AUGUST 21, 2017

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Amy Davidson Sorkin on the opioid crisis;
Kosciuszko warriors; Randy Newmans faith;
cultural collision; Hampton Fancher talks.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Adam Davidson 20 No Questions Asked
Did Trumps rm vet its foreign partners?
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Evan Waite and River Clegg 29 Million-Dollar Subway Fixes
ANNALS OF AGRICULTURE
Dana Goodyear 30 Strawberry Valley
Breeding the perfect berry.
PROFILES
Ra Khatchadourian 36 Man Without a Country
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the election.
SKETCHBOOK
Will McPhail 49 N.Y.C.s Most Eligible Pigeons
FICTION
Garth Greenwell 62 An Evening Out
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Nathan Heller 70 Assessing the power of protest.
BOOKS
74 Briey Noted
POP MUSIC
Amanda Petrusich 78 Adam Granduciel and the War on Drugs.
MUSICAL EVENTS
Alex Ross 80 The Salzburg Festival.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 82 Good Time, Nocturama.
POEMS
Elly Bookman 25 Privilege
Bob Hicok 46 Origin Story
COVER
Adrian Tomine Upstate

DRAWINGS Danny Shanahan, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Michael Maslin, Tom Toro, Kate Curtis, Maddie Dai,
Liana Finck, Sara Lautman, Edward Steed, Emily Flake, Julia Suits, P. S. Mueller, Kendra Allenby, Farley Katz,
Lars Kenseth, Tom Chitty, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Paul Noth, Harry Bliss SPOTS Miguel Porlan
 CONTRIBUTORS
Ra Khatchadourian (Man Without a
Country, p. 36) has been a sta writer
since 2008.
Bob Hicok (Poem, p. 46) is the author
of nine books, including Hold, which
will be published in 2018.
Amanda Petrusich (Pop Music, p. 78), a
writer for newyorker.com, is the au-
thor of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The
Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the Worlds
Rarest 78rpm Records.
River Clegg (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29)
contributes to McSweeneys, the Onion,
ClickHole, and newyorker.com.
Evan Waite (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29)
is a writer for The President Show,
the Onion, Funny or Die, and Mad
Magazine.
Will McPhail (Sketchbook, p. 49) has con-
tributed more than sixty cartoons to the
magazine since 2014. He is the recipi-
ent of this years Reuben Award for best
gag cartoonist.
Dana Goodyear (Strawberry Valley,
p. 30) has published three books, in-
cluding Honey and Junk and Any-
thing That Moves.
Adam Davidson (No Questions Asked,
p. 20) is a sta writer. Manuela An-
dreoni, Inti Pacheco, and Giannina
Segnini, of Columbia University, con-
tributed reporting for this piece.
Garth Greenwell (Fiction, p. 62) is the
author of the novel What Belongs to
You, which came out last year.
Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 15)
is a sta writer and a regular contrib-
utor to Comment. She also writes a
column for newyorker.com.
Adrian Tomine (Cover) is a cartoonist
and an illustrator. His most recent
graphic novel is Killing and Dying.
Elly Bookman (Poem, p. 25), the recipi-
ent of the rst annual Stanley Kunitz
Memorial Prize, is at work on her rst
book of poems.

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2 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
 THE MAIL
ART IN MOTION
Anthony Lane seemed so unaware of
Jacob Lawrences magisterial Migration
Series, from 1941, that he did not recog-
nize the animated version that Kathryn
Bigelow used to open her new lm,
Detroit (The Current Cinema, Au-
gust 7th & 14th). Neither the original
paintings nor Bigelows renditions of
them are crude or like a childrens pic-
ture book, as Lane wrote dismissively.
Certainly, the images abiding power to
communicate both facts and truths about
important times and places in twentieth-
century American history extends to all,
including children, but that is because
they are a towering achievement of Amer-
ican art. The New Yorkers editing process
let Lane down by not catching this gae.
Stephen McFarland
Brooklyn, N.Y.
1 they wear cowboy hats, button-down
THE TRUTH ABOUT COUNTRY
As a lifelong fan of country-and-Western
music, and a fan of George Strait since
the nineteen-eighties, I enjoyed reading
Kelefa Sannehs Prole of Strait (Hat
Trick, July 24th). I appreciated Sannehs
exploration of the roots of Straits style of
country music, such as the inuence of
Bob Wills, who was known as the king
of Western swing. However, Sanneh
missed an important point: one of the rea-
sons for Straits success during the past
three decades is that his songs (two-steps,
waltzes, and swing numbers) are great to
dance to. Strait is not just the king of coun-
try; for many years, he was also the king
of the country-music dance scene. He cut
his teeth in honky-tonks, and to this day
his music is performed by country sing-
ers in clubs throughout the United States.
Country music isnt just about radio air-
time and Billboard charts; it is a social
phenomenon as well, and Strait has long
been an essential element of that culture.
Pierre M. Atlas
Carmel, Ind.
It is hardly surprising to learn that Straits
producer Jimmy Bowen was smart enough
not to interfere too much with the young
artists music. Bowen had once been a
young artist himself. He had played bass
and sung for the rockabilly quartet Rhythm
Orchids, which also featured the singer
and guitarist Buddy Knox, when they
charted four Top Twenty hits (Party
Doll,Im Stickin with You,Rock Your
Little Baby to Sleep, and Hula Love),
in 1957. Bowens own singing proved too
straightforward and unadorned for emerg-
ing rock and roll, and he migrated o the
stage and into the production booth, later
producing Frank Sinatra (among others)
before taking up with Strait.
Douglas J. McReynolds
Cedar Falls, Iowa
Sanneh assumes that Strait has, to use
his words, unimpeachable country cred-
ibility. Musicians like Strait, Blake Shel-
ton, and Garth Brooks are wildly popular,
and their music is good, but just because
shirts, bluejeans, cowboy boots, and huge
silver buckles on their belts does not mean
that their music is country. They are drug-
store cowboys who get away with hat
tricks (ironically, the name of Sannehs
article, though he used it for a dierent
reason). Those musicians are missing the
Appalachian-folk sound, a genre made
popular in the nineteen-twenties, which
came from the mountains and hills of
Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee. A
sound that true country singerssuch as
Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Johnny
Cash, and Willie Nelsonhave. Any-
time a so-called country singer steps on-
stage with electried instruments and
backup singers, and without a ve-string
banjo, a dobro, a mandolin, and a ddle,
you can be sure that he isnt country. Its
a pity that generations of young people
will grow up believing that country music
means George Strait and the others.
Phil Jacobs
Pana, Ill.
Letters should be sent with the writers name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 3
 AUGUST 16 22, 2017

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Kathy Lee, who records and d.j.s as Yaeji, litters her sets with hints at her interests: the wailing sirens of
U.K. rave, the deep kicks of New York house, and, occasionally, the stringed ourishes of traditional Korean
folk. Im into it all, she has oered, as a biography of sorts. But her own songs beguile with their singular
focus, as on her self-titled EP of whispery, slow-blooming dance tunes. On Aug. 18, the Queens producer
plays late into the night at Sunnyvale, joined by Will Martin, a co-founder of the dance label Firm Tracks.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCELO GOMES

NIGHT LIFE
1
ROCK AND POP
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; its advisable to check
in advance to confirm engagements.
Juan Atkins
Most young laptop musicians may find it dif-
ficult to imagine producing music without a
computer screen and the technologies that cor-
rect and simplify the processwhich makes
the precision and emotion found on the pre-
P.C. tracks of Juan Atkins, known as the God-
father of Techno, and his Detroit ilk all the
more impressive. Clear, which Atkins re-
leased with Richard Davis, as Cybotron, in
1982, is yanked forward by an uphill arpeggio,
which was liberally sampled on dozens of rec-
ords throughout the next three decadesa lit-
eral sound of the future. His Korg MS-10 ex-
periments were soon dubbed techno, and,
even then, Atkins stressed that his output was
a progression not of music but of technology:
Stretching it, rather than simply using it.
(Sugar Hill Disco, 217 Nostrand Ave., Brooklyn.
718-797-1727. Aug. 19.)
Mary J. Blige
In the lineage of Holiday, Fitzgerald, Frank-
lin, and Baker, Blige will be remembered as
much for her edge as for her grace. At a time
when female singers were expected to embody
poise along with raw talent, Blige tore onto the
scene with Whats the 411? (1992), a transfor-
mative dbut album that balanced the rattling
bass of downtown New York night clubs with
meditative covers of soul standards like Sweet
Thing, by Chaka Khan; we would hear Blige
on her own terms, she seemed to insist. Her
tumultuous personal life informed her public
image across a dozen albumsas did the in-
creasingly uninteresting label of divabut she
has emerged, twenty-five years later, as a nine-
time Grammy winner, resembling those fore-
bears whose music inspired her as a teen-ager
in Yonkers. She tours in support of her latest
record, Strength of a Woman. (Ford Amphi-
theatre at Coney Island Boardwalk, 3052 W. 21st
St., Brooklyn. 718-954-9933. Aug. 18.)
Playboi Carti
This Atlanta rapper, born Jordan Carter, traffics
in slurred flows that land frictionlessly on the
ears of club rats and mall loiterers alike; Broke
Boi, his breakout song, has been streamed more
than twenty-two million times since 2015, each
accounting for three minutes of mindless fun.
Carti came to notoriety as part of Awful Rec-
ords, a loose collective of Atlanta beatniks who
have self-released dozens of mixtapes; on the
strength of a handful of songs and his riotous
performances, Carti was soon tugged into the
circle of the Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky. Bel-
lowing bass, bright, wiry synthesizers, and slack-
jawed ad-libs characterize Cartis style, captured
most purely on his latest street hit, Magnolia;
this performance at one of the few clubs left in
Hells Kitchen promises to be as lively as the
rapper makes each verse sound. (Stage 48, 605
W. 48th St. 212-957-1800. Aug. 17.)
DIIV
The front man Zachary Cole Smith, a native
New Yorker, founded DIIV in 2011. He has per-
severed through a full suite of rock-star trap-
pings: a very public relationship with the singer
Sky Ferreira and a documented battle with sub-
stance abuse, culminating in a 2013 arrest for
heroin possession. The bands dbut, Oshin, born vocalist with an internationalist musical
which put excellent guitar work first and lyri-
cal clarity second, was released, on the Brook-
lyn label Captured Tracks, after years of gigging
around the city, most famously at Brooklyns
now defunct punk landmark 285 Kent. DIIV will
perform an unplugged set at this small new
concert hall on the edge of Prospect Heights.
(Murmrr Theatre, 17 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn.
murmrr.com. Aug. 17.)
Forth Wanderers
This Montclair slacker outfit caught the at-
tention of Father/Daughter Records shortly
after Ava Trilling, the front vocalist, graduated
from high school. Few bands enjoy such an en-
viably short path to fame, where news of ones
dbut album may appear in the campus paper:
Ben Guterl, the bands co-founder and primary
songwriter, bounced between the studio and ju-
nior-year seminars, and told the Oberlin Review
that his new success was kind of overwhelming
and a little nerve-wracking. Its also well de-
served. The lo-fi, low-slung rock found on the
groups four-song project, Slop, is confident
and untainted, and Guterls mucky guitar tugs
out Trillings coy confessions in all the right
ways: I cant sleep when Im uneasy/I get in vided his bona fides. Here, in direct tribute to
my head, please relieve me, she sings, on Un-
fold. (Sunnyvale, 1031 Grand St., Brooklyn. 347-
987-3971. Aug. 18.)
Kim Ann Foxman
Foxman, a Hawaii-born artist and d.j., claims
to sneeze when shes full, her version of synes-
thesia. Its not too far off from thatcrossing There doesnt seem to be a reed or brass instru-
wires of the senses in a way, she explained to
the dance-music outlet Thump. For the deep-
club denizen, who runs an egalitarian record
label out of an old firehouse, escapism is de-
livered with a straight face. Foxman has done
work for fashion houses looking to sharpen
their edge (shes scored dinners for Gucci and
shilled for Adidas Stan Smith), but her hard
style shines most brightly at her various res-
idencies, which include stints at Berlins Pan-
orama Bar and Greenpoints Good Room. She
returns this week, to dole out dizzying trance
and stuttering Chicago house with the special
guest L.Sangre. (98 Meserole Ave., Brooklyn. 718-
349-2373. Aug. 19.)
John Maus
An encounter with the synth-pop prince of dark-
ness Maus could bring anything: references to
Oedipal drama or to Stockhausen, an analysis
of his former bandmate Ariel Pink, or a twenty-
four-thousand-word diatribe about life and in-
tent, much like the one he sent to the music zine
AdHoc, in 2012, after it published an open let-
ter to the musician. Maus, who has a Ph.D. in
political philosophy, is also a cult musical hero
known for crafting woozy, space-age baritone
pop musings about quantum leaps and the moon,
most notably on his 2011 album, We Must Be-
come the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves. Its un-
clear what, exactly, his performance at Babys
All Righthis first in New York since 2012
will involve. But, like most of what Maus does,
1
it promises to be nothing short of illuminating.
(146 Broadway, Brooklyn. 718-599-5800. Aug. 18.)
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
Cyrille Aimee
Charm comes easily to this delightful French-
bent. Her 2016 release, Lets Get Lost, found
her adding intriguing originals to a mix of judi-
ciously selected standards that flits from Sond-
heim to an Edith Piaf favorite to the bass leg-
end Oscar Pettifords Laverne Walk. (Le Poisson
Rouge, 158 Bleecker St. 212-505-3474. Aug. 16.)
Kenny Barron and Ray Drummond
Mainstream jazz piano has its most elegant
champion in the veteran virtuoso Barron, who, at
seventy-four, remains at the top of his game. Hes
joined by another distinctly graceful player, the
bassist Drummond, who, after decades of inter-
action, has a second-sight connection with Bar-
ron. (Check out the live sets from the nineteen-
nineties, recorded at the late, lamented Bradleys,
for proof of their early telepathy.) (Mezzrow, 163
W. 10th St. mezzrow.com. Aug. 18-19.)
A Love Supreme, A Tribute to John
Coltrane
Azar Lawrence, a saxophonist of gravity and pro-
pulsion, has never been the least bit shy about
acknowledging his stylistic debt to John Col-
trane, and his tenures with the key Coltrane
sidemen McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones pro-
the great man, he tackles revered texts includ-
ing A Love Supreme. His devotional cohorts
include Benito Gonzalez, on piano. (Smoke, 2751
Broadway, between 105th and 106th Sts. 212-864-
6662. Aug. 18-20.)
Scott Robinson Quartet
ment (not to mention occasional oddities, in-
cluding the theremin) that this extraordinary
musician cant coax jazz out of, but even when
Robinson sticks to the saxophone and the clar-
inet he regularly achieves greatness. Given his
fluency of instrumentation and genre (hes as
comfortable with pre-swing-era jazz as he is
with the avant-garde), Robinson usually has his
datebook filled working with a variety of cel-
ebrated bandleaders, not least Maria Schnei-
der. Grabbing a rare spotlight, Robinson leads
a quartet that includes Helen Sung, on piano.
(Jazz at Kitano, 66 Park Ave., at 38th St. 212-
885-7119. Aug. 19.)
Brandee Younger
There have been other jazz harpists, notably
Dorothy Ashby, in the sixties, and Alice Col-
trane, the visionary musician to whom Brandee
Younger paid tribute at a celebratory concert
last month. Where Coltrane was self-taught
she took up the instrument after her husband in-
stalled one in their Long Island homeYounger
brings classical training to her dulcet device; a
varied rsum has found her collaborating with
the likes of Ravi Coltrane (John and Alices son),
Jane Monheit, and Common. (Jazz Standard, 116
E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. Aug. 22.)
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 5

Alexander Dovzhenkos childhood memories are brought to life by the actor Vladimir Goncharov, in Yuliya Solntsevas 1964 film The Enchanted Desna.
Family Business
Yuliya Solntseva directed a masterwork
based on her late husbands script.
Some of the most rapturous of silent
lms were made by Alexander
Dovzhenko, a Ukrainian director who
worked in the Soviet Union and, during
the sound era, bore Stalinist constraints
stoically. After Stalins death, in 1953,
Dovzhenko wrote scripts for three per-
sonal lms, but he died in 1956, before
he could see them produced. His
widow, Yuliya Solntseva, also an ac-
claimed lmmaker, went on to direct
them, and theyll be screened Aug. 26-27,
in the ongoing See It Big! series at the
Museum of the Moving Image. The
last of the three, The Enchanted
Desna, from 1964, is by far the most
original. Made at a time of great daring
in European cinema, its as extrava-
gantly lyrical and painterly as any movie
of the era.
Dovzhenko grew up in a town sit-
uated on the banks of the Desna River.
The movie is a quasi-autobiographical
memory piece that brings together
three periodsthe modern day, the
Second World War, and the time of the
6 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
MOVIES
lmmakers prerevolutionary childhood
in a farm villagewith a boldly sub-
jective freedom akin to that of such
innovators as Alain Resnais. Its pro-
tagonist, also named Alexander, a Red
Army ocer during the war, reaches
Ukrainian soil with his outt and ob-
serves the smoldering ruins of battle.
Taking shelter in a cave, he reminisces
about his boyhood in what was then a
lavish landscape; young Alexander darts
through elds of poppies and sunow-
ers, their erce primary colors slashing
the screen as Solntsevas camera rushes
alongside him.
Alexanders childhood recollections
involve touches of comedyhis grand-
mothers salty curses; his mighty Uncle
Samiylos dispute with a neighbor over
a haystack, leading to a rowdy but
bloodless gang war; and young Alex-
anders fantasies of talking horses and
a lion on the loose. His paean to the joy
of the sound of scythes being ham-
mered launches a brilliant scene of
farmers rhythmically massed in syn-
chronized threshing. Solntseva pairs
Alexanders idyllic memories with pic-
torial rhapsody, lling the screen with
a molten crimson sunrise, wavering
light on a rivers surface which looks
like animated Abstract Expressionism,
mist drifting dreamily along the river-
banks, smoke billowing, and clouds
swarming amid the twilit sky.
The movies conventional political
nods are laced with bitter irony. A war-
time mention of Ukraine as invaded
land could refer to Russia as well as to
Germany. When Alexander makes men-
tion of Communism, Solntseva pairs it
with a massive explosion onscreen. As
the aged protagonist discusses the mod-
ern eras technological advances, Solnt-
seva shows vast, graphically detailed
visions of new cities under construction,
which she lms with a terror-lled fas-
cination to match that of Antonionis
Red Desert, which was released the
same year. In a tribute to socialist labor-
ers, Solntseva lms construction workers
looking like specimens pinned to an
enormous metal architectural framework
that theyre building. The lm concludes
with an ode not to progress but to nature,
even its devastating forces. As a blood-
red sun sets over the horizon, Solntseva
hints at a geological span of life that
outlasts regimes.
Richard Brody
1 OPENING
Lemon A comedy, directed by Janicza Bravo, about
a frustrated actor (Brett Gelman) whose girlfriend
(Judy Greer) leaves him. Co-starring Nia Long
and Michael Cera. Opening Aug. 18. (In limited re
lease.) Logan Lucky Steven Soderbergh directed
this comedic thriller, about a hapless construction
worker (Channing Tatum) who organizes a rob-
bery of a Nascar speedway. Co-starring Daniel
Craig, Adam Driver, and Riley Keough. Opening
1
Aug. 18. (In wide release.) Patti Cake$ Reviewed in
Now Playing. Opening Aug. 18. (In limited release.)
NOW PLAYING
Atomic Blonde
This standard-issue spy-by-the-pound yarnset
during the last days of the Berlin Wallis both
enlivened and deadened by its unusually realistic
and numbingly plentiful violence. Charlize Theron
stars as Lorraine Broughton, an M.I.6 agent sent
to the still divided city to locatewith the help of
a British colleague (James McAvoy)a wristwatch
containing a list of Western spies, and to rescue
a Stasi turncoat (Eddie Marsan), who has the list
memorized. This action is seen in flashbacks, in-
tercut with scenes of the bloodied, bruised, and
embittered Lorraines chilly debriefing by her han-
dlers (Toby Jones and John Goodman). The de-
ceptive twists and cynical moods of espionage take
place in nostalgically bleak Cold War cityscapes,
but the fine points of spycraft are either reduced
to mere winks or amplified to bone-thwacking and
gore-spraying martial artistry. Theron keeps her
cool throughout the pummelling gyrations, but the
film strains to achieve a breathless panache and
a lurid swagger for which David Leitchs direc-
tion is too heavy-footed and literal; a deft, metal-
bashing automotive ballet comes too late to help.
With Sofia Boutella, as a French agent with an
artistic streak.Richard Brody (In wide release.)
Bamboozled
Spike Lees sharp, riotous satire, from 2000, zeroes
in on the grotesque misrepresentation of blacks in
American mediaand on their underrepresenta-
tion in the corporate offices that control it. Pierre
Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is the sole black pro-
gramming executive at a TV network. Wanting to
prove his bosses obliviousness, he proposes a mon-
strous absurditya Saturday Night Live-style of England. The saga, an essential chapter in the
minstrel show, featuring black actors, in black-
face, reprising vile stereotypes. To Pierres horror,
the show is picked up and becomes a hit, restoring
those stereotypes to popular culture. With a wide
range of incisive, sardonic, hyperbolic humor and
drama, Lee sketches the circular connections be-
tween racist images, racist policies, and the lack of
leadership to resist them. The exuberant perfor-
mances of the shows starsa comedian (Tommy
Davidson) and a tap dancer (Savion Glover), whom
Pierre has plucked off the streetsbring out Lees
potent theatrical paradox. The pleasure of mock-
ing stereotypes risks perpetuating them, which is
why comedyas embodied by the old-school co-
medians Junebug (Paul Mooney) and Honeycutt
(Thomas Jefferson Byrd)is, in Lees view, a high
and serious calling. With Jada Pinkett Smith, as
Pierres conflicted colleague.R.B. (Anthology Film
Archives, Aug. 18 and Aug. 20.)
Columbus
The title of the visual artist and video-essayist
Kogonadas intellectually passionate first feature
refers to the Indiana city thats home to a sur-
MOVIES
prising abundance of modern architectural mas-
terworks. Those buildings fire the imagination
of his protagonist, a twentyish woman named
Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), whos stuck in place.
Spurning college to care for her mother (Michelle
Forbes), whos a recovering drug addict, Casey
works in the local library. When Jin (John Cho),
an architectural historians son, comes to town, he
abets her outpouring of pent-up ideas and enthu-
siasms about architecture and tries to help change
her life. Richardson infuses her hyperalert perfor-
mance with a rare dialectical ardor; her avid gaze
at the citys landmarks is matched by Kogonadas
own images, which capture the virtual libido of
aesthetic sensibility. Filming Casey and Jin on
location in the presence of the buildings that in-
spire them, he revels in the power of contempla-
tive companionshipof looking, talking, thinking
togetherand unfolds the wonder of an artis-
tic coming of age. With Rory Culkin, as Caseys
ironic grad-student colleague, and Parker Posey,
as Jins longtime friend.R.B. (In limited release.)
Detroit
The latest Kathryn Bigelow movie is set in July,
1967. Nothing about the season should be mistaken
for a summer of love. The action begins in dark-
ness, with a police raid on a Detroit bar, and pro-
ceeds to waves of rioting and looting. Only fitfully
do we seem to see the light. The centerpiece of
the story, which was written by Mark Boal and is
grounded in historical events, unfolds at a motel,
where shots are heard; the cops, with a racist bully
(Will Poulter) in their midst, line up a bunch of
suspects, including a marine (Anthony Mackie)
whos just back from Vietnam, and interrogate
them. By the end of the night, three of the sus-
pects are dead. The new film, compared with Big-
elows Zero Dark Thirty (2012), is gruelling to
watch, drawn out rather than tightly wound, and
no uncertainty hangs over the crime at its heart;
we know who the bad guys are. If there is depth
and doubt here, it resides in John Boyega, who
plays a security guard caught up in the deeds at
the motel. The tragedy of the times is right there,
in his horrified eyes.Anthony Lane (Reviewed in
our issue of 8/7 & 14/17.) (In wide release.)
Dunkirk
The new Christopher Nolan movie is set in 1940,
during the mass evacuation of British and French
troops from northern France to the relative safety
British wartime narrative, is not widely known else-
where, and what Nolan delivers is neither a history
lesson nor even much of a war film. A good deal of
it strikes the senses, not to mention the nerves, as
an exercise in high tension and near-abstraction,
as men (there are almost no women to be seen) are
perilously poised between land and water, water
and air, darkness and light. Mark Rylance, dourly
determined, plays the skipper of the Moonstone,
one of the innumerable Little Ships that went to
the aid of those who were trapped on the beaches.
Overhead, Tom Hardy is in typically phlegmatic
form as a Spitfire pilot who must protect the naval
vessels from German bombers. The movie feels
old-fashioned whenever it seeks to stir up British
pride; as a fable of survival, though, with its quick-
silver editing and an anxious score by Hans Zim-
mer, it amazes and exhausts in equal measure. With
Kenneth Branagh, Fionn Whitehead, and Harry
Styles.A.L. (7/31/17) (In wide release.)
Full Moon in Paris
Eric Rohmers 1984 romantic comedy is one of his
most robust achievements, thanks to a cast that in-
cludes two of Frances finest modern performers.
Pascale Ogiertall, angular, darting, filled with
nervous energy and ardent longingplays Lou-
ise, an interior designer who lives with her athletic
boyfriend, Rmy (Tchky Karyo), in a new sub-
urban apartment complex. Needing more time to
herself, she refurbishes the Parisian pied--terre
that she had planned to sell, and, in the city, spends
time with Octave, a writer played by the theatrical
Fabrice Luchini, whose hyper-refined diction and
magisterial gestures capture to perfection the aes-
theticizing intellect. But Octave caddishly presses
the physical side of things and puts the friendship
at risk, even as Louise innocently stirs up trou-
ble with Rmy. With a graceful round of self-
deceptions and mistaken identities, exquisite ra-
tionalizations and fortuitous accidents, Rohmer
pierces the glossy veneer of the social scene and
the dignified realm of art to reveal the sexual fury
that they embody. In French.R.B. (Film Society
of Lincoln Center, Aug. 18, and streaming.)
Girls Trip
This warmhearted, occasionally uproarious comedy
doesnt quite sustain the heights of its performers
inspirations. Ryan (Regina Hall), a best-selling au-
thor, is chosen to deliver the keynote address at the
Essence Festival, in New Orleans, and she invites
her three longtime best friends to join her for a sen-
timental and hard-partying reunion. Sasha (Queen
Latifah), a journalist whos now on the celebrity
beat, has money trouble; Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith),
a nurse and divorced mother of two young children,
is lonely; and Dina (Tiffany Haddish), an outra-
geously brazen pleasure-seeker, seems oblivious of
the consequences of her actions. Meanwhile, Ryan
learns that Stewart (Mike Colter), her husband and
business partner, is having an affair with a younger
woman (Deborah Ayorinde). These womens prob-
lems have substance even though their characters
are thinly written, and the films comedic flour-
ishes offer a refreshing frankness about sex from
womens perspectives. The view of middle-class
African-American womens lives behind closed
doors, despite its antic exaggeration, has a lived-in
specificity. Malcolm D. Lees direction doesnt offer
much style or vigor, but Haddish delivers a wild
yet precise performance of verbal and gestural
fury that puts her at the forefront of contemporary
comedy.R.B. (In wide release.)
Ingrid Goes West
Aubrey Plazas fiercely committed performance
nearly rescues this dubious contrivance from ab-
surdity. The drama, directed by Matt Spicer, is
the latest entry in the picturesque-mental-illness
genre. Plaza plays the title character, a young
woman whose violent outbursts lead to a spell
in an institution. When Ingrid gets out, instead
of receiving therapy and taking medication, she
moves to Los Angeles in order to stalk an Insta-
gram celebrity named Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen)
and insinuate herself into Taylors private life
and social-media feeds. Ingrid manipulates Dan
(OShea Jackson, Jr.), her new neighbor and quasi-
landlord, for help with her schemes; indifferent
to the pain she causes, Ingrid is speeding toward
disaster and determined not to crash alone. Yet
Spicers empathetic view of Ingrids tangle of mis-
ery is outweighed by his satirical critique of on-
line stardom, Hollywood hustling, and conspic-
uous consumption; he presents Ingrids maladies
as the results of the social ills of the times. The ac-
tion devolves into wan op-ed commentary. With
Billy Magnussen, as Taylors dissolute yet deeply
loyal brother, and Wyatt Russell, as her trophy
boyfriend.R.B. (In limited release.)
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 7

Lady Macbeth
A striking dbut feature from William Oldroyd,
basedwith many alterationson a novella by
Nikolai Leskov, which also spawned an opera by
Shostakovich. The setting has moved from Russia
to the North of England, in 1865, and to the un-
lovely castlelike home of Alexander (Paul Hilton)
and his new wife, Katherine (Florence Pugh). He
is a boor, often absent; she is weary and resent-
ful, desperate to crack the tedium of her days and
nights. Opportunity presents itself in the person
of Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), a groom from the
stables, who ends up sharing not merely her bed
but, to his great discomfort, her dinner table. The
wrongs of the situationpitiless crimes as well
as social outragesacquire their own momen-
tum, and, if our initial sympathies lie with the
oppressed heroine, we soon grow alarmed, and
then appalled, by the lengths to which she will go
in her reckonings. Oldroyds film is constructed
and framed with unstinting care; sometimes, in-
deed, you want it to cut loose, although Pugh lends
a definite dash of madness to her impassioned role.
With Naomi Ackie, as the ladys maid, and Chris-
topher Fairbank, as the husbands horrible father,
who deserves everything he gets.A.L. (7/24/17)
(In wide release.)
On the Ropes
Every choice that the directors Nanette Burstein
and Brett Morgen make in this 1999 documentary
about amateur fighters at Brooklyns Bed-Stuy
Boxing Center brings us deeper into the psyches
of their characters. The film pivots on Harry Keitt,
a trainer who short-circuited his own pugilistic ca-
reer with drugs and crime. Harry hopes to keep
three protgs from repeating his mistakesbut chael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, at the hands
he cant keep them from making their own. Ty-
rene Manson, an ardent female fighter, gets in-
dicted for possession of crack with intent to sell
simply because she lives with a crack-addicted
uncle. Harrys prize prospect, a sunny-faced nat-
ural named George Walton, embodies the stresses
of youthful impatience and success. And Harrys
third charge, Noel Santiago, admits, at the out-
set, I was still robbing when I was boxing, but
not as much as I used to. Yet theres no more
heartening moment in the film than when Santi-
ago brags to Harry about getting the top score on
a storefront-college English exam. The filmmak-
ers convey Harry and his fighters victories and
defeats with a soul-rocking combination of inti-
macy and intricacy.Michael Sragow (Anthology
Film Archives, Aug. 19 and Aug. 21.)
Patti Cake$
Geremy Jaspers hardscrabble New Jersey fantasy
has a heartbut an artificial one. Its the story of
the twenty-three-year-old Patricia Dombrowski
(Danielle Macdonald), who lives with her mother,
Barb (Bridget Everett), an alcoholic, and her ail-
ing grandmother (Cathy Moriarty). Pattiwhos
overweight and has long endured the nickname
Dumboworks as a waitress at a grim bar while
dreaming of hip-hop stardom under the name
Killa P. Although she can out-rap her fellow-locals
in a street-corner contest, her musical partnership
with Hareesh (Siddharth Dananjay), a pharma-
cist whose rap name is Jheri, is going nowhere. But
she eventually meets a taciturn loud-core anarchist
who calls himself Basterd the Antichrist (Ma-
moudou Athie), a sort of musical genius, whom
she lures into the group, sparking romance and suc-
cess. There are hiccups along the waydebt, work,
insult, injury, illness, deathand Pattis forceful,
confident pugnacity takes some blows. She has
to accept her family identity while attempting to
8 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
MOVIES
forge an artistic oneand to reconcile with Barb, a
former singer who put her own dreams aside. Jas-
per hits every note of sentimental manipulation
in a tale thats as fleetingly affecting as it is insub-
stantial and mechanical.R.B. (In wide release.)
War for the Planet of the Apes
If only Darwin were alive to see this film. Caesar,
incarnated by Andy Serkis, is living proof that
the highest human virtuesvalor, compassion, a
keen intelligence, and a gift for leadershipare
most credibly combined in a monkey. In this lat-
est chapter of the simian saga, Caesar plans to lead
his freedom-loving comrades to a promised land;
first, however, there is a military lunatic (Woody
Harrelson) to contend with, and murders to be
avenged. What follows is often cruel, and hard
to classify as entertainment; we see a labor camp
in full spate, andsurely a cinematic firstsome
form of ape crucifixion. Matt Reevess film takes
itself extremely seriously, and, without a glim-
mer of irony, adds a touch of religious allegory
to both the dialogue and the highfalutin images
with which the story concludes. Still, the technical
achievement marches on, and there appears to be
no challenge that cannot be met and overcome by
the magi of the digital craft. (Do orangutans really
cry?) The most affable character, new to the fran-
chise, is a chimp who, after a long spell in a zoo,
speaks Englishvoiced by Steve Zahnrather
better than he gibbers or howls.A.L. (7/24/17)
(In wide release.)
Whose Streets?
A new documentary, directed by Sabaah Folayan
and Damon Davis, about the 2014 killing of Mi-
of the police, and about the widespread anger
that ensued. Indeed, the film is still fired up; if
it makes no effort to take a balanced view, that
is because the time for balanceto judge by the
ART
1
MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Met Breuer
Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical
It irked Sottsass, who died in 2007, at the age of
ninety, that he might be best remembered for a
crowd-pleasing blip in his six-decade career
the red plastic Valentine typewriter, from 1968.
This lively retrospective makes a persuasive case
that the aesthetic legacy of the quixotic, irrever-
ent Italian designer and architect is enduring and
broad. Sottsass was prolific, producing ceramics,
textiles, furniture, computers, glassware, build-
ings, and jewelry in the course of his progression
from modernist experimentation to postmodern
provocation. (Sottsass was a core member of the
nineteen-eighties Memphis Group.) The curator
Christian Larsen contextualizes his work with a
surprising mix of visually related material, includ-
ing ancient artifacts, modern and contemporary
art, and design objects by forebears, colleagues,
and up-and-comers indebted to his style. Two
sleek Superbox cupboards, circa 1966 and 1970
(each meant to house the entirety of ones posses-
sions within its striped laminate exterior), share a
room with an Egyptian shabti box, from the elev-
opinions expressed with such vehemence here
is long gone. Few moderate voices are heard, and
the movie seems destined to become part of the
activist movement that it portrays. In lieu of a
narrator who might shepherd us calmly through
the fractious events in Missouri, we are treated
to a busy collage of interviews, archive footage,
and tweets, plus a load of cell-phone-video clips,
freshly caught from the flow of the streets. One of
the most appealingand most forthrightfigures
we encounter is Brittany Ferrell, who instructs her
six-year-old daughter in the art of public protest.
On that basis, Ferguson is in no danger of being
forgotten.A.L. (8/7 & 14/17) (In limited release.)
Yeast
The director Mary Bronstein co-stars with
Greta Gerwig and Amy Judd in this raw-looking,
raw-feeling drama, from 2008, about three artis-
tic young friends in Brooklyn who struggle with
romance, money, and adulthood as they lovingly
exacerbate one anothers misery. Rachel (played
by Bronstein), a teacher, seems to be the most
stable of the trio; Alice (Judd) is something of a
lost soul who eagerly shares her anguish; and Jen
(Gerwig) has a passive-aggressive streak, which
reaches a crescendo in a scene that deserves inclu-
sion in movie anthologies as well as in psychology
textbooks. (Gerwigs actorly inventiveness, in all
its wild spontaneity, has rarely had such a show-
case.) The drama is rooted in complications aris-
ing from a simple situation: the groups effort to
go on a weekend road trip. The handheld cine-
matography, by Sean Price Williams and a quar-
tet of others (including the director Josh Safdie),
powerfully evokes the womens furious reckon-
ing with their outer constraints and inner chaos.
Bronsteins exhilarating meditation on perfor-
mance and identity advances to a resolution that
is as surprising as it is transcendent.R.B. (Spec-
tacle, Aug. 19, and streaming.)
enth century B.C., and a Donald Judd stack, from
1968. Elsewhere, Sottsasss geometric ceramic ves-
sels are seen with non-Western antiquities from
the museums collection, pointing to the sources
of his simplified ziggurat, mandala, and yantra
forms. If the inclusion of more recent and famil-
iar art (particularly the contemporaneous Mini-
malist and Pop works) seems to state the obvious,
it hardly detracts from this shows bright and edgy
appeal. Through Oct. 8.
Museum of the Moving Image
The Jim Henson Exhibition
Advance reservations are advised for this wildly
popular permanent exhibition, a tribute to the
twentieth centurys most beloved pop-culture pup-
peteer. (Same-day tickets are also available, on a
first-come, first-served basis). It houses forty-seven
Muppets, from Big Bird to Taminella Grinderfall,
as well as Henson memorabilia (including Pierre
the French Rat, a comic strip from his high-school
magazine). Monitors play an abundance of clips,
including the famous Muppets-on-bicycles scene
from The Great Muppet Caper, a lip-synching
proto-Kermit in a black wig, and a selection of com-
mercials Henson made in the nineteen-fifties. In
one of the latter, a puppet named Wilkins bops,
 blows up, and sets fire to another, named Wont-
kins. (Note that some monitors require your own
earphones.) Best of all is a blank blue head next to
a tray of accessories. Nothing in the show conveys
the creative achievement of Henson and company
as magically as adding a pair of eyes, a purple nose,
1
and a wavy wig and seeing the foam head spring to
comical life. Ongoing.
GALLERIESCHELSEA
Karel Funk
The Canadian artist first made his name with
photorealistic portraits of young men in an-
oraks. In his fourth show in New York, Funk
shifts his focus to hoods, each one seen from
behind, against a white background. The pan-
els are almost Renaissance-worthy studies in
detaildespite being painted in acrylic, rather
than oilrippling with intricate folds of light
and shadow. Funk adds a dash of the surreal by
depicting the fabric anthropomorphically, as
if each garment were inhabited by the head of
a ghost. A hunched dark-green hood evokes a
mood of resigned determination; a purple one
seems to gaze toward a distant horizon. It may
all look a bit like Magritte meets American Ap-
parel, but what Funks high-concept premise
really amounts to is a means to an old-fashioned
end: indulging in the pleasures of representa-
tional painting. Through Aug. 18. (303 Gallery,
555 W. 21st St. 212-255-1121.)
Sheila Hicks
Just after the High Line makes a sharp turn
toward the Hudson River, at West Thirtieth
Street, an assortment of big, colorful tubes
comes into view: the snaking, looping Hop,
Skip, Jump, and Fly: Escape from Gravity. Its
the latest site-specific commission by Hicks, an
American sculptor who has been working with
textiles for more than five decades, drawing on
traditional craft techniques from around the
world to make her innovative woven, twisted,
knotted, and sewn sculptures and installations.
The mischievous Hop, Skip, Jump, with its
saturated, rainbow hues, seems to mock the
sober steel rails of the High Line, running
alongside or crossing them before breaking
away to form a loose tangle or curlicue. Several
ILLUSTRATION BY JOO FAZENDA
On Aug. 19, MOMA opens Lone Wolf Recital Corps, an exhibitionand, next month, a series of live eventsdedicated to the performance collective
founded, in 1986, by Terry Adkins (1953-2014), the polymathic American musician and artist. (His 1995 sculpture Last Trumpet is depicted above.)
ART
arc in unison for a crescendo, which concludes
in front of bleachersvisit late in the day and
watch the sun set. Through March, 2018. (The
High Line, W. 30th St., at 11th Ave. 212-500-6035.)
Body, Self, Society: Chinese Performance
Photography of the 1990s
In the repressive period following Chinas 1989
Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, as-
sertions of individuality were dissident by defi-
nition, and most of the black-and-white photo-
graphs in this compact seven-artist exhibition
leverage that fact with a fraught but straight-
forward focus on the artists own bodies. Zhang
Huan prods and pinches his face, Ma Liuming
walks naked on the Great Wall, and Ai Weiwei
interacts violently with his nations history, in
the triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn.
Most interesting are the artists who dempha-
size their own position in favor of the complex
futility of the larger situation, as Song Dong
does in Printing on Water (Performance in
the Lhasa River, Tibet), a grid of thirty-six
pictures, documenting an hour that the art-
ist spent repeatedly trying to stamp the word
water into the river using a large wooden seal.
Through Aug. 19. (Walther Collection, 526 W. 26th
St. 212-352-0683.)
The Coffins of Paa Joe and The Pursuit
of Happiness
The Ghanaian artist Paa Joe is the foremost
maker of abebuu adekai, fantasy coffins that
border on festive in their commemoration of
the dead. The centerpiece of the show, which
was commissioned by the late Claude Simard,
who co-founded the gallery, is a meticulously
detailed architectural model of a castle dating
back to the Dutch slave trade. It crystallizes
one of the shows animating tensions, between
seventeenth-century European art and contem-
porary portraiture by artists of the African di-
aspora. Court paintings of Spanish nobles hang
alongside recent treasures, regal figures painted
by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Toyin Ojih Odu-
tola, and Kerry James Marshall, among oth-
ers. The fascinating show, which includes too
many great artists to list, continues in the gal-
lerys satellite upstate, in Kinderhook, known
as the School. Through Aug. 25. (Shainman, 524
W. 24th St. 212-337-3372.)
1 GALLERIESDOWNTOWN
Elaine, Lets Get the Hell Out of Here
The title of this eclectic show refers to an anec-
dote, relayed by Elaine de Kooning, about her
fellow-painter Joan Mitchells response when
a man approached them at a cocktail party,
in the early sixties, and asked, What do you
women artists think? The shows curator, Ash-
ton Cooper, unites works by thirteen artists
spanning sixty years, from de Koonings por-
trait Edwin Denby (1960) and an untitled
blue-and-red pastel scrawl (1991) by Mitch-
ell, to two diffident figure drawings (2007) by
Ralph Lemon, who is better known as a cho-
reographer. Highlights made this year include
Sheila Pepes sprightly installation of bright-
blue rope, titled On to the Hot Mess, Deb-
orah Anzingers not quite figurative painting,
and Vanessa Thills brownish, T-shaped Petro-
Queen II, made using industrial products on
paper, which feels like a relic from the future.
Cumulatively, the works convey a gestural
lan that is both formally rooted and idiosyn-
1
cratic. Through Aug. 18. (Beauchene, 327 Broome
St. 212-375-8043.)
GALLERIESBROOKLYN
From Dada to Ta-Da!
Nathaniel de Larges PawPrints, a small needle-
point reproduction of Vermeers Milkmaid,
stuffed with catnip and attached to the bottom
of the gallerys door, introduces visitors to riffs
on the Duchampian readymade by eighteen art-
ists for whom nothing is quite as it seems. In Re-
sistance Training, by Jes Fan, a barbell weight
made of Barbie-pink silicone rests on the cor-
ner of a pedestal, slowly breathing in and out.
Vegetarianism the First 24 Hrs., a light box
by Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman, looks like
a takeout menu, except that the food in each
of the eight pictured dishes has been arranged
into a smiley face. The five shiny tools that are
Nick van Woerts contribution were made from
a melted-down bronze garden statue of a boy
holding a golf club. The show was curated by
Max Wolf, with an eye on art as a hustle. Through
Aug. 20. (Fisher Parrish, 238 Wilson Ave., Bushwick.
fisherparrish.com.)
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 9

CLASSICAL MUSIC
1
CONCERTS IN TOWN
Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra
A program emphasizing the close bonds among
Robert and Clara Schumann and Brahms opens
a little unconventionally, with the superb pianist
Kirill Gerstein (in his festival dbut) perform-
ing Brahmss solo-piano work Variations on a
Theme of Schumann, Op. 9; the orchestra and
its music director, Louis Langre, then join Ger-
stein in Schumanns Piano Concerto in A Minor
and conclude the program with Brahmss First
Symphony. (A preconcert recital finds Langre
at the piano, partnering with the elegant soprano
Susanna Phillips in Schumanns Frauenliebe und
leben.) The festival finale features the violin-
ist Gil Shaham in Tchaikovskys Violin Concerto
in D Major, preceded by Prokofievs Classical
Symphony and Mozarts Symphony No. 25 in
G Minor. Aug. 15-16 and Aug. 18-19 at 7:30. (David
Geffen Hall. mostlymozart.org.)
Mostly Mozart: A Little Night Music
In the last of the festivals intimate late-night
concerts, Kirill Gerstein plays chorale preludes
by Brahms as arranged by Busoni, Brahmss
Piano Sonata No. 2 in F-Sharp Minor, and Clara
Schumanns own tribute to her husband, Varia-
tions on a Theme of Schumann, Op. 20. Aug. 16
at 10. (Kaplan Penthouse, Rose Bldg., Lincoln Cen-
ter. mostlymozart.org.)
Mostly Mozart: Don Giovanni
The festival revives the conductor Ivn Fischers
supremely effective, stripped-down staging of
Mozarts opera, which, in lieu of actual sets, uses
sixteen actors (clad in white, full-body costumes)
who contort themselves to resemble tables, walls,
and windows. The British baritone Christopher
Maltman leads a cast that also includes Laura
Aikin, Lucy Crowe, Zoltn Megyesi, Jos Far-
dilha, and Kristinn Sigmundsson; Fischer con-
ducts the Budapest Festival Orchestra, his per-
sonal, hand-picked ensemble. Aug. 17 and Aug.
19 at 7 and Aug. 20 at 5. (Rose Theatre, Jazz at Lin-
coln Center, Broadway at 60th St. 212-721-6500.)
Bargemusic
Beethoven, classical musics biggest fish, dom-
inates the weekend at the harborside chamber-
music series. On Friday night, the pianist Asiya
Korepanova offers the Sonata No. 16 in G Major
as a prelude to Schumanns Papillons and
Liszts Grandes tudes de Paganini. On Sat-
urday night, the St. Petersburg Piano Quartet
performs Beethovens Piano Quartet in E-Flat
Major, Op. 16, along with Schumanns master-
piece in the same key. Philip Edward Fisher
wraps up the weekend on Sunday afternoon, per-
forming the Masters Piano Sonatas Nos. 13, 17
(in D Minor, Tempest), and 28. Aug. 18 at 8,
1
Aug. 19 at 6 and 8, and Aug. 20 at 2 and 4. (Fulton
Ferry Landing, Brooklyn. bargemusic.org.)
OUT OF TOWN
Glimmerglass Festival
This seasons schedule mixes classic Ameri-
cana with stories that echo todays headlines.
10 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
The summers flagship work is George Ger-
shwins beloved Porgy and Bess, a jazz-and-
blues-inflected piece that depicts the lives of an
African-American enclave bedevilled by drugs
and poverty, in Charleston. Francesca Zambello,
the companys general director, and the con-
ductor, John DeMain, have restored the works
original recitatives and orchestrations; Musa
Ngqungwana and Talise Trevigne take the title
roles. Aug. 17 at 7:30, Aug. 19 at 8, and Aug. 21 at
1:30. John Holiday, an up-and-coming counter-
tenor with an appealing, sopranolike timbre,
sings the title role of Handels Xerxes, giv-
ing audiences the chance to hear his rendition
of one of the most exquisite arias the composer
ever wrote, Ombra mai fu. Nicole Paiement
conducts; Tazewell Thompson directs. Aug. 18
at 7:30. With its muted colors and sympa-
thetic narrative, Donizettis The Siege of Cal-
ais dramatizes the struggle of the French port
city during the Hundred Years War, when it was
under sustained attack by Edward III. The spec-
tre of the so-called Calais Junglethe migrant
camps that were dismantled by the French gov-
ernment in 2016lingers over Zambellos pro-
duction, the works American premire. Joseph
Colaneri conducts a cast that includes Aleks
Romano, Leah Crocetto, Adrian Timpau, and
Chazmen Williams-Ali. Aug. 19 at 1:30. Rod-
gers and Hammersteins Oklahoma!, a com-
plex but idyllic slice of frontier life, features
the young opera singers Jarrett Ott and Vanessa
Becerra as Curly and Laurey, in a staging by
Molly Smith; James Lowe conducts. Aug. 20 and
Aug. 22 at 1:30. (Cooperstown, N.Y. glimmerglass.
org. These are the final performances.)
Tanglewood
The cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the pianist Eman-
uel Axclassical-music superstars and long-
time friendsheadline another event in Tan-
glewoods journey through the chamber music
and songs of Schubert. This concert, which also
features vocal fellows of the Tanglewood Music
Center, includes Schuberts Arpeggione So-
nata (for cello and piano) and world premires
of vocal works by Nico Muhly and John Har-
bison, among other pieces. Aug. 17 at 8. The
performances of the Boston Symphony Orches-
tra, Tanglewoods raison dtre, continue on Fri-
day evening, with a deeply Viennese program
led by David Afkham. The distinguished bari-
tone Simon Keenlyside is on hand for a gen-
erous selection of songs from Mahlers Des
Knaben Wunderhorn and Rckert-Lieder; includes Wolfs Italian Serenade and Dvoks
the concert closes with an old Boston favorite,
Brahmss Symphony No. 2 in D Major. Aug. 18
at 8. Saturday night belongs to John Williams,
with the Boston Pops Orchestra performing
excerpts from Williamss scores for Lincoln,
E.T., and other films, in addition to music
by such Hollywood titans of the past as Erich
Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, and
Alex North; in a gracious gesture, Williams will
share podium duties with the B.S.O.s music di-
rector, Andris Nelsons. Aug. 19 at 8. Nelsons
continues his tour of the festivals subsidiary
groups, leading the sterling young instrumen-
tal fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center Or-
chestra in works by Beethoven (the Piano Con-
certo No. 3 in C Minor, with a guest star, Paul
Lewis) and Strauss (the Alpine Symphony).
Aug. 20 at 2:30. (Lenox, Mass. For tickets and a
complete listing of concerts, visit bso.org.)
Bard Music Festival: Chopin and His World
For its twenty-eighth iteration, Leon Botstein
has gathered the musical and academic forces
of Bard College to devote two weekends, burst-
ing with concerts and talks, to the musical and
cultural universe of a single major composer.
Frdric Chopin is the lodestar this summer, an
artist whose influence on keyboard music was
beyond measure and whose career transcended
not only national boundariesFrance and Po-
landbut the whole idea of musical nationalism.
Concerts on the final weekend kick off early,
with a Thursday-night program at the Bard
Spiegeltent, a chamber concert that traces the
influence of Chopin on the music of such mod-
ern Polish composers as Lutosawski, Grecki,
and Agata Zubel. Events at the main venue,
the Sosnoff Theatre, include a Friday-evening
Chopin fest featuring the pianists Charlie Al-
bright, Michael Brown, and Anna Polonsky; a
Saturday-night concert performance of Mo-
niuszkos opera Halka (with the Met soprano
Amanda Majeski); and the Sunday-afternoon
finale, in which Botstein conducts the Orches-
tra Now, the Bard Festival Chorale, the pianist
Danny Driver, and the mezzo-soprano Tamara
Mumford (among others) in Chopins An-
dante Spianato and Grande Polonaise and Ber-
liozs dramatic symphony, Romo et Juliette.
Aug. 17-20. (Richard B. Fisher Center for the Per-
forming Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. fisher-
center.bard.edu.)
Tannery Pond Concerts
The charismatic Israeli cellist Inbal Segev,
joined by the pianist Alon Goldstein, offers a
recital at the festivals acoustically satisfying
concert barn, a program featuring intensely ex-
pressive works by Ravel (Kaddisch), Brahms
(including the Sonata No. 2 in F Major for Cello
and Piano), and Dvok, as well as a solo work
for Goldstein (Liszts Miserere du Trovatore
de Verdi). Aug. 19 at 8. (New Lebanon, N.Y. tan-
nerypondconcerts.org.)
Maverick Concerts
Juliusz Zarbski, a gifted Polish pianist and
composer whose career as a travelling virtuoso
in the Lisztian mold flourished in the eighteen-
seventies, wrote his Piano Quintet in G Minor in
1885, the year he died of tuberculosis. Recently
championed by Martha Argerich, the stormy, cy-
clical work receives its first performance at the
Mavericks woodland music chapel in the sure
hands of the pianist Ran Dank and the Amer-
net String Quartet, part of a program that also
Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-Flat Major. Aug 20 at 4.
(Woodstock, N.Y. maverickconcerts.org.)
Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival
This longtime East End festival, directed by
the flutist Marya Martin, has flourished by of-
fering concerts both effervescent and distin-
guished. In the next program at the series home
base, Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church,
Martin joins the clarinettist Romie de Guise-
Langlois, the cellist Paul Watkins (of the Em-
erson String Quartet), and other musicians in
works by Andrew Norman, Mozart (the Clari-
net Quintet), and Beethoven (the String Quin-
tet in C Major, Op. 29). Aug. 20 at 6:30. (Bridge-
hampton, N.Y. bcmf.org.)

