newyorker--2020-11-19--When the Enslaved Went South

When the Enslaved Went South

Why did runaways head toward Mexico ?
For enslaved people in Texas or Louisiana , the northern states were hundreds of miles away .
Even if they did manage to cross the Mason-Dixon line , they were not legally free .
In fact , the fugitive-slave clause of the U.S. Constitution and the laws meant to enforce it sought to return runaways to their owners .
Mexico , by contrast , granted enslaved people legal protections that they did not enjoy in the northern United States .
Mexico ’ s Congress abolished slavery in 1837 .
Twenty years later , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ freedom to all enslaved people who set foot on Mexican soil , signalling that freedom was not some abstract ideal but a general and inviolable principle , the law of the land .
Two options awaited most runaways in Mexico .
The first was to join Mexico ’ s military colonies , a series of outposts along the northern frontier , which defended against Native peoples and foreign invaders .
The second was to seek employment as servants , tailors , cooks , carpenters , bricklayers , or day laborers , among other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ means easy , and slaveholders pointed to these difficulties to suggest that bondage in the United States was preferable to “ freedom ” in Mexico .
Noah Smithwick , a gunsmith in Texas , recalled that a slave named Moses had grown tired of living off “ husks ” in Mexico and returned to his owner ’ s “ lenient rule ” near Houston .
Another came back from his “ Mexican tour ” in 1852 , according to the Clarksville , Texas , Northern Standard , with a “ supreme disgust ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were so bad , according to newspapers in the United States , that runaways returned to their homes of their own accord .
Some enslaved people did return to the United States , but typically not for the reasons that slaveholders claimed .
In 1858 , a slave named Albert , who had escaped to Mexico nearly two years earlier , returned to the cotton plantation of his owner , “ a Mr. Gordon of Texas.
” The Independent Press in Abbeville , South Carolina , reported that , “ like all others @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he has a poor opinion of the country and laws.
” Albert did not give Mr. Gordon any reason to doubt this conclusion .
He remained at his owner ’ s plantation , near Matagorda , Texas , where the Brazos River emptied into the Gulf .
But Albert did not come back to stay .
Five or six months after his return , he was gone—this time with his brothers , Henry and Isaac .
What drew them across the Rio Grande gives us a crucial view of how Mexico , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and political upheaval , deepened the debate about slavery in the decades before the Civil War .
In 1850 , several hundred Seminoles moved from the United States to a military colony in the northeastern Mexican state of Coahuila .
Eighty-four of the three hundred and fifty-one immigrants were Black—formerly enslaved people , known as the Mascogos or Black Seminoles , who had escaped to join the Seminole Indians , first in the tribe ’ s Florida homelands , and later in Indian Territory .
Fugitive slaves were already escaping to Mexico by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1849 , a judge in Guerrero , Coahuila , reported that David Thomas “ save [ d ] his family from slavery ” by escaping with his daughter and three grandchildren to Mexico .
A year later , seventeen people of color appeared in Monclova , Coahuila , asking to join the Seminoles and their Black allies .
Another two men , José and Sambo , claimed to be “ straight from Africa , ” according to one account .
By 1851 , three hundred and fifty-six Black people lived at this military @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had arrived with the Seminoles the previous year .
Life in Mexico was not easy .
Few fugitive slaves spoke Spanish .
( “ Couldn ’ t even ask for a chaw of terbacker !
” a son of a Black Seminole remembered in an interview with the historian Kenneth Wiggins Porter , in 1942 . )
Most had so little taste for Mexican food that they scraped the red beans from the tortillas their neighbors handed them .
But the Mexican government did what it could to help them settle at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.S. border .
A priest arrived from nearby Santa Rosa to baptize them .
A schoolteacher followed , along with crates of tools .
With the help of the three hundred and seventy pesos a month that the government funnelled to the colony , the new inhabitants set to work growing corn , raising stock , and building wood-frame houses around a square where they kept their animals at night .
In this small , concentrated community , Black Seminoles and fugitive slaves managed to maintain and develop their own traditions .
At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Rosa , they fasted every Friday and baptized the faithful in the Sabinas River .
But when they kept vigil over the dead there was traditional stamping and singing around the bier , and when they took sick they ministered to one another using old folk methods .
The demands of military service constrained their autonomy—fathers , husbands , and sons had to take up arms at a moment ’ s notice—but this also earned them the respect of the Mexican authorities .
In 1851 , a high-ranking official of Mexico ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Black Seminoles never abandoned the “ desire to succeed in punishing the enemy.
” Another official expected that their service would be of “ great benefit ” to the country .
The victories that they helped score against the Comanches and Lipan Apaches proved to Mexican military commanders that the Seminoles and their Black allies were “ worthy of every confidence.
” For all of its restrictions , military service also helped fugitive slaves defend themselves from those who wished to return them to slavery .
On September 20 , 1851 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Texas , rode two hundred miles from San Antonio to the Mexican military colony .
There , he arrested two men he suspected of being runaways and carried them across the Rio Grande .
José Antonio de Arredondo , a justice of the peace in Guerrero , Coahuila , insisted that the two men were both “ under the protection of our laws & government and considered as Mexican citizens.
” When U.S. officials explained that a court in San Antonio had ordered their arrest , the sub-inspector of Mexico ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ released .
Meanwhile , a force of Black and Seminole people attempted to cross the Rio Grande and free the prisoners by force .
These runaways encountered a different set of challenges .
Those who worked on haciendas and in households were often the only people of African descent on the payroll , leaving them no choice but to assimilate into their new communities .
Most learned Spanish , and many changed their names .
( A former slave named Dan called himself “ Dionisio de Echavaria.
” ) Fugitive slaves also encountered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hallmarks of chattel slavery .
In northern Mexico , hacienda owners enjoyed the right to physically punish their employees , meting out corporal discipline as harsh as any on plantations in the United States .
In parts of southern Mexico , such as Yucatán and Chiapas , debt peonage tied laborers to plantations as effectively as violence .
In 1849 , a Veracruz newspaper reported that indentured servants suffered a state of dependence worse than slavery .
In 1857 , El Monitor Republicano , in Mexico City , complained that laborers had earned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But , in contrast to the southern United States , where enslaved people knew no other law besides the whim of their owners , laborers in Mexico enjoyed a number of legal protections .
These workers could file suit when their employers lowered their wages or added unreasonable charges to their accounts .
They could also sue in cases of mistreatment , as Juan Castillo of Galeana , Nuevo León , did , in 1860 , after his employer hit him , whipped him , and ran him over with his horse .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ excess of anger.
