century by the English mathematician
degree in philosophy and a doctorate sent to a Catholic theologian, whose George Boole. Boole’s creation is a large
in law—and a job offer as a professor. opinion Leibniz was eager to hear— part of the basis for computer languages.
He turned it down, because, as he later he was always trying to come up with When he learned of Leibniz’s precur-
put it, he had an “ardent desire to earn formulations of ideas that might be ac- sor to his handiwork, Boole said that
more glory in the sciences.” At first, ceptable to both Protestants and Cath- he felt as if Leibniz had shaken hands
Leibniz had to settle for legal work at olics. But Leibniz was not in the moun- with him across the centuries.
the court of the prince-archbishop of tains because it was a peaceful spot to
Mainz, but, luckily, this led to a diplo-
matic mission to Paris, and with it a
path to scientific glory.
philosophize. He had been trying to
help his employers solve a drainage
problem in the local silver mines. For
Itantnunearthing
the decades that Leibniz spent
documents about dis-
Welfs for his main employers, he
When he got to Paris, in 1672, Leib- six years, he had spent half his time in also did side jobs for plenty of other
niz was already enthusiastic about Gal- the region, attempting to drain the grandees, especially during his fifties.
ileo’s and Descartes’s new science of mines by harnessing wind power. Un- At the behest of Emperor Leopold I,
matter in motion—the so-called me- fortunately, Leibniz became all too fas- he took part in negotiations to recon-
chanical philosophy. In order to mas- cinated by theoretical questions of dy- cile the churches. He was appointed
ter it, he began to study mathematics namics, exasperating the miners. His to one of the Empire’s highest courts
in earnest, mentored by the Dutch contraptions were sometimes ingenious, of appeal, served as a counsellor to
mathematician and physicist Chris- but, as Kempe explains in “The Best Russia’s tsar, Peter the Great, and be-
tiaan Huygens, a circumstance that re- of All Possible Worlds,” Leibniz’s quix- came the first president of the Berlin
sulted in Leibniz’s discovery of calcu- otic windmills kept breaking down, and Society of Sciences, which he had per-
lus. (He started figuring out the system by the start of 1686 his mining work suaded the Elector of Brandenburg to
around 1674.) He did sometimes worry, was gradually coming to an end. found. Leibniz constantly lobbied to
though, about the religious implica- There were plenty of other things do more, though he couldn’t always
tions of the mechanical philosophy. It to do during that time, anyway. Leib- get people to listen. Sometimes it was
seemed to reveal the workings of the niz collected fossils and conducted geo- Leibniz who politely declined. He was
physical world, yet it could also lead logical research, which eventually re- approached about taking charge of the
to “the ruin of holy doctrine” if taken sulted in an innovative essay on the Vatican Library, but that would have
too far. Ever the conciliator, Leibniz history of the earth. He had also begun meant becoming a Catholic, and he
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 65
was not inclined to take ecumenism university post at the age of twenty, a the state with political intelligence. Sub-
quite that far. choice that he believed led to a life of stitute “Big Tech” for Leibniz’s “state”
Leibniz always found time for his “undue deference for princes and a lam- and his snooping, money-making en-
abstract pursuits as well. Shortly after entable waste of time in the endeavour tertainments seem not unfamiliar.
his appointment to the Berlin Society, to please them.” This rather missed the Leibniz conceded that this reverie
in 1700, he started to work in earnest point. Leibniz sought out princes be- of gadgets and wonders might sound
on the development of a binary arith- cause they had the power to advance rather odd, but such projects would
metic, something he had long been toy- the sciences and get things done. They stimulate further inventions. The time
ing with. The binary system of ones were the “gods of this world,” as he once seemed ripe for awesome advances, and
and zeros later became the basis of dig- put it. By persuading such potentates Leibniz was confident that he was just
ital coding, and Leibniz himself at- of the wisdom of one’s projects, one the man to scour the world for exploit-
tempted to exploit it in some of his de- might “obtain in a few years what would able discoveries. There was treasure to