THE THEATRE
1
OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday
In Sarah Ruhls new play, directed by Les Waters,
Kathleen Chalfant plays a woman who returns
to her home-town childrens theatre, fifty years
after playing Peter Pan. (Playwrights Horizons, 416
W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200. Previews begin Aug. 18.)
If Only
Melissa Gilbert stars in Thomas Klingensteins
historical drama, about the reunion of an ex-
slave and a society woman who were introduced
by Abraham Lincoln thirty-six years earlier.
(Cherry Lane, 38 Commerce St. 866-811-4111. Pre-
views begin Aug. 19.)
Inanimate
The Flea inaugurates its new home with Nick
Robideaus play, directed by Courtney Ulrich,
about an awkward young woman who falls in
love with a Dairy Queen sign. (20 Thomas St.
212-352-3101. Previews begin Aug. 21.)
Prince of Broadway
Manhattan Theatre Club stages a musical cele-
bration of the Broadway director-producer Har-
old Prince, whose six-decade career includes
Cabaret, Company, Evita, and The Phan- In Dominique Morisseaus play, Nya (Karen
tom of the Opera. Prince directs, with co-
direction and choreography by Susan Stroman;
the cast features Karen Ziemba, Chuck Cooper,
and Emily Skinner. (Samuel J. Friedman, 261
W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. In previews.)
The Red Letter Plays: Fucking A
Jo Bonney directs Suzan-Lori Parkss drama,
which recasts the heroine of The Scarlet Letter
as a modern-day abortionist trying to free her son
from jail. (Pershing Square Signature Center, 480
W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. Previews begin Aug. 22.)
The Suitcase Under the Bed
The Mint stages a quartet of short plays by the
deaf Irish playwright Teresa Deevy, whose work
was produced at Dublins Abbey Theatre from
1
1930 to 1936. (Beckett, 410 W. 42nd St. 212-239-
6200. In previews.)
NOW PLAYING
Curvy Widow
When her writer husband of more than thirty
years dies, Bobby Goldman (Nancy Opel) wal-
lows for a bit, then forges ahead. She moves from
Park Avenue to a downtown loft and throws her-
self into online dating with a millennials aban-
don. (The musicals title is her Match.com screen
name.) Her girlfriends are supportive, while the
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKKEL SOMMER
new men in her life run the gamut from nin-
compoops to a dreamboat who whisks Bobby to
Per Se. After looking at the program, you may
notice that our spunky heroine bears the same
name as the shows book writer, and, indeed, the
story is largely autobiographical. Opel (Urine-
town) is a trouper who does her best to sell
Bobbys largely innocuous adventures, but she
has little to work with: Drew Brodys cabaret-
inflected score is mostly bland, and Goldman
the writer doesnt offer any fresh insights into
Goldman the serial dater. (Westside, 407 W. 43rd
St. 212-239-6200.)
A Parallelogram
Dyspeptic and dystopian, Bruce Norriss drama
conjures Bee (Celia Keenan-Bolger), a young
woman living in domestic gloom with her older
boyfriend, Jay (Stephen Kunken). One day, Bee
is startled by an apparition of her future self
(Anita Gillette), a blithe crone who scarfs Oreos,
warns of pandemics, and uses a remote control
to offer Bee glimpses of her own past and pros-
pects. Michael Greifs direction is crisp and in-
cisive, and the performances are agile amid re-
winds, fast-forwards, and freeze-frames. Yet
theres something tetchy and dispiriting about
the play itself. The outlandish premise allows
Norris (Clybourne Park) to satirize everyday
pieties, but, while his comic voice still cuts, the
targets seem unusually broad, the weapons he at-
tacks them with too whopping. Before it seems
to quit on its own conceptualism, the play of-
fers a very Norris homily: The world will still
be a terrible, horrible place and our lives are ul-
timately meaningless. (Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd
St. 212-246-4422. Through Aug. 20.)
Pipeline
Pittman) is a black teacher at an economically
disadvantaged urban high school. Her son,
Omari (Namir Smallwood), attends a board-
ing school upstate, but he may have blown his
future by shoving a white teacher who was con-
descending to him. What must it be like to an-
ticipate your childs slow annihilation, the con-
struction of his tomb, brick by brick, even as he
lives? As played by Pittmanan actress of real Shubert. Marvins Room American Airlines
witNya is a woman who feels while trying
not to feel. The director, Lileana Blain-Cruz,
has Pittman behave as if the world were closing
in on her, because it is: she wants to throw her-
Harold Prince, whose Broadway career as a producer and director spans hits from West Side Story
to The Phantom of the Opera, directs a musical retrospective of his work, Prince of Broadway.
self into the grave that is being dug for her son.
Blain-Cruz cant quite overcome the curse of a
flawed script, by a talented writer who is too
taken with the clich of the black mother as a
symbol of oppression and then redemption. (Re-
viewed in our issue of 7/24/17.) (Mitzi E. New-
house, 150 W. 65th St. 212-239-6200.)
Summer Shorts
Two evenings, each about ninety minutes in
length, consist of three playlets by American
playwrights. Series A is the stronger collection,
with Melissa Rosss Jack at the vanguard. As di-
rected by Mimi ODonnell, Quincy Dunn-Baker
and Claire Karpen are funny, real, and devas-
tating as a divorced couple with one last thing
to share. Alan Zweibels Playing God is your
basic comic mashup of theology and squash. And
Graham Moores Acolyte puts the philosophy,
and the person, of Ayn Rand in a setup that re-
calls the quartet from Whos Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?, with some Pinteresque sexual menace
thrown in for flavor. In Series B, Chris Cragin-
Days A Woman imagines a conversation be-
tween two old friends, now pastor and parish-
ioner, that explores the confluence of religion,
politics, and feminism. Lindsey Kraft and An-
drew Leedss Wedding Bash is a satirical four-
hander set in the wake of a destination wedding
that was either the best or the worst party ever.
And Neil LaButes Break Point takes us behind
the scenes to view a collusion between two long-
1
time tennis rivals at the French Open. (59E59,
at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)
ALSO NOTABLE
AmerikeThe Golden Land Museum of Jew-
ish Heritage. Through Aug. 20. Come from
Away Schoenfeld. A Dolls House, Part 2
Golden. The Government Inspector New World
Stages. Through Aug. 20. Groundhog Day Au-
gust Wilson. Hamlet Public. Hello, Dolly!
Theatre. 1984 Hudson. The Play That Goes
Wrong Lyceum. The Terms of My Surrender Be-
lasco. War Paint Nederlander. Woody Sez: The
Life & Music of Woody Guthrie Irish Repertory.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 11

DANCE
Battery Dance Festival
The free outdoor festival, sponsored by the Battery
Dance Company, returns for its thirty-sixth edition.
The weeklong series, which includes performances
by international companies like the Afro-fusion en-
semble Mophato Dance (from Botswana), Bollyli-
cious (from Belgium, specializing in Bollywood-style
dances), and Compaa Elas Aguirre (from Spain), powers as a storyteller to baggier gatherings of epic
is always worth a visit. The closing evening takes
place at the Schimmel Center. (Robert F. Wagner, Jr.,
Park, 20 Battery Park Pl. 212-219-3910. Aug. 13-19.)
Beach Sessions Dance Series
Combining a day at the beach with a taste of ex-
perimental dance, this series, now in its third year,
plants a stage on the sands of Rockaway Beach and
invites people to watch from all sides. In the first
of two Saturday-evening programs, the choreog-
raphers Jodi Melnick and Jon Kinzel expose their
extreme subtlety to the elements in the duet At
Night. For the duet Fun Young God, by an anon- Drive East
ymous choreographer, the motions of Mick Jag-
ger, Beyonc, and other pop stars are mimicked,
mocked, and mined for charismatic force by Pierre
ABOVE & BEYOND
Brooklyn Comedy Festival
This annual showcase argues that the heart of
comedy lies in Brooklyn, and puts together an
eclectic program of standup, improv, sketch per-
formance, and short film to prove it. The festival,
founded by the performers Julian Kiani and Chris
Nester and the producer Ashleigh Walker, has
staked its claim over the years by nabbing such
big names as Reggie Watts, Vanessa Bayer, and
Hannibal Buress, along with surprise guests who
pop in for quick gags. This year, it kicks off with
a show at the Bell House headlined by Sasheer
Zamata, formerly of Saturday Night Live, with
special guests including Ilana Glazer, of Broad
City, Eman El-Hussein, and the comedian and
selector DJ Donwill. (149 7th St., Brooklyn. bk-
comedyfestival.com. Aug. 20 at 8.)
Hudson River Park Blues BBQ
Celebrate summer at the eighteenth edition of
this pier concert, which invites a slate of big blues
and roots bands to perform while fans and fami-
lies enjoy dishes by Mighty Quinns, Fort Gan-
sevoort, and other local barbecue spots. This
years lineup of musicians includes the Camp-
bell Brothers, Sugar Ray and the Bluetones,
Eric Gales, Terrie Odabi, and Dumpstaphunk,
a New Orleans-based jam band led by Ivan Nev-
12 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
Guilbault and Cori Kresge, dancers who are pretty
fabulous themselves. (Beach 86th St., Rockaway
Beach, Queens. beachsessionsdanceseries.com. Aug. 19.)
Emily Johnson
Drawing on her Yupik heritage, Johnson has pro-
gressed from solo works grounded in her beguiling
length, more powwow than performance. Then
a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing
at Stars starts at dusk and extends through sun-
rise. Presented on Randalls Island by Performance
Space 122 and directed by Ain Gordon, the all-
night outdoor event, some of which takes place on
message-bearing quilts, includes a two-mile walk,
several light meals, song, dance, stories, stargazing,
and earnest discussions about personal and societal
well-being. (Randalls Island Park, Randalls Island.
nycgovparks.org/parks/randallsislandpark. Aug. 19.)
Since 2013, this festival has been packing an amaz-
ing quantity of high-quality classical Indian dance
and music into one week of August. This years
ille, the oldest son of the soul singer and song-
1
writer Aaron Neville. (Pier 97. hudsonriverpark.
org. Aug. 19 at 2.)
READINGS AND TALKS
Bryant Park Reading Room
Coming out of the Korean War, and sobered
by the looming threat of the Soviet Union, the
U.S. teetered precariously close to a third world
war, as President Harry S. Truman and General
Douglas MacArthur wrangled for the final word
on the countrys course of action. In The Gen-
eral vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman
at the Brink of Nuclear War, the historian and
professor H. W. Brands shares his insights into
this tense moment. He recounts his findings at
this free lecture, part of a series presented in col-
laboration with the New-York Historical Society.
(42nd St. and 6th Ave. nyhistory.org. Aug. 16 at 7.)
Books Are Magic
The novelist Emily Culliton leans into the
screen-tested trope of good citizen gone bad in
her dbut, The Misfortune of Marion Palm.
Mrs. Palm embezzles a hundred and eighty thou-
sand dollars from her daughters private school,
dance selections open with Sujata Mohapatra, an
Odissi dancer whose mute storytelling is extraor-
dinarily lucid, followed, the next evening, by Janaki
Rangarajan, a clear, dexterous expert in bharata
1
natyam. (Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St. driveeast-
nyc.org. Aug. 21-22. Through Aug. 27.)
OUT OF TOWN
Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival
Late summer is a good time to appreciate the laid-
back grace of Trisha Browns dances, which come to
the Ted Shawn Aug. 16-19. The generous spirit of the
choreographer, who died earlier this year, lives on
in these works, which take their time to unspool in
skeins of unrushed, ribbon-like movement. Trisha
Brown Dance Company performs a program that
includes Opal Loop, a work from 1980 originally
staged amid puffs of fog, and LAmour au Thtre,
an example of Browns late, decorative style, set to
opera arias by Rameau. Off-site, on Aug. 13, on the
grounds of the Clark Museum, in Williamstown, the
company will perform a mashup of material from
several of Browns works, part of its continuing In
Plain Site series. At the Doris Duke, Aug. 16-20, the
Cuban ensemble Compaa Irene Rodrguez presents
its sizzling brand of flamenco, infused with dashes
of Afro-Cuban rhythms, tango, and ballet. (Becket,
Mass. 413-243-0745. Aug. 16-20. Through Aug. 27.)
and skips town with the money in her backpack
after a ceremonial meal of cheeseburgers; she
runs out on the bill to avoid revealing the wads of
cash to her children. The narrative shifts briskly
between Mrs. Palms perspective and that of her
unfaithful husband; quippy digs at gender norms
and the coastal lite abound. Culliton discusses
her novel with Helen Ellis, the author of Amer-
ican Housewife. (225 Smith St., Brooklyn. books-
aremagic.net. Aug. 16 at 7:30.)
Museum of Food and Drink
The Tin Roof, in Maui, serves a spread of roasted
meats, noodles, salads, and pastries, all informed
by modern and traditional Hawaiian cuisine.
The restaurants founder, Sheldon Simeon, has
a long-standing interest in the culinary history
of his native state, and hopes to extend Hawaiian
ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO
food in the rest of the U.S. beyond the poke
bowl and the pineapple. Here in Hawaii, we
get to cook Korean, Portuguese, Japanese, Puerto
Rican, Filipino, Hawaiian, and its still one cui-
sine, Simeon says in Eaters Cooking in Amer-
ica series, which he began hosting after gain-
ing notoriety on Top Chef. Elyse Inamine, of
Food & Wine, joins Simeon at this talk and tast-
ing centered on the islands many flavors. (62
Bayard St., Brooklyn. mofad.org. Aug. 17 at 6:30.)

TABLES FOR TWO
Birds of a Feather
191 Grand St., Brooklyn (718-969-6800)
In traditional Chinese culture, mandarin
ducks, which are believed to mate for life,
symbolize unflinching fidelity. A similar
degree of devotion can be inspired by
Sichuanese cuisine, which lands on the
unsuspecting tongue like the kiss of a
fierce lover; you might have conceived of
the encounter as a forgettable fling, but
it leaves you gasping for airin thrall to
its numbing, tingling fervor and possibly
besotted for life.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID WILLIAMS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
Birds of a Feather, a new Sichuanese
eatery in Williamsburg, whose Chinese
name is Mandarin Duck, indulges chili
devotees and blithely defies preconceived
notions about Americans low heat toler-
ance. I dont cook down to foreigners, the
chef Ziqiang Lu, from Chengdu, Sichuans
provincial capital, told a table one night.
They must eat up to the Sichuanese. The
owners Xian Zhang and his wife, Yiming
Wang, bankers turned restaurateurs who
also run the Michelin-starred Caf China,
in midtown, are to thank for the staff s
quiet efficacy, the rustic sparsity of the
dcorgoodbye, eighties chandeliers and
kitsch chinoiserieand the practical,
time-conserving no-tip policy.
Equally tasteful is the menu. Yes, there
are the surefire hitsspicy cumin lamb,
braised tilapia in chili sauce, gargantuan
plates of Chongqing diced chicken, which
FD & DRINK
extracts tears and sweat through blizzards
of dried chilis. But the true standouts are
dishes that have long been thought too
pedestrian to merit importation to the
West. Consider the spicy-and-sour tofu
pudding, a street food that dates back
more than two thousand years, purport-
edly the unexpected result of a Han Dy-
nasty princes attempt to manufacture
immortality pills. Tofu puddingor tofu
brains, as it is called in some regions of
Chinamay not turn you into a god, but
its slippery, satiny smoothness makes for
divine slurping. The so-called husband-
and-wife specialformerly the food of
rickshaw driversis made from the
wasted parts, beef offal that only the poor
would deign to eat; seasoned with chili
oil, peanuts, and Sichuanese peppercorns,
however, tripe has a depth of flavor and a
texture that would be impossible to
achieve with, say, filet mignon.
On a recent night, a Sichuan native
reminisced about requesting the husband-
and-wife special on her tenth birthday,
despite terrible mouth ulcers. Her com-
panion looked at her quizzically, reflecting
that mala spiciness couldnt possibly have
been soothing. The woman explained:
When you are in that much pain, you
want the food that brings you the most
pleasure, even if its for three seconds be-
fore the agony starts again. The pepper-
corns may abuse you senseless, but you
are an addict for life. (Entres $12-$25.)
Jiayang Fan
1 BAR TAB
Elsa
136 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn (917-882-7395)
Walking into the reincarnation of the beloved Al-
phabet City bar Elsa, which closed in 2014 and re-
opened this spring, in Cobble Hill, is like having a
lucid dream: the space feels familiar and, then again,
not at all. The new layout is nearly identical to that
of the original, but its mostly white interior is now
punched up with mirrors, marble, and burgundy
leather. One can easily imagine the bars namesake,
Elsa Schiaparelli, lounging in the exceedingly charm-
ing back yard, with its high white walls, creeping
vines, and cream-colored bistro chairs. If the origi-
nal bathrooms, lined by dark wooden slats, were
striking, the new bathrooms, with slats made of
mirrors, are irresistible in the age of the selfiethe
bars Instagram geotag is full of self-portraits taken
in the gleaming lavatories. I dont know how to feel
about it, Scott Schneider, a co-owner, said on a re-
cent Monday afternoon. He hoped, at least, that the
toilets viral celebrity wouldnt outshine the impres-
sive drink menu: each of the twenty-odd cocktails
contains at least one imaginative house-made ingre-
dient; the sinus-clearingly spicy Hotel Danger! (with
house-infused peach mezcal) and the spirituous
Glassine Stamp (Earl Grey gin) are fantastic, equal
parts tasty and weird. Elsas flight to brownstone
Brooklyn is reflected in its patrons, tooa cool-dad
aesthetic pervades the crowd. At the bar, a blonde
in a colorful tunic debated whether to post a picture
of the bright-pink Salted Watermelon Ros, Elsas
contribution to the fros trend. The cocktail tastes
as good as it looks, but it melts too quickly to fret
over which filter best accentuates its hue. Save it
for the bathroom, the blondes friend advised, a
welcome reminder that at least a good frozen drink
is still better enjoyed I.R.L.Wei Tchou
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 13
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
MISDIAGNOSING A CRISIS
uring the 2016 Presidential cam-
D paign, when Donald Trump was
asked about the opioid crisis he often
mentioned that he rst learned about
the severity of the situation in New
Hampshire, which he visited several times
ahead of that states primary. In 2014,
after West Virginia, New Hampshire
had the second-highest rate of death
from opioid and heroin overdoses, at
twenty-two out of every hundred thou-
sand fatalities. (In 2015, there were more
than thirty thousand such deaths nation-
wide, and the rate is projected to rise.)
As Trump heard more about addic-
tion, he began speaking about it at ral-
lies and, sometimes, in personal terms.
Five days before the New Hampshire
primary, at an event in Manchester,
Trump talked about his older brother,
Fred, who died in 1981, following a long
battle with alcoholism. He had every-
thing, Trump said. I mean, the most
handsome guy. And then he got hooked
and there was nothingand by the way,
nothing you could do about it. A woman
sitting behind him nodded in agreement,
as others in the room listened, rapt. Yet,
as much as people empathized with
Trumps conclusion that he was, on an
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
individual level, powerless in the face of
his brothers addiction, some of them
voted for him because he also claimed,
with increasingly sweeping rhetoric, that
he, and perhaps only he, could solve
the national crisis.
Last Tuesday, the President attended
a major brieng on the epidemic with
the Secretary of Health and Human Ser-
vices, Tom Price, and other aides, at his
golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. They
had with them a draft report that had
been prepared by a special commission
chaired by Governor Chris Christie, of
New Jersey. The draft is rich in recom-
mendations for channelling additional
resources to the crisis. One is that nal-
oxone, an anti-overdose drug known
commercially as Narcan, be provided to
rst responders at a lower cost. Another
would expand the denition of the kinds
of in-patient facilities that are eligible
for reimbursement under Medicaid,
which the authors say is the quickest way
to get help to a large number of people.
In fact, the report demonstrates the cru-
cial role that Medicaid plays in address-
ing the crisis, and the programs still
greater potential for combatting it. (The
report also helps explain why Senator
Mitch McConnell had a hard time get-
it go by.
exposed to disruption, broken families,
ting colleagues from states hit hard by
opioids to sign on to an Obamacare re-
peal that called for gutting Medicaid.)
Trump, however, gave no sign of re-
thinking his approach to funding these
public-health initiatives. Instead, before
he upended the brieng with his threat
to consume North Korea with re and
fury, he had focussed his remarks on
nger-pointing and punitive measures.
The opioid crisis, he said, is the fault of
the Mexicans and the Chinese, who allow
drugs to be sent from their nations to
ours. The metric that he oered for suc-
cess in handling the problem domesti-
cally was the number of federal drug
prosecutions brought and the average
length of prison terms they produced.
Both have dropped since 2011, which the
President sees as evidence not of a bi-
partisan consensus on the need for sen-
tencing reform but as proof of the lax-
ity and the bad faith of members of the
Obama Administration, who, he said,
had looked at this scourge, and they let
Attorney General Je Sessions has al-
ready instructed federal prosecutors to
pursue charges yielding the maximum
possible prison terms, and revoked ear-
lier guidelines designed to avoid harsh
mandatory minimum sentences in cases
involving nonviolent drug oenders. This
promises to expand the practice of mass
incarceration, with people cycling in and
out of prison without receiving treatment,
and further generations of children being
and, potentially, their own susceptibility
to what painkillers seem to oer.
At the brieng, the President pointed
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 15
out, again, that once a person starts using
drugs it is awfully tough to get him
o, but suggested that the problem might
be avoided by telling young people that
drugs are no good, really bad for you
in every way. His wife, Melania, sat be-
side him, as if to echo Nancy Reagans
support of the Just say no campaign
during her husbands Administration.
But that message seems particularly in-
appropriate, given the epidemiology of
this drug crisis: the rst person many
addicts would have to say no to is a
health-care provider.
The commissions report notes that
the number of opioid prescriptions for
treating pain has quadrupled during the
same period in which overdoses have
skyrocketed, and that although some of
those prescriptions may have been fraud-
ulent, the great majority were not: We
have an enormous problem that is often
not beginning on street corners; it is
starting in doctors oces and hospi-
DEPT. OF INFRASTRUCTURE
TO THE BRIDGE
or nearly eight decades, the Kos-
F ciuszko Bridge, a six-thousand-foot
span of rusted steel connecting Brook-
lyn and Queens, was the coronary oc-
clusion of New York traca per-
sistent clot of exhaust and frustration
a hundred and twenty-ve feet above
Newtown Creek, a federal Superfund
site. In April, the state closed down
the Kosciuszko (customary pronunci-
ation, kos-kee-ah-sko; accurate pro-
nunciation, kosh-choosh-ko) and
opened its like-named successor, a
ashy construction with geometric ar-
rays of cables and colored L.E.D. light-
ing, adjacent to the original. Rumor
had it that the state planned to blow
up the old bridge. Scores of motorists
took to the Internet to rejoice. After
commuting over that cursed structure
for 10 years I want to be the one who
ips the switch for the demolition
charges, one typical comment read.
Brian Hersey, a forty-one-year-old
Web developer in Bushwick, was among
16 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
tals. That reality is fuelling a dierent
kind of legal response. On the day of
Trumps brieng, New Hampshire led
a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, the
maker of OxyContin, for mismarketing
and misbranding the drug, leading doc-
tors to prescribe it in ways that encour-
aged dependency and, ultimately, abuse.
(The company has pleaded guilty to re-
lated federal charges.)
In other ways, too, Trumps actions
have been at odds with the goal of tak-
ing a serious approach to the crisis. The
report calls for more work by the Na-
tional Institutes of Health and the Cen-
ters for Disease Control and Prevention,
while Trump has proposed slashing the
budgets of both organizations. It also
asks for a declaration of a national emer-
gency, which would expedite various prac-
tical measures and show that the Ad-
ministration has a coherent plan. Trump,
following a familiar pattern, rst ignored
that recommendation, leaving Tom Price
the minority who found such gloating
unseemly. Ive been over that bridge
hundreds of times, he said recently. Its
an eyesore, but it has a mystique. The
new bridge lights up like a pachinko ma-
chine. In May, he issued a rejoinder in
the form of a Facebook page titled De-
fend the Kosciuszko Bridge from Demo
with Wolves & Swords. In diction rem-
iniscent of the Book of Revelation and
Dungeons & Dragons, he inveighed
against the new false bridge and pledged
to muster an army of sword wielding
human warriors and their wolf warrior
brethren and sistren to protect the old
one when the demolition day arrived.
An illustration showed the Kosciuszko
beset by ames, wolves, and Xena the
Warrior Princess.
It was a whim, Hersey recalled.
A ight of fancy. I was playing devils
advocate.
Once launched, however, political
movements and Facebook invitations
have their own momentum. By late
June, hundreds of people had R.S.V.P.d.
Even after the state announced that
the bridge would not be blown up, but
would instead be tidily dismantled,
interest ran high. Gradually, anxiously,
Hersey realized that he was going to
have to go through with the wolves-
and-swords thing. I didnt expect any-
to explain why it didnt make sense (ba-
sically, opioids arent a Zika outbreak),
and then, on Thursday, reversed himself
in a statement in which he expressed
nostalgia for the days when, as he saw
it, Americans only had to worry about
drugs like L.S.D. Then he returned to
threatening North Korea.
Its enough to make one wonder what,
exactly, Trump learned in New Hamp-
shire. Last January, in a phone call with
President Enrique Pea Nieto, of Mex-
ico, the transcript of which was obtained
by the Washington Post earlier this
month, Trump said, I won New Hamp-
shire because New Hampshire is a
drug-infested den. He didnt win the
state in the general election; Hillary Clin-
ton did. But he got his rst primary win
after an embarrassing loss in Iowa
which propelled his campaign forward.
The state, however, is still waiting for
something to be done.
Amy Davidson Sorkin
thing to actually happen, he said. Any-
one who knows me knows organization
isnt my strong point. Im more of an
idea person. He settled on a date, Sat-
urday, July 22nd, ordered a wolf mask
and a faux-fur cape from Amazon, and
readied himself for battle.
At 3:45 p.m. on the appointed day,
Hersey drove to the demonstration route
he had scoped out: a stretch of indus-
trial roadway on the perimeter of the
First Calvary Cemetery, with a sweep-
ing view of the two bridges. He was ac-
companied by his ance, Aram Lee,
Kosciuszko Bridge
and a friend, a rock bassist named Mat-
tley Mountain.
Hersey has narrow shoulders, a high
forehead, and a tapered beard. He wore
shorts and black combat boots. Pinned
to his shirt was a red leather heart, onto
which Lee had drawn a likeness of the
old Kosciuszko.
Hersey ddled with his fur cape. He
couldnt decide which prospect worried
him more: hordes of followers or none
at all. I dont know what the legal rami-
cations might be, he said. Should I have
gotten a permit for assembly?
At four oclock, the trio pulled up to
the cemetery. The street was deserted.
Then Hersey spotted two men and a
woman in war paint and full ersatz bat-
tle gear. Lee and Mountain cheered.
I think Im going to leave my mega-
phone in the car for now, Hersey said.
He stepped out to introduce himself. I
guess this is what happens when a meme
becomes real life.
More warriors soon assembled: a
schoolteacher in a skeleton tiara and a
leather halter top; a pair of dockworkers
from Local 1556; a digital-content strat-
egist; a Pulitzer-winning photographer.
A woman arrived with a large, placid dog
named Wendy. Shes a wolf, the woman
said. (Actually, a shepherd-husky mix.)
The schoolteacher distributed natural
ice pops. Is your name Storm? she asked
the strategist. You look like a guy I met
at a Star Trek convention.
As the crowd grew, so did Herseys
condence. By four-twenty-ve, his mot-
ley militia was nineteen strong. He drew
a plastic sword from his belt and shouted,
Tremble, bridge, for we are coming!
With the exception of some honking
truckers and a fenced-o square of bro-
ken sidewalk, which Hersey cursed
(These damn bridge-builders and their
traps!), the march proceeded without
incident. At the end of the street, in front
of a scrap yard, Hersey mounted a con-
crete block. He pulled a rumpled sheet
of paper from his pocket.
O solemn body of steel, mighty con-
duit of transport, he began. The speech
proceeded through multiple vows, blood
oaths, and encomiums, interrupted by
howls and cheers. It ended deantly:
And to you, false bridge, we condemn
you fall to the ground and go away!
Nothing happened. Cars continued
to ow across the new bridge. But the
mood remained celebratory. The group
posed for photos, brandishing their weap-
ons. (I feel like fty per cent of this is
getting things on Instagram, a young
woman with a cardboard shield said.)
Then they marched to a local bar. Four
days later, engineers lowered the Kos-
ciuszkos central section onto a barge. It
1
was shipped to New Jersey to be recycled.
Daniel Smith
THE MUSICAL LIFE
HIGH CEILINGS
andy Newman, the singer-song-
R writer and composer, stopped in
at the Rose Center for Earth and Space
the other day, in the hope of glimps-
ing some dark matter. Newman, who
is seventy-three, has just released Dark
Matter, the rst album of his own
songs in nine years. These days, his
second career, writing music for Pixar
lms, takes up much of his time. The
Hollywood Randy Newman, the com-
poser of light matter such as Youve
Got a Friend in Me, from the rst
Toy Story lm, occasionally steps the Beacon Theatre.) The high ceil-
aside to make way for the more brood-
ing voice found in Newmans classic al-
bums from the seventies, such as Good
Old Boys and Sail Away.
Newmans movie work (he has two
Oscars) also allows him the privilege
of collaborating with real orchestras.
I love those hours in there with an or-
chestra, he said on the way to the Rose
Center, which is in the American Mu-
seum of Natural History. Its just as im-
portant to me, even when its Cars 3
his latest movie scoreand you cant
hear what I wrote because of the
He made the vroom sound of a race-
car engine. I grew up watching the
musicians on a soundstage, he went
on. And they seemed heroic to me.
He had on a short-sleeved shirt printed
with images of musiciansa drum-
mer, a bass violinist, a sax player.
Dark Matter is a reference to the
albums eight-minute-long opening track,
in which a team of scientists and a choir
of believers engage in a musical debate
about three basic tenets of science: dark
matter, evolution, and climate change.
Clearly, you know which side Im
on, Newman, a nonbeliever, said. Faith
wins because of what is connected with
faith. Beethoven, Bach, gospel music,
Shirley Caesar, who I saw last night.
(She and Newman performed at a
Grammy salute to musical legends at
ings, he went on. Can you imagine
living in mud and going into a church
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 17
and seeing those high ceilings? Thats
tremendous. We dont have anything like
that on the atheist side. Except, possi-
bly, for the Hayden Planetarium, inside
the Rose Center, where Dark Universe,
a short lm about the frontiers of astro-
physics, plays throughout the day.
A group of children led solemnly
into the planetarium behind Newman.
A voice said, Ladies and gentlemen,
please turn your attention to the video
screens above. Your journey is about to
begin. The face of Neil deGrasse
Tyson, the astrophysicist, appeared. The
universe is all around us, and within
us, he intoned. Our minds, our hearts,
everything well ever see or touch.
Tyson welcomed the audience on a
13.8-billion-year journey to discover
the invisible cosmic constituents called
dark matter and dark energy.
Newman started writing songs be-
cause his childhood friend Lenny
Waronker, who later became the presi-
of my mouth when I rst started, he
said, and added, I think it just sounds
better to me to do that to the vowels.
Twenty minutes later, Tyson was say-
ing, We stand on the threshold of great
discoveries . . . and we always will . . . as
long as we keep exploring! The lm
ended in a wash of synthetic-sounding
orchestral music.
Newman wasnt moved to revise the
debate on Dark Matter. Jesus still had
the better soundtrack. A real orchestra
works better than what they gave this
guy, Newman said, of the space lms
score, as he waited with the children to
exit. I couldnt hear anything real. Maybe
a few violins. The rest was all synths.
This was the bass player, this is rst vi-
olin, he said, holding up two ngers.
Still, he was heartened to have learned
that ninety-ve per cent of the universe
is made up of dark matter and dark en-
ergy. Fantastic, he said. Five per cent
for all the rest. And my career is far less
has been zipping around New York, giv-
ing talks. So far, the ones Ive started
with are the safer ones, not the public
publicmore like the Buddhist com-
munity, he said. He hopes to speak
at more challenging venues, such as a
Jewish-history museum. Im still work-
ing on which way is better to present the
topicto start from the Hitler part and
go into the swastika in India, he said,
or to approach it the other way around.
This is a very sensitive issue.
In 1986, the year after Nakagaki
moved to Seattle from Japan, he made
a swastika out of owers at his temple,
in honor of the Buddhas birthday. One
of the members came up and said, You
cant do this here! He acceded to the
local sentiment for many years. But, at
a hate-crime conference in 2009, he felt
provoked by one of the speakers, who
called the swastika the universal sym-
bol of evil. Nakagaki replied, What
do you mean by universal?The speaker

dent of Warner Bros. Records, suggested
that he try it. He knew who Carole King
was and stu. His dad had started a rec-
ord company, Newman said. He was
my courage for years. Newman wrote
songs about geography, history, and
civil-rights issues. Im interested in stu
like that, he said. Sometimes Im sur-
prised that other people dont do more
of that. But I dont think the medium is
designed to edify, necessarily. Its I love
you, You dont love me. Its just that,
and its been that for a thousand years.
For good reason. Later, when he began
recording, he sang in a Cajun-tinged
voice that drew on childhood visits from
Los Angeles to New Orleans, his moth-
ers home town. It was what came out
Randy Newman
18 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
1
than that.
John Seabrook
CROSS-CULTURAL DEPT.
DIALOGUE
oshikazu Kenjitsu Nakagaki, a fty-
T six-year-old Buddhist priest who
lives near Brighton Beach, watched with
frustration as swastika ags unfurled
in some far-right circles after Trumps
election. In the Jodo Shinshu tradition
of Japanese Buddhism, which Nakagaki
practices, the swastika is a sign of peace
and good luck. A year earlier, a book hed
written on the three-thousand-year his-
tory of the symbol, The Buddhist Swas-
tika and Hitlers Cross, was dropped
by his New York publisher. (A Holo-
caust scholar had raised concerns.) This
April, nding no other takershed
brought out a Japanese edition in 2013,
without incidenthe self-published the
book on Amazon.
After Mr. Trump became President,
hate crime increased, and more people
talk about this symbol, the swastika, Na-
kagaki, who is slight and soft-spoken,
with a shaved head, said the other day.
Since the release of his book, Nakagaki
didnt know anything about Buddhism
or Hinduism. At the time, Nakagaki
was a resident minister at an Upper
West Side Buddhist temple. A year later,
he quit to pursue a doctorate at the New
York Theological Seminary; the book
came out of his dissertation.
On a recent Sunday, Nakagaki, wear-
ing navy robes, got into his Honda Civic
and drove to a Chinese community cen-
ter in Flushing, Queens, to give his swas-
tika talk. Inside, a dozen Buddhist monks
and nuns occupied the rst row of fold-
ing chairs, marked V.I.P. Nakagaki
spoke in English, pausing to allow for
translation into Mandarin. He smiled
nervously. A monk in glasses jumped
up to help him with his PowerPoint.
One slide read, Why Swastika? As
Asian people, we tend to be quiet, but
sometimes I feel like we should talk
about it, Nakagaki said. Next, a series
of bullet points: More hate crimes re-
cently, Ignorance should stop, and
Enough silence, it is time to have di-
alogue. Talking about the swastikas
history in multiple religious traditions,
he hopes, will encourage mutual under-
standing across cultures.
He showed photographs of the swas-
tika on a shrine in Kyoto, on a lantern
in Korea, and on temple doors in China
and Tibet; then images of the symbol
in America before the Second World
Waron a postcard, on a Coca-Cola
pendant, and on a Boy Scout merit badge.
The word swastika, he explained, de-
rives from the Sanskrit word svastika,
which means to be good. Hitlers ver-
sion has an X at its center, while the
Buddhist versioncalled manji in Jap-
anesehas a plus sign. Hitler never ac-
tually called this particular symbol a
swastika, he said. He always said Hak-
enkreuz, or hooked cross. Drawing on
pseudo-scientic theories, he went on,
Hitler linked the symbol to an invented
Aryan race.
After the talk, organizers passed
around Chips Ahoy cookies and bottles
of water. Nakagaki sat at a table and
signed books (he sold fteen).
As Buddhists, I feel like we have a
responsibility to explain to more people
about this symbol, Pingping Huang,
who helped organize the event, said.
Jing Yi Shi, a smiling nun in brown,
described an incident at her temple in
Chinatown. There was a glass win-
dow with the Buddha statue with the
swastika, she said. Passersby came in
to ask why she had that symbol in her
window. She said, I told them, its
dierentits wisdom, compassion, not
killing people.
Another attendee, a feng-shui con-
sultant, agreed. Twenty years ago, I
came to America, she said. I had a lit-
tle belt and all the chains on this belt
had the symbol, turned to the left. I
wore it in Manhattan, and this man says,
Dont wear that belt, its evil. Since then,
I put it in my drawer.
Later, Nakagaki reected on the event.
Sometimes when you go to someones
house theres one room you cant go into,
he said. When you open the door, all
the junk falls out. This is like a door they
1
dont want you to open.
Anna Russell
THE PICTURES
NINE LIVES
IthannHampton
the nineteen-sixties and seventies,
Fancher appeared on more
fty TV shows and starred in sev-
eral obscure lms. Only two obstacles
kept him from becoming a true lead-
ing man. One was his hair, a thick brown
thatch like an orioles nest. You couldnt
even nd the scalp, Fancher said the
other afternoon, in his Brooklyn loft.
So, because I was also tallnearly six
feet veI got cast as the oddball: the
rebug, the rapist, the coward. The
second obstacle was his personality. I
exuded a lazy superiority that came
from the trembling part of me I kept
hidden from myselffrom the fear that
I was an asshole.
Always charismatiche had a long
relationship with Barbara Hershey and
shorter relationships with many, many
other womenhe was the smolder-
ing gure at the edge of the frame.
Fancher is now seventy-nine, and his
hair has relaxed into a graying nim-
bus. His personality has relaxed, too.
He sat on an orange exercise ball in
his living room, wearing a sarong fas-
tened with a binder clip, blithely dis-
cussing what it was like to be the sub-
ject of a new documentary, Escapes,
made by Michael Almereyda.
The lm mostly consists of Fancher
telling tales that are juxtaposed with
vintage footage of him riling the boys
on Bonanza or getting busted on
Adam-12. He details how, when he
was dating Teri Garr, he stormed out
one night to get her the money her old
boyfriend owed her, and how, when he
was publicizing a ludicrous lm called
The Naughty Cheerleader, which
also starred Barbi Benton, Broderick
Crawford, and Klaus Kinski, he slept
with the theatre managers secretary in
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, just so
shed drive him to the airport. We have
no idea where these stories are going
Fancher will break his hand beating
up Garrs ex; the ight he misses be-
cause of the theatre managers secre-
tary will crashand he doesnt always
seem to, either. He appears to be still
reconsidering the pattern, still seeking
the vital detail.
His second and nal marriage was
in 1963, when he was twenty-four, to
Sue Lyon, the seventeen-year-old star
of Lolita. There was a lot of bad
press, he recalled. They accused me
of being a pompous, horndog guy in-
terested only in the world of yachts and
private jets, which I thought was to-
tally unfair. But they were mostly right!
He laughed. There were bets in Vegas
about how long the marriage would
last. Nine months, right? Uh-huh. A
lot longer than expected! Fanchers
yearning for intimacy proved to be out-
weighed by his need for solitude.
Still, the sixties were a fragile joy. He
recalled, The premise of Romeo und
Julia 70, a German lm in which Tina
Sinatra played Julia and I played Romeo,
was Would Romeo and Juliet survive
in the late sixties? And the answer was
no. We went around the world twice
and shot scenes with heads of state like
Princess Grace and Nixon. The princess
of Thailand knocked me out. We were
on the grass in the back of their palace
having fun things to eat, about eight of
us, and I noticed these bowls on the pe-
riphery, and I said, Whats in the bowls?
He adopted the princesss sensual into-
nations: She said, Milk. I said, Milk
for what? And she said, For . . . cobra.
He icked his tongue rapidly.
The seventies were tougher, grain-
ier. In 1977, after quitting the partying
life, Fancher stopped acting to become
a full-time writer. Over the course of
several years, he turned a Philip K. Dick
novel into a script that became the bones
of Blade Runner, the dystopian Rid-
ley Scott lm.
This October brings Scotts Blade
Runner 2049, featuring Harrison Ford,
the star of the original, and Ryan Gos-
ling. When the lmmakers began try-
ing to devise a story for the reboot,
Fancher said, Ridley didnt call me for
a year. He went to everyone else rst,
and I felt bad. The joke from him and
his team, after he nally did call, was
We need the old magic! But the truth
is they were desperate. He smiled.
Fancher shares a screenplay credit for
the lm, and has the sole story credit.
Seeing his early work in the docu-
mentary startled him, because his act-
ing wasnt as bad as hed remembered.
If I were a director now, Id use me in
certain roles, Fancher said. Say you
decide to go see the guy who wrote the
ad that made you want to change your
lifeand its me! Or whatever. Of
course, he added, standing to stretch,
the lmnot to demean itbut its
pennies at the bottom of the pocket.
People who know me well say, Oh, thats
not your life. We want to do a lm about
your real life. He grinned. Let em try.
Tad Friend
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 19