” ) In general , laborers had the right to seek new employment for any reason—a right denied to enslaved people in the United States .
And , more often than not , the greatest concern of former slaves who joined Mexico ’ s labor force was not their new employers so much as their former masters .
Hennes had belonged to a planter named William Cheney , who owned a plantation near Cheneyville , Louisiana , a town a hundred and fifty miles northwest of New Orleans .
When @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who was kidnapped from the North and sold into slavery , arrived at a plantation in a neighboring parish , he heard that several slaves had been hanged in the area for planning “ a crusade to Mexico.
” As Northup recalled in his memoir , “ Twelve Years a Slave , ” the plot was “ a subject of general and unfailing interest in every slave hut on the bayou.
” From her years working on Cheney ’ s plantation , Hennes must have known that Mexico ’ s laws would give @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some point—when or how is unclear—Hennes acted on that knowledge , escaping from Cheneyville , making her way to Reynosa , and finding work in Manuel Luis del Fierro ’ s household .
To del Fierro , Matilde Hennes was not just a runaway .
As a servant , she was a member of his household .
In the room , del Fierro took hold of his firearms , while his wife called for help from the balcony .
One of the kidnappers , who was arrested , turned out to be Hennes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In Mexico , Cheney found that he could not treat people of African descent with impunity , as slaveholders often did in the United States .
While Cheney sat in prison , Judge Justo Treviño , of the District of Northern Tamaulipas , began an investigation into the attempted kidnapping .
Del Fierro ’ s actions were not unusual .
In 1851 , the townspeople of a small village in northern Coahuila took up arms “ in the service of humanity , ” according to a Mexican military commander , to stop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kidnapping “ an entire family of negroes.
” Later that year , the Mexican Army posted a “ respectable ” force and two field-artillery pieces on the Rio Grande to stop a group of two hundred Americans from crossing the river , likely to seize fugitive slaves .
In 1852 , four townspeople from Guerrero , Coahuila , chased after a slaveholder from the United States who had kidnapped a Black man from their colony .
They found the slaveholder , who pulled out a six-shooter , but one of the townspeople drew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to bring the kidnapper to court , the councilmen brought his corpse to a judge in Guerrero , who certified that he was , in fact , dead , “ for not having responded when spoken to , and other cadaverous signs.
” The protection that Mexican citizens provided was significant , because the national authorities in Mexico City did not have the resources to enforce many of the country ’ s most basic policies .
Mexico ’ s antislavery laws might have been a dead letter , if not for the ordinary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risked their lives to protect fugitive slaves .
These laws had serious implications for slavery in the United States .
Mexico bordered the American South—and specifically the Deep South , where slave-based agriculture was booming .
Eventually , enslaved people escaped to Mexico with such frequency that Texas seemed to have much in common with the states that bordered the Mason-Dixon line .
Samuel Houston , then the governor of Texas , made the stakes clear on the eve of the Civil War .
“ Texas is a border state , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ insecure her entire western boundary .
Her slaves are liable to escape but no fugitive slave law is pledged for their recovery.
” In fact , Mexico ’ s laws rendered slavery insecure not just in Texas and Louisiana but in the very heart of the Union .
The land seized from Mexico at the close of the Mexican-American War , in 1848 , was free territory .
That territory included most of what is modern-day California , Nevada , Utah , and Arizona .
When Southern politicians attempted to establish slavery in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ controversy that would lead to the overturning of the Missouri Compromise , the outbreak of violence in Kansas , and the birth of a new political coalition , the Republican Party , whose success in the election of 1860 led the southern states to secede from the Union .
It is easy to discount Mexico ’ s antislavery stance , given how former slaves continued to face coercion there .
But these laws were a momentous achievement nonetheless .
Only by abolishing human bondage was it possible to extend the debate over the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enslaved people who escaped from the United States and the Mexican citizens who protected them insured that the promise of freedom in Mexico was significant , even if it was incomplete .
As the poet Walt Whitman put it , “ It is provided in the essence of things , that from any fruition of success , no matter what , shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.
” Their work—our work—is not over .
This essay was drawn from “ South to Freedom : Runaway Slaves to Mexico and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” which is out in November , from Basic Books .

In the four decades before the Civil War, an estimated several thousand enslaved people escaped from the south-central United States to Mexico. Some received help—from free Black people, ship captains, Mexicans, Germans, preachers, mail riders, and, according to one Texan paper, other “lurking scoundrels.” Most, though, escaped to Mexico by their own ingenuity. They acquired forged travel passes. They disguised themselves as white men, fashioning wigs from horsehair and pitch. They stole horses, firearms, skiffs, dirk knives, fur hats, and, in one instance, twelve gold watches and a diamond breast pin. And then they disappeared.
Why did runaways head toward Mexico? For enslaved people in Texas or Louisiana, the northern states were hundreds of miles away. Even if they did manage to cross the Mason-Dixon line, they were not legally free. In fact, the fugitive-slave clause of the U.S. Constitution and the laws meant to enforce it sought to return runaways to their owners. Mexico, by contrast, granted enslaved people legal protections that they did not enjoy in the northern United States. Mexico’s Congress abolished slavery in 1837. Twenty years later, the country adopted a constitution that granted freedom to all enslaved people who set foot on Mexican soil, signalling that freedom was not some abstract ideal but a general and inviolable principle, the law of the land.
Two options awaited most runaways in Mexico. The first was to join Mexico’s military colonies, a series of outposts along the northern frontier, which defended against Native peoples and foreign invaders. The second was to seek employment as servants, tailors, cooks, carpenters, bricklayers, or day laborers, among other occupations. Their lives were by no means easy, and slaveholders pointed to these difficulties to suggest that bondage in the United States was preferable to “freedom” in Mexico. Noah Smithwick, a gunsmith in Texas, recalled that a slave named Moses had grown tired of living off “husks” in Mexico and returned to his owner’s “lenient rule” near Houston. Another came back from his “Mexican tour” in 1852, according to the Clarksville, Texas, Northern Standard, with a “supreme disgust” for Mexicans. The conditions in Mexico were so bad, according to newspapers in the United States, that runaways returned to their homes of their own accord.