signs for machines that could perform otherwise have taken several centuries.” be found in the work of countless half-
calculations. Leibniz loved the simplic- If that meant wearing a powdered wig, mad inventors, if only one knew where
ity and the suggestiveness of binary: he so be it. (Every portrait of Leibniz shows to look. A case in point was phospho-
titled a draft paper “Wonderful Origin him in an enormous wig, which served rus, which a German alchemist, Hen-
of All Numbers from 1 and 0, Which to conceal his baldness, a lump on his nig Brand, had isolated from urine. Leib-
Serves as a Beautiful Representation of head, and his modest height.) niz had been enthused by the potential
the Mystery of Creation, since Every- Leibniz, as Borowski shows in her military and civilian applications of this
thing Arises from God and Nothing biography, was an awkward and some- “eternal fire” and negotiated a deal with
Else.” Writing to a Jesuit missionary in what reluctant courtier. He could be Brand on behalf of Duke Johann Frie-
China, Leibniz floated the idea that gauche and undiplomatic when selling drich. (In his determination to secure
the binary system might help to con- himself and his projects. In a memo- the benefits of phosphorus, Leibniz cut
vert the Chinese to Christianity, by fa- randum to Duke Johann Friedrich, he corners and seems to have tricked Brand,
miliarizing them with the Biblical con- immodestly described himself as a who subsequently compared Leibniz to
cept of creation ex nihilo. “walking encyclopedia,” and he once a clown.) Leibniz’s other pitches to the
In his late sixties, Leibniz summa- boasted that he had turned down sev- Duke included a system of disaster in-
rized his distinctive take on what ex- eral grandees so that he could conduct surance, techniques for mechanizing
actly God had created. “Monadology,” his research “more freely, and perhaps silk production, various medicinal rem-
which supposedly combined the best with greater benefit to the public.” edies, improved watches, and designs
of both old and new ideas, proposed Leibniz’s wish lists of schemes for for a novel kind of wagon.
that each building block of the universe the public benefit were always ambi-
is a self-contained world of its own. Ev- tious and sometimes utopian. One early eibniz was still fizzing with ideas
erything is in some sense made of these
“monads,” though the monads are not
proposal for a reformed and fairer econ-
omy, which he wrote in his twenties,
L in the last year of his life, 1716. In
July, he had just turned seventy and was
themselves physical and never interact envisaged an end to unemployment excited about a recent encounter with
with one another—they just appear to and food shortages, and a merry band the tsar. Peter I was taking the waters
do so because they are coördinated by of workers singing away as they ex- at a German spa, and Leibniz deluged
what Leibniz calls a “pre-established changed useful work-related tips. These him with proposals for reforming Rus-
harmony.” The destiny of each one un- carefree artisans would be encouraged sian science along with the country’s
folds according to its own implanted to tell “all sorts of funny stories,” though schools, economy, and armed forces. He
program, and all of them will last until not to drink, and would be spared the was particularly eager for the tsar to
God, who is a uniquely important kind fatigue of child care, as their offspring support a research expedition to Sibe-
of monad, brings the whole show to an would be raised in state institutions. ria and the Pacific coast of Asia. “I hope
end. Most philosophers have found this During his Paris years, an exhibition that with his help we shall learn whether
story unbelievable; Bertrand Russell’s of machinery on the Seine prompted Asia is connected to America,” Leib-
first impression was that it was “a kind Leibniz to write a memo in which he niz wrote to a friend. He also corre-
of fantastic fairy tale.” Still, on closer really let himself go. He proposed a sponded about a debate with an En-
examination, Russell at least came to European network of scientific acade- glish philosopher and cleric, Samuel
respect some of Leibniz’s reasoning. mies that would entertain the public Clarke, regarding the implications of
with technological marvels, including Newton’s views on space and time. In
ussell kept a bust of Leibniz on his “speaking trumpets,” artificial gems and an argument that Albert Einstein later
R mantel and held imaginary con-