A REPORTER AT LARGE
NO QUESTIONS ASKED
Trumps firm barely vetted its foreign partners. Was this a lapseor a strategy?
BY ADAM DAVIDSON
Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump, is looking at his past deals.
resident Donald Trumps attorney
P Jay Sekulow recently told me that
the investigation being led by Robert
Mueller, the special counsel appointed
by the Justice Department, should focus
on one question: whether there was cor-
dination between the Russian govern-
ment and people on the Trump cam-
paign. Sekulow went on, I want to be
really specic. A real-estate deal would
be outside the scope of legitimate in-
quiry. If he senses drift in Muellers
investigation, he said, he will warn the
special counsels oce that it is exceed-
ing its mandate. The issue will rst be
raised informally, he noted. But if Muel-
ler and his team persist, Sekulow said,
he might lodge a formal objection with
the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Ro-
20 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
senstein, who has the power to dismiss
Mueller and end the inquiry. President
Trump has been more blunt, hinting to
the Times that he might re Mueller if
the investigation looks too closely at his
business dealings.
Several news accounts have conrmed
that Mueller has indeed begun to exam-
ine Trumps real-estate deals and other
business dealings, including some that
have no obvious link to Russia. But this
is hardly wayward. It would be impos-
sible to gain a full understanding of the
various points of contact between the
Kremlin and the Trump campaign with-
out scrutinizing many of the deals that
Trump has made in the past decade.
Trump-branded buildings in Toronto
and the SoHo neighborhood of Man-
hattan were developed in association with
people who have connections to the
Kremlin. Other real-estate partners of
the Trump Organizationin Brazil,
India, Indonesia, and elsewhereare
now caught up in corruption probes, and,
collectively, they suggest that the com-
pany had a pattern of working with part-
ners who exploited their proximity to
political power.
One foreign deal, a stalled 2011 plan
to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, a
city on the Black Sea in the Republic
of Georgia, has not received much jour-
nalistic attention. But the deal, for which
Trump was reportedly paid a million
dollars, involved unorthodox nancial
practices that several experts described
to me as red ags for bank fraud and
money laundering; moreover, it inter-
twined his company with a Kazakh oli-
garch who has direct links to Russias
President, Vladimir Putin. As a result,
Putin and his security services have ac-
cess to information that could put them
in a position to blackmail Trump. (Seku-
low said that the Georgia real-estate
deal is something we would consider
out of scope, adding, Georgia is not
Russia.)
The waterfront lot where the Trump
Tower Batumi was supposed to be built
remains empty. A groundbreaking cere-
mony was held ve years ago, but no
foundation has been dug. Trump re-
moved his name from the project shortly
before assuming the Presidency; the
Trump Organization called this normal
housekeeping. When the tower was an-
nounced, in March, 2011, it was the cen-
terpiece of a bold plan to transform Ba-
tumi from a seedy port into a glamorous
city. But the planned high-riseforty-
seven stories containing lavish residences,
a casino, and expensive shopswas oddly
ambitious for a town that had almost no
luxury housing.
Trump did very little to develop the
Batumi property. The project was a li-
PHOTOGRAPH: SKYNESHER/GETTY (HANDS)
censing deal from which he made a quick
prot. In exchange for the million-
dollar payment, he granted the right
to use his name, and he agreed to visit
Georgia for an elaborate publicity cam-
paign, which was designed to promote
Georgias President at the time, Mikheil
Saakashvili, as a business-oriented re-
former who could attract Western nan-
ciers. The campaign was misleading: the
ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY
Trump Tower Batumi was going to be
funded not by Trump but by businesses
with ties to Kazakh oligarchs, including
Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of Ka-
zakhstans autocratic ruler, Nursultan
Nazarbayev, and a close ally of Putin.
Kazakhstan has the largest economy in
Central Asia, based on its vast reserves
of oil and metals, among other natural
resources. Kazakhstan is notoriously cor-
rupt, and much of its wealth is in the
hands of Nazarbayevs extended family
and his favored associates.
Trump visited Georgia in April, 2012,
at a politically vulnerable time for
Saakashvili. Nine years earlier, Saakash-
vili had led the Rose Revolution, which
overturned the countrys autocratic
post-Soviet leadership. After assuming
power, he initially cracked down on wide-
spread petty corruption and cleaned up
the civil service, which had functioned
largely on bribes. Then, in 2008, he led
a disastrous war against Russia over con-
trol of the breakaway region of South
Ossetia. By then, his ght against cor-
ruption had largely ceased, and Trans-
parency International and other N.G.O.s
were reporting that lite corruption
in which wealthy, politically connected
people receive better treatment from
courts, prosecutors, and government ad-
ministratorswas rampant in Georgia.
Under these conditions, few Western
investors or brands were willing to put
money into the country. Saakashvili him-
self was increasingly unpopular, and the
Trump deal was meant to help salvage
his reputation.
Saakashvili showed Trump around
Tbilisi, the capital, and Batumi. Geor-
gian television covered the events fawn-
ingly, promising viewers that Trump
would soon build a second tower, in
Tbilisi. One broadcaster proclaimed
that Trump was the worlds top devel-
oper. At the groundbreaking ceremony
in Batumi, Saakashvili said that the
tower was a big deal . . . that changes
everything around here. At another
event, beneath a banner that proclaimed
trump invests in georgia, he
thanked Trump for being part of the
projectwhich, he said, had a budget
of two hundred and fty million dol-
lars. He also awarded Trump the Geor-
gian Order of Brilliance. Trump, in
turn, praised Saakashvili. Everybody
in the world, they speak of Georgia
and the great miracle thats taking
place, he said.
Upon returning home, Trump ap-
peared on Fox and Friends. Gretchen
Carlson, the host at the time, asked him,
What are you going to be investing in?
He responded, Im doing a big devel-
opment thereand its been amazing.
He said of Saakashvili, Hes one of the
great leaders of the world.
Virtually none of the things that
Saakashvili and Trump said about the
deal were true. The budget of the Trump
Tower Batumi was not two hundred
and fty million dollars but a hundred
and ten. Trump, meanwhile, could hardly
have invested such a sum himself. He
professed to be a billionaire, but a few
months earlier an appeals court in New
Jersey had shut down Trumps legal cam-
paign against Timothy OBrien, the au-
thor of TrumpNation, which argued
that Trump had wildly inated his for-
tune, and was actually worth less than
a quarter of a billion dollars. Julie
George, a political scientist at Queens
College who studies Georgia, told me
that, by 2012, Saakashvilis tenure could
in no way be considered a great mira-
cle. The countrys economy was oun-
dering, and shortly after Trumps visit
it was revealed that the government
had been torturing political opponents.
(Saakashvili did not respond to requests
for comment.)
The announcement of the Batumi
tower was handled with cynical oppor-
tunism by both Trump and Saakashvili,
but that was not the deals biggest
problem. The developer that had paid
Trump and invited him to Georgiaa
holding company known as the Silk Road
Grouphad been funded by a bank
that was enmeshed in a giant money-
laundering scandal. And Trump, it
seemed, had not asked many questions
before taking the money.
efore the collapse of the Soviet
B Union, in 1991, Batumi had been
a popular resort town, but by the early
aughts it had fallen into disrepair. Its
beachfront hotels housed refugees from
the nearby Abkhazia region, which had
broken away from Georgia in 1992. Ba-
tumi was the capital of the semiauton-
omous Adjara region, which was itself
on the verge of declaring independence.
Saakashvili saw the redevelopment of
Batumi as critical for maintaining
Georgian sovereignty there. Batumi
residents promised to turn the city into
the Monaco of the Black Sea.
But nobody seemed willing to put
money into Batumi. Levan Varshalo-
midze, the governor of Adjara at the
time, told me that Saakashvili and other
Georgian ocials sought nancial back-
ers, but they could not get anyone to in-
vest in a run-down Georgian port.
Then, in 2005, something remark-
able happened. Saakashvili and Pres-
ident Nazarbayev, of neighboring
Kazakhstan, announced that B.T.A.
Bankthe largest bank in Kazakh-
stanwas giving several hundred mil-
lion dollars in loans to help develop
Georgia. The loans would pay for the
construction of hotels in Batumi, the
expansion of the Georgian telecommu-
nications industry, and the growth of a
Georgian bank. Curiously, all the loans
went to subsidiaries of one company:
the Silk Road Group, which specialized
not in real-estate development but in
shipping crude- and rened-oil prod-
ucts, by rail, from Kazakhstan to other
countries. Its senior executives had very
little experience in telecommunications,
banking, or hospitality. The Silk Road
Group, which had annual revenues of
roughly two hundred million dollars,
was planning, in an instant, to venture
into several new industries. Compound-
ing the risk, this expansion involved tak-
ing on a debt one and a half times its
annual revenue.
That wasnt the only puzzling thing
about the loans. At the time that B.T.A.
was lending all this money to the Silk
Road Group, the banks deputy chair-
man, Yerkin Tatishev, was apparently
crossing an ethical linepositioning
himself to exert improper inuence over
some of the very Silk Road Group sub-
sidiaries that were benetting from the
loans. B.T.A. Bank had representatives
on the boards of those subsidiaries, but
one representative serving on two boards,
Talgat Turumbayev, was simultaneously
working for Tatishevs company, the
Kusto Group, supervising mergers and
acquisitions. (Turumbayev told me that
serving on the boards wasnt a conict
of interest, because it didnt take a lot
of time.)
I spoke with people who had knowl-
edge about the subsidiaries. They told
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 21
me that the subsidiaries were co-owned
by the Silk Road Group and secret part-
ners. The source at one subsidiary told
me he suspected that Tatishevwho re-
peatedly participated in company meet-
ingswas a hidden owner.
Tatishev, who is estimated by Forbes
to be worth half a billion dollars, left
B.T.A. Bank in 2009. He insisted to
me that, while he was there, he had no
personal nancial involvement in the
Silk Road Group. But he acknowl-
edged that he developed a strong
friendship with George Ramishvili,
the companys C.E.O., and oered to man of a Kazakh bank to have personal
advise him. He added, It was the right
thing to do, and this is my denition
of friendship. But is it true that Tati-
shev merely advised the Silk Road
Group? The Web site of Tatishevs
company, the Kusto Group, declares
that it has been an outstanding part-
ner for the Silk Road Group since
2006, noting, Together we have suc-
cessfully invested in various sectors of
the Georgian economy. Whenever I
pointed out such contradictions to Tati-
shev, he came up with new answers. In
an e-mail, he said that the joint invest-
ments were simply charity/heritage
projects. After he told me that he never
served on the committee of B.T.A.
Bank that oversees lending, I checked,
and conrmed that this was false. He
then insisted that he did not recall
participating.
If, as the Web site suggests, Tatishev
Its a very hip disease, so its good that we caught
it early, before everyones talking about it.
nancially involved himself in businesses
funded by the B.T.A. Bank loans, then
he and the Silk Road Group may well
have committed bank fraud. When bank
executives have a personal nancial stake
in projects that their own bank is nanc-
ing, it is known as self-dealing, and it
is a crime in nearly every country, in-
cluding Kazakhstan. I recently spoke
with Sergei Gretsky, a professor at the
Catholic University of America, who
wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the Ka-
zakh banking sector. When I asked him
if it would be illegal for the deputy chair-
investments in a project that his bank
was funding and withhold that informa-
tion from investors, he laughed and said,
Yes, of course.
Richard Gordon, the director of the
nancial-integrity unit at Case Western
Reserve University School of Law, ex-
plained that self-dealing represented a
central cause of the 1997 global nan-
cial crisis. Banks in Indonesia, South
Korea, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, and Tai-
wan failed, in part, because bank exec-
utives and board members kept lending
money to themselves and to their cro-
nies. This leads to defaults, bank bank-
ruptcies, or government bailouts, he
said. Since then, nearly every nation has
made eorts to prevent self-dealing.
Gordon said that, at most banks today,
the board members and senior sta
dont even have a credit card associated
with the bank, in order to eliminate
any appearance of a conict of interest.
Lending to companies in which a se-
nior bank executive has a personal stake
is a crime because it violates the central
trust that makes banking possible. The
fundamental business of banking is to
borrow money from one group and lend
it to another. B.T.A., which had been
heralded internationally as a fast-growing
bank in a troubled part of the world, had
raised money by selling bonds through
J. P. Morgan, Credit Suisse, and many
other top Western banks. If these West-
ern banks had known that a senior B.T.A.
ocial was heavily involved in the op-
erations of a company that was receiv-
ing huge loans from B.T.A., they might
have balked.
n the years before the Trump Tower
Ientangled
Batumi deal, B.T.A. Bank became
in a spectacular crime.
Mukhtar Ablyazov, the banks chair-
man, was a prominent gure in Ka-
zakhstan, and not just because he was
a billionaire. He was one of the lead-
ing sponsors of a political party op-
posed to President Nazarbayev. In 2009,
when Nazarbayev signalled a desire to
seize control of B.T.A. Bank, Ablya-
zov ed the country for Londontak-
ing billions of dollars in bank funds
with him. He accomplished this with
a diuse scheme: dozens of oshore
companies under his control received
loans from B.T.A., and none of the
loans were paid back.
In 2010, when a Trump Organiza-
tion executive, Michael Cohen, began
negotiating with the Silk Road Group
about licensing Trumps name for the
Batumi tower, Ablyazov was facing
eleven lawsuits in the U.K. The Ka-
zakh government, which had indeed
seized control of B.T.A. Bank, had sued
him to reclaim ten billion dollars that
he had allegedly siphoned out of the
country. The Financial Times covered
the case extensively, as did the Times,
which described a scheme by B.T.A.s
former chairman, Mukhtar Ablyazov,
to direct between $8 billion and $12 bil-
lion worth of B.T.A. loansabout half
of the banks loan bookto compa-
nies that he secretly controlled. The
article noted that Ablyazov was rent-
ing a 15,000-square-foot mansion in
London.
It would have taken only a Google
search for the Trump Organization
to discover that the Silk Road Group
had received much of its funding from
B.T.A. Bank, which, at the time of the
Batumi deal, was mired in one of the
largest fraud cases in recent history. The
Silk Road Group had even been busi-
ness partners with the central gure in
the scandal: Ablyazov and the Silk Road
Group were two of the owners of a bank
in Georgia. I asked Cohen, who visited
Georgia with Trump, if he had been
concerned about the Silk Road Groups
connection to B.T.A. Bank. I didnt
even know that B.T.A. was involved in
this entire scenario up until the mo-
ment you told me, he said. He added
that he was not aware of any informa-
tion about how the tower would be
fundedor even if there was going to
be any funding at all. He went on, We
had not gotten to that stage of the pro-
cess. Remember, this was a licensing
deal. The nancing of the project was
the responsibility of the licenseethe
Silk Road Group.
I recently spoke with John Madinger,
a retired U.S. Treasury ocial and I.R.S.
special agent, who used to investigate
nancial crimes. He is the author of
Money Laundering: A Guide for Crim-
inal Investigators. When I told him
what Cohen had said to me, he re-
sponded, No, no, no! Youve got to do
your due diligence. You shouldnt do a
nancial transaction with funds that ap-
pear to stem from unlawful activity.
Thats like saying, I dont care if Pablo
Escobar is my secret business partner.
You have to careotherwise, youre at
risk of violating laws against money
laundering.
A judge in the U.K. ruled repeat-
edly against Ablyazov, starting in 2009,
and ordered him to hand over more
than four billion dollars to B.T.A. (The
Kazakh government insisted that six
billion dollars more remained miss-
ing.) The judge, Sir Nigel John Mar-
tin Teare, said that Ablyazovs use of
oshore holding companies had facil-
itated fraud on an epic scale. Teare
ruled that there can be only one ex-
planation for the fact that the very large
sums of money which were advanced
were immediately transferred to com-
panies owned or controlled by Mr.
Ablyazov, namely, that the original
loans were part of a dishonest scheme
24 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
whereby Mr. Ablyazov sought to mis-
appropriate monies which belonged to
the bank. Ablyazov was eventually
sentenced to twenty-two months in a
U.K. prison, for contempt of court, be-
cause he had refused to reveal disputed
assets. In February, 2012, when Trump
was planning his trip to Georgia, Ablya-
zov ed to France. He is currently ght-
ing extradition.
he Silk Road Group, which was es-
T tablished in Georgia shortly after
the fall of the Soviet Union, does not
have a conventional corporate struc-
ture. It is a holding company that con-
trols dozens of corporate entities reg-
istered around the world. In total,
B.T.A. loaned the Silk Road Group
three hundred million dollars, and these
funds were dispersed among its many
subsidiaries, making the money trail
hard to follow. For example, an eight-
million-dollar loan was granted to Ba-
tumi Riviera Holding, B.V., which was
registered in Holland. Batumi Riviera
Holding has reported having a sole
asset: a company called Vento, L.L.C.,
which is registered in Georgia. That
registration indicates that its creditor
is B.T.A., which made loans valued at
seventy-ve per cent of the initial in-
vestment in the company. Batumi Riv-
iera Holding, in turn, is owned by Tbilisi
Central Plaza, a company registered in
Malta. Tbilisi Central Plaza is owned
by Susalike Holding GmbH, which is
dering operation: multiple shell com-
registered, in Germany, to a Silk Road
Group subsidiary.
Giorgi Rtskhiladze co-owns the Silk
Road Transatlantic Alliance, a subsid-
iary that focusses on business deals in-
volving the U.S. He brokered the Trump
relationship. The Silk Road Groups
leadership in Georgia asked him to
represent the company in interviews
for this article. I recently met him at
the St. Regis hotel in New York. When
I asked why the Silk Road Group had
such a bewildering structure, Rtskhi-
ladze said, There are tax reasons, and
there are other reasons. To reduce lia-
bilities, if we were sued or have to sue,
certain courts are more ecient. He
pointed out that many companies le-
gitimately use oshore jurisdictions to
register their rms.
Thats true, Richard Gordon, the
nancial-integrity expert at Case West-
ern, said. However, he added, it is di-
cult to conceive of legitimate reasons
for one shell company in an oshore
jurisdiction to own a chain of compa-
nies established in a series of other
oshore jurisdictions. Such byzantine
arrangements add expense, complex-
ity, and uncertaintythe opposite of
what businesses normally wantwith-
out providing any clear benet, other
than obfuscation. Moreover, by regis-
tering in so many dierent jurisdic-
tions, the Silk Road Group has actu-
ally increased its legal risk, because a
potential claimant can sue the com-
pany in all those jurisdictions. Gordon,
who helped write the Republic of Geor-
gias tax law, told me that he could think
of no reason that this structure would
help a Georgian company lawfully pay
fewer taxes.
When I described to John Madinger,
the retired Treasury ocial, the vari-
ous entities and transactions involved
in the funding of the Trump Tower
Batumi, he said, That is what you
would expect to see in a money-laun-
panies in multiple countries. Its de-
signed to make life hard for people
trying to follow the transaction.
It was dicult to pierce the veil of
ownership, but I made some headway
by collaborating on a reporting proj-
ect with an investigations team at the
Columbia University School of Jour-
nalism. Manuela Andreoni and Inti
Pacheco, two recent graduates who are
now investigative fellows, have spent
months researching the Silk Road
Group, Mukhtar Ablyazov, Yerkin Tati-
shev, and B.T.A. Bank. They have
looked closely at relevant lawsuits, and
they have obtained and translated prop-
erty records and corporate registries
from around the world.
Although Tatishev had repeatedly
assured me that he was not involved
in making decisions about Silk Road

PRIVILEGE
Into this sky which has
more airplanes
than other skies
I look and see half a dozen
small whitenesses passing
like tired stars
through the blue. I watch them
instead of watching
the woman swimming
in an oversized Tshirt that clings
to her body like slime, instead of
seeing the child splashing
in his inflatable sleeves
while his parents pu on
elaborate ecigarettes.
Instead of speaking,
I lie back in my chair thats
turned to face the suns full strength
and try to become browner.
In this sky, planes fly
low and heavy, back and
forth from the base,
practicing war. Im afraid
Im finally all right
knowing good things
in me have died.
Elly Bookman
Group projects that had been funded action. We are cool guys, Tatishev wrote.
by B.T.A. loans, I continued to accrue And should always work with cool guys.
contradictory evidence. I recently re Borger responded, Dear Yerkin, in this
ceived a cache of internal Silk Road case can you please help us to get a cool
Group emails, dating back to 2014, and deal with them? He then asked Tati
they make clear that Tatishev has ex shev to describe how he wanted the deal
erted detailed operational control over to be structured.
the companys activities, including real In another recent email discussion,
estate businesses that were funded by which touched on crucial questions about
the B.T.A. loans.The email cache shows the ownership and the nancing of a
that David Borger, a German nancier major Silk Road Group project, Borger
who is a top executive at the company, told Tatishev, I need your ok. In a sub
regularly informed Tatishev about del sequent email, George Ramishvili, the
icate internal nancial matters and asked C.E.O. of the Silk Road Group, added
him for approval on a wide variety of that Tatishev needed to give his approval.
decisions pertaining to Silk Road Group Tatishev did so. In a 2014 email, a Silk
hotels, casinos, telecommunications in Road Group consultant sent Tatishev
frastructure, and hydroelectric plants. and Ramishvili a summary of a plan they
Many of these projects had been ini had devised to settle the outstanding
tially funded by loans made while Tati debt owed to B.T.A. Bank.
shev was a senior ocial at B.T.A. Bank. Video from Trumps visit to Geor
In one email exchange, from earlier gia provides further evidence that Tati
this year, Tatishev weighed in on a de shev was a key part of the Silk Road
cision about which investment bank the Groupand suggests that Trump rec
Silk Road Group should use for a trans ognized his importance. During a
speech that Trump gave in Tbilisi, Tati
shev can be seen sitting in the audi
ence next to Ramishvili. Trump says,
We have two great partners. He points
toward the seats where Tatishev and
Ramishvili are sitting. And theyre
going to do a fantastic job. (Giorgi
Rtskhiladze, the Silk Road Transatlan
tic Alliance executive who met me in
Manhattan, told me that Trump must
have thought it was him, not Tatishev,
sitting next to Ramishvili. But Rtskhi
ladze and Tatishev look nothing alike:
Rtskhiladze is cleanshaven, with
lightcolored hair; Tatishev is nearly
bald, with dark facial hair.) Tatishev
accompanied Trump to meet Saakash
vili at the Presidential Palace, in Tbilisi.
When Michael Cohen, the Trump Or
ganization executive, went to Georgia
in 2010 to discuss building a tower
with the Silk Road Group, he also met
with Tatishev. A representative of the
Silk Road Group said that Tatishev is
a friend of Ramishvili and simply
wanted to say hello to a big American
tycoon. Inviting friends to important
business meetings, the representative
said, is common practice in the Cau
casus region.
ith minimal due diligence, Trump
W Organization executives would
have noticed that the Silk Road Group
exhibited many warning signs of nan
cial fraud: its layered and often hidden
ownership, its ornate use of shell com
panies, its close relationship with a bank
that was embroiled in a nancial scan
dal. Trumps visit to Georgia occurred
while his company was making a series
of similar foreign deals. Until then, the
Trump Organization had ventured
abroad only occasionally: in 1999, a set
of Korean buildings licensed the Trump
name; in 2006, Trump bought a golf
course in Scotland; the following year,
construction began on a Trumpbranded
tower in Turkey. But by 2012 Trump was
struggling in the U.S. market. His big
gest investment, in American casinos,
had proved ruinous, and he was now a
minority owner of a nearbankrupt busi
ness. Trump had defaulted on loans mul
tiple times, and nearly every bank in the
U.S. refused to nance deals bearing his
name. And so Trump turned to people
in other countries who did not share this
reluctance to give him money. In 2012
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 25

Hes wearing oven mitts, so I threw him an oven.
alone, the Trump Organization negoti
ated or nalized deals in Azerbaijan,
Brazil, Canada, Georgia, India, the Phil
ippines, the United Arab Emirates, and
Uruguay.
At the time, the Trump Organiza
tion had only a handful of sta mem
bers involved in dealmaking. His chil
dren Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump,
Jr., assumed a management role in many
of these foreign projects. According to
Rtskhiladze, Trump, Jr., helped oversee
the Batumi deal. At one point, Rtskhi
ladze and Cohen held two days of meet
ings in New York to discuss the project.
Trump, Jr., dropped by several times. Ac
cording to former executives at the
Trump Organization, the company
lacked rigorous procedures for assessing
foreign partners.
A month after Trump visited Geor
gia, he agreed to license his name to, and
provide oversight of, a luxury hotel in
Baku, Azerbaijan, a deal that I examined
in an article in The New Yorker earlier
this year. Trump received several million
dollars from the brother and the son of
an Azerbaijani billionaire who was then
the Minister of Transportationa man
who, U.S. ocials believe, may have been
simultaneously laundering money for the
26 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In 2013,
Trump met with the AzerbaijaniRus
sian billionaire Aras Agalarov and his
son, Emin; that November, they part
nered with Trump on the Miss Universe
contest, in Moscow, and discussed build
ing a Trump Tower in the Russian cap
ital. In June, 2016, at Emin Agalarovs
request, Trump, Jr., met with Natalia Ve
selnitskaya, a lawyer who has represented
Russian intelligence. Trump, Jr., was
promised damaging information about
Hillary Clinton. Veselnitskaya came to
the meeting accompanied by business
associates who have extensive ties to
Georgia and Azerbaijan.
n December, 2012, not long after Trump
Icompany
signed the Batumi licensing deal, a
called Riviera, L.L.C., bought
the fteenacre parcel of land on which
the Trump Tower Batumi would sup
posedly be built. The price was twelve
million dollars, and the seller was Vento,
L.L.C., which was owned by a company
that was owned by a company that was
owned by a company that was owned by
the Silk Road Group. Riviera, L.L.C.,
was also partly owned by the Silk Road
Group. In other words, the Silk Road
Group was selling property to itself.
The Financial Action Task Force,
headquartered in Paris, is led by repre
sentatives from thirtyseven nations. In
2007, the task force issued a report about
the use of realestate projects for money
laundering. The report makes note of
several red ags. It warns of complex
loans in which businesses lend them
selves money, creating the appearance
that the funds are legitimate. It also
warns of the use of oshore shell com
panies and tangled corporate legal struc
tures, especially those in which third par
ties are hired to administer a company
and conceal its true ownership. These
intertwined companies can then trade
property among themselves, in order to
create inated valuations: An oftenused
structure is, for example, the setting up
of shell companies to buy real estate.
Shortly after acquiring the properties,
the companies are voluntarily wound up,
and the criminals then repurchase the
property at a price considerably above
the original purchase price. This enables
them to insert a sum of money into the
nancial system equal to the original
purchase price plus the capital gain,
thereby allowing them to conceal the or
igin of their funds.
The report states that money laun
derers often nd that buying a hotel,
a restaurant or other similar invest
ment oers further advantages, as it
brings with it a business activity in
which there is extensive use of cash.
Casinoslike the one planned for the
Trump Tower Batumiare especially
useful in this regard. The casino was
to be owned by the Silk Road Group
and its partners.
Alan Garten, the chief legal ocer
for the Trump Organization, declined
to describe the due diligence behind
the Batumi tower. When the deal was
signed, the general counsel for the
Trump Organization was Jason Green
blatt, who is now President Trumps
envoy to negotiate Middle East peace.
(The White House declined to com
ment for this story, referring me in
stead to Sekulow, Trumps lawyer, who
also declined to discuss the specics of
the Batumi deal.)
A representative of the Silk Road
Group told me that the company had
been eager to assuage any ethical con
cerns the Trump Organization or other
potential partners may have had, and so
it had conducted due diligenceon it-
self. In May, 2012, the Silk Road Group
commissioned K2 Intelligence, a rm
founded by the investigator Jules Kroll,
to produce a report. (This was fourteen
months after the Trump Organization
signed the Batumi deal.) I recently ob-
tained a summary of the report, which
explained that K2 was asked to probe
the background and integrity of S.R.G.s
principal shareholder, George Ramish-
vili, more deeply than a standard inves-
tigative or compliance report might.
However, the report seems to have ad-
dressed only one issue: a rumor, circu-
lating in the Georgian media, that Ra-
mishvili had once been a member of the
Mkhedrioni, a right-wing militia. K2
concluded that the rumor was false. The
summary did not address the Silk Road
Groups funding sources, its complex
legal structure, or its relationship to the
B.T.A. Bank scandal, which was unfold-
ing in London courts at the time. Other
due diligence may have been performed,
but the Silk Road Group, K2, and the
Trump Organization declined to share
specic information.
Ross Delston, a prominent anti-
money-laundering attorney in Wash-
ington, D.C., told me that, if one of
his clients approached him with the
possibility of entering a licensing re-
lationship with the people involved in
the Batumi deal, he would tell him
not to walk away but to run awayto
run like hell. He explained, There are
too many aspects of the deal that dont
make sense, and theres no way, as an
outsider, that you could conduct su-
cient due diligence to gure out if it
is criminal.
So many partners of the Trump Or-
ganization have been ned, sued, or
criminally investigated for nancial
crimes that it is hard to ascribe the pat-
tern to coincidence, or even to shoddy
due diligence. In criminal law, there is
a crucial concept called willful blind-
ness: a person can be convicted of a
crime even if he was unaware of certain
aspects of the crime in which he was
engaged. In U.S. courts, judges routinely
explain to juries that no one can avoid
responsibility for a crime by deliberately
ignoring what is obvious. (When the
Trump Organization cancelled the Ba-
tumi deal, it noted that it held the Silk
Road Group in the highest regard.)
John Madinger, the former Treasury
ocial, said that, in any deal that might
involve money laundering, there is one
critical question: Does the nancial
transaction make economic or business
sense? In recent years, a lot of residen-
tial housing has been built in Batumi,
but most of it has consisted of what
Colliers, the market-analysis rm, calls
low-segmentdown-marketapart-
ments. The Trump Organization, with
its extensive experience in the luxury
real-estate market, could surely sense
that it would not be easy to enlist hun-
dreds of wealthy people to buy multi-
million-dollar condominiums in Ba-
tumi. I asked several New York real-
estate developers to assess the proposed
tower. One laughed and said that the
Batumi deal reminded him of The Pro-
ducers, the Mel Brooks movie about
two charlatans who create a horrible
musical designed to fail. Another New
York developer, who spent years mak-
ing deals in the former Soviet Union,
told me, A forty-seven-story tower of
luxury condominiums in Batumi is an
insane idea. I wouldnt have gone near
a project like this.
Giorgi Rtskhiladze, the Silk Road
Transatlantic Alliance executive, con-
rmed that the luxury-housing mar-
ket in Batumi was nonexistent in 2012,
when he invited Donald Trump to
visit Georgia, but said that the tow-
ers investors were nonetheless con-
dent that a Trump-branded skyscraper
would attract buyers. He insisted that
the Silk Road Group had not taken
part in anything illicit, and said that
B.T.A. Banks 2005 decision to lend
the Silk Road Group several hundred
million dollars was hardly suspicious.
The company had been working in
Kazakhstan for years, transporting oil
products, and had become close with
the Tatishev family. When the bank
that Tatishev helped run, B.T.A., de-
cided to invest in redeveloping Ba-
tumi, the obvious partner was the Silk
Road Group. We were the partner
they knew, Rtskhiladze said. Were
active in the region.
Rtskhiladze acknowledged that it
was quite a big loan for such a poor
country. Unbelievable, he called it.
And it was true that the Silk Road
Group had little experience in hotels
or construction or telecommunications
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 27
when it suddenly entered those in-
dustries. But, he pointed out, Geor-
gia was still emerging from the tor-
pid days of the Soviet Union. Youre
talking about a country that had no
experience, he said. Nobody else had
experience. In any case, he suggested,
real-estate development wasnt that
complicated. You hire third parties,
who do feasibility studies. You look at
the numbers. It wasnt that dicult.
He added, We like to do clean, trans-
parent business.
I asked Rtskhiladze why he had in-
vited Trump, who has generally avoided
travelling abroad, to Georgia. He told
me a story from 1989, when he was a
young soldier in the Soviet Army. They
told me, for target practice, to shoot
Ronald Reagans face, he recalled. I
refused. The Army jailed him for sev-
eral days. Soon after he was released,
he said, he saw a magazine with Trump
on the cover. He told himself, One
day, I will go to New York and meet
this man.
He argued that the fact that there
was no luxury in Batumi was precisely
why the idea of a Trump Tower was so
smart. The skyscraper, with its pool
and gyms and conference rooms, would
single-handedly create an entire uni-
verse of very New York-style luxury in
a seaside town.The luxury condomini-
ums, he added, were for international
buyersSaudis, Turks, Russians. In
his strong opinion, the Trump brand
was the only brand for them. (David
Borger, the Silk Road Group executive,
told me that a study by a well-regarded
Turkish rm had concluded that the
tower was a good business idea, but he
declined to share the name of the rm
or the study.)
Melanie A. Bonvicino, who handles
communications for the Silk Road
Group, told me that the Trump Tower
Batumi deal demonstrated an open-
hearted vision. With the Batumi proj-
ect, Trump was once again able to
demonstrate his keen business sense,
she wrote in an e-mail. Donald Trump
in his role as futurist and visionary or-
dained the region as the next big thing.
Mr. Trump had an immediate grasp
over the geopolitical signicance of the
Republic of Georgia and its Black Sea
region, acknowledging its vast poten-
tial by jointly transforming this hid-
28 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
den gem into the next Riviera. In the
lite realm of global residential and
commercial real-estate developers, the
Trump moniker was and remains syn-
onymous with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and
Michael Jackson.
n 2009, when Ablyazov ed to Lon-
Icontrol
don, the Kazakh government seized
of B.T.A. Bank. (Tatishev moved
to Singapore in 2013.) A lawyer repre-
senting the bank, Roman Marchenko,
informed the Silk Road Group that he
had reason to believe that it had par-
ticipated in Ablyazovs loan scheme.
The Silk Road Group denied any
wrongdoing. A settlement was reached,
for fty million dollarsa bargain price,
considering that the loans had totalled
three hundred million. Marchenko
believes that the Silk Road Group was
deeply entwined with Ablyazov, but
Kazakh government ocials decided
to stop investigating. They were pur-
suing Ablyazovs stolen assets all over
the world, and there was more money
in other countries.
The Kazakh government placed
B.T.A. Banks assets under the author-
ity of its sovereign-wealth fund. Soon
after, Timur Kulibayevthe powerful
son-in-law of the countrys dictator,
Nursultan Nazarbayevbecame the
director of the fund. Kulibayev and his
sta had access to all the banks inter-
nal documents. Recently, Kulibayev be-
came the majority owner of the bank,
giving him total control over B.T.A.s
archives, as well as ownership of its as-
sets. Kulibayev was surely familiar with
the players involved in the Trump Tower
Batumi project. In 2011, Giorgi Rtskhi-
ladze and Michael Cohen, the Trump
Organization executive, began promot-
ing the idea of a Trump Tower in As-
tana, the capital of Kazakhstan. They
visited Astana and met with Karim
Masimov, the Prime Minister. Masi-
mov is now the head of Kazakhstans
national-security apparatus.
Keith Darden is a political scien-
tist at American University who has
written extensively on the use of com-
promising informationkompromat
by former Soviet regimes against peo-
ple they want to control. He told me
that Kazakh intelligence is believed to
collect dossiers on every signicant
business transaction involving the
country. This would be especially true
if a famous American developer was
part of the deal, even if it would not
have occurred to them that he might
one day become the U.S. President.
There is no questionthey know ev-
erything about this deal, Darden said.
Darden explained that Kazakh in-
telligence agents work closely with
their Russian counterparts. Kulibayev
himself has direct ties to Russias lead-
ership. In 2011, he was named to the
board of Gazprom, the Russian gas
behemoth, which is widely consid-
ered to be a pillar of Putins fortune.
In The Return: Russias Journey from
Gorbachev to Medvedev, Daniel Treis-
man, a political scientist at U.C.L.A.
who specializes in Russia, wrote, For
Putin, Gazprom was a personal ob-
session. He memorized the details of
the companys accounts, its pricing
rules and pipeline routes. He person-
ally approved all appointments down
to the deputy level, sometimes for-
getting to tell the companys actual
C.E.O., Aleksey Miller. Kulibayev
could not possibly be serving on Gaz-
proms board without Putins assent.
Robert Mueller has assembled a
team of sixteen lawyers. One of them
is uent in Russian, and ve have ex-
tensive experience investigating and
prosecuting cases of money launder-
ing, foreign corruption, and complex
nancial conspiracies. The path from
Trump to Putin, if one exists, might
be found in one of his foreign real-es-
tate deals.
When Mueller was appointed spe-
cial counsel, his ocial writ was to in-
vestigate not just any links and/or
coordination between the Russian gov-
ernment and individuals associated
with the campaign of President Don-
ald Trump but also any matters that
arose or may arise directly from the
investigation. Much hinges on the
word directly. Sekulow, Trumps law-
yer, insists that Muellers mandate es-
sentially stops at the Russian border.
Pawneet Abramowski, a former F.B.I.
intelligence analyst, told me that Seku-
lows assertion is nonsensical. You
must follow the clues, she said. When
investigating a businessperson like
Trump, you have to follow the money
and go wherever it leadsyou must
follow the clues all the way to the end.

SHOUTS & MURMURS
MILLION-DOLLAR
SUBWAY FIXES
BY EVAN WAITE AND RIVER CLEGG
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority . . .
will award three $1 million prizes for the bright-
est ideas for improving New York Citys sub-
way system.
The Times.
CHANGE TRAINS TO PLANES
Planes are much faster than trains. So,
if we turn those slow trains into fast
airplanes, people will get to their stops
more quickly. Plus, ying airplanes in
underground tunnels will be less scary
for pilots, since there isnt as far to fall
if something goes wrong.
ALTER THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY
Many people have to commute to work,
but if that no longer had to happen
people could stay home.
REDUCE OVERCROWDING BY HIRING
LUCI GUTIRREZ
UNSKILLED BREAK-DANCERS
Its simple: people are less likely to travel
by subway if theyre worried about get-
ting kicked in the face. And the threat
of face-kickings will be all too real once
every train car is full of terrible break-
dancers, ipping around on poles. Bad
dancers, loud dancers, dancers demand-
ing that you clap your handsthe new
subway will have them all! Suddenly,
its showtime all the time, and that cab
fare doesnt seem so bad.
REFRAME THE ISSUE
New Yorkers should be thankful that
they have a subway at all. A lot of cit-
ies dont, you know.
SOLAR-POWERED TRAINS
Granted, this solution would present
some logistical challenges. For one, the
subway is underground, which is not
where the sun is. So the trains would
need to be moved to street level. To
minimize disruption, they would also
have to be reduced in size. Each solar-
powered train would have only four
wheels, and a maximum capacity of
seven or eight passengers, one of whom
would be responsible for driving the
train. The trains would be privately
owned, most often by their drivers. The
trains would run on gasoline.
REPLACE SUBWAYS WITH STRONG
MEN WHO CARRY YOU AROUND ON
THEIR BACKS FOR MONEY
They do this in other countries, we
think.
GREASE THE SUBWAY TRACKS
Sometimes the best solutions are the
simplest ones that involve grease.
MAKE PASSENGERS FEEL
BAD ABOUT THEMSELVES
Tell commuters that they dont deserve
a better subway system. Insult them per-
sonally. Make them feel small. Seriously,
who do these people think they are? All
they do is tweet and write op-eds when
their ride doesnt go perfectly. It never
ends with them! A train malfunctions,
goes o the tracks, and injures a few
dozen people, forcing everyone to es-
cape on foot through the slimy, dark
tunnels, and suddenly the subways ar-
ent good enough for commuters any-
more? Talk about ungrateful.
RIG THE TRAINS SO THAT THEYRE
PULLED AROUND BY RATS
Sure, theres the added expense of hav-
ing millions of tiny harnesses sewn,
but think how adorable theyll be!
EMPHASIZE THAT TIME IS
A HUMAN CONSTRUCT
There is no late.
LET LAWLESSNESS REIGN
Just hear us out. If city ocials imme-
diately stop enforcing local, state, and
federal laws, yes, people will die. A tide
of theft and violence will wash over
New York, and bands of marauders will
institute a new economy whose sole
currencies are rearms and human teeth.
As water and food become increasingly
scarce, neighbor will turn against neigh-
bor. Blood will be shed, and civilized
society will give way to a brutal atmo-
sphere of isolation and hatred. All will
be lost. Delayed trains dont seem like
such a big deal now, do they?
POKE THE CONDUCTOR IN THE CHEST
Get it moving, bub.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 29