Some enslaved people did return to the United States, but typically not for the reasons that slaveholders claimed. In 1858, a slave named Albert, who had escaped to Mexico nearly two years earlier, returned to the cotton plantation of his owner, “a Mr. Gordon of Texas.” The Independent Press in Abbeville, South Carolina, reported that, “like all others” who escaped to Mexico, “he has a poor opinion of the country and laws.” Albert did not give Mr. Gordon any reason to doubt this conclusion. He remained at his owner’s plantation, near Matagorda, Texas, where the Brazos River emptied into the Gulf. But Albert did not come back to stay. Five or six months after his return, he was gone—this time with his brothers, Henry and Isaac. What drew them across the Rio Grande gives us a crucial view of how Mexico, a country suffering from poverty, corruption, and political upheaval, deepened the debate about slavery in the decades before the Civil War.
Northern Mexico was poor and sparsely populated in the nineteenth century. During the winter months, Comanches and Lipan Apaches crossed the Rio Grande to rustle livestock, and the Mexican military lacked even the most basic supplies to stop them. Local militiamen did not have enough saddles. Military commanders asked “the coöperation of the female population” to provide their men with uniforms. Town councils pleaded for more gunpowder. Desperate to restore order, Mexico’s government issued a decree on July 19, 1848, which established and set out rules for a line of forts on the southern bank of the Rio Grande. A previous decree provided that foreigners who joined these colonies would receive land and become “citizens of the Republic upon their arrival.”
In 1850, several hundred Seminoles moved from the United States to a military colony in the northeastern Mexican state of Coahuila. Eighty-four of the three hundred and fifty-one immigrants were Black—formerly enslaved people, known as the Mascogos or Black Seminoles, who had escaped to join the Seminole Indians, first in the tribe’s Florida homelands, and later in Indian Territory. Fugitive slaves were already escaping to Mexico by the time the Seminoles arrived. In 1849, a judge in Guerrero, Coahuila, reported that David Thomas “save[d] his family from slavery” by escaping with his daughter and three grandchildren to Mexico. A year later, seventeen people of color appeared in Monclova, Coahuila, asking to join the Seminoles and their Black allies. Another two men, José and Sambo, claimed to be “straight from Africa,” according to one account. By 1851, three hundred and fifty-six Black people lived at this military colony—more than four times the number who had arrived with the Seminoles the previous year.
Life in Mexico was not easy. Few fugitive slaves spoke Spanish. (“Couldn’t even ask for a chaw of terbacker!” a son of a Black Seminole remembered in an interview with the historian Kenneth Wiggins Porter, in 1942.) Most had so little taste for Mexican food that they scraped the red beans from the tortillas their neighbors handed them. But the Mexican government did what it could to help them settle at the military colony, thirty miles from the U.S. border. A priest arrived from nearby Santa Rosa to baptize them. A schoolteacher followed, along with crates of tools. With the help of the three hundred and seventy pesos a month that the government funnelled to the colony, the new inhabitants set to work growing corn, raising stock, and building wood-frame houses around a square where they kept their animals at night.
In this small, concentrated community, Black Seminoles and fugitive slaves managed to maintain and develop their own traditions. At the urging of the priest in Santa Rosa, they fasted every Friday and baptized the faithful in the Sabinas River. But when they kept vigil over the dead there was traditional stamping and singing around the bier, and when they took sick they ministered to one another using old folk methods. The demands of military service constrained their autonomy—fathers, husbands, and sons had to take up arms at a moment’s notice—but this also earned them the respect of the Mexican authorities. In 1851, a high-ranking official of Mexico’s military colonies reported that the “faithful” Black Seminoles never abandoned the “desire to succeed in punishing the enemy.” Another official expected that their service would be of “great benefit” to the country. The victories that they helped score against the Comanches and Lipan Apaches proved to Mexican military commanders that the Seminoles and their Black allies were “worthy of every confidence.”
For all of its restrictions, military service also helped fugitive slaves defend themselves from those who wished to return them to slavery. On September 20, 1851, Sheriff John Crawford, of Bexar County, Texas, rode two hundred miles from San Antonio to the Mexican military colony. There, he arrested two men he suspected of being runaways and carried them across the Rio Grande. José Antonio de Arredondo, a justice of the peace in Guerrero, Coahuila, insisted that the two men were both “under the protection of our laws & government and considered as Mexican citizens.” When U.S. officials explained that a court in San Antonio had ordered their arrest, the sub-inspector of Mexico’s Eastern Military Colonies demanded that they be released. Meanwhile, a force of Black and Seminole people attempted to cross the Rio Grande and free the prisoners by force.
Though military service helped insure the freedom of former slaves, that freedom came at a cost: risk to one’s life, in the heat of battle, and participation in Mexico’s brutal campaign against Native peoples. Not every runaway joined the colonies. Some settled in cities like Matamoros, which had a growing Black population of merchants and carpenters, bricklayers and manual laborers, hailing from Haiti, the British Caribbean, and the United States. Others hired themselves out to local landowners, who were in constant need of extra hands. Evaristo Madero, a businessman who carted goods from Saltillo, Mexico, to San Antonio, Texas, hired two Black domestic servants. Espiridion Gomez employed several others on his ranch near San Fernando.
These runaways encountered a different set of challenges. Those who worked on haciendas and in households were often the only people of African descent on the payroll, leaving them no choice but to assimilate into their new communities. Most learned Spanish, and many changed their names. (A former slave named Dan called himself “Dionisio de Echavaria.”) Fugitive slaves also encountered labor practices that bore some of the hallmarks of chattel slavery. In northern Mexico, hacienda owners enjoyed the right to physically punish their employees, meting out corporal discipline as harsh as any on plantations in the United States. In parts of southern Mexico, such as Yucatán and Chiapas, debt peonage tied laborers to plantations as effectively as violence. In 1849, a Veracruz newspaper reported that indentured servants suffered a state of dependence worse than slavery. In 1857, El Monitor Republicano, in Mexico City, complained that laborers had earned their “liberty in name only.”
But, in contrast to the southern United States, where enslaved people knew no other law besides the whim of their owners, laborers in Mexico enjoyed a number of legal protections. These workers could file suit when their employers lowered their wages or added unreasonable charges to their accounts. They could also sue in cases of mistreatment, as Juan Castillo of Galeana, Nuevo León, did, in 1860, after his employer hit him, whipped him, and ran him over with his horse. (His employer admitted to an “excess of anger.”) In general, laborers had the right to seek new employment for any reason—a right denied to enslaved people in the United States. And, more often than not, the greatest concern of former slaves who joined Mexico’s labor force was not their new employers so much as their former masters.