versations in which he would “tell him
dragons, and self-playing musical in-
struments. These circuses of science
partly endorsed, Leibniz maintained,
against Newton and Clarke, that time
how fruitful his ideas have proved.” He would be profitable—by hosting lot- and space exist only as relations be-
particularly admired Leibniz’s work on teries and selling trinkets—and could tween things, not as absolutes—an idea
logic, but he was contemptuous of his feature gaming houses in which hid- that was, as it were, ahead of its time.
“courtly” existence. Russell disapproved den pipes and mirrors would be used Leibniz was also still tinkering with a
of Leibniz’s decision to turn down a to spy on the populace, thus providing mechanical calculator that he had told
66 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
a friend, back in 1673, was on the verge
of completion. And there was the Welf
history to finish. In the last weeks of BRIEFLY NOTED
his life, Leibniz suffered severe pain
from inflammation in his arms and legs, Aflame, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead). For more than three de-
but he did not stop writing until eight cades, Iyer, an essayist and a novelist, has spent several weeks
days before his death, in November. a year at a silent retreat in a monastery in Big Sur, California.
How many of Leibniz’s schemes In this spare, delicately woven memoir, he combines portraits
and inventions came to any sort of fru- of the people he has encountered during his stays with crys-
ition? Historians have not been able to talline descriptions of the natural setting and philosophical
say much on the subject. It is safe to ruminations on the purposes of retreat. If Iyer’s ultimate goal
assume that many of his plans went is to illuminate a certain state of feeling—the incendiary sense
nowhere; it is not even certain that his of being alive hinted at in the title—his focus radiates out-
mechanical calculator ever worked ward: “It’s writing about the external world that feels most in-
properly. An exception was his cam- terior,” he tells a fellow silence-seeker. The result is a power-
paign to set up institutions for the ex- ful work of observation in which deep truths seem to arise
change of scientific information, which almost by accident.
did eventually bear fruit in several coun-
tries. Voltaire, in one of his historical Only in America, by Richard Bernstein (Knopf ). This capa-
works, rightly gave him credit for that. cious biography of the Lithuanian-born entertainer Al Jol-
Leibniz’s weary secretary once com- son also traces the evolution of American Jewry on stage and
plained that his boss tried to do every- screen, casting Jolson as an exemplar of immigrant success.
thing and could therefore finish noth- Bernstein analyzes Jolson’s role in “The Jazz Singer” (1927),
ing, “not even if he had angels as the first feature-length talkie, and explores how the film re-
assistants.” Constantly distracted by an flects tensions between embracing assimilation and honor-
influx of fresh information, Leibniz was ing Jewish traditions. Bernstein also reckons with Jolson’s use
wont to switch attention to a new task of blackface, engaging with contemporaneous Black news-
while the old ones were still pending. papers and later critical scholarship and taking the issue as
This is perhaps another way in which an opportunity to consider the potential spiritual and “tragic”
he reaches across the centuries and links between Jewish and Black music-making.
shakes hands with us, if we consider
the digital devices that do much to di- Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zı̌, translated from the
vert our attention, technology for which Chinese by Lin King (Graywolf ). Presented as a translation
Leibniz’s work on logic and binary did of an out-of-print Japanese text, this National Book Award-
much to lay the ground. winning metafictional novel takes place in colonial-era Tai-
Leibniz’s life was inevitably full of wan, and follows a Japanese writer on a trip during which
frustrations because he aimed so im- she falls in love with her local translator. Yáng details their
possibly high. Yet he always pressed on, sumptuous meals, teasing out the differences between Jap-
certain that everything would go bet- anese and Taiwanese foodways—and between what is im-
ter next time. He would not have re- posed and what is native. As tensions around the imbalance
garded himself as an optimist, though; that characterizes colonial relations threaten their intimacy,