ANNALS OF AGRICULTURE
STRAWBERRY VALLEY
How Driscolls became the Apple of the berry business.
BY DANA GOODYEAR
ne foggy May morning, the Joy
O Makers, a team of scientists em-
ployed by Driscolls, the worlds largest
berry company, gathered at its re-
search-and-development campus, which
is known as Cassin Ranch, in the small
agricultural town of Watsonville, on
Californias Central Coast. Before them
was a table laden with plastic clamshells:
red, white, and pink strawberries for
the pipeline. Phil Stewart, an aably
geeky, sandy-haired strawberry geneti-
cist, oered me a yellowish-white spec-
imen with rosy stains, like a skinned knee
when the blood starts seeping through.
The Joy Makers watched expectantly as
I tasted it. The fruit, an unpatented va-
riety referred to as 21AA176, was juicy
and soft, mildly astringent but tropical,
reminiscent of white tea. It goes back
Driscolls relentless focus on breeding has helped shape the supermarket strawberry.
30 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
to a variety called White Carolina, which
is maybe the oldest strawberry variety
still in existence, Stewart said. It dates
back to the seventeen-hundreds.
In some Asian markets, white fruit is
coveted, and Driscolls has conducted
commercial trials in Hong Kong. But al-
though the company has been breeding
whites for fteen years, it has yet to in-
troduce any to U.S. grocery stores; Amer-
icans, accustomed to an aggressive cold
chain, typically fear underripe fruit. I
brought these to a wedding, and all the
parents were telling their kids not to eat
the white ones, a Joy Maker remarked.
Lately, however, Driscolls focus groups
have shown that millennials, adventur-
ous and open-minded in their eating
habits, and easily seduced by novelty, may
embrace pale berries. With these con-
sumers, unburdened by preconceived no-
tions of what a white berry should look
or taste like, Driscolls has a priceless op-
portunity: the denitional power that
comes with rst contact. Before that
can happen, though, the berries must
conform to Driscolls aesthetic stan-
dards. Stewart held a 21AA176 up to his
face and inspected it carefully. Micro-
cracking, he said, pointing out some
barely perceptible brown spots, caused
by moisture on the plastic packaging,
that were marring the surface. This is
not going to go forward.
Driscolls, a fourth-generation fam-
ily business, says that it controls roughly
a third of the six-billion-dollar U.S.
berry market, including sixty per cent
of organic strawberries, forty-six per
cent of blackberries, fourteen per cent
of blueberries, and just about every rasp-
berry you dont pick yourself. Miles Rei-
ter is the chairman; his family owns
some seventy per cent of the company,
which develops proprietary breeds, li-
censes them exclusively to approved
Driscolls growers, and sells the fruit
under one of the few widely recogniz-
able brand names in the fresh section
of the grocery store. Though the farm-
ing is technically outsourced, the Rei-
ters also own a farming company, run
by Miless brother Garland, which grows
about a third of Driscolls fruit. Were
commonly referred to as the Evil Em-
pire, Allison Reiter Kambic, one of
Miless daughters, told me ruefully.
Theyre the leaders, Herb Baum, who
for decades led the berry coperative
Naturipe, said. I regret to say, as I
worked for a competitor. At ninety,
Baum is retired, but when he tells peo-
ple that he worked in strawberries and
they say, Oh, Driscolls? he knows just
how Salieri felt.
Produce is war, and it is won by hav-
ing something beautiful-looking to sell
at Costco when the competition has only
cat-faced uglies. In the eighties, beset by
takeover ambitions from Chiquita, Del
Monte, and Dole, Driscolls embarked
on a new vision: all four berries, all year
round. Otherwise, Miles told me, we
could be outanked. Driscolls berries
are grown in twenty-one countries and
sold in forty-eight; since the nineties, the
company has invested heavily in Mex-
ico. Driscolls sells more than a billion
clamshells every year; it was Driscolls
ILLUSTRATION BY JACK SACHS
idea to put berries into clamshells in the
rst place. At the corporate oces, in a
business park a few miles from Cassin
Ranch, interactive maps mounted on
the walls monitor every truck carrying
Driscolls fruit in North America, some
two hundred and fty at any given time.
An alarm goes o if a trucks tempera-
ture deviates from an accepted range, if
a truck stops for too long (in Las Vegas,
for instance), or if security is breached.
A full load of strawberries is worth about
fty thousand dollars; blueberries gar-
ner twice as much. The maps resemble
battle plans, with armies of trucks fan-
ning out across the continent.
Strawberries can be orange or white,
the size of a pinkie tip, oblong, conjoined
or bloblike, ecstatic, deant, ungainly,
unique. But you dont think of them that
way. What you picture is a Driscolls
berry: glossy, red, and heart-shaped, and
rm enough to ship to the East Coast
or to the Middle East and eat two weeks
past the harvest date. Driscolls berries
tend to lack the sugar rush and perfumed
oomph of a tiny sun-warmed heirloom
discovered on a country lane. Since the
companys inception, it has placed an
emphasis on appearance. We have helped
shape what a strawberry looks like with
our relentless focus, Soren Bjorn, the
companys president, said. Its cultivars
the genetically distinct new varieties it
creates through breedingand the germ-
plasm, the genetic library of plants its
breeders can draw on as parents for fu-
ture cultivars, constitute the companys
intellectual property. Speaking with a
legal newspaper, Driscolls senior vice-
president and general counsel compared
the company to its neighbors in Silicon
Valley. Growers are sort of like our man-
ufacturing plants, he said. We make
the inventions, they assemble it, and then
we market it, so its not that dissimilar
from Apple using someone else to do
the manufacturing but theyve made the
invention and marketed the end prod-
uct. Like Apple, Driscolls guards its
I.P. jealously.
Berries are the top-grossing produce
in the supermarket. (I remember when
we were little and berries surpassed ba-
nanas in revenue, Brie Reiter Smith,
Miless oldest daughter, who is the gen-
eral manager of North American produc-
tion, said.) According to Frances Dillard,
Driscolls global brand strategist and a
veteran of Disneys consumer-products
division, berries are the produce category
most associated with happiness. (Kale,
in contrast, has a health-control, me
focus.) On a slide that Dillard prepared,
mapping psychographic associations with
various fruits, strawberries oated be-
tween Freedom and Harmony, in a zone
marked Extrovert, above a word cloud
that read Social, pleasure, joy, balance,
conviviality, friendship, warmth, soft, nat-
ural, sharing. (Blueberries vibed as status-
oriented, demanding, and high-tech.) As
I studied the slide over Dillards shoul-
der in her oce, she smiled tightly and
said, This is proprietary.
In apples, varieties are obviousFuji,
Braeburn, Honeycrispand at farmers
markets and certain specialty stores straw-
berries, too, are sold by name. (In early
summer, Bi-Rite, a fancy grocer in San
Francisco, announced the much antici-
pated arrival of Seascapes and Chandlers
with cardboard strawberries dangling
from the ceiling.) But most strawberries
meet our mouths anonymously. Com-
pared with tree fruits, which take a de-
cade or two and a small fortune to pro-
duce, strawberries are quick and cheap;
plants, hardiest in their rst year, are
ripped out after a single harvest. Grow-
ing in microseasons and microclimates,
and easily falling victim to mildew,
weather, and pests, strawberries are sen-
sitive and eeting. The contents of a
clamshell in April are likely to be Mar-
quis berries from Oxnard, where Driscolls
has a large operation; by June, theyre
probably Del Reys out of Watsonville.
It takes about six years to develop and
test a cultivar, but Driscolls releases sev-
eral in North America each year; in ad-
dition, it maintains breeding programs
around the world to furnish its various
geographies with berries tailored to the
local conditions. (Varieties are made ob-
solete based on the decisions of an in-
ternal group called the Dead Variety
Society.) For the shopper, the only im-
pression that matters is the Driscolls
name, and the red berries, as uniform as
soldiers or paper valentines.
For decades, Driscolls most forbid-
ding competition has come from an un-
expected direction: a thriving strawberry-
breeding program at the University of
California, Davis, which, for nearly thirty
years, was led by Doug Shaw and his col-
league Kirk Larson. The program is
Driscolls antithesispublic, open, non-
exclusivesupplying, for a nominal roy-
alty fee, any grower wishing to use its
plants, and sharing crucial information
about horticulture derived from its re-
search. University berries are not labelled
as such, but they account for the vast ma-
jority of strawberries grown in Califor-
nia, and in the world. During their time,
Shaw and Larson worked assiduously to
advance the universitys germplasm, cre-
ating crosses that would result in com-
mercial cultivars that farmers deemed
worthy of planting; every farm the uni-
versity supplied was another acre not
given over to Driscolls.
During the taste-testing at Cassin
Ranch, the Joy Makers encouraged me
to try Albion, a university berry invented
by Shaw, only to deride its physique and
criticize its crunchiness. (Two weeks
earlier, in Oxnard, I had preferred a uni-
versity variety in a blind tasting, un-
leashing a cascade of explanations: this
time there would be no chance of em-
barrassment for either party.) Accord-
ing to Driscolls employees, university
varieties tended to be dull-hued, mal-
formed, seedy at the tip. I mentioned
that my favorite variety was Gaviota,
another Shaw berry, which I get from
Harrys Berries at the Friday farmers
market in my neighborhood, and which
to me seems exceptionally complex and
avorful. They quickly disabused me.
Theres nothing special in the genet-
ics, Michael Schwieterman, a biochem-
ist, said. What I was enjoying was over-
ripe, he said pityingly, and wouldnt
survive the weekend.
Behind the animosity lies a despera-
tion that everyone in the business feels.
Even as demand from consumers re-
mains strong, the strawberry industry
has been contracting rapidly; there are
now thirty per cent fewer acres under
cultivation than there were in 2013. (With
a sharp decline in migration from Mex-
ico and Central America, the primary
sources of agricultural labor for half a
century, stoop workjobs requiring
harvesters to crouch doubled over for
hours a dayhas become dicult to hire
for. Nearly every farm I passed in Wat-
sonville, in May and June, had a sign by
the road saying Se Solicitan Piscadores.
At the same time, changing minimum-
wage and overtime laws have made labor
more expensive.) A suite of troublesome
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 31
diseases has emerged as long-standing
soil fumigants are being banned. This
past winter, a ve-year drought was fol-
lowed by a Biblical deluge. New vari-
eties are the only way forward, and it is
the savviest breeder with access to the
best germplasm who will prevail.
ccording to scholars of medieval
A art, the strawberry is a symbol of
perfect righteousness. But the story of
Driscolls long dominion begins with
what might be perceived as an original
sin: in the midst of the Second World
War, the group of growers that eventu-
ally became Driscolls got hold of the uni-
versitys germplasm, hired its chief breed-
ers, and created a strawberry leviathan.
By then, the Reiters were established
berry growers, alongside their relatives
the Driscolls. The rst Reiter, a butcher
who eventually farmed near Watson-
ville, where there was a nascent straw-
berry industry, came to California from
Alsace in 1849. Wild strawberries grew
abundantly in the sandy soils along the
Central Coast; in A History of the
Strawberry, Stephen Wilhelm and
James Sagen write that, in peak season,
Native Americans would camp beside
the patches and eat for a week. The
conditions were ideal: cold fog in the
morning, mild sun in the afternoon.
The butchers son, J. E. (Ed) Reiter,
started growing with his brother-in-
law, R.F. (Dick) Driscoll. One summer,
Eds sister, visiting friends at a guest
ranch in Shasta County, was served
some especially sweet and shapely ber-
ries for breakfast; when she got back to
Watsonville, she told her brother, set-
ting in motion what family members
thereafter referred to as the California
strawberry gold rush.
In 1904, at Cassin Ranch, Reiter and
Driscoll planted the berry that came to
be called Banner. Other berries at the
time were awkward and irregular; Ban-
ners were exceptionally consistent. Al-
ready shrewd marketers, the brothers-
in-law began an energetic promotional
campaign, declaring Banner A Wonder:
The talk of the Pacic Coast. People
write about it to their Eastern Friends.
For more than a decade, Driscoll and
Reiter maintained exclusive access to
Banner, but eventually most farmers on
the Pacic Coast had it. There were no
plant-patent laws, Miles Reiter, a gen-
32 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
tlemanly, white-haired man in his six-
ties, who studied history at Princeton,
told me. Ultimately, there was no way
to keep it to yourself.
The pursuit of new strawberry breeds
was a hotly competitive area of agricul-
tureThe Small Fruits of New York,
published in 1925, lists more than a thou-
sand varietiesbut Mendels theory of
genetics had only recently been rediscov-
ered, and many promising varieties were
created by chance pollination or dimly
understood laws of reproduction. (One
Cincinnati strawberry farmer briey con-
trolled ninety per cent of the market in
his city because he had grasped that the
variety he was planting required a par-
ticular approach to pollination, a sexual
secret that the Cincinnati Horticultural
Society devoted two years to investigat-
ing; its subsequent report drove down
the price of berries and forced the farmer
out of business.) An oddity of strawberry
reproductive life made the fruit ideal for
commercialization, and prone to theft.
Strawberries are self-cloning; mothers
send out runners, creating genetically
identical daughters. This was also a
problem in the fruit-tree business, where
clones can be created by grafting, and in
the rst decades of the twentieth century
nurserymen began to agitate for protec-
tion from copiers. One large Missouri
nursery, the exclusive carrier of the Red
Delicious apple, built a fence around its
mother tree and asked buyers to sign con-
tracts promising not to propagate. When
that didnt work, the nursery appealed to
Congress. Thomas Edison sent a tele-
gram supporting legislation, saying,
Nothing that Congress could do to help
farming would be of greater value and
permanence than to give to the plant
breeder the same status as the mechan-
ical and chemical inventors now have
through the patent law. The Plant Pat-
ent Act, which described breeders as in-
ventors, passed in 1930, and became a cor-
nerstone of intellectual-property law.
The Driscolls and the Reiters had en-
joyed the advantages of controlling a breed,
but, after a twenty-year run, Banner fell
victim to the yellows, a viral infection
spread by strawberry aphids. Looking for
disease-resistant plants to cross into the
Banner line, the plant-pathology depart-
ment at the University of California at
Berkeley began to collect germplasm.
Under the guidance of Harold Thomas,
a brilliant pathologist, and his talented
eld manager, Earl Goldsmith, the de-
partment established a breeding program,
systematically inventing and releasing
new strawberry varieties. The primary
objective, according to a history by Henry
Wallace, who served as the Secretary of
Agriculture in the nineteen-thirties, was
a large, rm berry which could be picked
one-fourth green and which could stand
shipping to the east coast.
The strawberry industry in the early
twentieth century was dominated by Jap-
anese immigrants, who represented not
only the labor force but also some of the
most experienced growers. In 1942, when
the Japanese were forced into internment
camps, the business eectively collapsed.
According to the Reiters, Ned Driscoll,
Dicks son, was one of the few farmers
still planting strawberries during the war,
testing crosses invented by Thomas and
Goldsmith. By the mid-forties, the uni-
versity was making plans to suspend its
strawberry-breeding program. Rather
than accept reassignment, Thomas and
Goldsmith quit the university and went
to work for Ned.
Family lore has it that in 1944 Ned
Driscoll and some grower friends pooled
their gas rations and drove to the uni-
versity plots to rescue the lifes work of
Thomas and Goldsmith: untold thou-
sands of strawberry seedlings, represent-
ing precious university germplasm. We
usually say that the launch of Driscolls
was in 1944, Miles Reiter told me. That
was initiated by the abandonment of the
U.C. Berkeley breeding program. Which
would have been lost otherwise. Ned
Driscoll appointed Goldsmith his breeder
and Thomas the director of a new re-
search institute, which later merged with
an exclusive growers collective that Ned
and his cousin Joe Reiter formedthe
precursor to the modern Driscolls. (Fam-
ily records indicate that the institute paid
a thousand dollars for the germplasm,
which was made available to other grow-
ers, too, but those other growers hadnt
hired Thomas and Goldsmith.) Herb
Baum, the former Naturipe director, told
me that the Reiter and Driscoll families
were smart enough to know, If we can
get this material and have a monopoly,
were going to make a fortune.
In spite of what Thomas and Gold-
smith, and the Driscolls and the Reiters,
believed in 1944, the university did not
abandon its breeding program. In 1945,
the university, which presumably retained
copies of plants that left the collection,
released ve new varieties, designed by
Thomas and Goldsmith and named for
the mountains and lakes of California. It
moved its laboratories north from Berke-
ley to Davis, and hired breeders to take
up where the others had left o. Under
the new breeders, strawberries grew to
be one of Californias most signicant
and lucrative crops. But, in the mean-
time, Driscolls had begun its ascent.
Developing successful cultivars from
a set of potential parents depends on in-
tuition, experience, sensibility, and luck,
as much as it does on systematic data
collection and dogged trial and error.
With the universitys plants, the Driscolls
and the Reiters gained access both to a
rich and diverse source of genetic traits
and to the expertise of the two men who
had studied that source for decades. In
1946, Thomas and Goldsmith crossed
two university varieties, only one of which
was widely available, yielding what at rst
appeared to be an unimpressive plant of
uncertain commercial value. In an ac-
count provided by Driscolls, Thomas
writes that nevertheless Goldsmith did
recognize it as having a fruit character of
excellent quality. He and Goldsmith
kept at it, testing and adjusting the grow-
ing regimen until they had perhaps the
nest commercial strawberry ever devel-
oped. In 1958, they released it as Z5A,
Driscolls rst proprietary cultivar, a block-
buster berry that would prove momen-
tous for the company. Z5A could with-
stand shipping; equally important, it
fruited in the late summer and early fall,
giving Driscolls berries in the months
when other growers had none. With that,
the company was on its way to becom-
ing a grocery-store staple, a nationwide
brand that markets could rely on enough
to build display cases around.
he strapping, broad-shouldered mod-
T ern strawberry that Driscolls exem-
plies is the product of a cross between
a Virginian male and a Chilean female
that took place in France in the eigh-
teenth century. The female was imported
by a French Army intelligence ocer,
who, on a reconnaissance mission to
South America, spotted the berry grow-
ing along the coast near Concepcin; he
described it as being as big as a walnut,
and sometimes as a hens egg, of a whit-
ish red, and somewhat less delicious of
taste than our Wood strawberries. The
Virginian was bright scarlet, and, accord-
ing to an apothecary at Nuremberg who
published a treatise on the medicinal gar-
den there, consistently large, the size of
a plum, eshy, and of an excellent avor
and fragrance. The cross resulted in
Fragaria x ananassa, whose pineapple-
scented fruit an early taxonomist de-
clared to be monstrous, in a good way.
As the cost of growing berries rises,
Driscolls must nd ways of enticing peo-
ple to pay more for them. Recently, the
company built a consumer lab equipped
with a gas chromatograph and a gene-
sequencing machine, so that the Joy Mak-
ers could begin to pick apart the scien-
tic components of avor and gure out
how best to appeal to a public whose idea
of strawberry is inuenced by strawberry
syrup and red Popsicles. Dillard, the brand
strategist, dreams of a ten-dollar clam-
shell lled with splurge-worthy super-
premium berries. Bjorn, the companys
president, says, Consumers have to be
more satised, or what we call more de-
lighted, all the time. Produce companies
tend to be driven by supply: what they
grow, they try to sell. Driscolls, conversely,
sees itself as a consumer-products com-
pany. According to Bjorn, We create the
demand. Its more like a Procter & Gam-
ble. Through the eorts of the Joy Mak-
ers, Driscolls is trying to do the equiva-
You must have thought up a million jokes.
lent of adding body-butter-enhanced
shave-gel bars between razor blades.
One day at Cassin Ranch, Phil Stew-
art, the strawberry geneticist, took me
into his greenhouse. Germplasm was ev-
erywhere: geriatric university stock; plants
from a public seed bank maintained by
the U.S.D.A.; others foraged by Driscolls
employees on backpacking trips. In one
corner, Stewart was running hydroponic
tests on a cross between a Driscolls va-
riety and Fragaria chiloensis, which was
picked up on a beach in Santa Cruz.
The beach species is exceptionally tol-
erant of salt, because it evolved on sand
dunes, Stewart saida compelling qual-
ity, because drought and fertilizers cause
salts to accumulate in soil. To explore the
limits of this capacity, he was growing a
leathery, dark-green plant in a tub of
heavily salted water. (An oversized jar of
Morton salt sat nearby.) Half the plants
leaves looked like potato chips, and its
roots were a brown mess.
Deeper in the greenhouse, we came
upon a droopy little berry that looked
like a gnome hat felted by a Waldorf
mom. It was a moschata, or musk straw-
berry, possibly the kind that Bosch su-
persized in The Garden of Earthly De-
lights. This particular variety, Mr. Zuks,
was thought to have been grown by
Thomas Jeerson; Stewart ordered it
from a nursery that works with Monti-
cello. (Based on Jeersons writings, Stew-
art believes that Jeerson got it from an

I said Im thinking about getting my own place.
Italian friend, who got it from a Pole.)
The shelf life is patheticberries picked
in the morning are trash by the after-
noonbut it is strongly resistant to mil-
dew. Even more interesting to the Joy
Makers is its aromatic prole, which
reects an abundance of methyl anthra-
nilate, an ester that is rarely found in cul-
tivated varieties, and that calls to mind
grape Jolly Ranchers (though it can also
have a whi of Gorgonzola).
Like much of what I saw in the
greenhouse, Mr. Zuks was part of an
intensive eort under way at Driscolls
to recast the parameters of Fragaria x
ananassa, established some three centu-
ries ago. You have a random event that
happened in France that dened what
we think of as the strawberry, Judson
Ward, a molecular biologist at Driscolls,
said. Were going back to the wild and
picking up new traits. We have people
just as capable of identifying good avors
as whoever it was in France who hap-
pened upon that strawberry. In the re-
vision process, the company is deliber-
ately reversing some of its own breeding
biases, as mainstream consumers be-
come increasingly interested in dainty
shapes and obeat tastes. Ward men-
tioned that Stewart had made a cross
with a wild berry from Alaska. It was
like a fantasy of what people imagine
picking wild strawberries is like, Ward
said. They were all cute little things.
Each one has a dierent avor, so it is
like that experience that people want to
34 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
have in the wild. Dillard added, I think
we have some packaging on that!
The next day, I visited the consumer
lab. It was spacious, consisting of two
rooms, and had a determined-to-be-
cheerful air, with an orange-painted wall
and a whiteboard on which someone had
doodled a picture of a raspberry plant
over a diagram of a chemical compound.
Michael Schwieterman, the biochemist,
sat at a computer looking at an array of
data from the gas chromatograph com-
paring commercially available Driscolls
varieties with two old European Fragaria
vescas, or wood strawberries: a moschata
and a tiny, elegant French variety, Mara
des Bois, popular among epicures.
We can look at methyl anthranilate,
Schwieterman said, clicking onto a screen
that described the aromatic as sweet and
fruity, Concord grapes, with musty and
berry nuance. He pointed to a graph that
resembled a staircase. In a commercial
strawberry, there is practically none, he
said of the methyl anthranilate. (Only the
Mara des Bois exhibited its presence.) In
those vescas, theres a twenty-to-fty-fold
increase. In those moschatas, its through
the roof. Methyl anthranilate, he said, is
what potentially is dierent about wild
strawberries and commercial strawber-
ries. Thats why we have a lot of focus on
it. French consumers really like Mara des
Bois, and people like wild strawberries.
On the next screen, Schwieterman
showed me concentrations of gamma-
Decalactone, which suggests fruity,
creamy, peach and apricot with a syrupy,
fatty nuance. In contrast to methyl an-
thranilate, it was highly prevalent in com-
mercial varieties and scarce in wild ones.
He explained that Driscolls and other
breeders, liking the avor, yet oblivious
of the chemistry, had crossed it in. Its
potentially an anthropomorphic artifact,
he said. Another compound, cinnamyl
acetate, showed up in some of the ber-
ries. Would that be good, if we planted
a variety that had a cinnamon kind of
avor? Schwieterman went on, What
about reconstructing a basil avor in a
strawberry? This species has one com-
ponent thats pretty important to basil,
and one of our commercial species has
another. What would happen if we in-
trogressed that and got multiple com-
pounds in a strawberry? Youd have a
strawberry thats going to taste great with
your salad and balsamic dressing, because
it has a nice basil undertone. Driscolls
hopes that its breeders can use this in-
formation to create new cultivars, pro-
ducing strawberries as you would a track,
dialling down the greasy peach and lay-
ing in some cinnamon and must, over a
bass line of drought tolerance.
s the head of the strawberry-breed-
A ing program at Davis, Doug Shaw
eectively Driscolls chief rivaltook
a traditional approach, advancing the
germplasm by stalking the elds to nd
the highest-yielding, best-looking, tast-
iest berries. Looking to the wild for ex-
otic traitsthat would be absurd. A for-
midable if cantankerous and territorial
breeder, Shaw was loyal to the growers
who depended on his cultivars and un-
interested in working with proprietary
companies like Driscolls. The programs
patented plants, grown by farmers in
California and around the world, gen-
erated some hundred million dollars in
revenue for the university. (As inventors,
Shaw and Larson earned as much as two
million dollars a year in royalties.) But,
in 2011, as Shaw prepared for retirement,
he began to worry that the university
was shifting its focus from eld work to
the well-funded area of genomics. Where
would the cultivars come from?
Like Thomas and Goldsmith before
them, Shaw and Larson decided to leave
the university for the private sector.
Working with their superiors in the de-
partment of plant sciences, they proposed
spinning out a breeding company based
in U.C. germplasm. If the university was
no longer interested in commercializing
the germplasm, Shaw and Larson would
be happy to make use of it. In particu-
lar, Shaw wanted access to the varieties
that he had developed but had not yet
released. My motivation? Shaw said.
Id say its more ego than anything else.
I want my cultivars to be used. After
his retirement, Shaw joined California
Berry Cultivars, a new proprietary com-
pany that hopes to compete with Driscolls
in the race to invent a superior berry. But
in May, while the Joy Makers were eat-
ing berries in the sun, he stood accused
in federal court in San Francisco of hav-
ing stolen the universitys germplasm.
Shaw is sixty-three, with a rust-colored
boot-brush mustache and a high bloom
in his cheeks. His eyes, which he squints
warily, are the color of gingerbread. Hes
red-green color-blind, and tends to pick
his berries by their sheen. Youre look-
ing at maybe the best place on earth for
strawberries, he told me in June, as we
surveyed a eld of strawberry plants at
the headquarters of California Berry
Cultivars, in Watsonville. Monterey cy-
presses stooped witchily, wind-bent; in
the near distance, the Pacic Ocean was
visible behind fog. The soil is nine-
ty-six per cent sand, and we get this fog
that youre seeing right here every day
in the summer. He dug his shoe into
the soil, kicking up a int-knapped ar-
rowheadhe has a collectionand
nodded toward a nearby building with
a porch. One of my favorite things to
do is sit there and look out, he said.
Interestingly, C.B.C. had arranged to
lease the same piece of land the univer-
sity had once leased for its breeding
program. Shaw knew it well, as did most
of the people C.B.C. had hired to man-
age the elds and collect data; they were
former Davis employees.
Shaws troubles began in 2013, when a
strawberry research-and-marketing com-
mission led a lawsuit against the uni-
versity, claiming that giving Shaw access
to the germplasm would be a classic case
of the fox guarding the henhouse. In
May, Jane Fujishige Yada, a farmer who
is a partner in C.B.C., testied that the
commissions lawyer had said that the
lawsuit was intended to prevent Doug
Shaw from breeding again. She went on,
At that point, I think I got my rst in-
kling that our little C.B.C. company might
be going up against a pretty bigpretty
big ve-hundred-pound gorilla in the
industry. In the months leading up to
Shaws retirement, the university tried to
get him to submit a patent for the unre-
leased cultivars, in order to assert its right
to make use of Shaws intimate knowl-
edge of the plants. Shaw refused.
A. G. Kawamura, a former state sec-
retary of food and agriculture and a major
grower who serves as the president of
C.B.C., believes that the commissions
lawsuit originated with what he has de-
scribed as competitive angst on the part
of the proprietary companies. He told
me, The proprietary companies have an
opportunity to benet from no more
competition from new and improved va-
rieties. When I broached the subject,
the commission denied that Driscolls
had inuenced the lawsuit. Miles Reiter
called the suggestion totally fabricated.
In 2016, frustrated that Shaw couldnt
get a license to breed with the cultivars,
C.B.C. decided to sue the university,
claiming that it had risked the loss and
destruction of the varieties, and has put
them in a black hole, suppressing com-
petition and denying Shaw the benet
of his own inventions. What was at stake,
C.B.C. said, was nothing less than the
future of the strawberry industry. With-
out new cultivars, growers dependent on
the university could not continue. Only
Driscolls and a few other proprietary
companies would survive. Fujishige Yada
testied, If anybodys ever had a straw-
berry in California, it was probably cre-
ated by Doug or Kirk. . . . My concern
was that we wouldnt have those new va-
rieties in the pipeline to grow, as farm-
ers. To others, it just looked like history
repeating itself. Baum, the retired straw-
berry executive, said, If you make any
kind of deal letting Shaw and that group
have those materials, you are going to be
doing the same thing that happened with
the university and Driscolls, giving them
the same kind of a hold that Driscolls
had for fty years. They could easily
eclipse Driscolls.
The university, in a countersuit, ac-
cused Shaw of illegally breeding with the
pipeline cultivars on behalf of his new
company, while still employed by Davis.
Entrusted with the crown jewels, the
university contended, Shaw had attempted
to destroy the public breeding program
in order to enrich himself and his friends.
Steven Knapp is a genomics expert, for-
merly of Monsanto, who was hired as
Daviss new breeder. When I talked to him
by phone not long ago, he was apoplectic
at what he perceived to be Shaws breach
of loyalty. Its one of the worst conspir-
acies Ive ever seen by a faculty member,
he said. They did it while they had the
keys to the castle! They had the plants
in their own hands. Contrary to what
C.B.C. had claimed, he said, the pro-
gram was not dead. Knapp had sequenced
the strawberry genome and secured a
multimillion-dollar grant, and would be
releasing new cultivars in the fall.
I was in the courtroom when the ju-
rys verdict came back, siding decisively
with the university. A DNA expert from
Yale had found that seedlings in C.B.C.s
eld, crossed in Spain in 2014, had uni-
versity parentage. After the verdict, I
drove a couple of hours down to Wat-
sonville to see Kyle VandenLangenberg,
a young breeder at C.B.C., and Lucky
Westwood, who works for a large ship-
per called California Giant Berry Farm,
which is also a partner in the business.
Whatever happened next in the legal
battle with the university, Westwood said,
we dont intend to stop. (Settlement
talks are under way.)
We walked around the eld, lled
with hybrids that Shaw had designed,
including the contentious 2014 Spanish
crosses. Those were in a legal limbo, and
might need to be destroyed. The rulings
and decisions, Shaw later wrote me, had
created obstacles, but they were not in-
surmountable. Long-term success will
depend on what you know, not what
you have, he wrote. I.P., he seemed to
be insisting, lives in the inventors head.
Westwood, however, wasnt thinking
about the Spanish crosses; he was look-
ing for something else. Is this the one?
he said.
The one they cant take away! Vanden-
Langenberg crowed when he came upon
the right row. Like Shaw, who trained
him, VandenLangenberg is color-blind.
With help, he found a ripe berry, red and
plump and nicely shaped. It looked like
a commercial fruitwith luck, it would
be available in ve yearsand, best of
all, it had no U.C. parentage. I asked
where it had come from. Were not going
to talk about it, VandenLangenberg
said. The information was proprietary.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 35

MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and the 2016 Presidential election.
I.
he Ecuadorian Embassy in Lon-
T don is situated at the end of a
wide brick lane, next to the Har-
rods department store, in Knightsbridge.
Sometimes plainclothes police ocers,
or vans with tinted windows, can be found
outside the building. Sometimes there are
throngs of people around it. Sometimes
there is virtually no one, which was the
case in June, 2012, when Julian Assange,
the publisher of WikiLeaks, arrived, dis-
guised as a motorcycle courier, to seek
political asylum. In the ve years since
then, he has not set foot beyond the Em-
bassy. Nonetheless, he has become a global
inuence, proving that with simple dig-
ital tools a single person can craft a new
kind of powera distributed, transna-
tional power, which functions outside
norms of state sovereignty that have held
for centuries. Encouraged by millions of
supporters, Assange has interfered with
the worlds largest institutions. His re-
leases have helped fuel democratic upris-
ingsnotably in Tunisia, where a revo-
lution sparked the Arab Springand they
have been submitted as evidence in hu-
man-rights cases around the world. At
the same time, Assanges methodology
and his motivations have increasingly come
under suspicion. During the Presidential
election last year, he published tens of
thousands of hacked e-mails written by
Democratic operatives, releasing them at
pivotal moments in the campaign. They
provoked strikingly disparate receptions.
I love WikiLeaks, Donald Trump de-
clared, in exultant gratitude. After the
election, Hillary Clinton argued that the
releases had been instru-mental in keep-
ing her from the Oval Oce.
Shortly after Trumps Inauguration, I
ew to London, to visit Assangethe
rst of several trips, and many hours of
interviews, to better understand how he
runs WikiLeaks, how he has been living,
how his political views have changed, and
36 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
PROFILES
BY RAFFI KHATCHADOURIAN
what role Russia has had in his opera-
tion. Even as a new inquiry opened into
possible collusion between Trump-
campaign operatives and Russia, the
WikiLeaks connection, as James Clap-
per, the director of National Intelligence,
put it last year, remained obscure.
Assange is not an easy man to get on
the phone, let alone to see in person. He
is protected by a group of loyal staers
and a shroud of organizational secrecy.
One friend compared him to the central
gure in Philip K. Dicks The Man in
the High Castlea recluse trying to
reset the course of history. In many ways,
the Embassy has become a surreal re-
doubt: a place of extreme seclusion in the
center of a bustling world capital; a pro-
tective stronghold that few can enter,
even though it is the target of millions
of dollars worth of covert surveillance.
The easiest route to the Embassy, if
you are using the London Underground,
is through the Knightsbridge station, next
to Harrods. The building, at 3 Hans Cres-
cent, is a block away. Although Assange
has remained in his sanctum for years,
he is attuned to his immediate surround-
ings: real-estate ownership, the Lambor-
ghinis parked nearby, the habits of Arab
sheikhs descending on local night spots.
The lane between the station and the
Embassy is packed with tourists. Assange
knows the street artists and buskers there
(for years, one has been playing the theme
song to Knots Landing over and over).
At the end of the block, the brick faade
of the Embassy is visibleits tricolor ag
hanging from the white Juliet balcony
where, from time to time, Assange issues
proclamations.
Arriving at the buildings front en-
trance, I rang the buzzer, and a heavy-
set doorman came out, wearing the look
of a bouncer accustomed to turning peo-
ple away.
Im here to see Mr. Assange. His hair was short, white, messy.
Do you have an appointment?
I do.
Ah, he said, brightening. Then come
in. A guard inside the Embassy had me
empty my pockets and my bag onto a
coee table, then scanned my body with
a security wand. Assange rarely allows
visitors to carry electronics, so I was in-
structed to turn over my phone. The
guard then directed me into a small con-
ference room, closing the door behind
me without giving any indication how
long I could expect to wait.
Most visitorseven celebrity friends,
like PJ Harvey and Brian Enomeet
Assange only here. Like the rest of the
Embassy, the room is small, and the win-
dows are cloaked with drapes. There is
a poster, published by the Ecuadorian
ministry of foreign relations, of a tubby,
grinning pre-Columbian gurine. There
are cabinets lled with books, including
dusty rows of a red-bound series, Bib-
lioteca Ecuatoriana Mnima (1960). Near
the ceiling, there is a surveillance cam-
era. Hanging above the conference table
from thin rods are two curious white
orbs, each about the size of a volleyball.
When I rst met Assange, seven years
ago, he was living out of a backpack.
Now he is a man with aides-de-camp.
One of themI will call him Mr. Pi-
cabiaentered the conference room.
Ill rouse Julian, he said, smiling. On
the way out, he ipped some switches
on a tiny black box, and the orbs above
lled the room with white noise. Hell
probably want them on, he said.
After a few minutes, Assange walked
in. Mr. Khatchadourian, he said, seriously,
as he opened the door.I extended my right
hand to shake his, and he responded
by giving me his left hand, palm up, re-
dening the exchange on his terms.He
was once rail thin, but, at forty-six, he is
softening in the middle. He looked pale
one close friend described his skin as
translucent. His hand trembled a little.
Assange was wearing a red shirt, tucked
into black trousers without a belt, and he
Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He has not left the Embassy since he sought asylum there, in June, 2012.
PHOTOGRAPH
BY NADAV KANDER THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 37
seemed groggy. He was ghting battles
around the world; he told me that he
has had a hundred and fty lawyers
work on his behalf. Ecuadors Presiden-
tial elections were just weeks away, and
a key candidate was vowing to evict him
from the Embassy. In Sweden, a crim-
inal investigation into whether he had
committed rape in Stockholm, in 2010,
was dragging on. In the United States,
the possibility loomed of a secret grand-
jury indictment, related to documents
that he had leaked years earlier. Al-
though WikiLeaks has always been a
magnet for criticism, the reaction to his
election publications was unusually se-
vere, with Assange gaining a reputation
in Washington as a Russian intelligence
asset. Wonderful, isnt it! he told me.
These motherfuckers have taken on
board a rhetorical device, and the rhe-
torical device is the fallen man or the
fallen angel. It used to be great, and now
its bad.
Often, the lulls between major pub-
lications are dicult for him. With the
2016 campaign behind him, he was fo-
cussing on a new projecta mysteri-
ous archive that he called Vault 7. The
work was invigorating, but his prolonged
isolation was clearly taking a toll. As-
sange has a fractured tooth, and a shoul-
der injury that requires an MRI, but if
he leaves the Embassy for treatment he
will face certain arrest. At one point,
he was looking for an orthopedic doc-
tor, and doctors were basically refusing
to go in there, Ben Grin, a former
You rst.
British Special Forces soldier who vol-
unteers as his personal trainer, told me.
As a precaution, Ecuador tried to ne-
gotiate a safe passage by which As-
sange could be admitted to a hospital
without compromising his diplomatic
protections, but the negotiations fell
through. In the Embassy, a whiteboard
lists the complex procedures involved
should he face a medical emergency.
Assanges physical universe for the
past ve years has been roughly three
hundred and thirty square feet, compris-
ing his private quarters and a few rooms
that he shares with Ecuadorian sta. Its
like living in a space shuttle, a friend of
his told me. Out of concerns about se-
curity, and also perhaps because paparazzi
occasionally wait for him on the street,
he rarely parts the drapes in the daytime,
or stands at the balcony. He lives in a
continuous state of hypervigilance, be-
lieving that the Embassy could be stormed
at any moment. Shortly after he arrived,
British authorities threatened to strip the
Embassy of its diplomatic protections
and apprehend him by force. Ecuadors
foreign minister responded, We want to
be very clear, were not a British colony.
Assange told me that, preparing for im-
minent arrest, he readied a pair of hand-
cus so that he could physically secure
himself to the Ecuadorian consul. After
that, British ocers stationed outside
taunted him by banging on the walls at
four in the morning, and for a time As-
sange slept in a dierent room each night.
The uniformed men were removed
in 2015. In their place, Scotland Yard
initiated more intensive covert monitor-
ing.Anyone familiar with Assanges world
view knows that this was far more psy-
chologically stressful for him. He does
not like to admit vulnerability, but in 2015
a specialist on isolation and trauma vis-
ited him and was struck by the way he
was changing. Pointing out clutter accu-
mulating in his bedroom, the doctor asked
if Assange registered the mess. Never
known for tidiness, Assange explained
that his landscape was becoming a blur.
The walls of the Embassy are as famil-
iar as the interior of my eyelids, he said.
I see them, but I do not see them. With
reluctance, he admitted that he has
suered bouts of depression, and that his
sleep was disrupted by anxiety. He often
stays awake for eighteen, or twenty, or
twenty-two hours, until he collapses from
exhaustion. Increasingly, the passage of
time is dicult for him to gauge. Noth-
ing is before or after, he told the doctor.
There are diminishing reference points.
Yet Assange has developed an acute sen-
sitivity to his environment. One evening,
he told me, I have a sixth sense of the
dynamics of the Embassy. He raised a
hand in an operatic gesture, as if hold-
ing a wand. Just based on environmen-
talthe ow of the air, the little rum-
bles, people walking, typing.
efore Assange gained notoriety, he
B lived a reclusive, rootless life. While
he was growing up, in Australia, his
mother moved the family dozens of times,
and the habit of motion seems to have
persisted; he once wrote software on the
Trans-Siberian Express. When I rst got
to know him, in 2010, he was traversing
Europe, in possession of what he claimed
was a roster of modest international leaks:
documents about the BBC, Canadian
detainees, Hungarian nance, Romanian
police, Israeli diplomacy, and some Rus-
sian and Chinese stu that I cant read.
None of it compared, though, to the trove
of classied documents that a young
Army private, Chelsea Manning, had
just provided him: half a million mili-
tary records from Iraq and Afghanistan,
and a quarter of a million diplomatic ca-
bles from the State Department, among
other things. Suddenly, he was walking
around with gigabytes of secrets belong-
ing to a superpower, and his worry about
being surveilled had grown extreme.
Theres all sorts of aggressive intelli-
gence action happening, he told me.
Lots of spying. He was trying to y to
Iceland, to connect with activists there,
and he suggested that I come immedi-
ately to meet him.
A few days later, I stepped o an air-
port shuttle bus at Reykjavks station
a little after dawn, uncertain whether I
would nd him, but there he was, dressed
in a silver full-body snowsuit. (He had
been out all night with friends to see a
volcano that had recently erupted.) You
didnt call, he chided me, in a way that
mixed humor and irritation. We climbed
a hill from the bus station into town,
and on the way to his base, in a rented
clapboard house, we got lost; Assange
has a terrible sense of direction. That
morning, he showed me an Army video
that Manning had given him, and we
went through it moment by moment.
He had known me for only a few hours,
but back then he trusted journalists
readily. A few months later, I wrote
about the footage, which he released as
Collateral Murder, and about his per-
sonal history, in a piece for this maga-
zine titled No Secrets. I did not imag-
ine that there would be so many secrets
to come.
Since then, in addition to Mannings
releases, he has published millions of doc-
uments, including hacked e-mails from
corporations and public gures, interna-
tional trade agreements, and foreign gov-
ernment records. Some of these publica-
tions have brought real harm to the
documents owners, some have altered
public perceptions about war and state
power, and some have been damaging to
individual privacy, with no public benet.
In his connement, Assange has become
a quixotic cultural icon, helping to give
the solitary act of whistle-blowing the
contours of a movement. Dr. Martens has
issued boots in his name, sculptors have
cast him in alloy, and lyricists have me-
morialized him in song. He has inspired
a Bond villain, and the ction of Jona-
than Franzen; he has mixed with A-list
musicians, like Lady Gaga, and A-list dis-
senters, like Noam Chomsky. At the same
time, he has had to navigate myriad legal
and managerial complications: multiple
F.B.I. investigations, crippling sta muti-
nies, venomous ghts with journalists.
Whether you see Assange as a fallen
man depends on how you viewed him
to begin with. He has detractors who be-
lieve that he is a criminal, or a maniac,
or both, and supporters who consider
him an immaculate revolutionary. There
have been calls for his assassination, and
for him to be given a Nobel Peace Prize.
Assange often describes himself in sim-
ple termsas a fearless activistbut his warfare, his closest friends strove to oer
character is complicated, and hard to rec-
oncile with his considerable power. He
is not merely the kind of person who will
wear socks with holes; he is the kind of
person who will wear socks with holes
and rain fury upon anyone who men-
tions the holes in public. He can be mis-
trustful to the point of paranoia, but he
can be recklessly frank. He tends to view
human behavior as self-interested, driven
by a Nietzschean will to power, but he
runs an organization founded on the idea
that individuals can be selessly coura-
geous. He is a seeker of hard, objective
truths who often appears to be unable to
see past his own realities. He can be quick
in the moment, an impressive tactician,
and he is often fairly blind to the long
arcs of strategy.
Assange is a dicult person, and he
knows it. The people who care for him
see a driven, obstinate man who has
constructed around himself a maze of
deections, but they see this behavior
as evidence of vulnerability, rather than
of malice or narcissism. They recognize
that his urge to resist conformity is
often greater than his urge to be un-
derstood. Beyond the noise of his per-
sona, they see the chief custodian of a
technology that can be used for trans-
formative good; whatever the hostility
that he provokes, they maintain that
there is no way his work could proceed
without angering people.
Assanges harshest critics know him
personally, too. They see that, beneath
his maze of deections, there is a man
with no core beliefs except in augment-
ing his own power. They see someone
with a romantic view of himself in the
worldhe once wrote, The surest es-
cape from the mundane is to teleport into
the tragic realmwho is also titanically
self-absorbed, and desperate never to ap-
pear reactive. Assange told me in 2010,
When you are much brighter than the
people you are hanging around with,
which I was as a teen-ager, two things
happen. First of all, you develop an enor-
mous ego. Secondly, you start to think
that everything can be solved with just a
bit of thinkingbut ideology is too sim-
ple to address how things work.
t the start of this year, as the alle-
A gations grew that Assange had fa-
cilitated an act of Russian information
a protective circle of support. This whole-
sale campaign to portray Julian as a sup-
porter of Trump has done a great deal of
damage, Yanis Varoufakis, the former
Greek nance minister, told me. His de-
fenders have had to withstand blistering
attacks from critics.I dont let them win,
another friend assured Assange.
One afternoon, while I was at the Em-
bassy, Pamela Anderson, the former Bay-
watch star and a vegan activist, walked
in, dressed in a demure tweed overcoat,
and took a seat in the lobby. Since last
October, Anderson has been stopping by
the Embassy regularly. Assange led her
to the conference room, and they spoke
for about an hourtheir conversation
disguised by white noise, though As-
sanges voice dominated, in long solilo-
quies. (Im being persecuted! he declared
at one point, loud enough to be audible
through the walls.) After their meeting,
the two emerged. Anderson held a note-
book and a pen. Hours go by, and I take
a lot of notes, she later told me.
Anderson and Assange have been
dropping hints to fuel speculation of a
romance; certainly, a juicy tabloid story
would make for a convenient diversion
from a run of withering press. But, as a
close Assange supporter explained, The
Ecuadorians are trying to run their Em-
bassy. They are quite a Catholic nation,
and so the idea of him having his girl-
friends come in is quite a dicult one. I
dont think it really happens. In the con-
ference room, Assange and Anderson had
met under the unblinking gaze of the sur-
veillance camera.
Anderson told me that she was a
bridge between Assanges cloistered
world and life beyond it. But it was a bridge
that primarily went one way. I was in the
rain forest in Brunei, and I was at home
in Canada and it was snowing, and I made
these videos and sent them to him, and
it devastated him, she said. Seeing the
great outdoors is very dicult for him. So
thats something that I did wrong. She
defended him as a visionary, a David cast-
ing stones at Goliaths. Hes a political
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 39
prisoner, she said. He is the hard line viewed the Iraqi leader and came to be- garded the theories as silly, but then he
and I always say that there has to be an lieve that he had been misunderstood. I became concerned that they were dis-
extreme for there to be a middle ground. know youll love it, Gittoes said. For the couraging supporters from donating, or
She shared some adoring odes that she next three hours, he photographed As- whistle-blowers from submitting mate-
had been writing: sange, making studies for an oversized rial. He considered distributing a video
diptych: two canvases, each seven feet tall of himself reading sports scores, but vid-
As for Romance and about as wide. They spent a good eos could be faked. Supporters requested
How impossible it is to
have feelings for deal of time trying to gure out where that he stand at the balcony, but that
Someone completely his hands should go, to avoid any un- didnt really solve the problem, since the
Unavailable wanted symbolism. proof for most people would be a photo,
Not because of his heart One half of the diptych was based on and this could be doctored. His two selves
But his circumstances. a conversation that Assange had with could not be reconciled.
Constantly under threat Gittoes and Rose, one evening in 2015. I can see the painting, Gittoes wrote
Threatened to be killed. They sat around a toolbox that Assange in his diary. He imagined Assange sur-
was using for a table in his bedroom, and rounded by images of himself on televi-
As Anderson left, Assange asked me, ate takeout sushi and drank sake, and sion screens. It will have a mystical qual-
Have you met my cat? It darted past us. after the sake was nished Assange pro- ity with the screens seeming both like
Is this the one with the Twitter ac- duced an armful of half-consumed bot- ghosts and a personal nightmare. For
count? I said. tles of liquorgifts from other visitors. several days, he lugged the canvases across
It is, he said. Its Michi, which is Late in the evening, with everyone Londonto the Frontline Club, where
Ecuadorian for cat. The animals name sprawled on a rug, he spoke about Edge- he painted in a private dining salon until
was in ux, he explained. When Castro walkers. Its a Julian thing, Gittoes ex- he was asked to pack up, and then to a
died, we started calling it Cat-stro. As- plained to me. He reckons that many studio on the citys outskirts. Eventually,
sange had told the tabloids that the cat people think they walk on the edge, liv- he lugged them to the Embassy, to paint
was a gift from his children. (He has sev- ing a risky life, but an Edgewalker really Assanges eyes from life.
eral, some of whom live in France, under walks on the edge, and that he is a real Wow, Assange said, pointing to the
assumed names.) But someone who Edgewalker. Gittoes had worked out a half of the diptych featuring the many
knows him well told me a dierent story: painting that would depict this by hav- versions of himself. Each was painted to
Julian stared at the cat for about half an ing Assange gaze over a precipice that represent a dierent emotion. The angry
hour, trying to gure out how it could be was crafted from smashed bits of mirror. Julian looks a bit like terried Julian. I
useful, and then came up with this: Yeah, The other half of the diptych was in- dont know if it could be made to look
lets say its from my children. For a time, tended to capture a curious existential less frightened.
he said it didnt have a name because quality of Assanges connement: on the I was kind of in a state of shock when
there was a competition in Ecuador, with one hand, he was estranged from the I saw you, Gittoes said. Youve got a
schoolchildren, on what to name him. hundred and ninety-seven million square much deeper face right now. Youve
Everything is P.R.everything. feet of the planet outside the Embassy; changed a bit because you are under so
on the other, his likeness and his words much pressurethe furrows.
n hour into my rst visit, Mr. Pica- were continuously circling the globe in I dont mind looking old, Assange
A bia interrupted to tell Assange that
guests had arrived: George Gittoes, an
said. Thats not where my value is. My
value is looking tough.
Australian artist, and his wife, Hellen You want to look tough? Gittoes
Rose. The plan was for Assange to set asked. He set up tins of acrylic on news-
aside his work and allow Gittoes, an old papers, while Rose went to get takeout
family friend, to paint his portrait. Git- from a local chef who wanted to support
toes has spent his life in war-torn coun- Assange by making them all crab lin-
triesRwanda, Somalia, Cambodia, Nic- guine. When she returned, she asked if
araguaand currently lives in Afghan- she could lm Gittoes painting Assange
istan. He is way more interesting than digital form, refracted through the biases for a documentary about the project which
meway more, Assange said. of supporters and detractors. Last Octo- was in development. Id like to have a
Gittoes was dressed in black. With a ber, just before the U.S. election, the de- moment where you say to George, Oh,
graying, neatly groomed beard and long gree to which the two realities were in- thats a great painting, she said. And
hair draping over his shoulders, he looked tertwined became evident when the George just says
like an elderly member of the Allman Embassy cut o Assanges access to the I would never aspire to have a great
Brothers Band. Rose has dark hair and Internet. With Assanges digital self gone, painting, Assange said. Thats vain.
an easy smile. The two greeted Assange conspiracy theories spread that he had O.K., Rose said, and suggested that
with hugs, and Gittoes handed him a been kidnapped or killed. (The Daily Star the two men merely greet each other.
book: Debrieng the President: The In- reported, SHOCK CLAIMS: Julian As- It cant be public, Assange said, his
terrogation of Saddam Hussein, by John sange murdered by CIA who have hi- tone sharpening.There cannot be an image
Nixon, a former C.I.A. agent who inter- jacked WikiLeaks. ) Assange at rst re- of Julian Assange looking at himself in
40 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
a painting.Thats madnessabsolute mad-
ness. That image is much worse for me
than the painting is positive. Understand?
After much discussion, someone sug-
gested that the two men be photographed
together, with the canvas turned toward
a wall, and Assange assented. I think its
not too bad, he said. And its O.K. that
my character is broader a bit, as some-
one who appreciates art.
Im going to get some forks for the
linguine, Rose said.
While everyone ate pasta from Sty-
rofoam containers, Assange explained the
mechanics of his diet. Usually, someone
he trusts brings him food. It has to be
brought in discreetly, he said. If it is all
from the same place, it is a security risk.
He rolled some linguine around his fork.
I dont want to sound paranoid. The
Embassy has security sta, and they have
concluded that it is too dangerous. The
worry is not that he will be fatally poi-
soned, he said; it is that he will become Whos been nibbling at my kale house?
ill enough to require a trip to the hospi-
tal and thus lose his asylum status. He
ate his forkful, and added, Its the best