On August 20, 1850, Manuel Luis del Fierro stepped outside his house in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, a town just across the border from McAllen, Texas. The night was hot, and a band was playing in the plaza. As he stood listening, two foreigners approached, asking if he wanted to join them at the concert. Del Fierro politely refused their invitation. He did not give the incident much thought until later that night, when he woke to the sound of a woman screaming. Del Fierro hurried toward the commotion. In one of the rooms of the house, he came upon the two foreigners, one waving a pistol at his maid, Matilde Hennes, who “had been held as a slave in the United States.”
Hennes had belonged to a planter named William Cheney, who owned a plantation near Cheneyville, Louisiana, a town a hundred and fifty miles northwest of New Orleans. When Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped from the North and sold into slavery, arrived at a plantation in a neighboring parish, he heard that several slaves had been hanged in the area for planning “a crusade to Mexico.” As Northup recalled in his memoir, “Twelve Years a Slave,” the plot was “a subject of general and unfailing interest in every slave hut on the bayou.” From her years working on Cheney’s plantation, Hennes must have known that Mexico’s laws would give her a claim to freedom. At some point—when or how is unclear—Hennes acted on that knowledge, escaping from Cheneyville, making her way to Reynosa, and finding work in Manuel Luis del Fierro’s household.
To del Fierro, Matilde Hennes was not just a runaway. As a servant, she was a member of his household. In the room, del Fierro took hold of his firearms, while his wife called for help from the balcony. One of the kidnappers, who was arrested, turned out to be Hennes’s former owner, William Cheney. In Mexico, Cheney found that he could not treat people of African descent with impunity, as slaveholders often did in the United States. While Cheney sat in prison, Judge Justo Treviño, of the District of Northern Tamaulipas, began an investigation into the attempted kidnapping.
Del Fierro’s actions were not unusual. In 1851, the townspeople of a small village in northern Coahuila took up arms “in the service of humanity,” according to a Mexican military commander, to stop a slave catcher named Warren Adams from kidnapping “an entire family of negroes.” Later that year, the Mexican Army posted a “respectable” force and two field-artillery pieces on the Rio Grande to stop a group of two hundred Americans from crossing the river, likely to seize fugitive slaves. In 1852, four townspeople from Guerrero, Coahuila, chased after a slaveholder from the United States who had kidnapped a Black man from their colony. They found the slaveholder, who pulled out a six-shooter, but one of the townspeople drew faster, killing the man. Unable to bring the kidnapper to court, the councilmen brought his corpse to a judge in Guerrero, who certified that he was, in fact, dead, “for not having responded when spoken to, and other cadaverous signs.”
The protection that Mexican citizens provided was significant, because the national authorities in Mexico City did not have the resources to enforce many of the country’s most basic policies. Mexico’s antislavery laws might have been a dead letter, if not for the ordinary people, of all races, who risked their lives to protect fugitive slaves.
Mexico has often served as a foil to the United States. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the population of the United States doubled and then doubled again; its territory expanded by the same proportion, as its leaders purchased, conquered, and expropriated lands to the west and south. Mexico, meanwhile, was so unstable that the country went through forty-nine Presidencies between 1824 and 1857, and so poor that cakes of soap sometimes took the place of coins. And yet enslaved people left the United States for Mexico. Although their labor drove the economic growth of the United States, they did not benefit from the wealth that they generated, nor could they participate in the political system that governed their lives. The United States Constitution acknowledged the right to property and provided for the return of “fugitives from labor.” The Mexican constitution, by contrast, abolished slavery and promised to free all enslaved people who set foot on its soil.
These laws had serious implications for slavery in the United States. Mexico bordered the American South—and specifically the Deep South, where slave-based agriculture was booming. Eventually, enslaved people escaped to Mexico with such frequency that Texas seemed to have much in common with the states that bordered the Mason-Dixon line. Samuel Houston, then the governor of Texas, made the stakes clear on the eve of the Civil War. “Texas is a border state,” he wrote in 1860. “Mexico renders insecure her entire western boundary. Her slaves are liable to escape but no fugitive slave law is pledged for their recovery.”
In fact, Mexico’s laws rendered slavery insecure not just in Texas and Louisiana but in the very heart of the Union. The land seized from Mexico at the close of the Mexican-American War, in 1848, was free territory. That territory included most of what is modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. When Southern politicians attempted to establish slavery in that region, they ignited a sectional controversy that would lead to the overturning of the Missouri Compromise, the outbreak of violence in Kansas, and the birth of a new political coalition, the Republican Party, whose success in the election of 1860 led the southern states to secede from the Union.
It is easy to discount Mexico’s antislavery stance, given how former slaves continued to face coercion there. But these laws were a momentous achievement nonetheless. Only by abolishing human bondage was it possible to extend the debate over the full meaning of universal freedom. The enslaved people who escaped from the United States and the Mexican citizens who protected them insured that the promise of freedom in Mexico was significant, even if it was incomplete. As the poet Walt Whitman put it, “It is provided in the essence of things, that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.” Their work—our work—is not over.
This essay was drawn from “South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War,” which is out in November, from Basic Books.


newyorker--2020-11-20--Sleep-Training Methods for Adults

Sleep-Training Methods for Adults

Pick up your phone and scroll through news apps for one hour .
Then slowly put your phone down and leave it there for one minute .
Repeat this over and over , gradually increasing the amount of time in which you ’ re away from your phone .
Stop when you ’ ve consumed enough content that being awake feels indistinguishable from a nightmare .
Shortly before bedtime , give yourself a warm bottle of eight-dollar Moscato .
After a little belching , you ’ ll go right down .
Then you ’ ll go back up at 3 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Spend the next four hours burping yourself to sleep , just in time for your alarm to go off .
Jolt awake at the sound of the baby ’ s piercing cries and tumble out of bed .
After smashing your toe on the doorframe , remember that you don ’ t have a baby—it ’ s just your neighbor Jean ’ s spiteful cat .
Spend the next several hours pleading with Gizmo through the wall to go sleep-sleep .
Toss and turn under the covers while thinking about how humans are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on your own personal failures .
Are you sure that you know which plastics can be recycled ?
And what should you do when you can ’ t get that last glob of honey out of the bottle—just throw the whole bear out ?
Google “ Recycling how it works , ” and realize it ’ s possible that everything is ending up in a landfill anyway .
Pop the last of your melatonin gummies , which never work but taste great , and chuck that empty jar right in the trash .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ plowing through the new season of “ Unsolved Mysteries.
” Scream yourself awake at 5 A.M. , drenched in sweat and with your head stuck at a forty-five-degree angle .
Right when you ’ re about to drift off , think back to your most humiliating moments from the eighth grade .
Like that time you tripped and fell in the cafeteria while carrying an open bag of Funyuns , and everyone laughed—even the principal .