the concept had not been invented. A the novel’s framing device, with its many footnotes, under-
French journal coined optimisme after scores the barriers to mutual understanding the two face. “I
his death, to refer to his account of God’s complained about the Empire’s treatment of its colonies,”
choice between possible worlds. It later the Japanese writer notes, “yet I was but another citizen of
came to mean some of the things that this world with all its earthly flaws.”
Leibniz personally was—energized by
hope, inclined to underestimate the Tasmania, by Paolo Giordano (Other Press). Paolo, the pro-
chances of failure, ready to see a bright tagonist of this searching novel, is, like its author, an Italian
side. When the pain in his legs kept writer with a physics degree. When his wife ends their efforts
him indoors, it was “a blessing in dis- to conceive a child, he takes up a wandering life, sleeping on
guise,” he half joked to a friend, because couches and in hotels while teaching, writing newspaper col-
it meant that he could get even more umns, and researching a book on the atomic bomb. He finds
done at his desk. That sounds like Vol- distraction in the lives of others, including a friend embroiled
taire’s Pangloss. But, unlike Pangloss, in a custody battle, a charismatic climate scientist, and a priest
Leibniz was never satisfied with the carrying on an affair. As Paolo struggles to make sense of re-
present state of things, because he lationships characterized by both intimacy and distance, Gior-
couldn’t stop dreaming up ways to make dano explores the challenge of finding safety in a world where
the world better.  disasters—from bombings to rising sea levels—proliferate.
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 67
 the new center. Ideologically, too, remote-
THE ART WORLD ness worked to the school’s advantage.
Its leaders stressed Tantric chanting, rit-
ualized sex, and other secretive practices,
ENLIGHTEN ME but, as Christian Luczanits suggests in
an eloquent catalogue essay, they could
The secret beauty of mandalas. be flashy about those secrets. Some of
the most ravishing works here were
BY JACKSON ARN painted in distemper on cloth, so that
they could be rolled up, transported any-
where, unfurled, and re-hidden the sec-
ond they started to dazzle.
Tibetan Buddhism persuaded with
sheer pictorial beauty. Not only with
beauty, of course; impatient rulers liked
that Vajrayana promised enlightenment
in one lifetime, as opposed to the usual
Buddhist dozens, and Kublai Khan spread
its teachings as far as his horsemen could
ride. But, even here, pictures drove the
religion’s expansion and begat other pic-
tures. Kings commissioned mandalas to
clinch future success; after they won the
battle or survived the plague, they cele-
brated by demanding more opulent ver-
sions. You can find Tugh Temür, Kublai
Khan’s great-great-grandson, in the bot-
tom left corner of a fourteenth-century
silk mandala he requested. Baby Khan
is nowhere near the most important of
the many beings depicted here, but it’s
an honor just to be included. Centers
and satellites are still the idea; above him
float several squares within circles, and
as the geometric shapes get smaller and
more central the figures within get more
important—not mortals but minor de-
ities, not minor deities but the big guy,
Vajrabhairava. Know him by his blue
here was more flaying than I ex- us amid the stink of rotting flesh, what skin and buffalo head.
T pected, though not necessarily
more than I wanted, at “Mandalas:
good is it?
A millennium ago, India was still a
Sound complex? It is, but one thing
this mandala definitively isn’t is bulky.The
Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet.” Buddhist headwater. Various schools shapes seem to slide soundlessly against
Any visitors going to the Met’s exhi- f lowed north and east, to China and one another; the in-between spaces are
bition in search of tranquillity will find Japan, but one, Vajrayana Buddhism, left loosened up with gorgeous floral squirms
a fifteenth-century flaying knife, a pair its richest deposits on the Tibetan Pla- of green thread. Even when I squint at
of flayed cadavers embroidered onto a teau. It’s a nice irony of this show that the little reproduction in the catalogue, I
rug, and another flayed cadaver, with remoteness can speed up transmission: get a sense of a complexity that has been
colorful guts stretched like caution tape the Himalayas were uncrossable for a captured without being tamed—too big
COURTESY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