linguine in Ecuador in London.
me, WikiLeaks is providing a reference is not getting enough support to eat.In
II. set to undeniably true information about Assanges view, the donations provide a
the world. But what if, in the interest of level of editorial independence that few
or some time, Assange has adopted source protection, he was advancing a mainstream competitors have.
F the media habits of the powerful, re-
stricting his appearances to brief, high-
falsehood that was more signicant than
the reference set itself? Arguably, his elec-
Assange has increasingly used the
money to oer rewards for information:
prole television interviews, conversa- tion publications only underscored what fty thousand dollars for footage of a
tions with friendly interlocutors, managed was known about the Democratic Na- hospital bombed in Afghanistan; a hun-
press events, and Twitter. On Novem- tional Committee and Hillary Clinton. dred and twenty thousand for documents
ber 5th, days before the election, in a TV His denials, meanwhile, potentially ob- about international trade negotiations.
interview with one of his ercest de- fuscated an act of information warfare When Trump implied that he had taped
fenders, he declared, We can say that between two nuclear-armed powers. his White House meetings with James
the Russian government is not the source That the stakes were so high was a Comey, Assange tweeted, WikiLeaks
of the election e-mailsa denial that potent indication of the immense power oers US $100K for the Trump-Comey
did nothing to quell a growing suspi- that WikiLeaks has acquired since it was tapes. At one stroke, he appeared to en-
cion, even among close supporters, that founded, in 2006. Assange projects an dorse Trumps bogus claim about the
he was not being honest. He says theyre image of his organization as small and tapes and also implied that WikiLeaks
not Russians, one of them told me. embattledas if it had not changed much was politically agnostic by seeking them.
Well, he cant know that. It could be since the days when he and a few friends More signicantly, he used the occasion
his source was a front for the Russians. were the only people involved. But today, to encourage supporters to donate, so
I think the truth is important, however he told me, the WikiLeaks annual bud- that he could purchase the tapeswhich,
its acquired, but if he knew it was the get runs in the millions of dollars, sup- unsurprisingly, proved not to exist.
Russians, and didnt declare it, that would plied partly by donations that are fun- The idea that WikiLeaks has prob-
be a problem for me. nelled through N.G.O.s.In 2016 alone, lems with accountability sends Assange
The problem was obvious. WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks raised hundreds of thousands into angry ts. Look at all the account-
like many journalistic organizations, has of dollars from donors in the United ability that is thrown at us! he told me
long insisted on keeping its sources se- States.He has money in tax havens, one in the Embassy one evening, nodding
cret. However, Assange was not merely colleague told me. They have so much at the walls to indicate hidden surveil-
maintaining silence; he was actively push- money in bitcoin its ridiculousmean- lance devices. Every second of every
ing a narrative about his sourcing, in which while, there are all these poor people who day! He cited the government scrutiny,
Russia was not involved. He once told are chipping in money who feel like he and relentless journalists, always ready
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 41
to pounce when he makes a misstep.
Raising his voice, he said, WikiLeaks
is probably the most held-to-account
organization on earth!
hen WikiLeaks was small, As-
W sange was less angry. His general
view of American power was one of sus-
picion rather than contempt. His wry
sense of humor was more readily appar-
ent, as was his optimism. During my visit
to Iceland, in 2010, we were seated side
by side when a submission came into the
anonymous WikiLeaks in-box. He gig-
gled and, in a mock-sober tone, announced
its importance: someone had submitted
the Declaration of Independence.
A few weeks earlier, just as Chelsea
Manning was uploading the last of her
disclosures to him, he had assured her
that they were remaking the world for
the better.
Ill slip into darkness for a few years,
she said. Let the heat die down.
Wont take a few years at the pres-
ent rate of change, he assured her.
True, she said.
Almost feels like the Singularity is
coming, theres such acceleration, he
said.Assange was once a member of a
transhumanist discussion group; given
the right software, he believed, a revolu-
tionary reordering of human aairs could
be possible. His vision for WikiLeaks re-
sembled a Silicon Valley startupa tech-
nological creation intended to disrupt the
normal way of doing business.
Conventional journalism is often an
incremental, inecient process, built on
chains of personal trust: between sources
and reporters, reporters and editors, ed-
itors and readers. Assange has dicul-
ties with the messiness of trust, and in
WikiLeaks he invented a system that
made it largely unnecessary. By design,
the WikiLeaks site prevents him from
knowing where submissions come from,
so there is no need to trust that he will
keep a sources identity a secret. (In prac-
tice, he readily accepts material in less
than anonymous ways.) There is no need
to trust his editorial judgment, either, be-
cause he has vowed to publish everything
in full, in as pristine a form as possible.
WikiLeaks, in Assanges ideal, is a pop-
ulist machine, delivering unmediated
secret information directly to readers.
With the authority of his publica-
tions anchored in validating rather than
in editing, Assange can do things that
no newspaper editor can. He could say
that the Smurfs built the pyramids, and
the documents he posts would seem no
less valid. This made it easy for him to
take on the role of activist impresario, to
frame his releases around his world view,
even to use deception. Tellingly, he often
calls the ocial reaction to his publica-
tions counter-spin.
The release of Collateral Murder,
in 2010and the knowledge that there
were more consequential releases from
Mannings cache to comesent As-
sange on an exhilarated high as he vis-
ited cable-news studios in Washington
and New York. In a hired car taking him
to The Colbert Report, he spoke to
me about developing a public persona.
Its going to take a lot of eort to main-
tain sensiblyso that it promotes the
goals of the organization, he said.As-
sange was a man accustomed to wear-
ing a T-shirt until the people around
him asked him to change it. Now he
was suddenly attuned to fashion. Back-
stage, he asked a stylist about his shirt.
It looks good, she said.
I always look good in this shirt, he
told her. Its me! Its not the shirt.
You look great, she said.
But two months later his triumphant
mood abruptly ended. In June, Wired re-
ported that Manning had been arrested
because of her work with WikiLeaks.
She had confessed to a well-known for-
mer hacker that she had submitted rec-
ords in bulk to Assange; the hacker, in
turn, routed the information to military
counter-intelligence, and then shared her
confessionswritten on an encrypted
chat servicewith the magazine. Assange
was furious. Wired needs a bullet, he
told me. Manning, he indicated, was
likely able to take care of herself. Anti-
interrogation training probably kicked in
immediately, he said. What worried him
was that the government now knew which
documents he had. The magazine had re-
ported that the cache contained at least
two hundred and sixty thousand State
Department cables. If this crazy state-
ment about 260K diplomatic cables is be-
lieved, well be fucked, he said.
Is the 260K true, anyway?I asked.
Ive already denied it, he said.
I know. I mean in its essence.
Not really, he said. Before the end
of the year, Assange himself proved this
to be untrue: Manning had merely
rounded up from 251,287.
Ill be in hiding now, he told me.
The Pentagon had indicated that it was
trying to nd himWed like his coper-
ation in this, an ocial saidand he
thought he was being hunted. He backed
out of an event in Las Vegas, where he
was scheduled to speak. If he did not act,
he feared, he would be an easy target for
an illegal attack. He was ready to pub-
lish everything Manning had given him
hundreds of classied records that could
have endangered people around the world.
They can see my only option is publish
or perish, he said. Hence, we have our
ngers on the go button.
Is there an in-between? I asked. Par-
tially publishing to show that you are
holding back bits that might endanger?
Wed like to, he said. Theres no federal government, who worked around
time for harm minimization. He indi-
cated that he would not allow himself to
be captured before releasing all that Man-
ning had submittedeven if it meant
causing the destruction of WikiLeaks.
Is that good chess? I asked, perplexed.
Sure, he said. If you are good at
leading with unpredictability, then cre-
ate a board arrangement that suits your
abilities better than your opponent.
A ssange left the United States. His
anxieties relaxed a little, and he ap-
peared at an event in Brussels. Journal-
ists from the Guardian found him there,
and, after arranging a meeting at his
hotel, they pitched a collaboration to
publish the rest of the Manning mate-
rial. We are going to put you on the
moral high groundso high that youll
need an oxygen mask, one of them told
him. Youll be up there with Nelson
Mandela and Mother Teresa. They wont
be able to arrest you. Nor can they shut
down your Web site.
Assange listened, sipping orange juice.
Just before the meeting, he had told me
that he had no interest in turning Wiki-
Leaks into a journalistic operationthat
the idea of journalism made him want
to reach for a gun. We come not to save
journalism but to destroy it, he said.
Doesnt deserve to live. Too debased.
Has to be ground down into ashes be-
fore a new structure can be formed.
The basic asymmetric information be-
tween writer and reader just encourages
lying.But he believed that his alia-
tion with the Guardianand, soon af-
terward, with the Times, among other
publicationsoered him a shield, that
he was creating a patronage network.
The rst of Mannings databases, pub- he had not anticipated. Assange slept
lished as the Afghan War Diary, came
out that summer, and were understand-
ably controversial. Redactions were done
hastily, in large part because Assange did
not prioritize them. At the last moment,
under pressure from his collaborators, he
withheld fteen thousand reports that
were most likely to contain details about
Afghan informants, until they could
be carefully analyzed. But hundreds of
Afghan people, many living in remote
places, were still identiable. The release
prompted the Secretary of Defense to
set up a task force of more than a hun-
dred people, linked to agencies across the
are reopened by another prosecutor. In
the clock, seven days a week. Assange
portrayed the task force as a war room
plotting oensive measures against him;
in fact, its focus was to mitigate harmful
repercussions of his publications. The
unit searched the database for people
who had been put at risk and forwarded
the information to commanders in Af-
ghanistan, who sent soldiers to nd them,
sometimes in hostile places. They located
many people, but many could not be
found, or were in environments too dan-
gerous to reach. Their fate is unknown.
I think there was harm, a key member
of the task force told me. There was tre-
mendous cost and risk. We added addi-
tional risk because we had a moral obli-
gation to notify people.
At the same time, the records oered
an unprecedented systemic view of the
militarys operations in Afghanistan.
Journalists used them to produce sto-
ries about the Talibans rising aggres-
siveness and the shifting American re-
sponse, which relied increasingly on
drone strikes and C.I.A. paramilitary
operations. They found data on a Spe-
cial Forces unit that hunted down sev-
enty top militantsand on how such
operations, along with everyday patrols,
often went deadly wrong.From the doc-
uments, one could discern a portrait of
the conict that was bleaker than the
ocial account.
After the release, Assange, again in
a triumphant mood, travelled to Swe-
den, which has a strong tradition of
media freedom. In Stockholm, he met
with politicians, hoping to secure
support for him to establish a base of
operations for WikiLeaks there.But the
trip proved to be fateful in a way that
with two women, who later reached out
to each other and together went to the
police to see if Assange could be com-
pelled to take an H.I.V. test. Hearing
the descriptions of their experiences, the
police decided to draw up a criminal
complaintfor rape in one instance and
molestation in the other. A prosecutor
reviewed the details and decided to
downgrade the rape investigation, ex-
plaining, I dont believe there is reason
to suspect that he has committed rape.
But the inquiry did not end there. In
Sweden, about ten per cent of discon-
tinued investigations that are appealed
Assanges case, the women appealed, and
the investigation was revived, on Sep-
tember 1, 2010. Speaking with a reporter,
Assange said, We have been warned
that the Pentagon, for example, is think-
ing of deploying dirty tricks to ruin us.
His attorney spoke of dark forces that
were behind the investigation, noting,
The honeytrap has been sprung.
hat happened in Sweden began
W a long argument, which has be-
come central to Assanges current legal
uncertainty and to his public persona.
Joseph Campbell, the scholar of mythol-
ogy, once sketched the fundamental struc-
ture of the heros journey: departure, ini-
tiation, return. Assange takes a quasi-neo-
Marxist view of religion, but he is at-
tuned to master narratives. He has framed
the events in Sweden as his initiation, a
nearly supernatural ordeal, to be over-
come on his path back to the every-
day world.
In his telling, the dark forces ema-
nate from Washington, which was at-
tempting to take revenge for his publi-
cations, and to keep him from releasing
the rest of the Manning archive. Assange
left Sweden on September 27th. The
Swedish prosecution authority had in-
formed him that there were no legal ob-
stacles to his leaving, but that the inves-
tigation was ongoing. Back in London,
he focussed on the Manning submis-
sions. In late November, he promised
followers, The coming months will see
a new world, where global history is re-
dened. A week later, he began to re-
lease the State Department cables.
The publication, which became
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 43
known as Cablegate, was perhaps the
most signicant of the Manning re-
leases. The contents of the documents
had obvious news valuea secret bomb-
ing campaign in Yemen, or the massa-
cre of a family by U.S. troops in Iraq
but, unlike with Mannings other
submissions, the richly detailed nature
of the material made the trove an en-
during resource for journalists, activ-
ists, and historians. Assange told me
that among his favorite cables was one
that documented how an independent
Kurdish TV station in Denmark be-
came a pawn among European coun-
tries vying for inuence in NATO. He
saw in the cable a clear expression of
Realpolitik at work.
For American ocials around the
world, the publication created immedi-
ate disturbances in delicate relationships.
Ecuadors leftist President, Rafael Cor-
rea, for instance, expelled the U.S. Am-
bassador over a cable that described high-
level police corruption there. In the
United States, political gures from
the two major parties delivered a fu-
sillade of criticism, with both Mitch
McConnell and Joe Biden calling As-
sange a high-tech terrorist. Conser-
vative commentators on Fox News and
in the Washington Times called for his
assassination. Hillary Clinton declared,
Lets be clear. This disclosure is not
just an attack on Americas foreign-
policy interests. It is an attack on the
international community.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department
launched a criminal investigation,
seeking to prosecute Assange as a co-
conspirator to Manning under the Es-
pionage Acta hundred-year-old law,
designed to prosecute spying, that the
Obama Administration had revived to
deter government whistle-blowing. A
grand jury was impanelled in Virginia,
and subpoenas were led to obtain pri-
vate communications. Agents ques-
tioned people who were aliated with
Assange.Suddenly, the surveillance
that he often imagined was becom-
ing real.
The Espionage Act had never been
applied to a publisher, and with good
reason. Sources who leak classied se-
crets are breaking the law; they make
a judgment that exposing the informa-
tion is worth the risk of prosecution.
But an investigation that targeted
44 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
WikiLeaks would necessarily be based
on a dierent idea: that the act of pub-
lication was also criminal, a principle
that would inevitably interfere with
core First Amendment protections.
Many journalistsmyself included
argued against the investigation.
Whether Assange handled the Man-
ning releases well or poorly, his work
on it was not criminal.
The Justice Department, it turns
out, held the same misgivings about
the Espionage Act that journalists did.
The biggest problem was what some
of us called the New York Times prob-
lem, Matthew Miller, a former Jus-
tice Department ocial, told me. How
do you prosecute Julian Assange for
publishing classied information and
not the New York Times? I think it
went on for a long time because pros-
ecutors were hoping they would nd
some obvious criminal act that could
support a charge, but it was evident
pretty early that, absent that, there was
no clear way to bring this case. Within
months, the department had quietly
allowed the case to stall.
Assange began to cast the Swedish
investigation as an extension of the
angry American response to his work.
The Swedes, we understand, have said
if he comes to Sweden they will defer
their interest in him to the Americans,
his lawyer, Mark Stephens, argued at
the time. So it does seem to me what
we have here is nothing more than
holding charges. Assange refused to
return to Sweden, explaining that he
feared that he would be delivered to
the United States. The day after he
published Cablegate, Sweden issued a
European warrant for his arrest, and
the United Kingdom initiated proceed-
ings to extradite him.
he day that the arrest warrant was
T announced, Assange sent me a mes-
sage with a smiley-face emoticon. Im
in my element, he told me. Battles with
governments come easy. Battles with
treacherous women are another matter.
It was our rst conversation about the
investigation in Sweden, and I asked him
what the case was about. It perplexed
me to begin with, he said. I understand
where theyre at now, though. He spoke
of Swedens very, very poor judicial sys-
tem, weakened by external political med-
dling, careerism, and a culture of crazed
radical feminist ideology. More import-
ant, though, the case was a matter of in-
ternational politics. Sweden is a U.S. sa-
trapy, he said.
If you did not want to see Assange
involved in an ugly sex-crimes investi-
gation, the idea that the real issue was
geopolitics had an immediate appeal; in
2010, the British journalist and activist
Jemima Khan, an early celebrity sup-
porter, noted that the allegations were
highly suspicious.
But Assanges argument made little
sense. The Swedish extradition process
requires the approval of the nations Su-
preme Court; thus, the scenario that
Assange was proposinga geopoliti-
cal plot to use his sex-crimes case as a
pretext to deliver him to the United
Stateswould require at least three
high justices to act as conspirators. If
this were not reason enough for skep-
ticism, under the rules governing Eu-
ropean arrest warrants Sweden could
not extradite Assange to the U.S. with-
out British approval; in other words,
shipping him to Stockholm would only
add a layer of bureaucratic obstacles for
Washington.In any event, Swedish law
prohibits extraditions for political
crimes, which include espionage, and
for cases eligible for the death penalty.
Assange and his lawyers often raise
the possibility that he will be rendered
from Sweden to the United States. The
precedent they cite is an incident, just
after 9/11, in which two Egyptian refu-
gees were detained by the Swedish se-
curity services and then turned over to
the C.I.A., which delivered them to
Egypt, where they were tortured. The
episode led to public outrage and a par-
liamentary probe, which concluded that
it had violated Swedish law. But, even
if the process were legal, Assange is not
a terrorist, and extraordinary renditions
do not deliver captives to civilian court-
rooms in Virginia.
I raised Assanges argument with
half a dozen former senior U.S. o-
cialsfrom the White House, the State
Department, and law-enforcement and
intelligence agencieswho were in a
position to know the details of U.S. pol-
icy on WikiLeaks. All said that they
knew of no plan to pressure Sweden. A
member of the Defense Department
task force told me that when the Swedes
reopened the investigation it was news
to his unit, and not terribly momen-
tous. A PowerPoint presentation for the
days morning brieng, which I obtained
with a Freedom of Information Act re-
quest, showed that there was just one
slide about the Swedish case; it had four
bullet pointsall cribbed from Reuters.
Another one of these ocials told me,
The allegation swirling out there that
somehow this was dreamed up by the
Americans to get him to Sweden, so he
could end up back in America He
stopped and exhaled. Think about where
this was happening. He is in the U.K.
our absolute closest partner with respect
to all things intelligence-gathering. And
the perception that somehow Sweden
was a place that American ocials would
want him, as opposed to the U.K., is on
its face so ludicrous. The rst link that
people are making in this argument, which
is not true, falls apart right there. It re-
ally was not a thing.
Dwight Eisenhower is said to have
once declared, If you cant solve a prob-
lem, enlarge it. Assange had taken a per-
sonal legal crisis and blown it up into an
international incident: he had teleported
himself from the mundane into the tragic
realm. A number of WikiLeaks volun- look out over the sea, and they dont injustice. When a judge, fearing that
teers urged him to step down until the perceive that if there are waves on top Assange posed a ight risk, ordered him
investigation was over. Instead, he en- there must be a body of water under- sent to Wandsworth Prison, he saw a
meshed support for WikiLeaks with sup- neath holding the waves up. When I press opportunity. The Guardian re-
port for his own case; he blurred the dis- see something, I think, What is it that porters had promised to make him a
tinction between the broader mission of I am not seeing that this thing must Mandela; here was his Robben Island
transparency and genuine legal questions be produced by? moment. Dont get me out too soon,
about his personal behavior. The tactic Assanges habit of describing his he told Mark Stephens, believing that
was half brilliant: the more the Swedish organization as suering a constant he needed a month in jail for maximum
prosecutor demonstrated that she did not existential emergency, of blaming his political impact. He told me that he
like being challenged by a celebrity, the personal legal diculties on nefarious was placed in solitary connement: You
more she appeared to act in an irregular external forces, of making the acceptance are living inside the state, physically.
way. Yet it was also half blind. It was a of narratives a litmus test for support, There is nothing to gauge the passage
move with no clear endgame, and it cre- had an uncomfortable ring. At one point, of time. You write, and the paper lls
ated complications for those who might Jemima Khan criticized him for surround- up. You read, and the pages you turn
want to defend the WikiLeaks cause.As- ing the Swedish case with his own my- add up. Quickly, I saw that isolation
sange began to speak as though he were thology, and warned of an Australian L. was interfering with the order of my
a dissident. You know they tried to get Ron Hubbard in the making. Khan once thinking. But I discovered that through
an order to put me in solitary conne- recalled that after she decided to co- repeated exercise you can change the
ment, held incommunicado, even from produce a documentary about WikiLeaks, tension in your legs, altering the lactic
my own lawyers? he told me. Then he Assange told her, If its a fair lm, it will acid, to create a clock in your body and
shifted into ghting mode. Were only be pro-Julian Assange. order the passage of time. Once I had
getting started. Beware of the celebrity who refers done that, I felt I had broken the back
to himself in the third person, she of solitary. After ten days, Assanges
ssange is an atheist, but at times warned. lawyers secured his release, with nearly
A he adopts the mode of a mystica
seer of deep conspiracies. Human be-
From London, Assange fought the
Swedish extradition request in the
four hundred thousand dollars in bail.
Remanded to house arrest, Assange
ings are not very good at perceiving courts, and in the media, turning it into moved into Ellingham Hall, the estate
the unseen, he once told me. They a battle against Western hypocrisy and of Vaughan Smith, a freelance video
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 45
journalist and the founder of the Front-
line Club. Ellingham Hall was a gilded
cagea beautiful old home in the Brit-
ish countrysideand Smith was an in-
dulgent host. He had covered the fall
of Yugoslavia, and he saw in Assange
the fearlessness and the vulnerability
he had seen in correspondents there.
Isnt it part of the balance sheet in this
changing age that the digital world can
provide us an Assange and the N.S.A.
at the same time? he told me. And to
have journalism turn its back on that,
simply because hes not part of us, or
simply because we dont like the result?
Core members of the WikiLeaks
team moved in, working in round-the-
clock cycles, but the Smith family im-
posed some basic rules: no computers at
the dinner table. Assange, wearing an
electronic security bracelet, held court
over a stream of visitorsjournalists, ac-
tivists, celebrities. A nancier who came
to lunch and was dismayed by his clothes
sent over custom-made suits. When As-
sanges fortieth birthday came, Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie were reportedly in-
vited to a party; some supporters sought
to steer him from the attractions of fame.
Im not sure who else is going, but the
initial invitation did not give train in-
formation, but did tell you where to land
your private plane, Craig Murray, a for-
mer British Ambassador to Uzbekistan
and a whistle-blower, wrote on his blog.
He wondered if WikiLeaks was going
astray: I hope when Assanges celebrity
dies down, those helicopter riders will
still support him.
Internally, Assange had been cop-
ing with an organization in turmoil. As
the stress grew, he threatened volun-
teers, and elevated people who served
him poorly. One of his closest collab-
orators, after being pushed out, dis-
abled the WikiLeaks submission sys-
tem and blocked him from reaching
the submissions stored there. We went
through an absolute bath of re, As-
sange later told me, apportioning no
blame to himself. Those people who
were not reproof burnt to a crisp.
Pressures mounted from the outside,
too. MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal
stopped servicing WikiLeaks, making
donations diculta response that As-
sange calls a banking blockade. Mark
Stephens, with whom he eventually
parted ways, charged him hundreds of
46 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
ORIGIN STORY
Metal shavings on the bottom
of his wingtips, my father
would come home in the dark
and take his shoes o,
Id slip shoe trees in
and put them in the closet.
The next morning at four,
hed put his shoes back on
and leave in the dark.
Every few months,
Id pull the shavings out
with needle-nose pliers.
Never asking,
Shouldnt a shoe tree
grow shoes,
and why arent you allowed
to see the sun?
My father the vampire.
thousands of dollars in fees. To help pay communicating directly with the hack-
them, Assange agreed to produce a ing crew. Its members provided him
memoir that he did not want to write, with reams of material, including e-mails
and his relationship with his ghostwriter belonging to Stratfor, a private intelli-
ended in disaster.Assange was out of gence rm, and to the Syrian President,
his depth. I was a decent colonial boy Bashar al-Assad. For Assange, there is
who came to a town that specializes in no real dierence between a hack and
lying and climbing the class ladder, so a leak; in both instances, individuals are
I was fresh meat to be exploited, he taking risks to expose the secrets of in-
told me. I needed a trusted introducer stitutions. What did it matter how the
especially because this has been the dark information came to light? Either way,
heart of empire for four hundred years, he would publish it.
and I was dealing with the outraged se-
curity structure of a superpower.
Hoping to keep WikiLeaks vital
while its anonymous-submission sys-
Iishnextradition
May, 2012, Assanges appeals of the
order had gone to the Brit-
Supreme Courtand there, too, he
tem was down, Assange was seeking had lost. Fearing that he had no further
material through alternative channels, legal recourse, he decided to apply for
in some instances taking remark - political asylum with a friendly country.
able risks.Unbeknownst to him, the He told me that he was already infor-
F.B.I. had opened a second WikiLeaks mally exploring the idea with a number
investigation, this one a possible hack- of diplomats, as a way out of his legal
ing-conspiracy case. When an Icelan- mess, and that a representative of the Ec-
dic WikiLeaks volunteer reached out uadorian government had sent encour-
to an oshoot of the hacking group aging signals.
Anonymous to ask its crew to hack the Assange prepared a disguisea mo-
Icelandic government, it turned out that torcycle-courier outtto wear as he
the hacker he was talking with was an ed, and rented a hotel room on the way
informant. Eventually, the Icelandic vol- to the Embassy, where he could change
unteer was drawn into the F.B.I. inves- without being seen. The intrigue was
tigation, too. Assange, though, began necessary, he believed, because he might

My father the bank.
My father the black keys
played all at once.
I saved those shavings
for years and pounded them
into a spoon that only cuts
my lips a little to remind me
Im the child of a drill press
and lathe.
Without the automobile,
Id never have had
a ten-speed bike,
which is how I got addicted
to wind, which is why I became a bird
as soon as I left home, a hawk
who rejected gravity, steel,
middle management, exactly
as I was supposed to,
one wing-flap at a time.
Bob Hicok
be followed. We had concern that, be- information to process, and by the time
cause there was a lot of intelligence ac- he processed it I was already in. As-
tivity on me, that maybe there would sange told me that he rushed across the
be an understanding that I might come lobby and knocked on the door, but he
here, he told me. In the room, he put had not realized that it was lunchtime,
on the costume, along with colored and key sta were out. That was a bit
contact lenses and large earrings, and disturbing, he recalled. I had gotten
dyed his hair. At the last minute, how- past that guy on the front step, into the
ever, he decided to abort the plan, be- interior, but the people who came to the
cause his lawyers informed him that door didnt recognize me.
there still might be a remaining legal Assanges asylum request had noth-
avenue to pursue: the European Court ing to do with Swedenat least di-
of Human Rights. rectly. It reected the belief that if As-
While his lawyers and the opposing sange were to be sent to the United
side wrangled over his petition, Assange States he would face a risk of cruel and
said, he had a distressing experience: the inhumane punishmentan assessment
company that maintained his security based primarily on a vague sense of
bracelet arrived to change the batteries, what he would face in court, since it
in a way that he thought was suspiciously was still unclear if he had even been
ahead of schedule. He decided that it charged. Nonetheless, he told me, It
was time to act. On June 19th, he told put my physical circumstance back into
me, he rushed over to the Embassy, wear- interstate domain, as opposed to, you
ing his disguise and carrying a motor- know, the everyday criminality.
cycle helmet. There was actually some- When the Ecuadorian Ambassador,
one waiting on the steps, he said. But Ana Albn, learned of his arrival, she
a good disguise is mostly body lan- was uncertain that his asylum was a
guageI put a stone in my shoe, so I good idea for her embassy: what would
didnt walk the same wayand this its end point be? Soon, the building was
forty-eight-year-old, heavyset white guy besieged. There were police cordons.
who was waiting, he did a Who is that There were threatssomeone sent a
guy? But I could see that he had so much bloody sharks jaw. Assange, she recalled,
initially behaved like a celebrity brat.
(They later became friends.) For weeks,
the Ecuadorians reviewed his applica-
tion; after British authorities threatened
to storm the Embassy, Albn recalled,
Ecuadors President quickly approved
it, validating Assanges narrative. As-
sange told me, It was a very serious
conict between a small publishing or-
ganization and a superpowervery se-
rious conict.
III.
ne evening this spring, in the
O Embassy, Assange held a glossy
magazine in his hands and deliber-
ately placed it face down on a table,
so that I could not see what it was.
He was going to get us coee, and
wanted to show it to me after he re-
turned, but he could not wait; half-
way to the door, he rushed back and
dramatically ipped it over, revealing
it to be a commemorative edition of
Newsweek, with Hillary Clinton posed
beneath the words Madam Presi-
denta DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN
headline from 2016. They had to pulp
it! he declared, gleefully. Then he
looked at the magazine with disgust.
Its hagiographic, he said.
For nearly half a decade, Assange
had been cultivating a dislike of Clin-
ton that was partly personal and partly
philosophical. Clinton, he suspected,
had wanted to assassinate him, and was
instrumental in aggravating his conict
with Sweden. Moreover, he saw her as
the main gear of a political machine
that encompassed Wall Street, the in-
telligence agencies, the State Depart-
ment, and overseas client nations, like
Saudi Arabia. Shes the smooth cen-
tral representation of all that, he once
said. And all that is more or less what
is in power now in the United States.
In his view, Clinton was corrupt,
pathetically driven by personal ambi-
tion, a neoliberal interventionist des-
tined to take the United States into
warthe epitome of a political estab-
lishment that deserved to be perma-
nently ousted. In February, 2016, he
wrote a rare editorial on the Wiki-
Leaks Web site declaring Clinton unt
for oce. The piece cited video foot-
age, from 2011, which showed Clinton
learning that Muammar Qadda had
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 47
been killed. We came! We saw! He
died! she declared, laughinga re-
action that prompted Assange to write,
Hillarys problem is not just that shes
a war hawk. Shes a war hawk with
bad judgment who gets an unseemly
emotional rush out of killing people.
She shouldnt be let near a gun shop,
let alone an army. And she certainly
should not become president of the
United States. Only Assange knows
whether sexism informed his dislike
of her. But he often speaks with dis-
dain about feminism generally, and
in unguarded moments he is liable to
comment on essential distinctions be-
tween the sexes. In 2010, when Julia
Gillard became Australias Prime Min-
ister, he told me scornfully that the
incumbent, Kevin Rudd, just got
rolled . . . by a woman.
riends of Assange say that he was an-
F imated in the days leading up to the
election. There were two forces that were
energizing Julian, Yanis Varoufakis, the
Greek politician, told me. The person
who might become President of the
United States was targeting him, and at
the same time he had material over her.
He was exhilarated.
Because Assanges Internet access had
been cut o several weeks before voting
day, he was forced to watch the returns
on the Embassys television, which, it
turned out, was not hooked up to cable.
A sta member had to run out to buy an
antenna. I rigged up the TV with an
old-fashioned aerial, Assange told me.
He began watching at around midnight,
when the rst polling stations were clos-
ing. The prelection assessments sug-
gested that Clinton was likely to win, and
Assange, watching the early returns, be-
came irked by the smugness that he de-
tected among the BBC presenters.
When Trump took the lead, he re-
called, the smugness disappeared. It
took a good fteen minutes for the BBC
sta to adapt, he said. They were look-
ing o balance, as if someone had poured
opiate gas into the room, and they re-
mained that way for about forty min-
utes or so. But then, remarkably, they
got back into their groove, and adapted.
What they saw was that a new power
structure had come aboutand I just
thought, This is the true nature of a
worker of a large institution. (Another
48 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
term for it: professionalism.) He told
me that he, too, had expected Clinton
to win, and that his own reaction was
This isnt happening, is it? theres criticismespecially associational
I asked if he had thought: I did this.
Im not sure, he said. While it is in
vogue now to talk up WikiLeaks, and
its signicance, at the time there was
serious suppression of the reporting in
establishment publications, because the
Democrat-aligned journalists were be-
hind the campaign. But then he brought
up, as he often did, the impact of his
campaign publicationse-mails from
the D.N.C. and from John Podesta,
Clintons campaign manager. During
the last ve weeks of the election,
WikiLeaks was the most referenced po-
litical term on Facebookand, in fact,
the second most referenced term of all
terms!(Facebook disputes these num-
bers but conrms that the term was
popular.) After the campaign, Assange
helped produce an annotated anthol-
ogy of his election publications. It is ti-
tled How I Lost: By Hillary Clinton.
The degree to which WikiLeaks
aected the elections outcome will likely
take years to sort out; aside from the
leaked e-mails, Clintons campaign was
also beset by strategic errors, an unpop-
ular candidate, and a prolonged inquiry
into the details of her personal e-mail
server. But, for Assange, a far more se-
rious question looms: How did he get
that material in the rst place? Months
after intelligence assessments in Wash-
ington concluded that the Democratic
e-mails were hacked by the Russian
government in a cordinated propa-
ganda eort, Assange has not allowed
the matter to stand. He has turned the
ocial assessmentat best, a declara-
tion that he had been usedinto a sym-
bol of American failure, establishment
mendacity, Democratic hysteria, neo-
McCarthyism, and fake news, in this
way stoking partisan anger and need-
less institutional mistrust.
The extent to which Assange has de-
veloped close ties with Russia remains
a matter of controversy, too. At the Em-
bassy one night, Assange expressed fury
over an article in the Times, titled How
Russia Often Benets When Julian As-
sange Reveals the Wests Secrets. The
story sought to track a pattern of com-
mon interest, unfolding across the years,
between two secretive entities: the Krem-
lin and WikiLeaks. Assange regarded
it as unfair and even fraudulent. Its in
my blood not to get pushed around when
criticism, he told me.
At times, though, Assange has had
questionable associations. In 2010, Is-
rael Shamir, a controversial Russian with
extremist views, visited him at Elling-
ham Hall. (Shamir, a convert from Ju-
daism to Greek Orthodox Christianity,
has written several anti-Semitic screeds.)
Some WikiLeaks volunteers viewed him
as an eccentric hanger-on; some suspected
that he had ties to Russian intelligence.
During one visit, Assangewho had be-
come lax in his attitude toward the State
Department trovegave him more than
ninety thousand unredacted U.S. diplo-
matic cables concerning Russia, former
Soviet-bloc countries, and Israel. Shamir
sold some of the material to a magazine
friendly to the Kremlin, and delivered
other parts of it to Alexander Lukashenko,
Belaruss authoritarian leader, who used
them to arrest opposition gures. (Shamir
denies this, citing a malicious invention
by my detractors.) One Belarusian ac-
tivist later told the Web site Tablet, I re-
ally hate WikiLeaks. How can they do
this? The KGB is telling these people,
Your name is in the American cables and
you are a traitor, an American agent, and
you will be treated like an enemy.
The WikiLeaks sta at Ellingham
Hall found out about the incident when
Belarusian activists began contacting
them in a panic, and immediately be-
came alarmed. Some wanted to inves-
tigate the matter. Julian just shot it
down, one recalled. His attitude was:
Just tell them there is no basis to any
of this, that he doesnt have the cables.
A few months ago, Shamir described
the WikiLeaks ethos to a colleague of
mine by saying, If the information is
true, if it is not doctored, if it is not
cooked, let it be delivered by Satan him-
self. It is not hard to imagine that the
Kremlin, watching Assanges conict
with the United States, found utility in
this attitude. While Assange was in
Wandsworth, Vladimir Putin oered
him sly support, casting him as a sym-
bol of Western hypocrisy: Why have
they hidden Mr. Assange in prison?
Thats whatdemocracy?
In 2012, during Assanges house
arrestwhen he was in dire need of
 SKETCHBOOK BY WILL McPHAIL

N.Y.C.S MOST ELIGIBLE PIGEONS

Stephan Proudfoot
Bird-about-town Stephan
is one of those not-quite-as-
hideous brown ones.

Francis Fairfeather
This real-estate mogul has property
in the deli pipe that blasts out meat
wind, the gap in the train platform
basically, wherever people didnt care
enough to put spikes.

Clarke St. Branch

Clarkes list of celebrity
romances includes the
pigeon that Rachel
trapped in a pot on
Friends and the eagle
David Hornby-Wenning that scared Trump.
Like accents? David grew up on
the leafy streets of London and
is the heir to a vast biscuit fortune
(one biscuit). Dont like accents?
Cool, he cant talk.

Benedict Elderberry
Held a high-level
position on Wall Street
until someone shooed
him away. Now Benedict
spends most of his time
in the glorious upstate
Claudio Wheatleaf countryside, because why
Entrepreneur Claudio crowdfunded doesnt every pigeon do
a pile of seeds at the tender age that? They can just do that.
of featherless and blind. Lock up your
daughters, because this Lothario mates
for life (around six years).