Counting backward from a hundred , picture all the classmates and lunch aides , who definitely still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ give in and take a ZzzQuil , but only once it ’ s late enough to guarantee that you ’ ll sleep right through all four of your alarms in the morning .
Gradually put yourself to bed later and later each night , until time folds in on itself and you ’ ve suddenly been awake for three weeks .
Around this point , you ’ ll slip into a REM cycle and remain there for three days .
When you finally regain consciousness , you will have been fired from your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ll feel refreshed .
Not to be confused with Bedtime-Hour Fading , this method is one where you simply stay up all night hate-reading the life-style blog of your childhood nemesis , because you don ’ t feel like getting up to brush your teeth .
Lie on your back and grind your teeth to the bass beat of your neighbor Troy ’ s stereo .
Intermittently , get up and scream , “ SHUT THE HELL UP !
, ” while banging on the ceiling with the handle of a Swiffer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this purpose .
Repeat this until you tire yourself out or puncture the drywall .
Get into bed and allow yourself to wail uncontrollably .
You should figure out how to self-soothe eventually .
And , if you don ’ t , at least all of your neighbors will be equally miserable .

The Pick-Up-Put-Down Method
Pick up your phone and scroll through news apps for one hour. Then slowly put your phone down and leave it there for one minute. Repeat this over and over, gradually increasing the amount of time in which you’re away from your phone. Stop when you’ve consumed enough content that being awake feels indistinguishable from a nightmare.
The Warm-Bottle Method
Shortly before bedtime, give yourself a warm bottle of eight-dollar Moscato. After a little belching, you’ll go right down. Then you’ll go back up at 3 A.M., with violent acid reflux. Spend the next four hours burping yourself to sleep, just in time for your alarm to go off.
The New-Parent Method
Jolt awake at the sound of the baby’s piercing cries and tumble out of bed. After smashing your toe on the doorframe, remember that you don’t have a baby—it’s just your neighbor Jean’s spiteful cat. Spend the next several hours pleading with Gizmo through the wall to go sleep-sleep.
The Graduated-Extinction Method
Toss and turn under the covers while thinking about how humans are destroying the planet, focussing in particular on your own personal failures. Are you sure that you know which plastics can be recycled? And what should you do when you can’t get that last glob of honey out of the bottle—just throw the whole bear out? Google “Recycling how it works,” and realize it’s possible that everything is ending up in a landfill anyway. Pop the last of your melatonin gummies, which never work but taste great, and chuck that empty jar right in the trash.
The Chair Method
Pass out in your favorite armchair while plowing through the new season of “Unsolved Mysteries.” Scream yourself awake at 5 A.M., drenched in sweat and with your head stuck at a forty-five-degree angle.
The Repressed-Mortification Method
Right when you’re about to drift off, think back to your most humiliating moments from the eighth grade. Like that time you tripped and fell in the cafeteria while carrying an open bag of Funyuns, and everyone laughed—even the principal. Counting backward from a hundred, picture all the classmates and lunch aides, who definitely still reminisce about it to this day. Eventually give in and take a ZzzQuil, but only once it’s late enough to guarantee that you’ll sleep right through all four of your alarms in the morning.
Bedtime-Hour Fading
Gradually put yourself to bed later and later each night, until time folds in on itself and you’ve suddenly been awake for three weeks. Around this point, you’ll slip into a REM cycle and remain there for three days. When you finally regain consciousness, you will have been fired from your job, probably, but otherwise you’ll feel refreshed.
Bedtime-Routine Fading
Not to be confused with Bedtime-Hour Fading, this method is one where you simply stay up all night hate-reading the life-style blog of your childhood nemesis, because you don’t feel like getting up to brush your teeth.
The Rock-and-Shush Method
Lie on your back and grind your teeth to the bass beat of your neighbor Troy’s stereo. Intermittently, get up and scream, “SHUT THE HELL UP!,” while banging on the ceiling with the handle of a Swiffer that has only ever been used for this purpose. Repeat this until you tire yourself out or puncture the drywall.
The Cry-It-Out Method
Get into bed and allow yourself to wail uncontrollably. You should figure out how to self-soothe eventually. And, if you don’t, at least all of your neighbors will be equally miserable.


newyorker--2020-11-20--Kamala Harris and the Noble Path of the Prosecutor

When I was in law school , twenty years ago , prosecution was a form of public service that was thought to carry little controversial baggage .
Marked as neither liberal nor conservative , it was also an all-purpose route for young people who aspired to political or judicial positions .
In recent decades , former prosecutors have been ubiquitous in public life .
President Bill Clinton and multiple Presidential nominees and candidates—John Kerry and Chris Christie , for example—were once prosecutors .
So were New York Governor Andrew Cuomo , Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer , and several dozen members @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Kirsten Gillibrand , Richard Blumenthal , Doug Jones , and Josh Hawley .
Countless federal judges have been prosecutors , among them Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito , and also President Barack Obama ’ s last Supreme Court nominee , Merrick Garland , whose prosecution of Timothy McVeigh , for the Oklahoma City bombing , in 1995 , was soon followed by President Clinton ’ s nomination of Garland to the D.C .
Circuit Court of Appeals .
Law students are far less sanguine about that choice of career today .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that a job as a prosecutor has become stigmatized among their peers—part of the contemporary consciousness of criminal justice as a major driver of systemic racial inequality .
At the start of Harris ’ s prosecutorial career , in 1990 , the American prison population had recently doubled , and tough-on-crime rhetoric was de rigueur , regardless of political party .
The next two decades saw the explosion of mass incarceration , which is now the subject of deep social reckoning .
During this past summer ’ s Black Lives Matter protests , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for prison abolition broke into the mainstream , many doubted that a career prosecutor could meet the needs of the Democratic ticket .
But , just as Harris reframed her own prosecutorial past by describing herself as a progressive reformer , so the social meaning of prosecution has been shifting in ways that track this era ’ s aspirations for criminal justice .
Prosecutors weren ’ t always so high-status .
In the nineteenth century , they were about as esteemed as “ dogcatchers , ” doing “ low-profile , low-prestige work , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jed Shugerman , a legal historian at Fordham Law School , who is writing a book about the rise of prosecution as a stepping stone to higher office .
He told me that the phenomenon began to emerge in the first half of the twentieth century , when prosecution became “ the upwardly mobile way to get into the league of élites and , especially , into a political career.
” The exemplar of the transformation of prosecution into a high-profile opportunity was Earl Warren , who , like Harris , went from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to being California ’ s attorney general .