around a palace. They may find tran- quarter of the year, but travellers needed to belong to any single person, least of
quillity, too—just not the cuddly sort to get through all the same, and many all the one who paid for it.
that American pop-Buddhism adver- of them spent months near the south-
ern side of the mountains, waiting out
tises. For the Himalayan monks of the
early teen centuries, the ideal setting
for initiation was a charnel ground,
the snow and soaking up Buddhist cul-
ture. By the thirteenth century, Vajrayana
IsettleftryI were smarter, or stupider, I would
to use the rest of this review to
the question of what Tibetan man-
where people left their dead to be eaten was close to extinct in its own birthplace, dalas (not the only art works here, but
by wild animals. If religion can’t help and Tibet, the ex-satellite, had become the most striking) were used for. I can
take some comfort in the fact that not
“Mandala of Jnanadakini,” a distemper painting from the fourteenth century. even the Met’s experts agree on an exact
68 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025
answer. At a recent conference hosted this show would be worth visiting for
by the museum, an eminent professor the eerie loveliness of the color. One RESCUING AND
claimed that they could be understood mandala, depicting the goddess Jnana- DELIVERING
primarily as meditation aids; in the cat- dakini, has barely a crack to show for al-
alogue, another insists that “there is no most seven hundred years of existing. FRESH FOOD
basis for this interpretation.” There is The colors are all pomp and hot splen-
plenty of basis for the interpretation dor: red grabs hold of softer pinks and
IN NYC TO
that mandalas are symbols of the divine jades and apricots and makes them burn. EMPOWER A
cosmos, designed to teach initiates about Slower to strike, but no less sensational,
the real thing, unless mandalas are ves- are the abstract patterns of frantic, curl-
STRONGER
sels in which the divine resides, noth- ing lines you find throughout, as though TOMORROW.
ing symbolic about them. They are Himalayan artists of the late fourteenth
teachers and icons, maps and billboards, century had somehow visualized brain
propaganda for the Buddhists who cre- coral. When line and color work to-
THAT’S HOW WE
ate them and also for the kings who
fund them. The most famous ones don’t
gether at full tilt, as they do behind the
walls of Jnanadakini’s palace, the pat-
FEED GOOD.
even exist, since they are studiously de- terns get so dense that they could al-
stroyed as soon as the monks finish mak- most be solid fills. Peace is made to feel
ing them from sand. like a state of faint, cheerful vibration.
Mandala-gazing calls for a buffet of “Biography of a Thought,” a huge man-
prepositions, an “at” that is also an “in” dala painting that the contemporary
that is also a “down upon.” You’re meant Nepalese artist Tenzing Rigdol contrib-
to start along the edges and proceed uted to the show’s atrium, is pat by com-
clockwise, passing the pictures of monks, parison—blue is just blue, solid is just
deities, or patrons in their neat squares. solid, and taking this all in after mar-
From there, go inward, to a circular plate velling at the real thing is like washing
on which a four-gated palace rests. Gen- fine wine down with syrup.
erally, each gate is guarded with a pair Distemper doesn’t survive seven
of prongs that suggest a vajra, a Buddhist centuries unless someone is guarding it
scepter; make it past these and you’ve from breath and sunlight. One point on
broken into the home of the main deity, which all the Met’s experts agree is that
who sits at the center, circled by lesser mandalas weren’t made for mass gawk-
deities while waving a weapon or, de- ing: most Vajrayana initiates journeyed
pending on the version, embracing a con- through them with an experienced mas-
sort. You can imagine each layer stacked ter as a guide.That was probably a shrewd
on top of the previous one (three-dimen- move on the master’s part. Images—the
sional mandala models are arranged this good ones, at least—are always richer
way), so that the farther in you move the than their official meanings, which is
higher the image pokes out of the pic- why so many religions police or ban
ture plane. Inward becomes upward. them. In a distemper-on-cotton man-
Either way, you are doing with your dala from 1800 or so, the deity Ekajata
eyes what Buddhism says you can do resides in a palace guarded by corpses
with your life: proceeding from outer to and surrounded by smoky darkness.
inner, base to noble, ignorant to enlight- There’s an obvious progression here,
ened. The crawl from one to the other from smoke to body and body to divin-
matters as much as the enlightenment ity, but maybe it leads from divinity all
itself—skipping the charnel grounds isn’t the way back to smoke, which gets
an option. Observe no fewer than eight brighter and livelier the longer we stare.
of them at the outskirts of a single Thick clouds seem to push out beyond
eleventh-century Nepalese mandala. the rectangle they’re in, and beyond any RESCUING FOOD FOR NYC
Greenish jackals feast while birds nibble bounds anyone might try to place around