Im sorry, guysI guess at our age Truth or Dare is a little too fraught.
revenuehe began to work on a talk
show with RT, a Russian state news
network that serves the Kremlins pro-
paganda interests.Assange told me re-
cently that the show was a cover for his
eorts to secure asylum. I was using it
to interview heads of state, and so on,
to approach a variety of embassies, he
said. When I asked about the shows
origins, he told me that the idea had
evolved out of a conversation with a
friend, but he declined to name the per-
son. Later, I learned that it was Israel
Shamirs son Johannes Wahlstrm (who
lives in Sweden, and testied on As-
sanges behalf in the rape investigation).
One thing seemed clear: RT had made
an investment in the show, but it did
not appear to regard the deal in nor-
mal business terms. Mark Stucke, the
C.E.O. of Journeyman Pictures, which
distributed the program, told me that
RT had no interest in licensing its shares
in markets outside its network. They
didnt bother pursuing that potential
revenue stream, he said. Its very un-
usual. But Julian was the guy who drove
the relationship.
Assange told me that, as he negoti-
ated the deal, he pushed for editorial free-
dom. He asked RTs editor-in-chief, Mar-
garita Simonyan, if he could host Alexei
Navalny, a Russian opposition leader. She
50 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
said, The Kremlin wont like it, but it
would be good for us, because it will show
our independence, he recalled. He then
asked about inviting a Chechen terror-
ist, and got an unambiguous no. Laugh-
ing at the memory, he said, Thats the
line: all the way up to a Chechen terror-
ist. Assange did invite Navalny, who de-
clined. Navalnys spokesperson told me
that he believed it was indecent to have
any contact with RT, saying, This chan-
nel is associated with the spread of lies
and propaganda, including about many
opposition activists.
or Assange, the show on RT was
F an opportunity. In addition to pro-
viding money, it oered a platform,
and perhaps, more crucially, a kind of
legal protectionjournalistic creden-
tials.For the Russians, it provided ac-
cess to an international celebrity with
sympathetic views. Simonyan once
said that she went out of her way to
choose hosts who think like us.
When I rst met Assange, his polit-
ical beliefs blended libertarian and an-
ti-establishment ideas with his own id-
iosyncratic world view. Since then, he
seems to have increasingly come to the
view that the United States, despite its
humanitarian rhetoric, acts primarily to
increase its power in the world, using
both economic and military coercion. In
this, he shares the position of Noam
Chomsky, whom he admires. But unlike
Chomsky, who called the Kremlin the
great criminal in modern history, he
tends to characterize Russia as a coun-
terweight; because of its history, geogra-
phy, and relative might, it can reject Wash-
ington policy.
Assanges show on RT ended after
a dozen episodes, but he continued
to appear on the network. Once, pro-
moting a book of essays based on Ca-
blegate, The WikiLeaks Files: The
World According to U.S. Empire, he
sat for an RT program called Going
Underground. The show presented
the anthology as evidence of Amer-
ican tyranny, and for half an hour As-
sange politely agreed while the host
described the United States as a global
overlord. The book details genocidal
U.S. policy right around the world,
from Latin America to Asia, all in
the name of liberalism, the host said.
How does all the torture and the
killings work with the free market,
and the use of free markets?
This spring, George Gittoes drew my
attention to a speech that Russias Am-
bassador to the United Nations gave
about the civil war in Syria; after the
United States had mistakenly bombed
Syrian forces, the Ambassador took to
a podium and framed the error as a par-
able of American hubris, misjudgment,
and bad faith. Gittoes told me that As-
sange was moved. He admired him so
much, he said. Youd think it was
Chomsky on the box. Assange down-
played this, but told me, Theres a Rus-
sian perspective on global politics, and
they have become not shy at saying it,
and it is good that they say it. I guess
Russia eventually thought,There is noth-
ing we can say, so we can say the truth.
Theres nothing to lose. Theres no rep-
utation to burn, no relationship to scrap.
So they twist things in relation to
Ukraine and to their immediate neigh-
borhood, but, in terms of their broader
description, then they are free to say
what, in my view, is pretty accurate.
ssange once told me about his life
A in the Embassy, I have always said
that the most counterproductive thing
is to keep me hereI have nothing to
do but work. But during his rst year
of diplomatic captivity the work began
to seem marginal. WikiLeaks still pub-
lished material, but none of it was as
signicant as the trove that Chelsea Man-
ning had leaked to him. In isolation, As-
sange came to resemble the Wizard of
Oz, a pallid inventor hidden behind a
grand machine.
In 2013, Edward Snowden walked out
of an N.S.A. facility in Hawaii with tens
of thousands of records about Ameri-
can global electronic surveillance, in-
cluding a sweeping system to monitor
and store phone calls by millions of
Americans. The materialvoluminous,
technical, classiedhad the potential
to transform not merely perceptions
about the N.S.A. but also the law. It was,
in many ways, the ultimate WikiLeaks
submission. When Snowden mailed a
drive containing the trove to the lm-
maker Laura Poitras, another collabo-
rator, he wrote his name as Manning
in the return address.
Snowden ew from Hawaii to
Hong Kong, where he decided to iden-
tify himselfimmediately causing
American authorities to seek his ex-
tradition. Assange stepped in. From
the Ecuadorian Embassy, he sent the
WikiLeaks investigations editor, Sarah
Harrison, to guide Snowden to a sanc-
tuary where the United States could
not reach him. The plan was to smug-
gle him to Moscow, and then on to a
sympathetic Latin-American country,
but en route his U.S. passport was re-
voked. After a month, Russia granted
him asylum.
Even as Assange was striving to lead
a movement, his publication model was
increasingly regarded with suspicion.
Glenn Greenwald, a longtime Wiki-
Leaks defender, and one of the journal-
ists who worked with Snowden, told me
that Snowden did not want the mate-
rial handled in the WikiLeaks way. He
was vehement, he recalled. He said, I
dont want you to dump it. Curate it.
When Assange was denied access to
the trove, his frustration boiled over. A
story based on the Snowden les ran on
the Intercept, describing an N.S.A. pro-
gram that worked with locals in two for-
eign countries to vacuum up every phone
call placed there. After consulting with
the N.S.A., the Intercept decided not to
name one of the countries, fearing that
locals would be killed as a result. Assange
learned the name of the redacted coun-
try, and declared on Twitter that if the
Intercept did not reveal it within seventy-
two hours he would do so unilaterally.
He eventually made good on the threat,
explaining that he could not stand by and
watch an ongoing crime of mass espio-
nage being covered up. When I asked
Assange about his interference, he told
me, We feel some sense of responsibil-
ity in relation to the Snowden stu. We
are part of this history, and we feel we
have a right to see that it is properly done.
It was not hard to see that he was
desperate for attention-grabbing mate-
rial. In May, 2015, the WikiLeaks on-
line submission systemoine since
2010was nally restored. A month
later, he published a large database of
government information: half a million
cables from Saudi Arabias foreign min-
istry. Perhaps more signicant than the
trove itself was the attribution. For the
rst time, it seems, a state had sought
to use WikiLeaks to release a database.
An entity called the Yemen Cyber Army
had taken credit for the breach, and
a Web site called WikiSaudiLeaks,
which published some of the material,
claimed to have given the bulk of the
trove to Assange. Cybersecurity analysts
believe that both were fronts. The con-
sensus view is that Iran created them to
weaken an adversary, but this assessment
is not universally accepted. An expert
familiar with the forensics
told me that several indi-
cators also point to Russia.
his spring, a few days
T after Assange showed
me the Newsweek special edi-
tion on Hillary Clinton, I
saw him again. I think thats
very mischievousthe claim
that the Russians hacked the
D.N.C. in order to increase the chance
that Donald Trump would win, he told
me. Because, if you actually look at the
chronology, the claim is that the initial
hack is in 2015. Evidence of a hack meant
nothing, he said, because prominent in-
stitutions are often hacked. The major
political parties in the rest of the world
the U.S. government hacks them. So you
would expect that the Chinese, Israel,
France, Russia, maybe India, had hacked
various U.S. political institutionsbe-
cause everybody is. But there cant have
been some plan by the Russians to hack
the D.N.C. to help elect Donald Trump,
because Donald Trump wasnt even on
the radar at the time.
I began to ask whether such a plan
might have evolved gradually, but he cut
in: Thats not the claim! The claim is
irrational, just completely irrational!
In one way, Assange was right. The
D.N.C. was hacked in 2015by an entity
called Cozy Bear, which cybersecurity an-
alysts suspect is controlled by Russias Fed-
eral Security Service. Once inside the net-
work, Cozy Bear used a technique that
exploited vulnerability built into the com-
puters operating system. Assange was also
correct that this breach predated Trumps
candidacy, so it could not have been part
of an eort to get him elected. The prob-
lem with his argument is that no one in
Washington or in the intelligence com-
munity is seriously making this claim.
The Russian government appears to
have penetrated the D.N.C. network
more than once, with a second hack ini-
tiated in 2016. The precise trigger for
the event is unclear, but it came at a
time of escalating tensions between Rus-
sia and the United States. In January, a
Treasury Department ocial declared
Putin corrupt. Several weeks later, jour-
nalists working on a mega-leak called
the Panama Papersa trove of eleven
million documents revealing how the
worlds lite shelter their moneyap-
proached the Kremlin to ask
about records suggesting
that close associates of Putin
had moved as much as two
billion dollars into oshore
accounts. Atypically, the
Kremlin made a statement
before publication, saying
that there would be no re-
sponse to honey-worded
queries from reporters, and
that Russia regarded the Panama Pa-
pers as an information attack.
On April 3rd, the reporters published
their story, and four days later, visibly
irked, Putin oered the rst of several
responses. He described the Panama Pa-
pers as an American-run operation.
They are trying to destabilize us from
within, he said. The Kremlin presented
the leak as a personal blow, and as an
eort to undermine Russian parliamen-
tary elections.Andrei Soldatov and Irina
Borogon, in a forthcoming update of
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 51
their book, Red Web, about the Rus-
sian Internet, make the case that the de-
cision to target the American Presiden-
tial election with an information-warfare
campaign likely originated at a high-level
meeting that Putin called the following
day. There is a line you cannot cross,
and this line is Putins family and his im-
mediate friends, Soldatov told me.
Within four days, entities that appeared
to be fronts for Russian military
intelligence began registering do-
main names for sites intended to
release hacked information: rst
Electionleaks, and then the more
general-sounding DCLeaks,
which was hosted in a tiny village
in Romania.By then, a hacking
group known as Fancy Bear
which cybersecurity analysts be-
lieve is also controlled by Russian
military intelligencehad initiated a wave
of phishing attacks targeting American
political gures.
For months, while the Fancy Bear
hacking operation harvested data, the
newly registered Web sites remained dor-
mant. Then, on June 6th, Hillary Clin-
ton became the presumptive Democratic
nominee, and within two days DCLeaks
went live. (Electionleaks was never used.)
The site positioned itself as a WikiLeaks
oshoot: A new level project aimed to
analyze and publish a large amount of
e-mails. DCLeaks claimed that it had
been launched by the American hack-
tivistspeople who were concerned
that the authorities are just lobbying in-
terests of Wall Street fat cats, industrial
barons and multinational corporations
representatives who swallow up all re-
sources and subjugate all markets.The
rst batch of campaign material that it
published looked like a test: seventy-two
inconsequential memos tracking media
coverage of Clinton in 2015. Five days
later, a second archive was added: e-mails
from a Clinton campaign press aides
Gmail account. Unlike the earlier con-
tent on DCLeaks, the aides e-mails were
locked with a passwordapparently to
allow for a controlled release, at a stra-
tegically opportune time.
t is a truism of military strategy that
Ienemy.
no plan survives rst contact with the
For the Russian hackers, it ap-
pears, rst contact had occurred in dig-
ital darkness, and on terrain that did not
52 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
seem to be a primary focusthe D.N.C.
computer network. The wave of phish-
ing attacks appeared to concentrate on
Clinton staers: the hackers targeted
about a hundred Clinton-campaign ac-
counts and only nine accounts at the
D.N.C. The Partys cybersecurity was
weak, and so perhaps Fancy Bears hack-
ers did not expect to be discovered as
they marched through the system. But,
shortly after the operation began,
the D.N.C. became aware of
their presence, and hired a cy-
bersecurity company called
CrowdStrike to do something
about it. The responders installed
scanning software on worksta-
tions, and for a month they did
nothing but watch.
By late May, a picture had
emerged of an alarmingly per-
vasive intrusion; a senior responder told
me that the hackers could access every
D.N.C. account. Within the D.N.C.,
though, only about a dozen people
knew of the breach, and they took care
to communicate about it in extreme
secrecy, o the network, so that the
hackers wouldnt know that they had
been detected. The responders began
to take defensive measures. Over Me-
morial Day weekend, they rebuilt in-
frastructure for routing e-mails, and on
June 10th they took the network oine.
That Friday night, the plug was pulled,
a D.N.C. ocial told me. There was
no D.N.C. for anyone in the world to
connect to.
By Sunday, June 12th, the D.N.C.
was back online, the malware purged.
The hack was still a tightly held se-
cret both at CrowdStrike and at the
Partys headquarters. The secrecy is
signicant, because that same day,
during an interview with a British
newscaster, Assange indicated that he
knew that Democratic operatives had
lost control of their e-mail. WikiLeaks
has a very big year ahead, he ex-
plained. We have upcoming leaks in
relation to Hillary Clinton, which are
great. It appears that he received a
tranche of hacked material sometime
between May 25ththe latest date
of any e-mail that WikiLeaks pub-
lishedand June 12th. In this same
window of time, the DCLeaks Web
site was launched, and DonaldTrump,
Jr., held his meeting at Trump Tower
with a Russian lawyer who had ap-
proached the Trump campaign oer-
ing dirt on Clinton.
What happened next is as revealing
as it is strange. On June 14th, the Wash-
ington Post ran a story about the D.N.C.
hacks, which noted CrowdStrikes con-
clusion that Russia was the culprit. A
day later, a curious Internet persona
emergedwhipped up overnight, it
seems, to counter the article. It was
named in tribute to a Romanian hacker,
Marcel-Lehel Lazar, who had called
himself Guccifer, a cyberpunk portman-
teau of Gucci and Lucifer. Before the
Romanian authorities arrested him, in
2014, Lazar had gained worldwide noto-
riety for a daring spree of hacksreveal-
ing, among other things, that George W.
Bush had been painting a picture of his
legs in a bathtub. His method was
proudly lo-. From his remote Transyl-
vanian village, he drilled into the biog-
raphies of targets, looking for details that
helped him guess passwords. At times,
he says, he relied on the Kabbalah, nu-
merology, or Jungian archetypes. In his
writings and hacks, he demonstrated a
fascination with celebrity and the oc-
cult, and an obsessive desire to expose
the Illuminati.
The new persona, called Guccifer 2.0,
was crafted to present the image of an-
other lone Romanian hacker, following
in Lazars footstepsbut the results were
comically unconvincing. Lazars writings
suggested an eccentric attention-seeker
with a keen tabloid sensibility, whose
exploits often ended up on such scandal-
minded Web sites as the Smoking Gun
and Gawker. Guccifer 2.0 had the air
of a Bell Atlantic phone book. It had
little evident understanding of Ameri-
can journalism, and erratic habits that
evoked a badly run P.R. committee. The
day it made its dbut, it reached out to
the Smoking Gun and to Gawker, oer-
ing hacked materiala conspicuous but
purely symbolic gesture, since it had
posted the very same documents to a
personal Web page, created that day on
WordPress.
The rst post, taken on its own terms,
was bizarre. It was presented as a per-
sonal statement, but its headline, writ-
ten in the third person, looked as though
it had been torn o the top of a propa-
gandists memo: Guccifer 2.0 DNCs
Servers Hacked by a Lone Hacker.The
post was designed with a heavy hand to
prove two things: that Guccifer 2.0 had
indeed committed the hack, and that it
wasnt linked to Russia. On the rst
count, the personas handlers oered
a trophy to prove its bona desan
opposition-research le on Trump, which
CrowdStrike said had been exltrated
from the D.N.C. On the second, it pre-
sented an array of other records that had
no apparent news value, except to dis-
credit the Post article. In strident terms,
Guccifer 2.0 insisted that accusing Rus-
sia was an act of deliberate mischief, em-
phasizing the point with a clunky ref-
erence to Lazar: Fuck the Illuminati
and their conspiracies! Before signing
o, it promised more. The main part
of the papers, thousands of les and
mails, I gave them to WikiLeaks, it said.
They will publish them soon.
wenty thousand D.N.C. e-mails ar-
T rived at WikiLeaks. Once they were
in Assanges hands, his overriding con-
cern was to insure that they were genu-
ine. We had quite some diculties to
overcome, in terms of the technical as-
pects, and making sure we were comfort-
able with the forensics, he recalled. As
an Australian, he had only a vague grasp
of the way the D.N.C. operated, which
made deciphering the political signi-
cance of the e-mails dicult. Its like
looking at a very complex Hieronymus
Bosch painting from a distance, he told
me. You have to get close and interact
with it, then you start to get a feel. Often,
a rst encounter with a WikiLeaks da-
tabase submission can be overwhelm-
ingas one former staer told me, My
heart sinks a bit.
To work on the material, Assange
had to cordinate with operatives out-
side the building, and avoid surveil-
lance inside it. I have a lot of security
issues in the Embassy, he told me. Its
not like you can be comfortable with
your source material and read it. He
would not tell me how many people
worked on the project, except that the
number was small. Were all secret
squirrels now, he said.
For many of his previous publications,
Assange had brought in partners from
the mainstream media, but, with the
Democratic National Convention fast
approaching, he decided that the time
pressure was too great to permit collab-
oration. He also maintains that all his
potential collaborators were too partisan.
I thought, Great material! Which media
to partner with in the United States? And
I couldnt think of one! he said. Assange
feared that the Times and the Post would
downplay what he believed were explo-
sive stories buried in the archive. He re-
called thinking, The material is broadly
critical of the Clinton campaign, so should
we go with a publication like Fox News?
But thats not credible, either! Ulti-
mately, he decided to work alone.
On July 22nd, Assange published the
e-mails on the WikiLeaks site. Depend-
ing on ones perspective, they contained
either a shocking expos of political cor-
ruption or an armation of the rough-
and-tumble nature of politics. When As-
sange was asked in an interview about
the most important stories in the cache,
his rst example was a spreadsheet that
kept track of donor contributionsall of
it previously public. In some of the e-mails,
sta members who believed Clinton to
be a stronger candidate than Bernie San-
ders questioned what they saw as his elec-
toral weaknesseshis religion, his poll
numbers. It was unclear if the Party had
acted on any of the remarks, or if the
e-mails merely reected Democratic in-
siders frustration with Sanders for not
ceding the race, despite near-impossible
electoral math. But, as the story spread,
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the D.N.C.
chairman, resigned, along with three other
Pickles, if you dont get off my lap, were toast.
employees. At one point, in an ecstatic
tweet, Trump wrote, The Democrats are
in a total meltdown!
n the day that WikiLeaks released
O the e-mails, Guccifer 2.0 took
credit for the trovethe docs Id given
them!!! It quickly became apparent
that the persona was a problem for As-
sange. Throughout June, cybersecurity
analysts built a case that it was a Rus-
sian fronta conclusion that was am-
plied by Democratic operatives. Fo-
rensic traces in the records on Word-
Press, and in the personas linguistic
quirks, linked it to Russia. Its handlers
had also provided the Smoking Gun
with the password to the Clinton press
aides e-mails posted on DCLeaks,
demonstrating its unique access to the
site, and, by extension, its ties to a cor-
dinated propaganda eort.
Assanges closest peers began to de-
bate how to push back. Some argued that
WikiLeaks should never discuss sourc-
ing, adhering to the organizations gen-
eral policy on the matter. Others argued
that the mounting allegations were too
damaging to ignore. Within WikiLeaks,
theres a number of people who are ideo-
logically, and in some cases culturally, very
opposed to any hint of fascism or the
Russian state, Assange recalled. They
have been oppressed by Russian behav-
ior, so they were eager to produce some
balance, or perception of balance, or a
counternarrative.He made appeals for
Trumps tax returns, and, he told me,
scoured the dark Web for veriable hacked
material tied to Trump or Russia. But
enormous scoops about a state dont come
about that often. If you look, how many
documents did CNN publish about
Trump? The New York Times managed
to get one extract of one old tax return.
We were aware of the building narrative
that was being pushed by the Democratic-
aligned interests. We did attempt to com-
bat it. But heres the problem. By saying
that we dont talk about sources, we left
an enormous vacuum. I felt that we had
to not permit this. Otherwise, we would
have the space lled by a narrative that
was bad for the publication and for
WikiLeaks.
In public, Assange tried several things.
He asserted that he was the only one
who knew the source. He implied that
DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 were likely
not what they seemed, and were in-
stead the manifestation of a crafty dou-
ble gamepossibly orchestrated by
Ukrainian state hackers. (Those look
very much like the Russians, but in some
ways they look very amateur, and they
look too much like it.) He also promoted
a theory that Guccifer 2.0 was exactly
what it seemed, an entity run by East-
ern European hackers. By the time I met
Assange in the Embassy, the C.I.A., the
N.S.A., and the F.B.I. had jointly as-
sessed that Russian military intelligence
was behind Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.
When I asked him what he thought
of this, he said, The whole thing is
extremely lame, as if he were talking
about the ramblings of a crazy uncle.
Assange also pursued a simpler rhe-
torical tactic. He argued that any attempt
to associate WikiLeaks with Guccifer
2.0 was pernicious spintrying to turn
a coincidence into a conspiracy. Unlike
documents that Guccifer 2.0 had pub-
lished, none of the campaign e-mails that
appeared on WikiLeaks contained traces
of Russian metadata; therefore, he said,
any links one could nd binding the per-
sona to Russia did not extend to his work.
Theres no forensic traces on our pub-
lications at all tying them to Russiaat
all! Its clearly completely dierent ma-
terial, and theres been a very sneaky at-
tempt to conate various hacks that have
occurred with our publications.
For a substantial constituency
supporters of WikiLeaks, of Bernie
San ders, of Trumpthis argument
struck a chord, and allowed conspiracy
theories about the true source of the
WikiLeaks e-mails to grow. Assange,
of course, was happy to encourage these
theories. In August, 2016, he suggested
during a television interview that his
source might have been a young D.N.C.
employee named Seth Rich, who was
murdered in Washington twelve days
before WikiLeaks began publishing.
We have to understand how high the
stakes are in the United States, and that
our sources face serious risks, he said.
Assange oered a cash reward for in-
formation leading to a conviction in
the murdera gesture that sent alt-
right sleuths, convinced that Clinton
had masterminded the killing, into a
frenzy worthy of Area 51, and which
caused pain for Richs family. When I
asked him about it, he said, I would
never name a source. People have their
own interpretations about that.
More theories began to surface. Am-
bassador Craig Murray, the friend to
WikiLeaks, insisted that Russia was not
the source of the D.N.C. e-mails; he knew
rsthand,he said, because he had met
Assanges source in the woods behind a
chapel at American University. Kim Dot-
com, a amboyant Internet entrepreneur
and a close associate of Assange, told me
in April that he had rsthand knowledge
of the source: an insider who had smug-
gled in a USB stick with malware on it.
Its not a Russian hack, he insisted. An-
thony Shaer, a retired lieutenant colo-
nel, knew rsthand, too; he told me about
an intricate conspiracy of retired intelli-
gence workers, unhappy about Clintons
handling of her State Department e-mails,
who formed a task organization to dig
up material.When I mentioned the the-
ories to Assange, he laughed.They to-
tally contradict each other! he said.
Once, when Assange had directed me
to a comment that Dotcom had made
about the source of the D.N.C. e-mails,
I asked him why it was important. Ill
just say that other people should not get
the credit for our epic scoop, he told me.
This was an idea that I noticed he was
road-testing. Its very irritating that Putin
is getting the credit! he declared on an-
other occasion. They are giving him
credit for our hard work! Although Pa-
mela Anderson stenographically repeated
the notion once on her blog, I never heard
Assange use it publicly. It seemed like a
risky way to convey an outraged denial,
with its conation of rolespublisher
and source. The implication was not so
much I received this as I did this.
hroughout August, DCLeaks pub-
T lished nothing about the Presiden-
tial election, and Guccifer 2.0 appeared
to focus on swing states, releasing doc-
uments that were relevant only to local
races. But in September, as Election Day
neared, both Russian fronts actively
shifted back to the campaign at the na-
tional level. Assange dismissed the new
releases, telling me, It was only the
WikiLeaks publications that had im-
pact. But this was not quite true. On
September 13th, Guccifer 2.0 dumped
six hundred and seventy-eight mega-
bytes of D.N.C. information online. A
day later, DCLeaks began to post hacked
e-mails belonging to Colin Powell and
a number of Clinton aides, all from
Gmail accounts. One e-mail, pulled from
a campaign staer, contained audio of
Clinton describing Sanders supporters
as educated young people who were un-
certain about their futures. Theyre chil-
dren of the Great Recession, and they
are living in their parents basement,
she said. In Trumps hands, this became
a cudgel: Hillary Clinton thinks Ber-
nie supporters are hopeless and igno-
rant basement dwellers.
A pattern that was set in June ap-
peared to recur: just before DCLeaks
became active with election publica-
tions, WikiLeaks began to prepare an-
other tranche of e-mails, this time culled
from John Podestas Gmail account.
We are working around the clock,
Assange told Fox News in late August.
We have received quite a lot of mate-
rial. It is unclear how long Assange
had been in possession of the e-mails,
but a staer assigned to the project sug-
gested that he had received them in the
late summer: As soon as we got them,
we started working on them, and then
we started publishing them. From when
we received them to when we published
them, it was a real crunch. My only
wish is that we had the equivalent from
the Republicans.
All of the raw e-mail les that Wiki-
Leaks published from Podestas account
are dated September 19th, which ap-
pears to indicate the day that they were
copied or modied for some purpose.
Assange told me that in mid-September,
a week or two before he began publish-
ing the e-mails, he devised a way to wea-
ponize the information. If his releases
followed a predictable pattern, he rea-
soned, Clintons campaign would be able
to prepare. So he worked out an algo-
rithm, which he called the Stochastic
Terminator, to help sta members se-
lect e-mails for each days release. He
told me that the algorithm was built on
a random-number generator, modied
by mathematical weights that reected
the pattern of the news cycle in a typi-
cal week. By introducing randomness
into the process, he hoped to make it
impossible for the Clinton war room to
adjust to the problem, to spin, to create
antidote news beforehand.
Imagine it this way, Assange told
me. The WikiLeaks tank is coming
down the road. You cant tell when it
got on the road, when it is going to
get o, how fast it is going, how big it
isbecause it has a decoy exterior. They
know that there are decoy parameters
because I say it, and so you never know
whats a decoy and what is not. It kind
of paralyzes their thinking. He re-
called how a Clinton supporter noted
that there were no Podesta e-mails
later than March 25th. We said, Well
spotted, something to look
forward to! And this just
spread around that there was
a next phase.
For a few minutes, As-
sange spoke proudly about
the way he often bent the
truth. He seemed uncon-
cerned that such tactics
might harm his credibility.
It could become an issue,
but what is it? he told me. So we cant Monday before the Convention; his
address an irritating question as much
as we can oer protection for our pub-
lications? The advantage is greater to
be a bit craftyno, its not just being
crafty. It comes, really, from what M.I.5
did in World War Two. He described
a British operation to use a corpse
dressed in a Royal Marines uniform as
a decoy, disguising the real target of an
invasion. They stued secret informa-
tion in his pockets, and had him wash
up on the coast of Spain, and then they
made it clear to the Germans that this
was what they were doing. So the Ger-
mans went from becoming fooled in
one instance to doubting every instance.
n our many conversations about the
IAssanges
election, the most striking thing was
emotion: the frustration he
expressed when faced with suggestions
that his material was linked to Rus-
sian intelligence, or the way he shook
his st when he insisted that he had
been robbed of credit. But his protes-
tations that there were no connections
between his publications and Russia
were untenable.
There are several, and they go beyond
Guccifer 2.0s insistence that it was re-
sponsible for the WikiLeaks releases. In
early July, for example, Guccifer 2.0 told
a Washington journalist that WikiLeaks
was playing for time. There was no pub-
lic evidence for this, but from the inside
it was clear that WikiLeaks was over-
whelmed. In addition to the D.N.C. ar-
chive, Assange had received e-mails from
the leading political party in Turkey,
which had recently experienced a coup,
and he felt that he needed to rush them
out. Meanwhile, a WikiLeaks team
was scrambling to prepare the D.N.C.
material. (A WikiLeaks staer told me
that they worked so fast that they lost
track of some of the e-mails, which they
quietly released later in the year.) On
several occasions, and in
dierent contexts, Assange
admitted to me that he was
pressed for time. We were
quite concerned about meet-
ing the deadline, he told me
once, referring to the Demo-
cratic National Convention.
His original release date
for the D.N.C. archive, he
explained, was July 18th, the
team missed the deadline by four days.
We were only ready Friday, he said.
We had these hiccups that delayed us,
and we were given a little more time
He stopped, and then added, strangely,
to grow. (Later, when I asked about
the comment, he argued that my re-
cording of his saying it was faulty.) It
was unclear who had given him time,
but whoever it was clearly had leverage
over his decisions.
A few weeks before WikiLeaks
published, Guccifer 2.0 appeared to
demonstrate just this type of leverage.
Throughout June, as WikiLeaks sta
worked on the e-mails, the persona
had made frequent eorts to keep the
D.N.C. leaks in the news, but also ap-
peared to leave space for Assange by
refraining from publishing anything
that he had. On June 17th, the editor
of the Smoking Gun asked Guccifer 2.0
if Assange would publish the same ma-
terial it was then doling out. I gave
WikiLeaks the greater part of the les,
but saved some for myself, it replied.
Dont worry everything you receive is
exclusive. The claim at that time was
true. None of the rst forty documents
posted on WordPress can be found in
the WikiLeaks trove; in fact, at least
half of them do not even appear to be
from the D.N.C., despite the way they
were advertised.
But then, on July 6th, just before
Guccifer 2.0 complained that WikiLeaks
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 55
was playing for time, this pattern of
behavior abruptly reversed itself. I have
a new bunch of docs from the DNC
server for you, the persona wrote on
WordPress. The les were utterly lack-
ing in news value, and had no connec-
tion to one anotherexcept that every
item was an attachment in the D.N.C.
e-mails that WikiLeaks had. The shift
had the appearance of a threat. If Rus-
sian intelligence ocers were inclined
to indicate impatience, this was a way
to do it.
On July 18th, the day Assange orig-
inally planned to publish, Guccifer 2.0
released another batch of so-called
D.N.C. documents, this time to Joe
Uchill, of The Hill. Four days later,
after WikiLeaks began to release its
D.N.C. archive, Uchill reached out to
Guccifer 2.0 for comment. The reply
was At last!
Given that Assange had barely pub-
lished before the Convention, I asked
if his source ever expressed impatience.
I am not describing communications
with a source, he said. The source did
not mandate a publication time.
I asked again if his source ever ex-
pressed impatience. Sources have lever-
age, I said. They can take a pile of
e-mails and they can give those e-mails
to someone else.
They could give them to someone
else, he said, curtly. Sure.
Someone close to WikiLeaks told
me that before Assange published the
Podesta e-mails he faced this precise
scenario. In mid-August, Guccifer 2.0
expressed interest in oering a trove of
Democratic e-mails to Emma Best, a
journalist and a specialist in archival
research, who is known for acquiring
and publishing millions of declassied
government documents. Assange, I was
told, urged Best to decline, intimating
that he was in contact with the perso-
nas handlers, and that the material
would have greater impact if he released
it rst.
Whatever one thinks of Assanges
election disclosures, accepting his con-
tention that they shared no ties with the
two Russian fronts requires willful blind-
ness. Guccifer 2.0s handlers predicted
the WikiLeaks D.N.C. release. They
demonstrated inside knowledge that As-
sange was struggling to get it out on time.
And they proved, incontrovertibly, that
56 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
they had privileged access to D.N.C. doc-
uments that appeared nowhere else pub-
licly, other than in WikiLeaks publica-
tions. The twenty thousand or so D.N.C.
e-mails that WikiLeaks published were
extracted from ten compromised e-mail
accounts, and all but one of the people
who used those accounts worked in just
two departments: nance and strategic
communications. (The single exception
belonged to a researcher who worked ex-
tensively with communications.) All the
D.N.C. documents that Guccifer 2.0 re-
leased appeared to come from those same
two departments.
The Podesta e-mails only make the
connections between WikiLeaks and
Russia appear stronger. Nearly half of
the rst forty documents that Gucci-
fer 2.0 published can be found as at-
tachments among the Podesta e-mails
that WikiLeaks later published. More-
over, all of the hacked election e-mails
on DCLeaks appeared to come from
Clinton staers who used Gmail, and
of course Podesta was a Clinton staer
who used Gmail. The phishing attacks
that targeted all of the staers in the
spring, and that targeted Podesta, are
forensically linked; they originated
from a single identiable cybermech-
anism, like form letters from the same
typewriter. SecureWorks, a cyberse-
curity rm with no ties to the Dem-
ocratic Party, made this assessment,
and it is uncontested. Speaking with
Assange, I explained that I would have
to acknowledge this. He nodded, and
said nothing.
his January, the oce of the di-
T rector of National Intelligence re-
leased a brief summary of the intelli-
gence communitys assessment con-
cerning Russian hacking and the elec-
tion. It was almost totally lacking in
detail, and Assange was dramatically
dismissive of it. As far as WikiLeaks
is involved, there is just one impor-
tant sentencethere is just oneand
its so grammatically inexact it is re-
ally hard to work out what it is say-
ing, he told me.The sentence in ques-
tion is tortured, but it is not gram-
matically inexact, and it expressed a
high-condence determination that
members of the intelligence commu-
nity would only arm, with greater
clarity, in the coming months. That
determination is simple: Russian mil-
itary intelligencethe same group
that appeared to control Guccifer 2.0
and DCLeaksreleased the D.N.C.
and the Podesta e-mails to Wiki-
Leaks through a third party. In intel-
ligence vernacular, this is called using
a cutout.
In March, James Comey, at that time
the F.B.I. director, told the House In-
telligence Committee that the Russians
didnt deal with WikiLeaks directly.
At a subsequent hearing, before the Sen-
ate, he spoke more vehemently. The
Russians interfered with our elections
in the 2016 cycle, he said. They did it
with purpose. They did it with sophis-
tication, with overwhelming technical
eorts, and it was an active measures
campaign driven from the top of that
government. A mark of that campaigns
sophistication is the way that it appar-
ently allowed Assange to declare, as he
did, Our source is not the Russian gov-
ernment, and it is not a state party.
James Clapper, the former director of
National Intelligence, put the conclu-
sion bluntly to me: It was done by a
cutout, which of course aorded As-
sange plausible deniability.
Deniability, though, is not the same
as ignorance. Assange can perhaps
plausibly argue that he did not know
where the D.N.C. e-mails came from.
But it is hard to see how he could
make the same case about Podestas
e-mails; even if he had received them
through a cutout, he would have been
watching the mounting public evi-
dence throughout the summer that
Russia was engaging in a political-
inuence campaign. He would have
seen that, throughout September, very
similar Gmail archives were being
posted to DCLeaks.
Assange once told me that he did
not accept the allegation that Russia
had provided him e-mails through a
third party, which of course was dier-
ent from saying that the allegation was
untrue. I asked if he was even able to
know the chain of custody of his elec-
tion material before it came to him.
He declined to answer. It probably did
not matter. When he was at Elling-
ham Hall, a guest once asked what he
would do if he learned that intelligence
agencies were using WikiLeaks as
laundry for information warfare. If
its true information, we dont care
where it comes from, he said. Let
people ght with the truth, and when
the bodies are cleared there will be bul-
lets of truth everywhere.
Such an assertion, made so blithely,
should be troubling to any WikiLeaks
supporter. Standing up to the power-
ful is one thing. Facilitating conicts
among the powerful is another. To
argue that it makes no dierence is a
license for impunity. Assange created
WikiLeaks to diminish institutional
abuse. But there is no way to be cer-
tain that a broker for geopolitical in-
uence campaigns among states would
not increase the over-all levels of abuse
(augmenting, in this case, the Krem-
lins power at the expense of Wash-
ingtons). Or start a war. Or provide
states that are more powerful, more
skilled in secrecy, with a way to be-
come even stronger.
State-sponsored information war-
fare is nothing like what activist hack-
ers and whistle-blowers do. The latter
take personal riskswith their freedom,
and their reputationto release infor-
mation that matters to them. For a state,
there is no personal risk, no courage,
and the content may not even be terri-
bly important. The release of a huge ar-
chive lled with arcana and gossip car-
ries its own symbolic weight, especially
during a moment of political volatility:
an institution that seems permeable does
not seem strongand an institution
with secrets looks duplicitous, no mat-
ter how benign the secrets may be. This
is something that Russian intelligence
appeared to understand: the leak is the
message. Last July, Kevin Collier, a jour-
nalist in touch with Guccifer 2.0, asked
about a le that he had been givena
banal writeup of a pitch that entrepre-
neurs had made to the D.N.C.
What r ur questions? the persona
said.
Im curious what you think of the
doc, he wrote.
i nd it interesting
What about it is interesting, though?
Collier asked. I dont really see how
it would be a story.
ok, what about another one?
The emergence of this kind of en-
tity raises vexing questions for journal-
ism. One night, while painting in the
Embassy, George Gittoes mentioned
If I had known how adult her place was, I would have brought nicer beer.
that he had seen a BBC interview with
Dean Baquet, the editor of the Times,
discussing the phenomenon. It was
interesting for me, psychologically, he
told Assange. He said, I have to admit
that if this stu landed on my desk I
wouldnt be able to sleep at night know-
ing that the American people did not
know it. Gittoes advised Assange to
mention the interview when defend-
ing his publications.
Back in New York, I watched the
interview, and it quickly became clear
that Assange could never credibly cite
it in his defense. Baquet did argue that,
in most cases, journalists should not
withhold true information, saying that
news value trumps all. But he sug-
gested that, in the case of a state-spon-
sored leak, the states identity and its
motives were bits of information that
were potentially as crucial as any other,
and that journalists could not turn
away from them. Above all, he insisted
on the value of publishing what was
genuinely important and not what was
trivial. If Russia leaked him documents
about the State Departments deci-
sions in Syria, he would report on
them; if it leaked about Obamas smok-
ing habit, he wouldnt.
This kind of judgmentdeciding
what is signal and what is noiseis
precisely what Assanges system was
designed to eliminate. In his campaign
publications, the results were clear.
There were stories of genuine import:
an episode in which Donna Brazile, a
CNN commentator who became the
head of the D.N.C., illicitly leaked
debate questions to Clinton; others in
which Clinton seemed uncomfortably
close to selling political access in ex-
change for large donations to her fam-
ily foundation. But there were also
thousands of pages of trivia, some of
which did harm. E-mail conversations
about a pizza place in Washington
were spun into a conspiracy theory
about child pornography, which ended
in an armed attack. The leaks revealed
staers personal e-mail addresses and
cell-phone numbers and, in one case,
a voice mail that captures a parent and
a child together at the zoo. Above
all, the steady drip from WikiLeaks,
always promising some bigger reve-
lation, distracted from an essential
inquiry into whether the countrys na-
tional sovereignty had been breached.
For more than a year, it has often
seemed that there is nothing but noise.
IV.
ate on a Thursday afternoon this
L spring, Assange sent word for me
to y to London and meet him at the
Embassy that Sunday morning. Three
days later, I was sitting in the conference
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 57
room waiting for him. He appeared
dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that
commemorated the ve-hundredth
episode of The Simpsons, in which
he had a cameo. (While grilling steaks,
the cartoon Assange tells Homer
Simpson, You know, you should re-
ally get out less!, then he dashes into
a bunker.) He was holding a black
leather-bound ledger the size of a din-
ner tray, which he peered into occa-
sionally but would not explain. Its a
book, he said, when I asked about it.
Standing at the door, he was about to
speak, then he held a nger in the air,
as if he had forgotten something, and
scurried o. He returned and led me
down a narrow hallway and into a tiny
room. Assange turned on an everyday
machinehe has asked me not to de-
scribe it, but it was about as loud as
a blenderto overwhelm any listen-
ing devices targeting him. Standing
there, we whispered. After a while, I
began to worry that the unit would
overheat.
He was planning one of his riski-
est disclosures: a trove of C.I.A. hack-
ing toolsgigabytes of malware and
related recordscomposing the larg-
est ever leak in the agencys history.
The archive contained actionable code,
which meant that Assange was in pos-
session of an arsenal, and some of his
staers were rattled. One of them re-
called, Everyone immediately was
super terried: Whats he doing? Its We wanted the name Vault 7 to stick,
so dangerousthese are the people
who make people disappear! As-
sange understood the risks, too. This
might get me kicked out of here, he
told me.
Last summer, when a supporter
urged him to push back harder against
allegations about Russia, Assange in-
dicated that he had a new publication
in the works that would likely alter
peoples views. You cant see the lon-
ger strategy, he said. But, in such mat-
ters, Assange seemed to be playing on
a Daliesque chess board that allowed
for just one piece, just one move. He
once wrote that a person should al-
ways follow his own instincts, rather
than do what appears good in the ab-
stract: Being on a path true to your
character carries with it a state of ow,
where the thoughts about your next
step come upon waking, unbidden, but
welcome.
Two weeks after Trumps Inaugura-
tion, he wrote a series of tweets about
a mysterious entity that he had labelled
Vault 7. Each tweet was accompanied
by a dramatic, and seemingly unrelated,
image: the doomsday seed bank in Nor-
way, an old jet-propulsion engine. The
tweets were a cryptic way to tease his
release of the C.I.A.s toolsAssange
loves puzzlesbut, he told me, they
also had a deeper marketing purpose.
so it was also a strategy to pre-intro-
duce the name, so that, when counter-
attack publicity came out, theythe
C.I.A.couldnt introduce another
name, he said.
For more than a year, Assange ap-
pears to have developed a source with
access to high-level electronic surveil-
lance. Beginning in the summer of
2015, WikiLeaks published several
classied N.S.A. intercepts of world
leaders from Brazil, Japan, Germany,
and France. Given the nature of the
records, the motivation behind the
leaks appeared to expose the reach and
the breadth of U.S. signals-intelligence
capabilities, and not wrongdoing. As-
sanges source for the C.I.A. hacking
tools appeared to have an identical
motivation; Vault 7 documented no
criminality, no corruption, no bulk spy-
ing, only the reach of the agencys tar-
geted cyber operations. Whoever had
decided to make the tools public knew
that their actions would render the ar-
senal useless.
Assange told me that a key reason
to release the tools was that they were
already out of the C.I.A.s control, and
were being passed among contractors,
who were deploying them for personal
use. If true, it constituted a frighten-
ing, newsworthy breach. But beyond
his word there was no way to know.
For months, I kept an eye out for any-
one professing to have heard of the
tools being shared among contrac-
tors, as he had described. I could nd
no one.
For Assange, this probably did not
make much dierence. Vault 7, even
more than his previous publications,
reected a sharpening view of Amer-
ican global power. A few years ago, a
journalist asked him if he thought he
would be leaving the Embassy soon.
Where would I go? Assange shot
back. I would end up in the outside
world where you are, but what is hap-
pening to the outside world? He de-
scribed Western democracies as ap-
proaching full-on Orwellian societies.
The internet, our greatest tool of
emancipation, has been transformed
into the most dangerous facilitator of
totalitarianism we have ever seen, As-
sange had written in 2012. Left to its
own trajectory, within a few years,
global civilization will be a postmod-
ern surveillance dystopia, from which
escape for all but the most skilled in-
dividuals will be impossible. In fact,
we may already be there.
Assange has long been preoccupied
with electronic surveillancea real
and growing problembut he has be-
come increasingly vehement that West-
ern democracies have become nascent
totalitarian states. It is an urgent view,
and as a general framework for under-
standing world aairs it upends dis-
tinctions that would otherwise seem
obvious: if you believe that the foun-
dations of a global dystopia are being
erected by Washington or London,
you might well regard those develop-
ments as a greater priority than con-
ventional crackdowns in Minsk or
Moscow.
ssange walked me to a small oce,
A resembling an A.V. room, where
staers were preparing for a press con-
ference to accompany the release of
Vault 7. There was a computer with
two large monitors, with their built-in
cameras taped over. A row of metal
shelves stocked with supplies doubled
as a rack for a large felt drape, which
Assange uses as a green screen. There
were bookcases that held DVDs, some
of Assanges publications, memoirs
(Mandelas Long Walk to Freedom,
Vivienne Westwoods Get a Life!),
and cat toys.
A technician was cuing up a sam-
ple from a song by Laibach, a Slove-
nian group that fuses totalitarian im-
agery with pop culture, to subversive
eect. In 2014, Laibach released a song
called The Whistleblowers, which
featured a chorus of whistlers juxta-
posed with lyrics about a rising army
giving the solitary, often fraught and
vulnerable act of whistle-blowing a
neo-fascist feel.Assange wanted audio
of the whistling to cycle on repeat while
people waited for the press conference
to begin. Over and over, the militaris-
tic sample lled the room. Its work-
ing! he said gleefully. Then he showed
me the songs video, which features
children dressed like Soviet gymnasts
training to blow up ceramic pots with
superpowered whistling. Behind them,
a Stalinesque painting of Assange
loomed. Laughing, he said, Its ob- in not being a part of that, he told
noxious, but funny. me. When theres a mob attacking a
Assange took a seat before the mon- particular subject, then to join that
itors. Do you want to see the weather? mob is, usually, almost always an act
he asked me. I knelt beside him as he of cowardice. Its to t in. This was
logged on to Twitter and plugged in inexplicable. His stated intent for
search terms about WikiLeaksl- WikiLeaks was to advance truthful
tering out any comments that were political discourse. How could he not
not from veried Twitter accounts, the criticize Trump for his serial lying? It
social-media lite. feels weak to me, he explained. Were
The weekends are usually terri- not saying anything new, therefore we
are just aping the conventional view
therefore it has no intellectual basis.
In a later conversation, I urged him
to articulate a coherent view of Trump,
but the prospect seemed to pain him.
Its hard to sum up in the current cli-
mate of polarization, he told me. It
seemed his main concern was that by
criticizing Trump he would somehow
appear to validate the previous norms
ble, he said. I call it troll oclock. of American politics. Governments
He stumbled on a tweet from Roger are evil, he told me. The last gov-
Stone, a Republican political opera- ernment was evil. This government
tive who was close to Trump and who, is evil. Does the Trump Administra-
during the campaign, appeared to tion appear to have a potential to be
have advance knowledge of the Wiki- uniquely bad? Maybe. But in many
Leaks release of Podestas e-mails. other respects its the same problem
Stone had written a tweet to a critic that existed under Obama. The dier-
that was burning up the Internet that ence is that now everyone is talking
weekend: You stupid stupid bitch. about it. What is associated with this
Never denied a perfectly legal back Administration is a certain aggressive
channel to Assange who indeed had rhetoric, which can make the prob-
the goods on #CrookedHillary.As- lem worse if people accept it; on the
sange smirked, and told me there was other hand, it also makes everyone
no back channel. Earlier in the year, pay attention to problems that have
he had written to Stone, he said, urg- been there for a long time. He told
ing him to stop making the false claim. me that, whatever Trumps aws, his
Stone, he recalled, had told him, The Administration had the capacity to
more you deny it, the more theyll be- challenge entrenched power in Wash-
lieve it. ington, and to disrupt the structure of
Twitter does not serve Assange well. American power overseas. I will give
It hasnt always done me favors, tac- you a list of counterintuitive structural
tically! he said, laughing. He acknowl- positives, he told me. Several days
edged that many supporters, and even later, he presented a set of ideas that
some sta, are uncomfortable with his could be distilled into one: A com-
tweets, especially those in which he plaint from civil libertarians and con-
seems to support Trump. They live stitutional scholars is that the power
in a community, and I live in an em- of the Presidency is too strong. O.K.,
bassy! he told me. I dont have to take it has been reduced now.
my kids to school, whereas they have
to interact with people. e are under attack! Assange
Assange has called Trump a popu-
W yelled. It was the day of the
list authoritarian, but his rejection of press conference to launch Vault 7, and
the liberal establishment, it seemed, the A.V. room, transformed into an on-
had almost forced him to refrain from air studio, was so jammed with equip-
criticizing Trump. When there is a ment it was barely possible to enter.There
moment of intense conformity, then were halogen lamps, and a camera pointed
there is a lot of competitive advantage toward a tiny step stool beside a table
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 59
with a laptop and a highlighted press re-
lease. Several cell phones were on a table.
As a security measure, WikiLeaks sends
transmissions for broadcast interviews
through mobile phones. Nothing is
working, a technician said.
Any phone that had access does not
have any, Mr. Picabia said.
Wryly, the technician added, But the
music is playing! The Laibach song was
on repeat. Embassy sta were humming
it in the hallways.
As Assange tried to work out the sys-
tem failure, he also considered how to
turn it to his advantage. It could work
out well, because it is proof of what weve
been saying, he said. He was certain
that his enemies in the intelligence com-
munity were sending a message: they
would not watch passively as their se-
crets were distributed. There would be
no press conference, but he had launched
Vault 7 anyway. We still have a chance
to respond to whatever garbage they
come up with today, he said. We might
be more reactive, but we had a contin-
gency plan for this. Its on the Web
the archive is out. I have a backup link.
We can tweet.
During the Presidential campaign,
Assange had become a Republican dar-
ling. Once he launched Vault 7, the love
cooled. Assange should spend the rest
of his life wearing an orange jumpsuit,
the Republican senator Ben Sasse de-
clared on March 9th. That night, As-
sange was dressed in an orange jump-
suit, and padding around the Embassy
with a pint of yogurt. He said he
wanted me to wear a jumpsuit for the
rest of my life, he told me, and grinned.
Im already there! I wanted to get one
that was more like a velvet orange cat-
suitand to look very relaxed and ac-
complishedbut this is the best we
could get.
Pressure from the Trump Adminis-
tration was beginning to build. A few
weeks later, Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. di-
rectoranother partisan WikiLeaks fan
during the electiondeclared the orga-
nization to be a hostile non-state intel-
ligence agency. In a press conference, he
bluntly criticized Assange and his sta,
and made a case for aggressive action
against WikiLeaks. We can no longer
allow Assange and his colleagues the lat-
itude to use free-speech values against
us. To give them the space to crush us
60 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
with misappropriated secrets is a perver-
sion of what our great Constitution stands
for. It ends now.
The next day, I sat in the conference
room while Assange paced around me
with a coee mug in hand. Im in the Syria, and dissident academics in China.
process of managing a response, he said.
So there was his new legal interpreta-
tionthe head of the C.I.A. deciding to
redene the lawand then there was a
statement in relation to WikiLeaks: This
ends now! he said. Which, coming
from the C.I.A., is a menacing statement.
Given that the C.I.A. doesnt engage in
prosecutions and court action, what is
meant by This ends now? Why so coy?
Is it a threat against my sta? that he was unsure how he would ap-
A week later, the Justice Department
indicated that the Espionage Act case
against Assangeleft dormant by the
Obama Administrationwas being
revived. Even Americans who may
have serious doubts and disagreements
with WikiLeaks conduct should be
concerned about legal eorts directed
against them, Ben Wizner, an A.C.L.U.
attorney, told me. Never in the history
of the United States has there been a
prosecution of a publisher for publish-
ing truthful information. A successful
prosecution of WikiLeaks will be a prec-
edent that is used to support a much
broader crackdown against mainstream
news organizations.
At the same time, Wizner said, it was
becoming harder to identify the princi-
ples guiding WikiLeaks.Assanges prov-
ocationshis indierence to facilitat-
inginformation warfare, his willingness
to pay for secrets, his encouraging mil-
lennials to take C.I.A. internships as
whistle-blowing opportunitieswere one Twitter jag, Assange posted thirty
recasting the dicult moral act of expos-
ing institutional abuse as something that
began to look like espionage. When the
Trump Administrations Justice Depart-
ment began a campaign to crack down
on leaks, Assange had so politicized his
position that he had lost the authority to
speak convincingly on the mattereven
though he had in many ways redened
the conversation about whistle-blowers.
He has done damage to the whole move-
ment of digital rights, a former supporter
told me, asking for anonymity out of fear
of reprisal, like many others who did not
want to identify themselves.
In London, I asked Assange about
criticism he had received for insucient
redactions, or exposing personal infor-
mation. Over the years, WikiLeaks
documents have revealed the identi-
ties of teen-age rape victims in Saudi
Arabia, anti-government activists in
Its nearly all bogus, he said. In any
case, we have to understand the real-
ity that privacy is dead.
If someone gave you all of Facebooks
chats, would you publish them?
He paused. All of them? he asked. I
knew he had been pondering the ques-
tion. He had once described Facebook
as the most appalling spying machine
that has ever been invented. He told me
proach such a submission, but that he
thought it could be socially transforma-
tional. It would change what people
should say, what people shouldnt say, how
unusual is betrayal and backstabbing, he
said. It would change the norms of pri-
vate human behavior. Something like that
would need a lot of careful thought. Its
not obvious.
Would every name be anonymized?
I dont know, he said. Its a hypo-
thetical.
hroughout the spring, Assange was
T in the mood for war. Almost every
time I heard from him there was a
conict to discuss. Laura Poitras, the
lmmaker, had made a documentary
about him that he felt was unfair, and
so he sent cease-and-desist letters, and
plotted to sue her for twelve million
pounds in damages. There were new
fronts in his legal battles and new skir-
mishes with journalists and critics; on
dierent links to people who had called
for his assassination. There were claimed
victories: when Donald Trump, Jr., de-
cided to tweet out e-mails that he had
received about the meeting with Rus-
sians, Assange took credit for persuad-
ing him to do so: Did you see our in-
credible result with Trump Jr.?
In May, Kim Dotcom poured accel-
erant on the conspiracy that Seth Rich
was Assanges source for the D.N.C.
e-mails by claiming that he had evi-
dence to back it up. The stunt was mag-
nied by Fox News, which ran a follow-
up story, reportedly with the Presidents
involvement, which was so packed with
fabrications that the network was forced
to retract it. Every time the story ex-
ploded into the news, Assange gave it
life by retweeting the latest iteration.
He either did not care or did not rec-
ognize that he appeared to be using
Seth Rich as a pawn. When I told him
that I thought he had opened the dis-
cussion about Rich as a diversion, he
accused me of being a conspiracy the-
orist, and said that it was not his prob-
lem that the story had metastasized
across the right-wing media. My ac-
tions are more than appropriate, he
told me. The issue is how to prevent
them from being distorted.
Assanges popular support now in-
cluded Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity,
along with a coterie of alt-right trolls. He
was pleased to have the alt-right involved
in the WikiLeaks project. In his view,
people at the margins of political life were
becoming energetic seekers of truth, as
they combed through primary source ma-
terial on his Web site.
The more his public inuence took
on the features of populism, the more
Assange was forced to accept the sup-
port of people no matter their views.
George Gittoes told me about seeing an
Australian newspaper headline announc-
ing that Pauline Hanson, a politician
known for anti-immigrant and anti-Mus-
lim views, had declared her support for
Assange. Shes a monster, Gittoes said.
I got onto Julian real fast. I said, This
is no good. And he said, But shes the
rst politician to support me! I dont like
going against my one supporter. Later,
from Afghanistan, Gittoes explained the
complexity of his own support for As-
sange: His thinking on Trump is beyond
my comprehension, but I can give him
the benet of the doubt on that because
the whole Trump phenomenon is so uid.
The reason why I support Julian and see
him as an inspiration is very simple. He
proves that one individual can still stand
up against the powers we all feel op-
pressed by.
On May 19th, the Swedish prosecu-
tor announced that, after much delay, she
was dropping the case; without vindicat-
ing Assange or charging him, she had
decided that the status quo had no other
pragmatic resolution. Even though he
had politicized the case, it had also, over
the years, developed its own unfair con-
tortions, and everything about the an-
nouncement was a lossfor the women
Help! Ive fallen and my son is a disappointment!
who had been involved, for Assange, who out it, he was going to stay put. The
was unable to prove his side, and for Swe- question is: where do you stage your
den, unable to serve justice. conict? he had once said, as he as-
That afternoon, after more than a sessed his tactical situation. I think in
year of continuous indoor existence, As- the center of London, at an embassy
sange emerged to make a statement on that is connected to the traditions of
the balcony. He hoped to manufacture Latin America, is quite a good place.
an iconic image; facing a few hundred Leaving Assange in the Embassy was
journalists, he looked out stoically, with always a vexed experience. Sometimes
a squint, and then pumped his st. he abruptly ended our conversation, ran
While today was an important victory, to his bedroom, and closed the door, and
and an important vindication, the road I let myself out. Sometimes he walked
is far from over, he said. The war me to the lobby. Once, I stopped half-
the proper waris just commencing. way to the exit, realizing that I had for-
He cited his years in the Embassy with- gotten my passport, and said, Oh, I cant
out sunlight and his estrangement from leave without that! He was silent for a
his children. Afterward, referring to the moment, and then began, At least you
investigation, he told me, I dont know In his face, his slouching physique, he
how forgiving Gandhi was, but this is seemed the saddest I had ever seen him.
not something I choose to forgive, or Whether he had made the Embassy his
that I want to forgive, or that I think is prison, or others had done this to him,
appropriate to forgive. I said that he he was trapped.
sounded angry. I would put it more During my last visit to London, I stayed
bluntly: the desire for revenge, he said. with Assange until midnight. As I got
Still, his legal circumstances had ready to leave, he stood to see me to the
barely changed. Scotland Yard was main- door, but before taking a step he stopped
taining an arrest warrant for him, based and became lost in thought. He whis-
on the violation of his bail. Assange was pered something I could not fully hear.
ghting the warrant, but he told me that Then, speaking as if he were observing
even if it was dropped immediately he the fall of Rome, he explained that he
would not walk out. What he wanted, thought Americas empire might nally
it seemed, was immunity: a guarantee be collapsing. With a long gaze and a
that he would never be called to the faint smile, he again whispered what he
United States to face any trial. With- had said: This could be the beginning.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 61
 DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY

62 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY WOLFGANG TILLMANS


AN EVENING OUT
had emptied half the carton of
Z. juice, and now I was holding it
as he poured the vodka into the
plastic funnel at the top. We had laughed
at the way he threw his head back and
drank, sucking the juice down even as
he grimaced at the taste, which was sickly
sweet. He refused to dump it in the gut-
ter: My grandfather is Russian, he said,
we never waste anything. And that, too,
had made us laugh, though he was seri-
ous now as he poured, tilting the plastic
ask so that the barest ribbon of liquid
threaded perfectly into the carton. He
didnt want to waste that, either, and I
was so absorbed in holding the carton
stilland absorbed in Z., too, who stood
close to me, our shoulders almost touch-
ingthat I had nearly forgotten about
N. when I heard the click of his phone
as it took a picture of us. What are you
doing, I said, and Im sure there was a
note in my voice of real concern at the
thought of the image shared with oth-
ers, an anticipation of shame, but we had
already drunk enough that the concern
was distant, and N. laughed it o. Im
sorry, he said, its just too epic, weve been
waiting for this for so long. He laughed
again when I warned him not to post it
on Facebook. Ill hunt you down, I said,
one of the phrases I had used often in
my seven years as a teacher, four of them
here in Bulgaria, a career whose end we
were celebrating that night. He held up
his hands, smiling broadly. Dont worry,
he said, I wont, I just want to remem-
ber this forever.
Z. took the carton from me and
screwed back on the lid, shaking it vig-
orously and for far too long, making us
laugh again. It was the second ask of
vodka, the second carton of juice, the
second time Z. had taken in hand the
mixing of our drinks. He would have
poured for us if wed had anything to use
as cups; instead we drank straight from
the carton, which he handed to me rst
and then to N. before drinking from it
himself. We were on a narrow street in
FICTION
BY GARTH GREENWELL
the city center, standing beneath a street
lamp in front of the little twenty-four-
hour shop where we had bought our sup-
plies. It was already late, but we had half
an hour or so before the concert at the
club that was our real destination. Soa
is famous for these clubs, where the citys
wealthy dance and drink; theyre called
chalgoteki, after the pop-folk music they
play. I had never been to one before, ev-
erything in my temperament kept me
away from them, but now, since I was
leaving Soa, Z. had insisted that at least
once I should have what he called a real
Bulgarian night out, and the lure of him
had overcome all my aversion to drunk-
enness and noise. I was eager for it, even,
I planned to enjoy myself, to dance and
drink, to relax in the company of these
boys I genuinely liked, to be their friend
for an evening and not their teacher.
he evening had started a few hours
T before, at a restaurant where I had
promised to meet a group of students to
say goodbye. They were already there
when I arrived, ten or twelve of them
seated at tables they had pushed together.
When they saw me, several of them stood
up, their chairs scraping on the uneven
patio, and they called out my name, or
not my name really but my family name,
I mean my fathers name; soon I wouldnt
be that name anymore, I thought, feel-
ing suddenly the relief of it. Of course
it was what they called me, though they
werent students anymore, or not my stu-
dents; they had graduated a year earlier
and were back in Soa after their rst
year abroad, in America or England or
Amsterdam, they had scattered as all my
students here scatter, none of them had
stayed behind. There was already wine
at the table, three bottles opened to
breathe, a cheap Bulgarian white for the
late June evening, even as I took my seat
I could taste the twinge of it. But it was
a pleasure to hold it up to the light, and
more than a pleasure to hear them say
my name again, my fathers name, and
then Z. said To new beginnings, and we
drank. It was terrible wine but it didnt
matter, I was as happy in that moment
as I had ever been. There were more
toasts over dinner, as the waiters carried
out dishes of the food my students had
missed in their months away, salads and
grilled meats and ceramic pots of vege-
tables and cheese. They toasted one an-
other, their year away, their stories of
London and New York.
I had a fucking miserable year, N. said
when his turn came, I mean I knew it
would be awful but it was fucking mis-
erable. I told you, Z. said, I knew you
werent cut out to be a lawyer, and the
girl next to him said Thats true, and ev-
eryone at the table expressed their agree-
ment, so that N. raised his hands in sur-
render. Hey, he said, I wasnt the one who
wanted it, but even Gospodinutand
here he waved one of his hands toward
me, calling me Mister, the word students
use for a male teachercouldnt con-
vince my mother it was a terrible idea.
It was true that I had tried, at the be-
ginning of N.s senior year, when his
mother came in for her quarterly con-
ference. She never missed these meet-
ings, even though it meant a two-hour
drive from her home in Plovdiv, losing
half a day of work. She was a serious
woman, invariably dressed in a pants suit,
dark navy or gray, her black hair cut in
a severe line just above her shoulders.
She was gracious, too, and she had
thanked me once for my inuence, as
she put it; You are the only teacher he
works hard for, she said, this is the only
class he likes. He isnt a stupid boy, she
said, as she said at each of our meetings
when we discussed his poor grades, his
late or missing assignments, but oh, he
is so lazy. But this time I demurred: It
isnt exactly that hes lazy, I said. I saw
her face tighten slightly with the wari-
ness I often saw in parents when I began
to speak about their children, a knitting
of the brow that might have meant a
special kind of attention but was usually
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 63
the opposite, was usually their attention
closing o. When N. is interested he will
work, I said, if its something he likes
and here she turned her head to the side,
she made a thick sound with her tongue
in the back of her throat. Please, N.s
mother said, turning back to me, her
tone at once dismissive and imploring,
please, if he likes it? What will he do
when he has a job, he cant only work
when he wants to. I nodded and started
to speak but she went on, Please, she
said, I know what you will say, N. has
told me many times, you tell them they
should do what they love, its beautiful
what you tell them. I see why they like
you so much, she said, with a tight, con-
ciliatory smile.
I do tell them that, I said, I believe
it. I took a breath. He has a talent, I
said, I think hes lucky to have found it,
and yes, I think he should follow what
he loves and build his life around it. I
paused. I had been wringing my hands
beneath the table, knitting and unknit-
ting my ngers, and now I laid them
at on top of it. I worry about N. in law
school, I said, I worry that he will keep
doing badly. I think, and here I tried to
make my voice lighter somehow, I think
he should do what he feels called to do,
I think he should study what he wants.
She had been very still as I spoke, her
tight smile unchanging. Yes, she said
again, its very beautiful what you say,
very inspiring. And what does he do
then, she said, after he studies what he
wants, what does he do when he has to
get a job? Things are dierent here, Gos-
podine, maybe in America what you say
is true; you try something there and if
you fail it is no problem, you try some-
thing else, Americans love starting over,
you say its never too late. But for us it
is always too late, she said. When N.
gets his diploma he has to nd a job,
right away, a good job in England, if he
doesnt he has to come back here, and
if he comes back here it will be very
hard for him to leave again, do you un-
derstand, if he comes back here he will
be trapped. I know you care about him,
she said, settling back in her chair, I
know your heart, and she hesitated, grop-
ing for the phrase, your heart is in the
right place, but what you say isnt true
for us, please, you must help him see
that. N. groaned when I repeated this
to him the next morning at school. You
64 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
see, he said, she wont listen, its impos-
sible to talk to her. Its because she loves
you, I said, its a way of loving you, and
he sighed and looked away.
Well, N. said at the restaurant table,
lowering his hands before Z. interrupted
himListen up, Gospodine, he said, youre
going to like this. N. smiled at me. No
more law school, he said, Im transfer-
ring departments, in the fall Ill be doing
literature. There was a cheer around the
table, as several students said Chestito,
congratulations, and all of us lifted our
wine. But what about your mother, I said
after we drank, how did you convince
her? N.s smile widened. It was easy, he
said, I just failed all my classes, and ev-
eryone laughed. I dont approve of your
methods, I said, though I was laughing,
too, and Z. raised his glass and said To
whatever works, and we toasted again.
e toasted on the street, too, after
W a fashion, lifting the carton to one
another before taking our drink. This
had been our plan, to leave the others
after dinner and drink together, just the
three of us alone, a prelude to more drink-
ing at the club. But the second or third
time it made the circuit I passed the car-
ton directly to Z. Hey, he said, trying to
give it back to me, you cant skip your
turn. But I didnt take it. I need to slow
down, I said, I cant drink as much as
you. I was already feeling it, the wine
from earlier and the vodka we were drink-
ing too quickly now, I could feel the edges
of myself softening, a kind of tingling
like a limb waking up. It was dangerous
to drink so much; I didnt have a sense
of who I would be really drunk, I had
never let myself go in that way, as men
around me did in my childhood, it was
another way I had always been unlike
them. Gospodine, Z. said, his voice heavy
with disappointment, come on now, and
he shook the carton, still holding it out
to me, dont let us down. All right, I said,
relenting. And then, in a broad, cartoon-
ish Slavic accent, another classroom trick,
I said Tonight I make exception, and
drank deeply. Bravo, Z. said, thats the
way, and N. said again This is so epic,
and then, this is the best night of my life,
which made all three of us laugh.
Lets go, Z. said then, and he set o
quickly, so that N. and I struggled to
keep up. E, kopele, N. said, bastard, slow
down, why are you rushing, and Z. turned
and smiled, still walking, moving back-
ward along the street. We dont want to
be late, well miss the show, he said. He
made a motion with his hips, a little
Turkish shimmy, before he turned back
around. The club was a short walk away,
on Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard, part of
a complex that included one of the citys
fanciest hotels. We showed our lichni
karti to the two men stationed at the door,
their torsos obscene with muscle, and
then descended a long carpeted staircase
that was lit dimly by red lights set high
along the walls. The music got louder as
we approached the glass doors separat-
ing the corridor from the club proper,
and it overwhelmed me as Z. pulled them
open and we stepped into a cavernous,
dark room strafed by lights that spun
somewhere above us. We made our way
single le through the crowded space,
toward the corner farthest from the en-
trance, where there were a few unclaimed
tables, small and chest-high, each with
an ashtray and an unopened bottle of
gin. Nearer the bar people stood with
bottles and glasses, moving their shoulders
and hips, dancing in place. There wasnt
a dance oor, though what else could be
the point of the place, with the music so
loud it was impossible to talk, after only
a minute of it my ears ached.
A young woman came up to us, hold-
ing a tray above her head as she angled
her way through the crowd. She wore a
white blouse several sizes too small, ex-
posing her navel and buttoned just barely
above her breasts, which she allowed to
touch Z., casually erotic, as she leaned
over and pressed her face against his.
She shouted something into his ear as
she placed three glasses and a small
bucket of ice on our table. He recipro-
cated her gesture, putting an arm around
her shoulder, and N. and I looked at each
other and laughed. Z. was always theat-
rical with women, a cartoon Lothario at
sixteen who had grown into real seduc-
tion; it was like he breathed sex as he
exchanged comments with the server,
they could almost have been kissing as
they moved mouth to ear. But then Z.
drew back, letting his arm fall from her
shoulder, and looked at her in disbelief.
He jerked his head in a single vertical
motion, a decided no. He started to turn
toward N. but the waitress pressed her
hand to his chest and gestured for him
to come back. She spoke longer this time,
her hand on his chest, balancing the
empty tray on the table. Now Z. did turn
to N., shouting into his ear, and N.
shouted to me in turn that to stay at the
table we had to buy the gin. O.K., I
shouted back, how much, and when he
told me a hundred and sixty leva, eighty
euro, I burst out laughing, making Z.
and N. laugh, too. But the woman didnt
laugh, she shrugged, all her seductive-
ness gone. Its crazy, Z. shouted, but the
alternative was to stand in the packed
space between the bar and the booths,
where you could hardly breathe and
where we wouldnt be a group at all, what
would be the point of that, and so I pulled
out my billfold. One night, I said, my
throat already raw with shouting and
with smoke, and they smiled and reached
for their pockets. No no, I said, wagging
my forenger, I didnt want them to spend
their money. I had gone to the bankomat
earlier that day, my wallet was full of
bills, and I drew out several to hand to
the woman, who smiled again, opening
the gin and a can of tonic and pouring
us our rst drinks before she spun away.
There were maybe seven or eight ta-
bles in our part of the room, almost all
of them taken by groups of young peo-
ple, two or three couples gathered at most
of them, too many people for the small
surface. N. made a motion then, point-
ing back to the entrance, and nodded to
Z. before he left. Z. mouthed something
at me but I didnt understand, the music
was too loud, and after he repeated it to
no avail he dropped his hands to his
crotch and mimed a man pissing, his
hands barely curled as if around an im-
possibly large cock. I laughed at this,
both because it was funny and because
it hid the other thing I felt. I mocked
him, rst holding my hand up curled like
his, making a doubtful face, and then I
dropped both hands to my own crotch,
as if holding a cock twice as large, three
times, and Z. laughed, too, a genuine
laugh, I thought, though it wasnt very
funny, and both of us seemed embar-
rassed a little once the laughter had
passed. Then Z. said something else and
again I didnt understand, so he took his
phone out of his pocket and typed into
it, holding up the screen for me to read.
This is a great night, he had written, and
I looked up and said Yes, and we raised
our glasses to each other, clinking them
before we drank.
The music changed as we set our
glasses down, there was a sudden assault
of gaidi, the mountain bagpipes ubiqui-
tous in folk music, and then a synco-
pated rush of drums that made both our
faces break open in smiles. It was a song
we knew, one of the big hits of Z.s se-
nior year, and we lifted our glasses again,
toasting each other and the song and the
memory of it we had. With the glass still
at his lips he began to dance, he extended
his other arm away from his body and
began to turn slightly from side to side,
and though it was half ironic it made me
feel a kind of pang, since it was for me,
his dance, I was his only audience, it
could only be for me. It just lasted a min-
ute, when he set his glass down his other
arm dropped, too, his performance aban-
doned. But I picked it up, I raised my
own arms, awkward and un-American,
I shued a step toward him and he was
in it again. It was like I had given him
permission to dance, to be foolish in front
of me, since I was so much more fool-
ish, without his beauty or his youth, I
was an old man in this place. But then
he smiled at me and I smiled back and
we were dancing with each other, after
a fashion, we made a little orbit together,
a center of gravity. At one point I reached
over to him and put my hand on his
shoulder, a friendly gesture, casual, avun-
cular maybe, and then I let my hand
curve around his shoulder and down his
arm and, as I felt him ex his biceps, that
reexive preening, I curled my ngers
around the muscle there and squeezed,
feeling how solid it was. I knew the ges-
ture wasnt casual anymore, that it showed
too much, I was touching him as I had
never allowed myself to touch a student
before. But he wasnt my student, I told
myself, for one night we could face each
other without all that, I could touch his
arm and have all of that fall away. Or
maybe thats not what I thought, maybe
Im adding it now, maybe then all I felt
was a seam or line drawn taut from my
throat to my groin, a circuit that came
alive in contact with him. He smiled and
bent his arm at the elbow, pumping the
muscle up, and I let my other hand join
the rst, linking my ngers around his
arm to take in the full span of it. I had
stopped dancing, I realized, and I dropped
my hands as I felt the embarrassment of
admiring him too long. But he didnt
seem embarrassed, he didnt stop smil-
ing, though he wasnt dancing anymore,
either; he stopped to slide his hand into
the front pocket of his jeans, which were
tight, my eyes followed as he worked his
ngers in and slid out his phone. His
face was studious in the light cast by the
screen, and then he held it up to me and
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 65
I saw that he had typed in all caps IRON
MAN. He expected me to laugh but I
didnt laugh, I looked at him, past the
glare of the phone which must have been
lighting my face now, letting him read
whatever he could see there, I looked
and shook my head from right to left in
armation; Da, I said, though he couldnt
hear me or the tone in which I said it,
which was a serious tone, grave, Da. He
slid the phone back in his pocket, smil-
ing more broadly, and took a half step
toward me, coming around the table. He
squared himself o, facing me and plant-
ing both his feet, like a challenge, and
then he balled one of his hands into a
st and struck his own stomach twice,
hard, showing o the muscles there, too,
before he opened his hand to make a
welcoming gesture, jerking his head up
in invitation. He wanted me to try, and
when I didnt immediately strike him
he reached out and grabbed my wrist,
pulling it toward his stomach. I made
a st and let him strike himself with it,
I felt the strength of him there, he was
like iron, I thought, or like something
dearer, really, like marble, and when he
gestured for me to hit him again, harder,
I did hit him, not very hard but hard
enough to satisfy him. I left my hand
there, my knuckles ush with his ab-
domen, and then I opened my hand and
laid my palm at against his stomach,
the cotton of his shirt just slightly damp
with sweat, and let my ngers trace the
muscles there, risen in their rows as he
clenched them, I curved the ends of my
ngers around them and pressed against
them as long as I dared. Then I released
my grip and smiled and brushed his
stomach quickly up and down with the
back of my hand, as if to erase the trace
of how I had touched him. I took my
glass from the table and with a grimace
drank what was left.
The same song was still playing, only
a couple of minutes had passed, though
it seemed much longer that I had let
myself admire him. As soon as I set my
glass down Z. was lling it, gallant again,
and then N. was back from the bath-
room, lifting his own glass expectantly,
so that Z. lled it, too, and then his own,
and once more we were toasting one an-
other. I glanced around quickly, aware
that everything I had felt would have
been obvious to anyone watching us, but
no one was watching us; in the dim light
I could see the other tables and beyond
them the crowded oor unchanged. I
put my arm around N.s shoulders,
friendly, trying to regularize touch, and
he and I danced together. Another song
had come on, one I didnt know but that
didnt matter, you can always dance to
chalga, thats the whole point of it, its
single virtue. I had turned away from Z.
to dance with N., who wasnt a good
dancer at all, he didnt even try to dance
well: he made all his movements ironic,
self-deprecating, an extension of the per-
sona he had taken on in class, which was
endearing but also a product of uncer-
tainty or doubt, a kind of abnegation. I
wanted him to grow out of it but now
I played along, laughing, dancing in the
same way, our motions silly and shuing,
a game that was in a way the opposite
of eros and so a relief to me.
Iagainhad only lost track of him for a min-
ute or two, but when I looked over
Z. had disappeared. He must have
gone to the bathroom, I thought, and
immediately I stopped dancing. I shouted
to N. that I was going to piss, at which
he nodded, and I left him without a
thought for how odd it was, to leave him
there alone, how transparent it must have
been, I would think of it only later. I
moved through the crowd as quickly as
I could, and then in the dimness ahead
there was a sudden rectangle of porce-
lain light as a door opened and I was in
a large bright room, tiled and clean.There
was a line of three urinals, from one end
of which a man was stepping away, zip-
ping himself up. Z. was at the other, I
saw with relief, I wasnt too late, and I
stepped up beside him, breaking that
distributive propriety of mens bath-
rooms, a guard against unchecked
glances, against desire. He looked over
quickly and saw it was me and smiled,
a little blurrily, I thought, he was drunker
than I was, or drunker than I felt, and
then he faced forward again. I didnt face
forward, though I could have, I could
still have seen what I wanted to see. I
let my eyes track down the front of him,
following the line of buttons down his
shirt, which was ridiculous in the uo-
rescent light, a kind of garish violet. Even
in my excitement I admired the neat-
ness of it, the buttons perfectly aligned,
so that I thought for the rst time in
many years of my father dressing me as
a boy, teaching me about this line, the
gig line, he called it, buttons and buckle
forming an order that was more than
vanity, that signalled some deeper righ-
teousness. The memory came in a ash
before I let myself look at his cock, pale
in his hand and pissing a pale line against
the porcelain, nothing extraordinary, not
small or particularly large, a handsome
cock, and I felt my own stien slightly
when I saw that with his index nger
he was rubbing just slightly the under-
side of the head, where he held the fore-
skin back, an unconscious gesture, prob-
ably, though it must have sent a small
current of pleasure alongside the plea-
sure of pissing. I knew I was acting badly,
that I was looking too brazenly and too
long, that I shouldnt have looked at all.
I would be ashamed later but I wasnt
ashamed now, I kept watching as the
stream weakened and became intermit-
tent, let him know, I said to myself, he
already knows, let him see it. He let go
of the head to pull the foreskin all the
way back and shake himself before he
pinched the base and drew his ngers
up the shaft, stretching himself out to
his full length and icking o the drop
of urine that hung at the tip. He did this
two or three times and then stopped,
leaving his cock dangling for a long mo-
ment, in which I felt my excitement
mount and become unbearable, there
wasnt any point to it, I thought, he must
be letting me see, it might be a kind of
invitation, before he tucked himself away
and drew up his y.
Only then did I look at his face. Our
eyes met: he had been watching me or
maybe he had only looked over at that
moment, I dont know. He held my gaze
without speaking, and I knew that if he
gave any sign I would do whatever he
wanted, or rather whatever he would let
me do, I would go into one of the stalls
with him or leave the club, walk out
without a word to N., I didnt care, what-
ever he wanted I would do. He closed
his eyes for a moment, a too long blink,
and swayed slightly before opening them
again and righting himself. Then he
leaned my way, crossing into my space,
and said Im really drunk, shouting it to
me; the music was loud in the bath-
room, too, the door did nothing to keep
it out. He leaned away again. Lets lis-
ten to the concert and then go home,
he said and turned, walking to the sink
to run water over his hands before going
back into the club. I didnt follow right
away, I stayed at the urinal, waiting for
my excitement to settle, until the door
opened and another man walked in, a
fat man in an expensive suit, who sta-
tioned himself at the urinal beside me
and with a sigh began to piss.
and Z. were standing at the table,
N .not dancing anymore, with full
glasses in front of them, and as I joined
them Z. relled my glass, too. He was
smiling, there wasnt any sign of what
had happened as we knocked glasses,
holding each others eyes to say Nazdrave,
I looked for some special message from
him but there was none. While we were
drinking, the music abruptly tapered
and cut o, leaving a kind of roaring in
its wake, and then over the speakers a
mans voice, loud and deep, theatrical,
said Dami i gospoda, ladies and gentle-
men, and in a burst of quick syllables I
couldnt quite follow announced An-
drea, the singer we had come to see.
With a single strike on a deep drum
the lights snapped out and then came
back up, even dimmer, and with an-
other strike a stage I hadnt noticed was
bathed in white light. It was against the
opposite wall, on the other side of the
bar, though we could see just ne, it
wasnt as large a space as I had thought.
A roar went up when the music started,
the intro of Andreas most popular song,
Haide Opa, the words all but mean-
ingless, nearly nonsense, and another
when a door in the wall opened and
she stepped out onto the stage, followed
by four other women. They wore skimpy
two-piece outts that exposed their
midris, the four dancers almost iden-
tical, Andrea set o by what looked like
a fur vest, plush and white, hanging
open around her breasts, and by her
hair, which wasnt gathered back like
the others but teased into a blond mane.
It was a small stage, they could hardly
move, they mostly lifted their arms and
spun, sometimes bending their knees
deeply, everything exaggeratedly sex-
ual. We had moved from our spots
around the table and were standing in
a line in front of it, Z. in the middle,
dancing so that we knocked into each
other, our shoulders and hips, and then
Z. put his arms around our shoulders
and drew us tight, hugging us. When
I looked over he was smiling, watching
Andrea, smiling more when he turned
his head and looked at me, and I smiled
back, happy, pressing against him, reach-
ing around him to squeeze N.s shoul-
der, and he smiled at me, too.
I tried to give Z. room to dance but
he held me tight, making me move
alongside him, his ank hot against
mine, his arm hot against my back, so
that I felt myself swept by a wave of
happiness or joy, my face stretched stu-
pidly in a grin. I must look foolish, I
thought somewhere, but there was so
much pleasure in being a fool, why had
I spent so much of my life guarding
against it? I looked at Z. and N. and
saw my feeling mirrored back at me,
their faces shone in the dark, or thats
how I remember it, as though they were
caught in the are of a cameras ash.
But no one was taking pictures, its only
my imagination that casts such light on
them. On the stage, Andrea was pac-
ing back and forth, like a cat in a cage.
And then Z. stumbled beside me, he
lost his footing and fell, or almost fell,
gripping my shoulder so that I was
pulled forward with him, and I reached
around with my other arm to catch him
around the waist. Whoa, I said, strug-
gling to hold him up as just for a sec-
ond he was a dead weight in my arms.
Then his legs found purchase, and as
he unfolded himself to stand straight
again I saw that my hand had fallen to
his crotch. I dont think I willed it, not
exactly, I think it was almost an acci-
dent but I didnt remove it, either, I
looked at it as if it were something dis-
connected from me, with its own im-
pulses and acts, its own culpability, and
though it wasnt groping him or mov-
ing at all it was culpable, it was a vio-
lation, I knew this even as I looked at
it in a kind of shock. I glanced at Z.s
face and saw he was looking, too, not
with any response I could read, and then
he looked up, not at me or at the stage
but simply forward, his face clouded
with an expression not of anger or dis-
may but of bewilderment, I thought,
and coming to myself suddenly I
snatched away my hand. I looked quickly
at N., who seemed not to have noticed
anything, he was still dancing, watch-
ing the show, absorbed in the music or
in Andrea. Z. stood motionless beside
me, his arm around my shoulder, his
face not clouded anymore but blank. I
looked away from him back to the stage,
feeling a heat in my gut that I recog-
nized as shame, but it wasnt sharp yet,
it was distant or dulled, and though I
knew in the next days I would be mis-
erable with it I turned away from it now.
Tomorrow you will feel it, I said to my-
self, feel it then, dont feel it now. I started
dancing again, and when I moved Z.
began to move, too, he let his arm fall
from my shoulder but began shifting
again side to side with the music, and
soon he was smiling as he had been be-
fore. Maybe he thinks it was an accident,
I thought, maybe it was an accident,
maybe theres no need for shame, even
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 67
as I knew that wasnt the case, or maybe
he was so drunk he would forget it and
then the only shame would be a private
shame, the shame I was accustomed to,
the shame that felt like home.
Z. stumbled again, this time falling
away from me toward N., who caught
him and kept him on his feet. N. looked
at me and laughed as Z. stood up again,
closing his eyes in a long blink and sway-
ing so that both of us put our hands on
his shoulders to keep him upright. I
looked at N. and tilted my head toward
the entrance. We should go, I shouted,
and he weaved his head from left to
right. We each took one of Z.s arms.
We had to walk sideways and single le
to get through the crowd, though peo-
ple tried to make room for us, smiling
and moving out of our way as best they
could. We must have been a familiar
sight, two friends helping a third, and
again I had the feeling of belonging with
them, which was warm and present and
drowned out my premonition of shame.
We climbed the stairs and pushed out
into the night air, nodding at the two
men, who didnt acknowledge us, and I
sucked in great breaths as if I had been
starving for it. Z. wavered again, lean-
ing hard against me, and we sat on the
curb to wait for the cab N. had called.
Z. bent forward, his elbows propped on
his knees, and moaned, and N. and I
laughed at him. Mnogo si slab, be, I said,
youre very weak, I expected better, and
I gripped his shoulder so that he leaned
in to me. But then it was as if he slipped
or lost his balance, he fell across my lap,
and a single uent stream of vomit struck
the pavement beside my shoes. He stayed
in that position, draped across my lap,
and I bent over him, as if to shield him
from something, and rubbed his back,
the fabric of his shirt damp with sweat.
Ne se chuvstvam dobre, he said, pushing
himself upright, I dont feel well, and N.
told him not to worry, they were going
home, he would sleep it o. They would
go to Z.s apartment, which was some-
where nearby, the studio his family kept
and that Z. had claimed as his own, a
place to take girls and have small gath-
erings, it was only big enough for ve
or six people, he had told me. He was
still slumped against me, I could feel the
heat of him against my side.
When the cab came we stood, N. and
I pulling Z. up and leading him to the
68 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
car. N. got in rst, and then he helped
Z. Will you be O.K., I asked, as Z. pulled
his legs in, half lying across N.s lap. But
youre coming, N. said, dont you want
to come with us, we can hang out at Z.s
place, and Z. echoed him, saying Yes,
come, Gospodine, his voice slurred with
drink. I stood with my hand on the car,
hesitating, wanting to join them and
imagining what might still happen, the
possibilities of privacy with Z., I was
tempted to try them. But I stepped back
instead. No, I said, I have to go home,
its too late already. But thank you for
tonight, I said, I had so much fun, thank
you. It was a great night, Z. said, letting
his head fall as I swung the door shut.
Irightdidnt have to wait long for another
taxi to appear; one pulled up almost
away, letting a couple out in front
of the club. On the ride to Mladost I felt
myself sinking into drunkenness, or felt
drunkenness rise around me, so that even
as I responded to the drivers small talk
I closed my eyes and could feel my head
roll to the side before I yanked it up again.
I waved to the guards in their booth at
the American College as the cab pulled
away, and then I was beyond the glare of
the oodlamps, on the dark road that led
to the school. For three years I had walked
this path every day, morning and after-
noon, with the weight of the day before
me or with the relief of casting it o, and
even now that I lived on campus I walked
it often, to the store or the gym, to cabs
waiting at the gates. I walked it slowly
now, feeling how easily I could stumble,
taking a step or two to one side before I
brought myself back to line. So this is
what that is, I thought, remembering the
drunks I had seen weaving in this way,
imagining what I must look like to the
guards in their booth, how maybe they
had turned to watch me, people often
watch drunks stumbling around, it amuses
them, I dont know why. In me it has
often aroused a darker feeling, pity or
sometimes disdain; it wasnt funny at all,
I would think, there was nothing inno-
cent in it, it was a kind of willful abne-
gation of judgment, of responsibility.
What have I done, I thought suddenly,
what have I done. I turned onto the path
between buildings, on the right the as-
phalt of the basketball court, where boys
played soccer in the mornings and after-
noons, and on the left the line of aca-
demic buildings, in the most stately of
which I had taught all my students, classes
coming and going, Z. and N. coming
twice, still boys in tenth grade and, two
years later, something closer to men. Its
a kind of performance, of course, all teach-
ing is pretending; I had stood before them
as a kind of poem of myself, an ideal
image, when for a few hours every day I
had been able to hide or mostly hide the
disorder of my life, hide most of all the
hunger that disorders most, and if I hadnt
succeeded entirely with Z. I had almost
succeeded, if he had seen glimpses of
what I was he had never until tonight
seen me fully. I had leered at him, I had
touched him, I had been a caricature of
myself, I thought, but that isnt true; I
had been myself without impediment,
maybe thats the way to say it.
I followed the path through the
wooded part of campus, the trees that
separate the main buildings from the
faculty houses. The two oors of my
cottage had been divided into apart-
ments, of which mine was the loveliest,
I thought, on the ground oor with win-
dows facing into the trees. I had moved
in less than a year before, tired of tak-
ing the bus each morning from my apart-
ment o campus. I hadnt known how
soon I would be leaving, not just Soa
but teaching altogether; it had become
unbearable, the drudgery and routine of
it, earlier that spring I had realized I
couldnt face another year. A short set
of stairs led to my door, four or ve steps,
and as I began to climb them I stum-
bled, catching myself with my hands
and then falling onto my side against
the concrete, where I lay or half lay for
a moment before sitting upright on the
bottom step. I swallowed hard against
a wave of nausea, of nausea and some-
thing else, they were indistinguishable,
seven years, I thought, seven years un-
done, a betrayal of vocation. But I re-
jected this even as I thought it, it wasnt
my vocation, it was just something I had
done, a way I had passed the time; dont
be so pious, something said in me, and
something else cringed away. I swal-
lowed again, I couldnt be sick here, ev-
eryone would see it, if I was going to be
sick I had to get inside. But though I
willed myself to stand I remained where
I was, barely upright, my hands but-
tressed at my side and my torso bent
forward, swaying a little. I was exagger-
ating or making excuses, it wasnt so bad
or it was worse. You cant know tonight,
I thought, in the morning youll know,
and I feared what I would feel, how my
actions would look in the light of day,
those were the words I used, the light
of day, I was thinking in old phrases.
I tried to stand again, lifting myself
a few inches before I dropped back down.
I heard a sound then and looked up, and
saw coming along the path toward me
the fat shape of Mama Dog, her tail
beating in the dark. She was the only
dog allowed on campus; for years she had
kept other dogs away, but now she was
too old to guard anything, and she spent
most of the day sleeping, on the porches
of our houses or beside the guards where
they sat in the shade. She was always
happy to see me, I gave her treats some-
times, but I didnt have anything for her
now, and I told her this, Nyamam nishto,
opening my empty hands. She cocked
her head, that look of understanding
dogs give, or of wanting to understand,
their demand for attention. Obicham te,
I said to her, I love you, but tonight I
dont have anything, go away, I said, mahai
se, and I made a shooing motion with
my hand. But she didnt go, she stood
staring at me, the movement of her tail
slowing just slightly, and then she inched
forward and pressed her snout against
my hand, her nose wet in my palm. Still
I didnt respond, but she insisted, jerk-
ing her nose up as if to toss my hand
to her head, where she wanted to be
scratched.This made me relent, I laughed
and said O.K., Mama, O.K., as I raked
my ngers through her fur. She whined
happily and came closer, pressing her
trunk against my leg and rippling her
body in that puppyish movement that
communicates joy better than anything
we can manage, so that I brought my
other hand to her as well and scratched
along both her sides, feeling bits of leaf
and pine needles and accumulated grime.
Youre lthy, I said, but I love you, and
I bent my face down to hers, touching
our foreheads together and gripping her
in something like a hug. She tolerated
this for a moment, and then she tilted
her snout slightly up and quickly licked
my face, her tongue wet across my lips.
I pulled back, making a sound of dis-
gust and wiping my lips clean, but then
I laughed again.
She pressed against me more insis-
tently, rubbing the top of her head
against my jeans. She wanted a treat,
and wanted more to be let inside. She
had been a house dog once, I had heard,
years ago she had belonged to a foreign
teacher who left her behind when he
went back to the States, she loved to
sleep in our houses. But we had been
told it wasnt allowed; she was almost
always dirty, and though she was treated
for eas and ticks you could never be
sure, she was an outdoor dog now, we
shouldnt encourage her. But there was
no one around to admonish me, and so
Ela, I said to her, come on, and then I
stood, successfully this time, maybe be-
cause Mama kept her side pressed
against me, as if to prop me up as I kept
one hand against the brick wall of the
house. She whined at the door as I fum-
bled the key into the lock. O.K., Mama,
I said soothingly again, O.K. I would
take the box of treats from the cabinet
above the sink, I would put towels down
on the kitchen oor so she would have
a soft place to lie down. She was dirty
but what was a little dirt, I thought as
I turned the latch, I should have let you
in a long time ago, I said, Im sorry. I
pushed the door open and she went
ahead of me into the house, going just
a few feet before she dropped onto the
tile of the entranceway, a spot she
claimed as if it had long been hers, and
gave a quick deep sigh as she laid her
head on her paws. She kept her eyes
on me as I tossed my keys in the little
dish by the door, her tail more subdued
but still striking the wall beside her as
I put my bag down, waiting for the diz-
ziness to pass. O.K., Mama, I said again,
you sleep there, well sleep and in the
morning well feel better, though I
feared I wouldnt feel better, in body
and spirit both I thought I would likely
feel much worse. And then, because the
dizziness didnt pass or maybe because
I wanted her warmth next to me, I low-
ered myself to the oor, I stretched my-
self out beside her and laid one hand
on her ank. Well sleep, I said again,
and she rolled onto her side, her stom-
ach toward me, and placed one of her
paws against my chest. It would leave
a mark, I knew, I would have to scrub
it out in the morning, but what did it
matter, I thought as I closed my eyes,
what does it matter, why not let it stay.
NEWYORKER.COM
Garth Greenwell on capturing what thinking
feels like.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 69

OUT OF ACTION
hat winter of 2003you remem-
T ber it, and so do Ithe world as-
sembled, arms linked, to protest the
prospect of war in Iraq. What times
those were, and how the passions
swelled. The fervor of the public reached
a peak on February 15th, when millions
of people in more than sixty countries
claimed the streets, voicing their op-
position. LISTEN TO US, a sign in
London read. In New York, demon-
strators stormed the avenues with a
huge inatable globe. Young and old
turned out, and citizens and foreign-
ers. A few weeks later, the United States
was at war.
Whatever. Less than a decade later,
in New York, Occupy Wall Street arose
to attack the misdeeds of the nance
industry, the stranglehold of corporate
power, and the predations of inequal-
ity. For two months, in the autumn of
2011, demonstrators camped, collabo-
rated, and convened in Zuccotti Park,
in lower Manhattan. By the time they
were evicted, Occupy had spread to
more than nine hundred cities world-
wide. No U.S. policies had changed.
Soon enough, it was 2014. A move-
ment known as Black Lives Matter
marshalled demonstrations in Missouri
and across the nation, using not just
signs but hashtags to help spread the
word. The highest-prole B.L.M. pro-
tests received front-page coverage in
every major paper in the country. Dem-
onstrators protested, by name, the kill-
ings of more than forty unarmed black
people by law-enforcement ocers. A
majority of these ocers were not in-
dicted, however; of those that were,
three were found guilty. To date, only
70 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Do protests work?
BY NATHAN HELLER
one of the convicted has received a
prison sentence.
Oh, but do you recall that Saturday
this past January? Throughout the na-
tion and in nearly seven hundred cit-
ies all across the world, millions of peo-
ple assembled for the Womens March,
chanting both for female empower-
ment and against the just inaugurated
President. The hats were great. The
signs were better. The boulevards in
cities including New York, Washing-
ton, Londoneven L.A., where hu-
mans rarely walkwere riverine with
marchers. It was said to be the largest
single-day demonstration in the his-
tory of the United States. Then Mon-
day came, and the new Administration
went about its work as planned.
For centuries, on the right and the
left alike, it has been an article of faith
that, in moments of sharp civic discon-
tent, you and I and everyone we know
can take to the streets, demanding
change. The First Amendment enshrines
such eorts, protecting the right of the
people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the Government for a redress
of grievances. From the Stamp Act boy-
cotts of the seventeen-sixties to the 1913
surage parade and the March on Wash-
ington, in 1963, protesters have pushed
proudly through our history. Along the
way, they have given us greatwell,
playablesongs. (Tom Lehrer: The
reason most folk songs are so atrocious
is that they were written by the Peo-
ple.) Abroad, activism drove the Arab
Spring and labor movements in Macau,
while outrages shared across continents
triggered such events as the feminism-
and-rationalism-aunting event known
as Boobquake. So strident was Boobquake
that it elicited a counter-campaign, called
Brainquake. All this expressiveness, we
think, is good.
Still, what has protest done for us
lately? Smartphones and social media
are supposed to have made organizing
easier, and activists today speak more
about numbers and reach than about
lasting results. Is protest a productive
use of our political attention? Or is it
just a bit of social theatre we perform
to make ourselves feel virtuous, useful,
and in the right?
In Inventing the Future: Postcap-
italism and a World Without Work
(Verso), a book published in 2015, then
updated and reissued this past year for
reasons likely to be clear to anyone who
has opened a newspaper, Nick Srnicek
and Alex Williams question the power
of marches, protests, and other acts of
what they call folk politics. These
methods, they say, are more habit than
solution. Protest is too eeting. It ig-
nores the structural nature of problems
in a modern world. The folk-political
injunction is to reduce complexity down
to a human scale, they write. This im-
pulse promotes authenticity-mongering,
reasoning through individual stories
(also a journalistic tic), and a general
inability to think systemically about
change. In the immediate sense, a move-
ment such as Occupy wilted because
police in riot gear chased protesters out
of their spaces. But, really, the authors
ABOVE: TODD ST. JOHN
insist, its methods sank it from the start
by channelling the righteous sentiments
of those involved over the mechanisms
of real progress.
This is politics transmitted into
Skeptics suggest that folk politicsmarches, protests, and the likeare a distraction from the challenges of real change.
ILLUSTRATION
BY ADAM MAIDA THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 71
pastimepolitics-as-drug-experience,
perhapsrather than anything capa-
ble of transforming society, Srnicek
and Williams write. If we look at the
protests today as an exercise in public
awareness, they appear to have had
mixed success at best. Their messages
are mangled by an unsympathetic media
smitten by images of property destruc-
tionassuming that the media even
acknowledges a form of contention
that has become increasingly repetitive
and boring.
Boring? Ouch. The criticism stings
because Srnicek and Williams arent
wing nuts of the right, or stodgy suits,
or even quailing centrists. They are
Marx-infused leftists who aspire to a
post-work, open-bordered world.
They believe that society can change
must changein order to phase out
capitalism as a system. Their objection
to protest and direct action dees gen-
erations of radical zeal. The people,
united, will never be defeated! the old
street chant goes. These lefties say that,
actually, they will.
The diculty, in their eyes, is that
the left, despite its pride in being pro-
gressive, is mired in nostalgia. Peti-
tions, occupations, strikes, vanguard
parties, anity groups, trade unions:
all arose out of particular historical con-
ditions, they say. They think that mod-
ernizing these things for an interna-
tionalized, digitized world will free us
from what they vividly call our end-
less treadmill of misery. Protest is ne
for digging in your heels. But work for
change needs to be pragmatic and up-
to-date. Inventing the Future may be
the shrewdest, sanest pipe dream of a
book published since the recession.
In their smokier moments, Srnicek
and Williams encourage postcapital-
ist change across society, often through
drastic means. They aspire to shorten
the workweek, introduce a generous
and global basic income, and release
people from the mind-set that makes
such things seem lazy and weird. They
look forward to the ever-nearing day
when robots take our jobs. (The more
work we toss to C-3PO, they explain,
the easier it will be to escape the cap-
italist churn of laboring for our keep.)
Mostly, theyre self-aware enough to
concede that these ideas border on the
utopian. Yet their portrait of a mind-
72 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
less, knee-jerk activist left predicated
upon critiques of bureaucracy, vertical-
ity, exclusion and institutionalisation
seems grounded and real. Can protest
be made great again? Or are the peo-
ple simply raising their sts to the skies?
n odd and revealing feature of
A American culture over the past
half century is that its protest trends
and its workplace ideals mirror each
other. Just as businesses have sought
to escape the old corporate strictures
by encouraging exible and o-site
work and by attening hierarchies
(sometimes even eliminating manag-
ers), protesters have tried to move past
the groaning actions of the past by
cordinating instantly across distance
and embracing leaderless or horizon-
tal movements. This is usually easier
said than done; the hardest aspect of
working without leaders tends to be
working at all. A nagging question is
how to get the people going when
theres no Gandhi to lead the charge.
This challenge lies at the core of
Assembly (Oxford), by Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, two political phi-
losophers who try to gure out how
movements can be led well without
leaders. Gone are the days, on the one
hand, when a political vanguard could
successfully take power in the name of
the masses, they write. On the other,
it is a terrible mistake to translate valid
critiques of leadership into a refusal of
sustained political organization and in-
stitution. Hardt and Negri also work
in the Marxist tradition, and their book
is light on details from society and ex-
tremely heavy on abstract forces. Some-
times, they seem to be describing less
the art of the possible than the uid
mechanics of a gas. (As capitalists,
under the rule of nance, lose their in-
novative capacities and are gradually
excluded from the knowledge of pro-
ductive socialization, the multitude in-
creasingly generates its own forms of
cooperation and gains capacities for
innovation . . .) Their scheme is apt
to be of greater interest to a fellow with
a lot of whiteboard markers than to
somebody with a handmade poster in
the street.
Thats a shame, because empower-
ing those they call the multitude is
what their program is supposedly about.
According to the classical model of pro-
test, strategy (the big idea, the master
plan) falls to a movements leaders, while
tactics (the moves you make, the signs
you wave, the action in the street) fall
to the people on the ground. One of
Hardt and Negris cornerstone ideas is
that the formula should be ipped: strat-
egy goes to the movement masses, tac-
tics to the leadership. In theory, this al-
lows movements to stay both nimble
(an emergency on the ground is when
you call in the brass) and on guard against
autocracy (no group can decide for the
many). People do not need to be given
the party line to inform and guide their
practice, they write. They have the po-
tential to recognize their oppression and
know what they want. Possibly Hardt
and Negri have much clearer-minded
friends than you or I do.
And yet their inquiry highlights an
important feature of contemporary ac-
tivism. In Direct Action: Protest and
the Reinvention of American Radical-
ism (Verso), L. A. Kauman assesses
movements of the past half century not
as scattered uprisings but as phases of
an overarching project. Its often as-
sumed that todays style of protest
owed naturally out of the nineteen-
sixties. But Kauman sees the end of
that decade as a kind of meteor strike
that left radicalism atomized, chaotic,
and fractured. Our current radical-
action culture, she thinks, really started
in the early seventies, when a new gen-
eration of green shoots rose up from
the ash.
She places its start at the moment
of a famous failure: the Mayday Viet-
nam protest of 1971, when twenty-ve
thousand people blockaded bridges and
intersections around Washington, D.C.
A manual describing the demonstra-
tions tactics allowed Nixons Attorney
General to summon the police, the mil-
itary, and the National Guard premp-
tively. More than seven thousand pro-
testers were arrested. Mary McGrory,
a journalist who was sympathetic to
the cause, described it as the worst
planned, worst executed, most slovenly,
strident and obnoxious peace action
ever committed.
Kauman disagrees. The spectre of
the protest rattled the Administration,
she points out. Whats more, it marked
the shift toward the tactics-driven