Shugerman ’ s research reveals that Warren ’ s political campaigns boasted of his crackdowns on the Mexican and Chinese communities and of his leadership in organizing the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War .
Warren won election as the governor of California by heightening public fear of Communists and Japanese immigrants .
He went on to become the running mate to the Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey and , finally , the great Chief Justice of the United States , leading the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unconstitutional some of the prosecutorial tactics he ’ d deployed .
After the Second World War , the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson as the U.S. chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials highlighted the heroism of the prosecutor as an enforcer of human rights .
The Kennedy family burnished that liberal ideal , marrying crime-fighting with a civil-rights agenda .
Robert Kennedy ’ s legal career began in the Justice Department ’ s Criminal Division , investigating espionage and corruption , and during his tenure as U.S. Attorney General famously took @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racial discrimination .
The template stuck , especially as young people ’ s idealistic skepticism of government during the sixties gave way to perceptions , in the seventies and eighties , of prosecutors as fighting a nationwide rise in crime .
The political-career opportunities that prosecution presented during the past half century were deeply consequential , even tragic .
In his book “ Locked In , ” the criminal-law professor John Pfaff observes that , between 1994 and 2008 , arrests actually dropped while prosecutors ’ rates of felony charges per arrest doubled—making @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Shugerman suggests that this happened , in part , because prosecutors ’ offices tended to attract people and maintain cultures shaped by political ambitions .
If the work of a prosecutor was functionally a seedling campaign for higher office , it was safest for prosecutors to direct their vast discretion over charges , plea bargains , and sentences toward harshness and severity , in light of a political landscape that rewarded being “ tough on crime ” and criticized leniency .
Perhaps those incentives also fuelled a reticence to prosecute the police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prosecutor in Manhattan , sixteen years ago , supervisors warned rookies not to “ end up in the newspapers ” for failing to jail someone who was arrested for a misdemeanor and then went on to commit a murder .
In the early years of Harris ’ s career , in the eighties and nineties , Joe Biden , then a senator , sponsored , spearheaded , or wrote much of the legislation that laid the foundations of our criminal-justice crisis : laws expanding drug felonies , increasing punishments and prison funding , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disparity between crack- and powder-cocaine offenses .
As Democrats competed with Republicans to prove that they could be even more punitive , Biden , as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee , criticized President George H. W. Bush ’ s anti-narcotics plan as “ not tough enough , ” with insufficient “ police officers to catch the violent thugs , not enough prosecutors to convict them , not enough judges to sentence them , and not enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.
” Since 2008 , Biden has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he supported was wrong ; in 2019 , he said , without naming a specific bill , that it “ was a big mistake when it was made , ” and that “ it ’ s trapped an entire generation.
” In her memoir , Harris notes that she faced questions , from early on , of “ how I , as a black woman , could countenance being part of ‘ the machine ’ putting more young men of color behind bars.
” But , in the same book , she writes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for people who commit serious crimes , ” and expresses particular pride in her work in increasing sentences for “ johns who paid to have sex with underage girls ” and treating the crime like child sexual assault .
She adds that she didn ’ t feel the same way about “ less serious crimes , ” for which “ mostly black or brown or poor men ” were imprisoned .
Harris writes , “ They represented a living monument to lost potential , and I wanted to tear it down.
” During @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those convictions , drawing on Harris ’ s record as a prosecutor .
Some of the strongest objections were to an anti-truancy program that she had implemented as the San Francisco district attorney , in 2008 , threatening prosecution of people whose children chronically missed school , and to her support of a California law that made it possible to jail such parents for up to a year .
( In 2019 , she expressed regret for the “ unintended consequences , ” namely the criminalization of parents . )
As San Francisco @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tougher on drug crimes than her predecessor .
In 2010 , a judge lambasted Harris ’ s office for systematically violating defendants ’ constitutional rights by hiding from defense attorneys the unreliability of a corrupt drug-lab technician ’ s work .
And , as Lara Bazelon argued in the Times , last year , between 2004 and 2011 , Harris “ fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct ” by prosecutors .
Even during the past decade , Harris held a number of positions that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time but are out of step with today ’ s Democratic Party : in 2015 , she opposed a bill that would have forced her office to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate police-involved shootings , and she supported the criminalization of marijuana until 2017 .
In her campaign for California attorney general , in 2010 , she promised to enforce the death penalty , and went on to appeal a federal-court ruling , from 2014 , that the death penalty was unconstitutional .
But Harris has also long sounded explicitly reformist notes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Smart on Crime , ” from 2009 , for a “ criminal justice system that gets truly tough on crime by being Smart on Crime.
” Harris urged prosecutors to “ go after the worst criminals ” but to redirect defendants accused of lower-level offenses and at-risk young people toward programs for reintegration and crime prevention .
In that vein , she has touted the Back on Track program that she implemented as San Francisco ’ s D.A.
, allowing young-adult first-time drug offenders to go to an education program instead of prison @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s attorney general , of a statewide implicit-bias training for law-enforcement workers .
During the 2020 Vice-Presidential debate , Harris described these reforms as part of the “ model of what our nation needs to do and we will be able to do under a Joe Biden Presidency.
” Harris ’ s shorter Senate record is decidedly reform-oriented .
In 2017 , she and Senator Rand Paul , a Republican of Kentucky , sponsored a bill to fund states ’ reform of bail systems .
Last year , she introduced a bill @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to her previous hard-line stance .
In recent years , Harris ’ s positions and rhetoric on mass incarceration have come to conform substantially with those of the growing movement of progressive prosecutors , who have been elected to lead district-attorney offices in major cities across the country , and who share a platform of reducing the societal harms of criminal justice .
The pivotal moment for that movement was the election , in 2017 , of the former public defender Larry Krasner as the district attorney of Philadelphia .
He began his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cent of his prosecutors and telling the others to stop charging small amounts of marijuana possession and other low-level offenses , to forego cash bail for certain misdemeanors and nonviolent offenses , and not to charge sex workers who didn ’ t have three prior convictions .
Chesa Boudin , San Francisco ’ s new district attorney , is also a former public defender—and , famously , the child of two Weather Underground activists who were incarcerated for the murder of two police officers and a security guard .
Boudin immediately directed his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stop seeking enhanced punishment for gang membership or for having three strikes , to review all available evidence before charging for resisting arrest or obstructing or assaulting police officers , and to drop cases that rely solely on testimonies of officers who had previously committed serious misconduct .
He is also forming a local “ truth and reconciliation ” commission , to seek accountability and healing for communities affected by unjust policing .