on skulls, and why shouldn’t they? They’re them. Religious art could have been
part of the cosmos, too. The red surround- doing so much more with smoke this
ing this mandala’s central deity is a Bud- whole time, I thought as I looked. Fire
dhist symbol of purity, but also a reminder and water have hogged the spotlight for
that purity starts with the flesh and blood too long; smoke has its own glamour, its
that everybody gets for free. own deathless wriggle. In this mandala,
Even if you know nothing about Bud- whether the monks approved or not, it
dhism, even if you’re in no mood to learn, gets the starring role it was born to play.  CITYHARVEST.ORG
 fettered kin, to fly into some histrion-
THE CURRENT CINEMA ics of her own. I thought of Hortense
often while watching “Hard Truths,”
Leigh’s blisteringly funny and crush-
MEAN TIME ingly sad new movie, in which Jean-
Baptiste fumes, rages, and, to my mind,
“Hard Truths.” gives the performance of the year and
likely of her career. Arriving nearly three
BY JUSTIN CHANG decades after “Secrets & Lies,” “Hard
Truths” has the feel of a genuine com-
e first met Hortense Cumber- with. His dramas, among them the TV panion work. Intentionally or not, it ex-
W batch, the soft-spoken optome-
trist at the heart of Mike Leigh’s won-
movie “Meantime” (1983) and cinematic
features such as “Naked” (1993), “Topsy-
pands on, completes, and at times chal-
lenges its predecessor. (Even its title
derful 1996 film, “Secrets & Lies,” at a Turvy” (1999), and “Vera Drake” (2004), feels like a blunt rejoinder.)
funeral. The camera paid her little mind. remind us that no one is a supporting Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy Deacon, a
Dwarfed by a crowd of mourners in a player in their own life—a truth made middle-aged woman of Caribbean de-
cemetery, her head bowed as she mur- especially plain in “Secrets & Lies,” which scent who lives in North London with
mured along to “How Great Thou Art,” is predicated on shock revelations and her husband, Curtley (David Webber),
Hortense, played with crystalline re- hidden identities. Hortense, having lost and their twenty-two-year-old son,
Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Here and
there are warm, persistent echoes of “Se-
crets & Lies”: the wonderful Michele
Austin, who played Hortense’s friend
Dionne, returns here as Pansy’s younger
sister, Chantelle. Another cemetery scene
looms at the midpoint, when Chantelle
drags a scowlingly reluctant Pansy to
honor their mother, five years after her
sudden passing. (It should be noted that
both movies were shot by Leigh’s long-
time cinematographer, Dick Pope, who
died in October; “Hard Truths” was his
final film.)
The similarities largely end there.
Where Hortense projected a luminous
inner calm, Pansy is profoundly unhappy.
From the moment we meet her—she
jerks upright in bed, emitting a loud, ag-
Michele Austin and Marianne Jean-Baptiste star in Mike Leigh’s film. onized cry—it’s clear that her life has
become a chain of rude awakenings and
straint by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, didn’t both her adoptive parents, set out to unmitigated miseries. Jean-Baptiste, her
give much indication of being a main track down her biological mother—only mouth set in a tight-lipped frown, her
character. It’s possible that Jean-Baptiste, to learn that she had been born to a eyes ablaze with fear and loathing,
a Black British stage actor and musi- white woman, Cynthia Purley (Brenda soft-pedals nothing. At home, Pansy
cian with only a handful of small film Blethyn). As years’ worth of disclosures spends much of her time trying to sleep,
roles to her name, didn’t know it yet and recriminations erupted into the open, complaining of pain and exhaustion.
herself. One of the curious effects of the serene Jean-Baptiste held us close In her waking moments, she scrubs
Leigh’s famously unorthodox working and rapt. At the climax, amid a flood of down every surface with, presumably, a
methods—in which the shape of a story family histrionics, our eyes sought out pandemic-bred obsessiveness, giving us
and the nature of its characters are dis- Hortense, sitting on the sidelines, stricken ample time to notice her house’s blank
covered, and perfected, through an often with remorseful silence. walls and spartan chill. She is wary of
months-long process of acting work- Hortense was the first major Black open windows, which could let in a stray
shops and rehearsals—is that the per- character in a Leigh film, and, as vivid animal from the back yard or even a gulp
formers themselves seldom know be- and memorable as she was, you couldn’t of fresh air. The very name Pansy feels
forehand whether they’re playing a lead help wanting more of her, and also more like a cruel joke; when Moses musters
or a supporting role. for her: perhaps a scene with other mem- the courage to buy her flowers for Moth-
Leigh’s approach, dogged in its pur- bers of her adoptive family, or just one er’s Day, she can’t bring herself to touch
suit of emotional truth, is meant to frus- moment in which she was permitted, them. For their part, Moses and Curt-