BRIEFLY NOTED
Queen of Bebop, by Elaine M. Hayes (Ecco). The early years
of Sarah Vaughans career coincided with the waning of the
swing era, and this biography shows how the change both
fuelled and limited her career. In 1946, the producer John
Hammond oered to turn Vaughan into the next Bessie
Smith, but she rebued him. Having already forged creative
partnerships with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who
admired her impeccable pitch, her four-octave range, and her
vocal improvisations, Vaughan had no interest in singing any
way but her own. Later, she struggled under label pressure
to re-create hits like Whatever Lola Wants, and was also
hindered by a habit of installing her husband or current ro-
mantic partner as her manager, with unfortunate professional
and personal results.
The Ends of the World, by Peter Brannen (Ecco). This gripping
survey of prehistorys extinction events (the death of the di-
nosaurs was only the most recent) is motivated by the fear
that we are on the brink of another such cataclysm. Brannen
excels at evoking lost worlds, from the global coral reefs of
the Devonian period to the Pangaean crocodilians of the late
Triassicboth of which were, in part, snued out by shifting
levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the ensuing climate
change. Today, the ever-increasing demand for dirty energy
threatens not only human civilization but, in the long run, all
life on earth. As Brannen demonstrates, fossils are useful for
more than just fuel: they can teach us how not to die.
Elle, by Philippe Djian, translated from the French by Michael
Katims (Other Press). This breezily elusive noveladapted
last year for a movie starring Isabelle Hupperttells the
story of a fortysomething film producer who detests just
about everyone in her lifeher mother, her former husband,
her son, her lover (who is married to her best friend). Her
callousness, we learn, stems from an appalling childhood
trauma. Decades later, when she is attacked in her home,
she finds herself, to her horror, increasingly drawn to her at-
tacker. Grappling with a mixture of shame and desire, she
is forced to acknowledge an unknown self, one that invites
confusion, flux, unexplored territories.
Black Moses, by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French
by Helen Stevenson (The New Press). Tokumisa Nzambe po
Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko, which trans-
lates as Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the
earth of our ancestors, is the auspicious name given to the
Congolese orphan at the center of this Man Booker-nominated
novel. He goes simply by Moses, and with a pragmatic and
unaected air narrates the tyranny of the orphanages direc-
tor, rivalries among his fellow-orphans, and the political tur-
moil of late-twentieth-century Congo. Running away, Moses
lives on the gritty streets of the port town Pointe-Noire, a
recurring setting for Mabanckous novels. The storys un-
flinching tone and sly humor belie the tragedy of Mosess
situation, as well as the cruelty of the people he meets.
74 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
approach that we still follow today.
The last major national protest against
the Vietnam War, Mayday was also a
crucial rst experiment with a new kind
of radicalism, she writes. It was less
about moral leadership than about the
fact of obstruction. It embraced what-
everand whoeverforced the hand
of power. You do the organizing, the
Mayday manual read. This means no
movement generals making tactical
decisions you have to carry out.
It is hard to overstate what a fresh
idea this seemedor how deeply its
now seated in our notions of activist
assembly, down to soft protests like
ash mobs and Critical Mass. Author-
ity, in the new tactical model, arose
from the number of people who showed
up. It swept away the need for com-
mon principles or precisely cordinated
strategies; the choices behind public
protest could be personal and private.
As Srnicek and Williams observe, Folk
politics prefers that actions be taken
by participants themselvesin its em-
phasis on direct action, for example
and sees decision-making as something
to be carried out by each individual
rather than by any representative. After
the labyrinthine doctrine of late-sixties
movements, this freedom was new.
Kauman tells us that in the sev-
enties, under this model, alt organiz-
ing movements started to emerge in
the corners of society, usually with
modest and local ambitionsthe Park
Slope Food Coop, the Michigan Wo-
myns Music Festival, and other Birken-
stocky citadels. To the extent that such
projects made political arguments, they
were expressed through what is often
called pregurative politics: you be-
have according to the rules of the so-
ciety you hope to create. Queer and
punk activism, well-practiced in work
at the periphery, took a lead, and paved
a road into the eighties, with theatri-
cal protests at the 1984 Democratic
National Convention; the audacious,
enormously successful eorts by ACT
UP to change AIDs policy; and the
pushy, calculating Earth First! move-
ment, which sought to make it more
costly for those in power to resist than
to give in.
Kauman follows this lineage of
tactical activism up to and beyond the
era of Iraq War demonstrations. She
focusses on New Yorks Iraq protest of
February 15, 2003purportedly the
largest action in decades, organized
quickly. But she shrugs o its lack of
eect. Sometimes you protest just to
register a public objection to policies
you have no hope of changing, she ex-
plains. Movements might have lost
their leaders, gained force, and oered
personal autonomy. Yet they hadnt ac-
quired the crucial thinga good crack
at success.
istory provides an especially sharp
H rejoinder to those who doubt the
sustained power of protest: the civil-
rights movement. From the mid-fties
to the mid-sixties, activists successfully
worked to roll back school segregation,
public-transit segregation, interstate-
bus segregation, restaurant segregation,
poll taxes, employment discrimina-
tion, and more. It happened, piece by
piece, under politically entrenched and
physically threatening conditions. Its
ecacy was virtually unmatched in
our national past. The civil-rights move-
ment preceded the protest meteor of
the late sixties, but, for a new genera-
tion eager for change, it showed what
was possible by taking to the streets.
Why did civil-rights protest work
where recent activism struggles? The
question looms behind Zeynep Tufek-
cis Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power
and Fragility of Networked Protest
(Yale). Tufekci is, by training, a sociol-
ogist, and her research centers on the
place where protest and digital media
meet. She was in Chiapas, Mexico,
among the Zapatistas, in the nineties;
in Tahrir Square for Egypts revolu-
tion; in lower Manhattan for Occupy
Wall Street; and at Istanbuls Gezi Park
for protests of the Erdoan govern-
ment. She spent a heroic amount of
time in these protests digital antecham-
bers, too, attending a Tunisian meet-up
of Arab bloggers and visiting the caf
oces of self-made social-media re-
porters. Yet she has a mixed review of
their successes. Modern networked
movements can scale up quickly and
take care of all sorts of logistical tasks
without building any substantial orga-
nization cavity before the rst protest
or march, she writes. However, with
this speed comes weakness.
Tufekci believes that digital-age
protests are not simply faster, more re-
sponsive versions of their mid-century
parents. They are fundamentally dis-
tinct. At Gezi Park, she nds that nearly
everything is accomplished by sponta-
neous tactical assemblies of random
activiststhe Kauman model carried
further through the ease of social media.
Preexisting organizations whether for-
mal or informal played little role in the
coordination, she writes. Instead, to
take care of tasks, people hailed down
volunteers in the park or called for them
via hashtags on Twitter or WhatsApp
messages. She calls this style of o-
the-cu organizing adhocracy. Once,
just getting people to show up required
top-down cordination, but today any-
one can gather crowds through tweets,
and update, in seconds, thousands of
strangers on the move.
At the same time, she nds, shifts
in tactics are harder to arrange. Digital-
age movements tend to be organiza-
tionally toothless, good at barking
at power but bad at forcing ultima-
tums or chewing through complex ne-
gotiations. When the Gezi Park oc-
cupation intensied and the Turkish
government expressed an interest in
talking, it was unclear who, in the
assembly of millions, could represent
the protesters, and so the govern-
ment selected its own negotiating part-
ners. The protest diused into disor-
dered discussion groups, at which point
riot police swarmed through to clear
the park. The protests were over, they
declaredand, by that time, they
largely were.
The missing ingredients, Tufekci
believes, are the structures and com-
munication patterns that appear when
a xed group works together over time.
That practice puts the oil in the well-
oiled machine. It is what contempo-
rary adhocracy appears to lack, and
what projects such as the postwar civil-
rights movement had in abundance.
And it is why, she thinks, despite their
limits in communication, these earlier
protests often achieved more.
Tufekci describes weeks of careful
planning behind the yearlong Mont-
gomery bus boycott, in 1955. That spring,
a black fteen-year-old named Clau-
dette Colvin refused to give up her
seat on a bus and was arrested. Today,
though, relatively few people have heard
of Claudette Colvin. Why? Drawing
on an account by Jo Ann Robinson,
Tufekci tells of the Montgomery
N.A.A.C.P.s shrewd process of audi-
tioning icons. Each time after an ar-
rest on the bus system, organizations
in Montgomery discussed whether this
was the case around which to launch
a campaign, she writes. They decided
to keep waiting until the right moment
with the right person. Eventually, they
found their star: an upstanding, middle-
aged movement stalwart who could
withstand a barrage of media scrutiny.
This was Rosa Parks.
On Thursday, December 1st, eight
months after Colvins refusal to give
up her seat, Parks was arrested. That
night, Robinson, a professor at Ala-
bama State College, typed a boycott
announcement three times on a sin-
gle sheet of paper and began running
it through the schools mimeograph
machine, for distribution through a
local network of black social organi-
zations. The boycott, set to begin on
Monday morning, was meant to last
a single day. But so many joined that
the organizers decided to extend it
which necessitated a three-hundred-
and-twenty-ve-vehicle carpool net-
work to get busless protesters to work.
Through such scrupulous engineering,
the boycott continued for three hundred
and eighty-one days. Parks became a
focal point for national media coverage,
while Colvin and four other women were
made plaintis in Browder v. Gayle,
the case that, rising to the Supreme
Court, got bus segregation declared
unconstitutional.
What is striking about the bus boy-
cott is not so much its passion, which
is easy to relate to, as its restraint,
whichat this moment, especially
is not. No outraged Facebook posts
spread the news when Colvin was ar-
rested. Local organizers bided their
time, slowly planning, structuring, and
casting what amounted to a work of
public theatre, and then built new struc-
tures as their plans changed. The pro-
test was expressive in the most con-
fected sense, a masterpiece of control
and logistics. It was strategic, with the
tactics following. And that made all
the dierence in the world.
Tufekci suggests that, among that
eras successes, deliberateness of this kind
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 75
was a rule. She points out how, in prepa-
ration for the March on Washington,
in 1963, a master plan extended even
to the condiments on the sandwiches
distributed to marchers. (They had no
mayonnaise; organizers worried that the
spread might spoil in the August heat.)
And she focusses on the role of the ac-
tivist leader Bayard Rustin, who was x-
ated on the audio equipment that would
be used to amplify the days speeches.
Rustin insisted on paying lavishly for
an unusually high-quality setup. Mak-
ing every word audible to all of the
quarter-million marchers on the Mall,
he was convinced, would elevate the
event from mere protest to national
drama. He was right.
Before the march, Martin Luther
King, Jr., had delivered variations on
his I Have a Dream speech twice in
public. He had given a longer version
to a group of two thousand people in
North Carolina. And he had presented
a second variation, earlier in the sum-
mer, before a vast crowd of a hundred
thousand at a march in Detroit. The
reason we remember only the Wash-
ington, D.C., version, Tufekci argues,
has to do with the strategic vision and
attentive detail work of people like Rus-
tin. Framed by the Lincoln Memorial,
amplied by a fancy sound system, de-
livered before a thousand-person press
bay with good camera sight lines, Kings
performance came across as something
more than what it had been in De-
troitit was the announcement of a
shift in national mood, the fulcrum of
a movements story line and power. It
became, in other words, the rarest of
protest performances: the kind through
which American history can change.
ufekcis conclusions about the
T civil-rights movement are unset-
tling because of what they imply. Peo-
ple such as Kauman portray direct
democracy as a scrappy, passionate en-
terprise: the underrepresented, the op-
pressed, and the dissatised get to-
gether and, strengthened by numbers,
force change. Tufekci suggests that the
movements that succeed are actually
proto-institutional: highly organized;
strategically exible, due to sinewy
management structures; and chummy
with the sorts of people we now call
lites. The Montgomery N.A.A.C.P.
76 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
worked with Cliord Durr, a patrician
lawyer whom Franklin Roosevelt had
appointed to the F.C.C., and whose
brother-in-law Hugo Black was a Su-
preme Court Justice when Browder v.
Gayle was heard. The organizers of
the March on Washington turned to
Bobby Kennedythe U.S. Attorney
General and the brother of the sitting
Presidentwhen Rustins prized sound
system was sabotaged the day before
the protest. Kennedy enlisted the Army
Signal Corps to x it. You cant get
much cozier with the Man than that.
Far from speaking truth to power, suc-
cessful protests seem to speak truth
through power. (The principle holds
for such successful post-sixties move-
ments as ACT UP, with its structure of
caucuses and expert working groups.
And it forces one to reassess the rise
of well-funded Astroturf movements
such as the Tea Party: successful grass-
roots lawns, it turns out, have a bit of
plastic in them, too.) Democratizing
technology may now give the voice-
less a means to cry in the streets, but
real results come to those with the
same old privilegestime, money, in-
frastructure, an ability to call in fa-
vorsthat shape mainline politics.
Unsurprisingly, this realization irks
the Jacobins. Hardt and Negri, as
well as Srnicek and Williams, rail
at length against neoliberalism: a
fashionable bugaboo on the left, and
thus, unfortunately, a term more often
aunted than dened. (Neoliberalism
can broadly refer to any program that
involves market-liberal policiespri-
vatization, deregulation, etc.and so
includes everything from Thatchers
social-expenditure reductions to Obamas
global-trade policies. A moratorium
on its use would help solidify a lot of
gaseous debate.) According to them,
neoliberalism lurks everywhere that
power resides, beckoning friendly pass-
ersby into its drippy gingerbread house.
Hardt and Negri dismiss participat-
ing in government, respecting capital-
ist discipline, and creating structures
for labor and business to collaborate,
because, they say, reformism in this
form has proven to be impossible and
the social benets it promises are an
illusion. They favor antagonistic pres-
sure, leading to a revolution with no
central authority (a plan perhaps more
promising in theory than in practice).
Srnicek and Williams dont reject work-
ing with politicians, though they think
that real transformation comes from
shifts in social expectation, in school
curricula, and in the sorts of things that
reasonable people discuss on TV (the
so-called Overton window). Its an am-
bitious approach but not an outland-
ish one: Bernie Sanders ran a popular
campaign, and suddenly socialist proj-
ects were on the prime-time docket.
Change does arrive through mainstream
power, but this just means that your
movement should be threaded through
the cultures institutional eye.
The question, then, is what protest
is for. Srnicek and Williams, even after
all their criticism, arent ready to let it
gothey describe it as necessary but
insucient. Yet they strain to say just
how it ts with the idea of class strug-
gle in a postindustrial, smartphone-
linked world. If there is no workplace
to disrupt, what can be done? they
wonder. Possibly their telescope is
pointing the wrong way round. Much
of their book attempts to match the
challenges of current lifea shrinking
manufacturing sphere, a global labor
surplus, a mire of race-inected socio-
economic trapswith Marxs quite
specic precepts about the nineteenth-
century European economy. They
dene the proletariat as that group of
people who must sell their labor pow-
ers to live. It must be noted that this
groupnow comprising Olive Gar-
den waiters, coders based in Bangalore,
janitors, YouTube stars, twenty-two-
year-olds at Goldman Sachsis really
very broad. A truly modern left, one
cannot help but think, would be at lib-
erty to shed a manufacturing-era, de-
terministic framework like Marxism,
allegorized and hyperextended far be-
yond its time. Still, to date no better
paradigm for labor economics and up-
rising has emerged.
hat comes undone here is the
W dream of protest as an expres-
sion of personal politics. Those of us
whose days are lled with chores and
meetings may be deluding ourselves to
think that we can rise as revolutionaries-
for-a-weekendNorman Mailers
phrase for his own bizarre foray, in 1967,
as described in The Armies of the
Night. Yet thats not to say the twenty-
four-year-old who quits his job and
sleeps in a tent to arm his commit-
ment does more. The recent studies
make it clear that protest results dont
follow the laws of life: eighty per cent
isnt just showing up. Instead, logistics
reign and then constrain. Outcomes
rely on how you cordinate your eorts,
and on the skill with which you use
existing inuence as help.
If that seems a deating idea, it only
goes to show how entrenched self-
expressive protest has become in po-
litical identity. In one survey, half of
Occupy Wall Street allies turned out
to be fully employed: even that puta-
tively radical economic movement was
largely middle class. (Also, as many
noted, it was largely white.) That may
be because even the privileged eche-
lons of working America are mad as
hell and wont take it anymore. But it
may also be because the social thresh-
old for protest-joining is low. A run-
ning joke in The Armies of the Night
is that many of the people who went
o to demonstrate were auent egg-
head typesunsure, self-obsessed, Take my hand, my love, and come with me to the cabin, where
squeamish, and, in many ways, pretty we can explore each others naked bodies for ticks.
conservative. There was an air of Ivy
League intimacy to the quiet conver-
sations on this walkit could not

really be called a March, Mailer says.
Writing of himself: He found a at every turn. But theres reason to be- test produced no concrete outcomes,
friendly face. It was Gordon Rogo, lieve that it works, because even bad and it held no legislators to account.
an old friend from Actors Studio, now legislators pander to their electorates. And yet the march, which encompassed
teaching at the Yale Drama School; In a new book, The Once and Future millions of people on every continent,
they talked idly about theatrical mat- Liberal (Harper), Mark Lilla urges a including Antarctica, cannot be called
ters for a while. This has been the turn back toward governmental pro- a failure. At a time when identity is
cultural expectation since the late six- cess. The role of social movements in presumed to be clannish and insular,
ties, even as tactical protest has left American history, while important, has it oered solidarity on a vast scale.
mainstream power behind. As citizens, been seriously inated by left-leaning What was the Womens March
we get two chipsone for the ballot activists and historians, he writes. The about? Empowerment, human rights,
box, the other for the soapbox. Many age of movement politics is over, at least discontentyou know. Why did it
of us feel compelled to make use of for now. We need no more marchers. matter? Because we were there. Self-
them both. We need more mayors. Folk politics, government remains a messy, fussy,
Would casual activists be better o tracing a fty-year anti-establishmen- slow, frustrating business. We do well
deploying their best skills toward change tarian trend, atters a certain idea of to remind those working its gears and
(teachers teaching, coders coding, ce- heroism: the system, we think, must be levers that the publicnot just the ap-
lebrities celebritizing) and leaving di- fought by authentic people. Yet that palled me but the conjoined us whom
rect action in the hands of organiza- outlook is so widely held now that it the elected serveis watching and
tional pros? That seems sad, and a good occupies the highest oces of govern- aware. More than two centuries after
recipe for lax, unchecked, uncordi- ment. Maybe, in the end, the system is our country took its shaky rst steps,
nated eort. Should they work indi- the powerless persons best bet. the union is miles from perfection. But
rectlywriting letters, calling senators, Or maybe direct action is something it is still on its feet, sometimes strid-
and politely nagging congresspeople on to value independent of its results. No ing, frequently stumbling. The march
Twitter? That involves no cool attire or specic demands were made at the goes on, and someday, not just in our
clever signs, and no friends wholl cheer Womens March, in January. The pro- dreams, well make it home.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 77

POP MUSIC
THINK PIECES
The meticulous rock of Adam Granduciel and the War on Drugs.
BY AMANDA PETRUSICH
Granduciels questing songs suggest a way forward for rock music.
hen rock and roll emerged from
W Mississippi or Georgia or Ten-
nessee or Illinois sometime in the early
nineteen-fties, it was a lawless mish-
mash of musical institutions, some an-
cient, some new. Its unruly rootsthe
incongruous coupling of the sacred and
the profanecame to determine much
of the genres mythos. By the sixties, its
edicts, as set out by early practitioners
like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats
Domino, and Little Richard, were de-
creed in full: rock and roll should be
scrappy and instinctive, a wild and un-
stable expression that appears free of
mediation or meddling, even (especially)
when its not. Thus its most iconic poses:
Pete Townshend clobbering the stage
with an electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix
humping his ampliers, Janis Joplin, on-
78 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
stage at Woodstock, shaking from her-
oin and whiskey.
The War on Drugs, a Philadelphia-
born outt fronted by the thirty-eight-
year-old guitarist and vocalist Adam
Granduciel, does not subscribe to this
ethos. Instead, it makes the old clichs
seem tired. The bands songs are per-
formed and recorded in such a way that
its impossible not to be cognizant of
their polishof labor invested. Though
other contemporary bands have made
ambitious and exacting music, few are
quite so painstaking. Yet the War on
Drugs is, to my ears, the best Ameri-
can rock band of this decade; it is cer-
tainly the one that makes the genre feel
most alive.
The groups fourth album, A Deeper
Understanding, which comes out on
August 25th, is a big and purposeful
record that shares some genetic material
with late-career releases by Rod Stew-
art, Dire Straits, Tom Petty, and Don
Henleythe songwriting lacks the
wholeness and negligence of youth, but
hasnt yet been softened by the capitu-
lations of adulthood. Spiritually, Gran-
duciel is still looking; nothing is secured
or presumed.
Philadelphia in the mid-aughts was
a very good place and time to be a gui-
tar player. The War on Drugs began,
in 2005, as a collaboration between
Granduciel and Kurt Vile; later, as the
leader of the Violators, Vile perfected
a guitar style and tone that married the
disaection of Sonic Youth with the
stoned, ickering warmth of the Grate-
ful Dead. Another Philadelphia native
(and former Violator), the guitarist
Steve Gunn, relocated to Brooklyn and
made several albums of warm but ter-
rically complex music. The War on
Drugs made its dbut with Wagon-
wheel Blues, in 2008, and, following
Viles departure and several more lineup
changes, released its second record,
Slave Ambient, in 2011. Both were
favorably received, but it took Lost in
the Dream, from 2014, to realistically
suggest Granduciel as rocks next torch-
bearer. He even looked the part: long
and wavy brown hair, Wayfarers, a
seemingly innite collection of vintage
denim jackets.
Lost in the Dream was conceived
mostly at Granduciels three-story row
house in Philadelphias South Kensing-
ton neighborhood. He has since re-
counted the way panic attacks and bouts
of listlessness led him to a near-obses-
sive immersion in his work. Compulsive
tinkering in the studio has sunk lesser
writers; too much fussing can make a
record claustrophobic and overwrought.
Somehow, for Granduciel, sealing him-
self inside allowed for an opening. Music
became a viable proxy for actual liv-
inga scout dispatched over the hill-
side, a manner of exploring the world
without directly engaging it. Despite
the intensity behind the albums pro-
duction, there are plenty of joyful mo-
mentslike Red Eyes, a song so plainly
exultant that, even after a hundred lis-
tens, its chorus still feels like cresting
a mountain.
Granduciel relocated to Los Angeles
ILLUSTRATION BY STEFAN GLERUM
after the release of Lost in the Dream
(he is in a relationship with the actress
Krysten Ritter, who stars in the Marvel
television series Jessica Jones), and his
new songs are indebted, in ways both
subtle and overt, to his present land-
scape. Its hard to say precisely what
would comprise a Los Angeles canonI
imagine Warren Zevon, Randy New-
man, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Youngs To-
nights the Night, and Guns N Roses Odyssey and the Oberheim Xpander.
Appetite for Destruction, though oth-
ers might choose N.W.A.s Straight
Outta Compton, Joni Mitchells Blue, most illusory quality.
or Frank Oceans Channel Orange. It
is even more dicult to specify how the
city impresses itself on the records made
there. I tend to think of L.A.s inuence
not so much as a relentless sunniness
but as a wide-eyed searching of the hori-
zon. Granduciel has always written dy-
namic, propulsive melodies that beg for
long stretches of good road. But A
Deeper Understanding has more scope
than anything he has done before. When
each constituent bit locks into place, the
massive scale and deep texture of the
work is thrilling. It contains all the ex-
pansiveness of the West, and some of its
optimism, too.
Lyrically, A Deeper Understanding
is a record about self-interrogation. Most
of Granduciels earlier songs address a
near-constant process of revision and
reinvention. Here, though, Granduciel
is more assured than ever. One of the
new albums best tracks, Holding On,
acts as a spiritual continuation of An
Ocean Between the Waves, another cut
from Lost in the Dream, and though
the new song never quite resolves the
older songs visceral fears (Can I be
more than just a fool? Granduciel wor-
ried), it does render them smaller. Gran-
duciel seems more cognizant of whats
at stake (Once I was alive and I could
feel, I was holding on to you, he sings),
yet he approaches heartache with am-
bivalence, a cool acceptance of lifes un-
predictable ow. I keep moving on the
path, holding on to mine. He sounds
nearly sereneor at least like someone
who has recently seen an ocean.
Throughout A Deeper Understand-
ing, Granduciels vocals are soft, steady,
and almost without origin. Though he
occasionally moves into a more discor-
dant, nasally voiceborrowing, for a
moment, the sourness of Bob Dylan
its often hard to distinguish his sing-
ing from any number of gauzy, fading
synthesizers. The War on Drugs remains
chiey a guitar bandthis is especially
true when it performs livebut there
are an awful lot of keyboards on the new
record, including Wurlitzer, Mellotron,
Hammond organ, and several vintage
analog synthesizers (or reissues of vin-
tage analog synthesizers), like the Arp
The synthesizers, especially, give A
Deeper Understanding a dreamy, al-
That sensibility is augmented by the
running length of most of the albums
songssix or seven minutes (Think-
ing of a Place, which was released as a
twelve-inch single for Record Store Day,
clocks in at more than eleven minutes)
and how they snake to curious places.
Halfway through Up All Night, a song
about managing the nocturnal willies,
the melodya gentle electric-piano ri
that recalls Bruce Hornsbyis displaced
by Granduciels crackling guitar. The
shift should be disorienting, but because
of the songs dream logic it takes a mo-
ment to realize youve been jolted awake.
A Deeper Understanding is the
bands rst album for a major label; it
left the Indiana-based indie Secretly
Canadian and signed a two-record deal
with Atlantic Records shortly after Lost
in the Dream was released. They should
be gigantic, Jimmy Iovine, a co-founder
of Interscope Records who has produced
albums by Bruce Springsteen, U2, and
Meat Loaf, told Billboard in a 2015 in-
terview. So far, however, the War on
Drugs is not making any concessions
to the mainstream market, where shorter,
sparser songs now dominate.
Perhaps no concessions are necessary.
The intricacy of Granduciels songwrit-
ing and productionthe way his urgent,
interior searching yields strange tapes-
triesisnt immediate in the way, say, a
punk-rock song can be. Rather than
knock you over, it slowly lls a room, and
lingers. Yet his work seems to commu-
nicate something vital about the inter-
nalization of modern life, the ways in
which we now manage, negotiate, and
curate expression before uploading it to
one platform or another. That these
machinations are laid plainthat this
music does not aspire to spontaneity
makes it feel more true.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 79
 Hinterhuser intends to revive the spirit
MUSICAL EVENTS of the Mortier regime, which caused
consternation at the time but is now re-

POWER PLAY
Fresh provocations at the Salzburg Festival.
BY ALEX ROSS
he upward-springing hair, bright
T polyester shirts, and merry cackle
of Peter Sellars, the American director,
are once again in evidence at the Salz-
burg Festival, which means that change
is in the air. In recent years, this most
sumptuous of classical-music gather-
ings has reverted to its default identity
as a parade of musical celebrities with
no clear artistic destination in sight.
Last year, though, the progressive-
minded Austrian pianist and impresa-
rio Markus Hinterhuser took over as
Salzburgs artistic director, and he is
stirring memories of the festivals most
vital periodthat of the nineteen-
nineties, when Gerard Mortier presided
Peter Sellarss production of La Clemenza di Tito evokes the war on terror.
80 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
over a superb array of provocations, in-
cluding an avant-garde series that Hin-
terhuser co-curated. Sellars was a star
of the Mortier era, staging Olivier Mes-
siaens Saint Franois dAssise in 1992 original, which was only partly Mozarts
and the premire of Kaija Saariahos
LAmour de Loin in 2000. Now he is
back, with a production of La Cle-
menza di Tito, Mozarts austere, elu-
sive nal opera. Mozart is, of course,
Salzburgs native son, and the festivals
raison dtre. He is also the composer
through whom Sellars rst won fame as
an opera director, with feats of modern-
ization that included a Marriage of
Figaro set in Trump Tower. Sellarss be-
lated return to Salzburg is a sign that
membered as a golden age.
Panoply of Power is the motto of
Hinterhusers rst season. Such slogans
festoon the brochures of European fes-
tivals, often amounting to little more
than pompous afterthoughts. But Hin-
terhusers decision to begin with Cle-
menza gave the theme substance: to hear
the work in Salzburg is to be confronted
with multiple representations of power.
First, there is the Roman emperor Titus,
who in Mozarts opera assumes an al-
most saintly prole but is better remem-
bered for his brutal conduct in the Jew-
ish War. Then there is the Austrian
emperor Leopold II, for whom Mozart
composed the opera, in 1791, and whose
benevolent image went hand in hand
with anti-revolutionary propaganda. Fi-
nally, there are the listeners among whom
one sitsa convocation of European
lites who have paid up to four hundred
and thirty euros for their tickets.
Sellars is not one to overlook such
tensions. His Clemenza, which unfolds
in the Felsenreitschule, the theatre carved
out of a Salzburg mountainside, repli-
cates the imaginative shock of his early
productions. In collaboration with the
Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis, Sel-
lars has drastically revised Mozarts score,
in a fashion that might oend purists.
He has reduced the recitatives and inter-
polated several movements from the Mass
in C Minor and other Mozart pieces,
further spiritualizing the drama. These
changes work surprisingly well: artful
manipulations of the recitatives make
transitions to and from the Mass sections
seamless. In a way, this hodgepodge might
be considered more authentic than the
creation. Pressed for time, the composer
turned to an assistantprobably his pupil
Franz Xaver Sssmayrfor help in writ-
ing the recitatives.
Mozarts libretto is based on a famous
text by the eighteenth-century poet Pi-
etro Metastasio, which, as of 1791, had
been set to music nearly forty times. Tito
survives a coup instigated by Vitellia, the
disgruntled daughter of a deposed ruler,
and led by her lover, Sesto, Titos friend.
When the conspiracy is exposed, Tito
forgives all. Sellarss Tito is the head of
a modern state that faces an inux of
ILLUSTRATION BY STEFANO PIETRAMALA
refugees. During the overture, he is seen
plucking Sesto and his sister, Servilia,
from a crowd of migrants; the outsiders
are invited into the rulers inner circle.
But Sesto is led astray by Vitellia, who
pushes him toward an act of terrorism.
In this version, Tito does not survive the
assassination attempt; he spends Act II
in a hospital bed, and issues clemency at
the point of death.
Sellars makes his moral vision even
stronger through his casting. In an essay
included in the program, he compares
Leopold II to Nelson Mandela, who,
on assuming power in South Africa,
forgave those who wished him dead.
The AfricanAmerican tenor Russell
Thomas sings Tito, and he is sur
rounded by nonwhite artists: the South
African soprano Golda Schultz, as Vi
tellia; the Trinidadian soprano Jeanine
De Bique, as Sestos friend Annio; and
the Jamaicanborn bass Willard White,
a Sellars veteran, as Titos military chief,
Publio. Marianne Crebassa, in the
castrato role of Sesto, and Christina
Gansch, as Servilia, seem to constitute
a white underclass in a black power
structure. This inversion puts the drama
in a fresh light and advances Sellarss
longterm campaign against systemic
racism in classical music.
Artistic ambitions match social ones.
At the second performance in the run,
the singers formed an ensemble of rare
cohesion: Thomass penetrating tenor,
which has lately acquired richness and
heft, anchored the evening, and Crebassa
complemented him with nimble tech
nique and sensuous vocal colors. Cur
rentzis drew vivid playing, on period
instruments, from the musicAeterna or
chestra, which is based at the Perm Opera,
in central Russia, where Currentzis serves
as artistic director. He is a restless, inter
ventionist conductor; his recordings of
Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cos Fan with the enigmatic Russian pianist Grig
Tutte, for Sony, have biting clarity but
seldom leave the music to unfurl freely.
Still, his fanatic intensity sustains the hy
brid Tito score that he and Sellars have
devised. The set designer George Tsypin
contributes a tableau of columnar Plexi
glas forms; James Ingallss lighting lends
sombre majesty to the cavernous space
of the Felsenreitschule.
One scene elicited an explosion of
applause, even from listeners who were
initially inclined to be skeptical. (The
woman sitting next to me tuttutted
when guntoting soldiers appeared on
stage.) This was Sestos great aria Parto,
parto, in which he swears vengeance
under the sway of love. The aria includes
a solo part for basset clarinet; in a be
witching coup de thtre, the clarinet
tist Florian Schle stepped from behind
one of Tsypins sculptures and performed
a slow dance with Crebassa, at one point
playing while lying down beside her.
Such theatricalizations of instrumental
music have become a Sellars signature,
notably in his stagings of the Bach Pas
sions. After Sesto sings, Guardami
(Look at me), the clarinettist oers
lilting phrases amid expectant pauses; it
seems that the object of Sestos love has
become music itself. And when Sesto
sings, Oh gods, what power you have
given to beauty, a line is drawn between
the beauty of the music and the violence
that ensues. The proximity of art and
power remains unsettling.
ther novelties at Salzburg this sum
O mer include a revival of Aribert
Reimanns 1978 opera, Lear; Shosta
kovichs Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; a
survey of the late Spectralist master G
rard Grisey; and a new production of
Bergs Wozzeck, by William Kentridge,
which will travel to the Met in the 2019
20 season. Festivalgoers who enjoy pay
ing large sums to see familiar faces should
not feel shortchanged. Before the sum
mer is out, they will have encountered
Domingo, Netrebko, Flrez, Bartoli, Ar
gerich, Trifonov, Mutter, Schi, Uchida,
Muti, Rattle, Barenboim, Haitink, and
much of the rest of what is thought to
be the classicalmusic Alist.
A cultish, worshipful atmosphere can
prevail in Salzburg, to sometimes irri
tating eect. A case in point was an eve
ning of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas
kindle them. Gerhaher has the power
ory Sokolov, who avoids travel to the
United States but has an avid European
following. He has an extraordinarily sen
sitive touch, and specializes in the sur
gical separation and articulation of voices:
when he plays a crisp, marcato line with
his left hand and a owing legato with
his right, the parts are so distinct that
it sounds as though two dierent peo
ple were at the instrument. He is also
deeply eccentric. His accounts of Mo
zarts Sonata in C, K. 545, and the Fan
tasia and Sonata in C Minor, rendered
without pause, veered from porcelain
prettiness to turbulent Romantic ges
turing and back again, neither manner
suitable to the music at hand. In Beetho
vens Opus 111, Sokolovs interpretive
meanderings matched the saturnine
magnicence of the score: endless even
toned trills and ethereal guration cast
a spell. Still, a humorless selfindulgence
prevailed.The crowd roared and stamped;
I went away perplexed.
On another night, the German bari
tone Christian Gerhaher gave an all
Schumann program, with Gerold Huber
at the piano. Here I happily joined the
cult. Gerhaher is one of the great vocal
artists of the day, although he is not an
interpreter of vast expressive range. His
characteristic mode is that of ironic in
telligence masking strong feeling, and
he seldom varies his approach. But his
voice is so singular in aura that nothing
appears to be missing. At the core of his
art is an artlessness akin to conversa
tional speech: time and again, he colors
a line by breaking the honeyed tone and
letting a folkish directness steal in. He
hints at the style of a balladeer, or even
of a cabaret singeran eect accentu
ated by the pointed use of rolled rs. In
MdchenSchwermut (A Girls Mel
ancholy), Gerhaher begins with a white,
wan sound, evoking a lost spirit that nds
only sadness in dewdrops and spring
breezes. When he reaches the words
freudenlose Welt (joyless world), a slight
roughness intrudes, as if he had lost faith
in the illusion of song. This quality of
contingent beauty imparts immense emo
tional weight to Gerhahers work.
In Heines poem Mit Myrten und
Rosen, which Schumann set in his
Liederkreis Opus 24, the narrator speaks
of his songs as mute and lifeless, wait
ing for the spirit of love that will re
to give the repertory a presenttense
immediacy. Such sorcery is, however,
far from routine at Salzburg, which, de
spite Hinterhusers eorts, features
few new pieces and remains captive to
the conservative taste of its lite audi
ence. In a prospectus for the festival,
issued a century ago, Max Reinhardt
wrote, The arts are not merely a lux
ury for the rich and sated, but food for
the needy. That idea has yet to take
root in Salzburg.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017 81

THE CURRENT CINEMA
DESPERADOES
Good Time and Nocturama.
BY ANTHONY LANE
hat is it like to be a heartthrob?
W How do you cope when the
throbbing swells out of control or, trick-
ier still, when you actively want it to
stop? One broiling August night in 1926,
H. L. Mencken had dinner in New York
with Rudolph Valentino, whose star-
dom was of a magnitude we can no lon-
ger comprehend. Mencken found him
Josh and Benny Safdies movie stars a grungy, compelling Robert Pattinson.
to be a gentleman, plagued by a suc-
cess that was hollow as well as vast, and
added, Every time the multitudes yelled,
he felt himself blushing inside. The
agony was soon quelled; a week or so
later, Valentino died, thus trapping his
fame in amber.
There are less drastic options. One is
to vanish from view. Another is to swan
dive into the mire of scandal. A third is
to saturate yourself in hard work, pref-
erably of a kind that will rue or coarsen
your reection in the eyes of fans. That
has been the strategy of Robert Pattin-
son, whose discomfort, during the blaze
of Twilight, was painful to observe
the problem being that such glowering,
reminiscent of his characters vampiric
gloom, made him yet more desirable.
82 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2017
not to Connie but to his brother, Nick
Since the franchise expired, though, he
has made smart choices, shunning the
anodyne and nding employment with
venturesome directors: David Cronen-
berg, for Cosmopolis (2012) and Maps
to the Stars (2014); Brady Corbet, for
The Childhood of a Leader (2015); and
James Gray, for The Lost City of Z
(2016). Coming soon is High Life, for
the audacious Claire Denis. If any Twi- money from a friend, Corey ( Jennifer
light groupies linger in the dusk, their
baement must be boundless.
Where Cronenberg caught some-
thing sculpted and near-robotic in the
Pattinson of Cosmopolis, Josh Safdie
and his brother Benny, the directors of
Good Time, Pattinsons latest movie,
drag him to the opposite extreme. Never
has he looked less beautiful, though his
claim upon our attention doesnt slip for
a second. He sports a beard, an earring,
and a selection of grungy clothes, and
at one stage he bleaches his hair yellow-
white, the hue of sour milk, in a fruit-
less attempt to disguise his appearance.
Most alarming of all, he barely blinks.
Throughout the Twilight saga, Pat-
tinson had the low lids and the see-
through pallor of the eternally unslept;
here, as a two-bit criminal named Con-
nie Nikas, his strung-out stare is that of
a man for whom sleep would be not so
much a blessing as a waste of a night.
The rst and the last scenes belong
(Benny Safdie), who has learning di-
culties and a speech impediment. At the
start, he is gently questioned by a psy-
chiatrist (Peter Verby), who asks him to
connect various words. The rst exam-
ple is scissors and a cooking pan. You
can hurt yourself with both, Nick says.
To salt and water, he replies, The
beach. A tear rolls from his eye. Con-
nie bursts in, exclaiming to the therapist,
How would you like it if I made you
cry?, and drags Nick away. At once, we
take Connies side, assuming him to be his
brothers keeper. Will he not guide this
timid soul through the obstacles of life
just as Tom Cruise, in Rain Man, tended
to the welfare of Dustin Homan?
In a word, no. Connie loves Nick,
but the next demonstration of that love
is to rope him into robbing a bank. The
heist is only slightly smoother than the
one in Take the Money and Run, where
Woody Allen hands over a note that
says, I am pointing a gun at you, and
the teller cant read it (That looks like
gub ). Though Good Time is strewn
with human screwups, its not quite a
comedy of errors, and the laughs keep
getting choked o. The brothers get-
away is a farce, and Nick winds up in
custody, where other miscreants take
spiteful advantage of him. In a bid to
bail him out, Connie tries to borrow
Jason Leigh)or, rather, without per-
mission, from her mothers credit card.
(Coreys expression suggests that this is
not the rst such favor.) Later, he be-
comes an impromptu drug dealer, hunt-
ing through an amusement park, at night,
for a bottle of acid thats been stashed
there, in the hope of selling it on. Never
is his quest not desperate; the movie
seems to begin where his tether ends.
As fraternal entrepreneurs, the Saf-
dies are considerably more successful
than the Nikas boys, having made a host
of inquisitive movies, short and long. I
have a soft spot for Buttons (2011),
which they created in conjunction with
Alex Kalman, and which is actually hun-
dreds of micro-documentaries pasted
ILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK LEGER
together. Some of them last mere sec-
onds; Packed, for instance, shows a
kid being squashed into a cardboard
box, for fun, next to the Canal Street
subway station. There was a time when
such spontaneous visual grabbing was
the province of still photographers, but
the Safdies like to grab on the move,
with witty, dejected, and surreal results.
To maintain that sense of melee in a
feature lm, however, is quite another
task. How do you turn a scrapbook into
a story?
The eort faltered in Heaven Knows
What (2014), a sapping saga of heroin
addicts, but Good Time is something
else. It marks a major stride forward, at
once sure-footed in its method and de-
stabilizing in its eect. Freakish close-
ups abound; when Connie and Nick
wear disguring rubber masks for the
bank job, youre not sure who or what
youre looking at. Scarlet dye, placed
amid the wads of stolen cash, explodes
and drenches the brothers faces and
clothes, but thats not all; the scenes that
follow are also reddened, as if we were
watching through blood-tinted specta-
cles. The whole movie, in fact, aches
with a neon glow, which heightens its
air of insomnia. The reckless plot may
remind you of Scorseses After Hours
(1985), but the suavity with which the
camera craned above the hero of that
lm, as he knelt in the street and cried,
What do you want from me?, has no
equivalent in the Safdies jitter-infested
world. We do glance downward from
an apartment block, but merely as ca-
sual onlookers, and Connie, far below,
is not imploring some heedless deity
but scampering from the cops.
In the end, what binds and propels
this uneasy tale is not so much the color
scheme or the handheld fretfulness of
the imagery as the presence of Robert
Pattinson. At one point, the movie ducks
away from him for a while, unwisely
ashing back into the recent past of an-
other character, and our interest ags.
He digs into the role, lays it bare, and
forbids us to make our minds up. When
he spirits a bandaged patient out of a
hospital, believing him to be Nick, we
half-admire Connies initiative, as if he
were an untrained Jason Bourne, where-
upon he does something so creepy or
so callous that we recoil. It is not that
Pattinson has ceased to make our hearts
throb but that he has learned to claw at
our nerves, too, and even to turn our
stomachs, all without sinking his teeth
into a single neck. The vampire is laid
to rest.
he change of tempo and of tone as
T you jump from Good Time to
Bertrand Bonellos Nocturama will
leave you tottering. Both movies deal
with outrageous conduct, and both come
alive in the space of one long night, but
Bonello, serene to a fault, pursues his
characterseven as they plant explo-
sives or brandish gunswith the prowl-
ing aplomb of a cat. There are traces of
Kubrick; as in The Killing (1956), the
time of day is regularly logged onscreen,
and Killers Kiss (1955) is recalled in
the eerie use of mannequins. One of
them, wearing a swimsuit, is ravished by
a human male. By the standards of Noc-
turama, such perversity counts as love.
We are in Paris, where a gang of
young peoplesome scarcely more than
boys and girlscarry out simultaneous
attacks. The head of a bank is shot at
his apartment. A tower is rebombed,
as are a government ministry and a
golden statue of Joan of Arc, whose face
gazes out through the ames. No mo-
tive is supplied, and although one guy
claims, Well go to Heaven, we hear
no mention of jihad. Ethnically and so-
cially, the perpetrators are a random
mixture, including a kid who bears a
box of Semtex as if delivering pizza, a
sybarite who puts on lipstick and mimes
to Shirley Bassey, a woman with the
features of a Matisse odalisque, and a
pale preppie type who declares, We did
what we had to do.
All of which will exasperate anyone
familiar with the genuine terrorist activ-
ity that France has endured of late. What
is to be gained by purging atrocities of
ideological content and redrafting them
as an exercise in style? In the second half
of the story, the oenders hole up in a
luxury department store, after hours.
There they try on suits, open bottles of
wine, and listen to costly sound systems,
as though rehearsing to be paid-up mem-
bers of the bourgeoisie. So much for our
suspicion that their crimes were fuelled
by anti-capitalist rancor. In truth, Bonello
is too cunning and too controlling to
grant us anything that resembles a set-
tled point of view, visual or moral; hence
his need to show a violent death from
multiple angles. Near the end, we get to
hear John Barrys The Persuaders
not only one of the catchiest TV themes
ever composed, redolent of moneyed in-
nocence, but a key to the tactics of this
movie. It is at once damnable and deb-
onair. It seduces as it repels.
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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 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 weeks cartoon, by Frank Cotham,
must be received by Sunday, August 20th. The finalists in the July 31st contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this weeks contest, in the September 4th issue. Anyone age thirteen
or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEKS CONTEST

..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

Food photography has gotten to be so competitive.

Kimberly Kielczewski, New Hyde Park, N.Y.

Remember when I told you that the pizza here is famous? Just go. Ill only end up hurting you.
Devlin Hyna, Chicago, Ill. Robert McNally, Chicago, Ill.

The food is O.K., but the media coverage is excellent.

Tom Parker, Orinda, Calif.