Various reforms aimed at providing alternatives to prison , reducing harshness and inequality , and charging and prosecuting less have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ progressive prosecutors , notably Eric Gonzalez , in Brooklyn ; Kim Foxx , in Chicago ; Kim Gardner , in St. Louis ; Aramis Ayala , in Orlando ; and Rachael Rollins , in Boston .
The latter four are following Harris as some of the first Black women to serve as top prosecutors in major American cities .
As chronicled in Emily Bazelon ’ s book “ Charged , ” progressive prosecutors ’ efforts are being fiercely resisted by police organizations , some judges , and conservative legislators .
Some leftist critics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ change of such a broken and poisonous system .
The law professor and former federal prosecutor Paul Butler suggested , in his book “ Let ’ s Get Free , ” from 2009 , that “ good people ” should not be prosecutors , because the effort to change the system from within will instead lead to the system changing them .
But , this year , he admitted to being “ optimistically skeptical or encouragingly pessimistic ” about the progressive-prosecutor movement .
James Forman , Jr. , whose book , “ Locking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leaders ’ role in the rise of mass incarceration , has said in an interview that he is “ thrilled ” about the progressive onslaught but also cautious about leaders claiming the mantle of progressive prosecutor while continuing “ just the same old brutality with a little .
.
.
tweak here or there.
” Yet the fact that the mantle may be attractive in electoral politics underscores the promise of the moment .
Prosecutors are the most powerful decision-makers in criminal justice—often seen as too powerful .
If past decades drew ambitious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ consequences , today ’ s politics are transforming what it means to be a successful prosecutor and what prosecutors consider a win .
The Trump Administration has also helped to transform the profile of the profession , as prosecutors have chosen to speak out , as institutionalists , against abuses of government power , even at the risk of seeming political .
In May , 2019 , a bipartisan group of more than a thousand former federal prosecutors signed a statement that Trump ’ s conduct , as described in the special counsel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would , in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President , result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.
” In October , twenty former U.S .
Attorneys , all appointed by Republican Presidents , stated that “ Trump ’ s leadership is a threat to the rule of law in our country , ” and that each of them planned to vote for Biden and Harris .
Prosecutors may still be stigmatized as administrators of racial inequality , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the opportunity for public servants to make a name for themselves as fundamentally different kinds of prosecutors , championing measures that are more rehabilitative than punitive .
Some have perceived Harris ’ s conversion to progressive prosecutor as opportunistic , but it is not entirely out of keeping with her record or with evolving public opinion , to which she and other politicians are responsive .
And her leadership , as Vice-President , in enacting reform could confirm that prosecution is renewing itself as a noble path to the highest offices , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ criminal justice govern less .
At the same time , in the wake of Democratic losses in congressional and state elections , some legislators have raised questions about the possibly negative effects of progressive ideas , particularly calls to defund the police .
As Democrats evaluate the election results , concerns about achieving majorities might temper some enthusiasm for reform .
Harris ’ s emphasis on the difference between “ serious ” and “ less serious ” crimes suggests that the progressive-prosecution era may cultivate and maintain pockets of harshness and severity .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ those that address today ’ s social-justice concerns—including sexual assault , domestic violence , police violence , public corruption , bias crimes , and financial exploitation of workers and the poor—may expand rather than contract .
Biden ’ s infamous 1994 crime bill , which increased drug sentences to draconian levels , is still lauded for imposing severe punishments for domestic violence and rape .
And , although conventional wisdom has emphasized the role of the war on drugs in increasing prison populations , recent studies have revealed that charges for violent crimes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explosion .
Tracing the impact of feminist law reform on mass incarceration , in her recent book , “ The Feminist War on Crime , ” the legal scholar Aya Gruber suggests that , in the over-all surge of support for criminal-justice reform , there may be far less interest in rehabilitative approaches to gender-based violence .
Such exceptions may enable the preservation of tough-on-crime sentiment .
And , even if liberals and conservatives reach some consensus on the need to reduce incarceration numbers , pressure from those who continue to emphasize law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a release valve .
As our leading former prosecutor in the White House , Harris will be forced to negotiate the conflict , just as she did as California ’ s attorney general , when she both addressed racial bias in policing and followed the will of the majority of voters who continued to support the death penalty .
How she and progressive prosecutors redirect the human thirst for punishment will test whether reform can rise above toxic incentives and transcend the pathologies that create them .

In the opening of her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” from 2019, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris writes that, as a law student, she found her “calling” while interning at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, in Oakland, California, in 1988. Harris then spent nearly three decades in law enforcement, referring to herself as “top cop,” rising from local prosecutor to district attorney of San Francisco and then attorney general of California—the first woman and the first Black person in these jobs—until she joined the U.S. Senate, in 2017.
When I was in law school, twenty years ago, prosecution was a form of public service that was thought to carry little controversial baggage. Marked as neither liberal nor conservative, it was also an all-purpose route for young people who aspired to political or judicial positions. In recent decades, former prosecutors have been ubiquitous in public life. President Bill Clinton and multiple Presidential nominees and candidates—John Kerry and Chris Christie, for example—were once prosecutors. So were New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and several dozen members of Congress, including Senators Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Richard Blumenthal, Doug Jones, and Josh Hawley. Countless federal judges have been prosecutors, among them Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito, and also President Barack Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, whose prosecution of Timothy McVeigh, for the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, was soon followed by President Clinton’s nomination of Garland to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Law students are far less sanguine about that choice of career today. Some of my students even tell me that a job as a prosecutor has become stigmatized among their peers—part of the contemporary consciousness of criminal justice as a major driver of systemic racial inequality. At the start of Harris’s prosecutorial career, in 1990, the American prison population had recently doubled, and tough-on-crime rhetoric was de rigueur, regardless of political party. The next two decades saw the explosion of mass incarceration, which is now the subject of deep social reckoning. During this past summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, when calls for defunding the police and for prison abolition broke into the mainstream, many doubted that a career prosecutor could meet the needs of the Democratic ticket. But, just as Harris reframed her own prosecutorial past by describing herself as a progressive reformer, so the social meaning of prosecution has been shifting in ways that track this era’s aspirations for criminal justice.