trate such narrative hierarchies to begin like Cynthia and her emotionally un- ley keep their heads down, lest they find
70 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 13, 2025 ILLUSTRATION BY ZACK ROSEBRUGH
themselves on the receiving end of Pan- good will, and who remains one of the good-natured wisdom. High spirits also
sy’s fury. (Curtley, a plumber, loses him- most polarizing protagonists in the prevail in the apartment that Chantelle
self in his work; Moses, who’s unem- Leigh canon. Pansy, as clenched and shares with her two grown daughters,
ployed, plays video games in his room misanthropic an antithesis to Poppy Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia
and goes on long walks.) as anyone could imagine, may well Brown); in one playful sequence, the
When Pansy does venture outdoors, join her in that company. (In a better three of them all but fall over one an-
to see a doctor or do some shopping, world, they’d headline their own buddy other laughing, their mood as bright as
she invariably picks fights with strang- comedy.) But the brilliance of both their pajamas. Two scenes that are wholly
ers, which can rise to impressive peaks characters—and of Hawkins’s and Jean- untethered to the main plot, and no less
of insult-comedy flair. “Your balls are so Baptiste’s richly inventive performances— incisively observed for that, take place at
backed up you’ve got sperm in your is the way they hint at gray zones within Kayla’s and Aleisha’s respective work-
brain!” she yells at a driver in a parking their respective emotional extremes. Is a places. Each is a modest tour de force of
lot. Back home at the dinner table, Pansy woman’s defiant happiness or unhappi- in-office confrontation—a reminder that
extemporizes ferociously on the micro- ness a basic reflex, a learned habit, or a happiness seldom means, or requires, the
absurdities of modern life: the clothing meticulously considered response to the absence of conflict or disappointment.
of pets, the nosiness of charity workers, world and its horrors? As so often, Leigh’s emotional egal-
the superf luities of infant apparel With Pansy, no answers are forthcom- itarianism feels like the product of a
(“What’s a baby got pockets for? What’s ing. “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Chan- sensibility both mathematical and phil-
it gonna keep in its pocket, a knife?”). telle demands, love and exasperation in osophical—as if, by juggling enough in-
Let no one, in their understandable ea- her voice. “I don’t know” is Pansy’s im- dividual perspectives, experiences, and
gerness to praise Leigh as an anatomist movable reply. The integrity of Leigh world views, he could advance a persua-
of the human condition, downplay just and Jean-Baptiste’s approach is that they sive theory, if not a definitive proof, of
how entertaining “Hard Truths” is. Woe believe, and respect, the character’s dearth human behavior. The effect is not with-
betide anyone who bumps into Pansy of self-knowledge. Pansy and Chantelle out its schematic aspects; the contrast
on the street, but to watch her onscreen talk of shared childhood woes—an ab- between Pansy’s spotless, Airbnb-ready
produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; sent father, an overly critical mother— home and Chantelle’s leafier, more
her viciousness has an awesome life force. that placed a far heavier burden of re- lived-in one—or between the closed-
At a certain point, I began wondering sponsibility on Pansy, the firstborn. But off Moses and his perpetually upbeat
whether Pansy would be best served not the movie knows that psychology and cousins—could hardly be more severe.
by counselling or antidepressants but by exposition have their dramatic limits, and The toughest figure to nail down is Curt-
a few pints and an open mike. Pansy’s feelings of isolation—“I’m so ley, whose lumpen stoicism both elicits
lonely,” she says, in a break from her usual and dodges our sympathies. Did years
or some time now, Leigh’s great sub- refrain of “I’m so tired”—are wisely of enduring Pansy’s hectoring break him,
F ject has been the elusive nature and
uneven allocation of happiness—an in-
framed as a mystery with no solution.
If Leigh has little use for explana-
or did his own emotional remove push
her away and over the edge? His solem-
equity at the heart of his contemporary tions, he is nonetheless fascinated by nity and her contempt converge, with
working-class dramas, such as “Life Is counterexamples, and he frequently takes startling force, in the movie’s final mo-
Sweet” (1991), “Another Year” (2010), us beyond Pansy’s purview, to show us ment. As vaguely as we understand what
and, perhaps most of all, his delightful how others make sense of the world. brought them here, we’re even less cer-
2008 comedy, “Happy-Go-Lucky.” In Chantelle is a hair stylist, and the salon tain where they’re headed. Not for the
that movie, Sally Hawkins played the where she works appears to be an invit- first time in Mike Leigh’s work, the ab-
sweet-souled Poppy, who greeted every ing fixture in the city’s West Indian com- sence of a clear truth may be the hard-
misfortune with a giggle of unvexed munity, overf lowing with gossip and est one to bear. 

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, JANUARY 13, 2025 71

 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 Mick Stevens,
must be received by Sunday, January 12th. The finalists in the December 16th contest appear below.
We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the January 27th 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

“ ”
..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“ You pulled me out of the ground for this?”

Ian Schorvitz, Los Angeles, Calif.

“I can’t believe he’s roasting vegetables.” “Nobody wants to hire you when you’re out of warranty.”
Sarah Enelow-Snyder, Edison, N.J. Doug Molitor, Covina, Calif.

“Somehow I didn’t expect karaoke at a salad bar.”

Donald Bjorn Benson, San Jose, Calif.
STORIES & SOUNDS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R

WOMEN
WHO
T R AV E L

LISTEN AND FOLLOW WHEREVER

YO U G E T YO U R P O D C A S T S
 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

11 12 13

THE 14 15 16

CROSSWORD 17 18 19

20 21 22 23
A challenging puzzle.
24 25 26

BY NATAN LAST
27 28 29 30

31
ACROSS
1 “Resident Evil” actress Jovovich 32 33 34 35
6 Late tourney round
36 37 38 39
11 Literary device that covers up plot holes
12 System on which the term “spamming” 40 41 42
was coined
14 “I had fun!” follow-up 43 44 45 46

17 “___ Kandelikas” (Ladino Hanukkah song)

47 48 49
18 Beset
19 “I talk to God, but the ___ is empty”: 50 51
Sylvia Plath
20 Shuttlecock 52 53

22 It parallels Park, for short

23 Malawi, Tanganyika, or Turkana DOWN 34 Alert
24 They might be delivered as audio essays 1 Second second? 35 “The Red-Headed League” author
25 Mac : Gaelic :: ___ : Hebrew 2 “Kinda weird, but . . .” 36 Campanile, e.g.
26 Poet and novelist Alyan 3 Tech that eclipsed plasma 39 Flute’s kin
27 Holy ___ 4 Ill-defined 40 Ride a lawn tractor, say
28 It gets billed first 5 Pro competitor 41 Running on ___ (exhausted)
6 Unique 42 Well groomed
31 Emmy that “Lost” once won, informally
7 English county south of Suffolk 44 Belch who says, “Excellent! I smell a
32 Brainiacs
8 Drink in Valhalla device,” in “Twelfth Night”
33 “. . . then what?”
9 Like Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 45 What an “L” may signify
36 Excessively dainty
10 Beachy-wave hair-product ingredient 48 Coward
37 “We are the ninety-nine per cent”
movement, briefly 11 Piece of writing that might have a 49 Affirmative word
stirring message?
38 Word from the Inuktitut for “house” Solution to the previous puzzle:
13 Word that can be translated as “small
40 Kvetch pieces of meat” S C T V A T M P R U D E
41 When albums are typically released, for 14 Endangered Southwestern predators P A R I S S K I P L A N E S
short 15 “The Last Samurai” author A L I B I H O T R O D E N T
B E G T I P V I E
42 Labyrinthine 16 Countdown day, briefly T O U C H G R A S S L E E R
43 Deficit ___ (term for an economist who 21 One of Oedipus and Jocasta’s daughters A R T E S I A N O W E N S
doesn’t think deficits are a problem) I C E S G U T N E T
23 “Video Games” singer Del Rey
44 Box ___ L A S S O L I D S T R A P
25 Peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol I L L G O B H E R O
46 Bubbly state 26 Confines R H O D A U N U S E D T O
47 “Now you understand what I’m dealing 29 Word that can be used as a postpositive P A I N B R A T S U M M E R
with . . .” intensifier E M T S U E R C A

50 Deli offering R O M A N T A S Y F O Y E R
30 Coach alternative
O N E P I E C E S S O N G S
51 Express 31 “___ dicho” (“Well said,” in Spanish) T E N E T H A L K E G S
52 Meeting 32 Kind of app used for mobile payments
Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
53 Course for an econ major 33 They’re sold in tins newyorker.com/crossword