Prosecutors weren’t always so high-status. In the nineteenth century, they were about as esteemed as “dogcatchers,” doing “low-profile, low-prestige work,” often part time, according to Jed Shugerman, a legal historian at Fordham Law School, who is writing a book about the rise of prosecution as a stepping stone to higher office. He told me that the phenomenon began to emerge in the first half of the twentieth century, when prosecution became “the upwardly mobile way to get into the league of élites and, especially, into a political career.” The exemplar of the transformation of prosecution into a high-profile opportunity was Earl Warren, who, like Harris, went from being a local prosecutor, in Oakland, to being California’s attorney general. Shugerman’s research reveals that Warren’s political campaigns boasted of his crackdowns on the Mexican and Chinese communities and of his leadership in organizing the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Warren won election as the governor of California by heightening public fear of Communists and Japanese immigrants. He went on to become the running mate to the Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey and, finally, the great Chief Justice of the United States, leading the liberal Warren Court, where he held unconstitutional some of the prosecutorial tactics he’d deployed.
After the Second World War, the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson as the U.S. chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials highlighted the heroism of the prosecutor as an enforcer of human rights. The Kennedy family burnished that liberal ideal, marrying crime-fighting with a civil-rights agenda. Robert Kennedy’s legal career began in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, investigating espionage and corruption, and, during his tenure as U.S. Attorney General, he famously took on organized crime and enforced laws against racial discrimination. The template stuck, especially as young people’s idealistic skepticism of government during the sixties gave way to perceptions, in the seventies and eighties, of prosecutors as fighting a nationwide rise in crime.
The political-career opportunities that prosecution presented during the past half century were deeply consequential, even tragic. In his book “Locked In,” the criminal-law professor John Pfaff observes that, between 1994 and 2008, arrests actually dropped while prosecutors’ rates of felony charges per arrest doubled—making prosecutors the primary drivers of mass incarceration. Shugerman suggests that this happened, in part, because prosecutors’ offices tended to attract people and maintain cultures shaped by political ambitions. If the work of a prosecutor was functionally a seedling campaign for higher office, it was safest for prosecutors to direct their vast discretion over charges, plea bargains, and sentences toward harshness and severity, in light of a political landscape that rewarded being “tough on crime” and criticized leniency. Perhaps those incentives also fuelled a reticence to prosecute the police. When I was trained as a prosecutor in Manhattan, sixteen years ago, supervisors warned rookies not to “end up in the newspapers” for failing to jail someone who was arrested for a misdemeanor and then went on to commit a murder.
In the early years of Harris’s career, in the eighties and nineties, Joe Biden, then a senator, sponsored, spearheaded, or wrote much of the legislation that laid the foundations of our criminal-justice crisis: laws expanding drug felonies, increasing punishments and prison funding, and creating the infamously discriminatory hundredfold sentencing disparity between crack- and powder-cocaine offenses. As Democrats competed with Republicans to prove that they could be even more punitive, Biden, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, criticized President George H. W. Bush’s anti-narcotics plan as “not tough enough,” with insufficient “police officers to catch the violent thugs, not enough prosecutors to convict them, not enough judges to sentence them, and not enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.” Since 2008, Biden has acknowledged that some of the crime legislation he supported was wrong; in 2019, he said, without naming a specific bill, that it “was a big mistake when it was made,” and that “it’s trapped an entire generation.” In her memoir, Harris notes that she faced questions, from early on, of “how I, as a black woman, could countenance being part of ‘the machine’ putting more young men of color behind bars.” But, in the same book, she writes that “there must be serious consequences for people who commit serious crimes,” and expresses particular pride in her work in increasing sentences for “johns who paid to have sex with underage girls” and treating the crime like child sexual assault. She adds that she didn’t feel the same way about “less serious crimes,” for which “mostly black or brown or poor men” were imprisoned. Harris writes, “They represented a living monument to lost potential, and I wanted to tear it down.”
During the Democratic primaries, many activists questioned those convictions, drawing on Harris’s record as a prosecutor. Some of the strongest objections were to an anti-truancy program that she had implemented as the San Francisco district attorney, in 2008, threatening prosecution of people whose children chronically missed school, and to her support of a California law that made it possible to jail such parents for up to a year. (In 2019, she expressed regret for the “unintended consequences,” namely the criminalization of parents.) As San Francisco’s D.A., she was also tougher on drug crimes than her predecessor. In 2010, a judge lambasted Harris’s office for systematically violating defendants’ constitutional rights by hiding from defense attorneys the unreliability of a corrupt drug-lab technician’s work. And, as Lara Bazelon argued in the Times, last year, between 2004 and 2011, Harris “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct” by prosecutors. Even during the past decade, Harris held a number of positions that were typical for a prosecutor at the time but are out of step with today’s Democratic Party: in 2015, she opposed a bill that would have forced her office to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate police-involved shootings, and she supported the criminalization of marijuana until 2017. In her campaign for California attorney general, in 2010, she promised to enforce the death penalty, and went on to appeal a federal-court ruling, from 2014, that the death penalty was unconstitutional.
But Harris has also long sounded explicitly reformist notes, advocating, in her book “Smart on Crime,” from 2009, for a “criminal justice system that gets truly tough on crime by being Smart on Crime.” Harris urged prosecutors to “go after the worst criminals” but to redirect defendants accused of lower-level offenses and at-risk young people toward programs for reintegration and crime prevention. In that vein, she has touted the Back on Track program that she implemented as San Francisco’s D.A., allowing young-adult first-time drug offenders to go to an education program instead of prison, and her initiation, as California’s attorney general, of a statewide implicit-bias training for law-enforcement workers. During the 2020 Vice-Presidential debate, Harris described these reforms as part of the “model of what our nation needs to do and we will be able to do under a Joe Biden Presidency.” Harris’s shorter Senate record is decidedly reform-oriented. In 2017, she and Senator Rand Paul, a Republican of Kentucky, sponsored a bill to fund states’ reform of bail systems. Last year, she introduced a bill to federally decriminalize marijuana, in contrast to her previous hard-line stance.
In recent years, Harris’s positions and rhetoric on mass incarceration have come to conform substantially with those of the growing movement of progressive prosecutors, who have been elected to lead district-attorney offices in major cities across the country, and who share a platform of reducing the societal harms of criminal justice. The pivotal moment for that movement was the election, in 2017, of the former public defender Larry Krasner as the district attorney of Philadelphia. He began his tenure dramatically, by firing ten per cent of his prosecutors and telling the others to stop charging small amounts of marijuana possession and other low-level offenses, to forego cash bail for certain misdemeanors and nonviolent offenses, and not to charge sex workers who didn’t have three prior convictions. Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s new district attorney, is also a former public defender—and, famously, the child of two Weather Underground activists who were incarcerated for the murder of two police officers and a security guard. Boudin immediately directed his prosecutors to end cash bail, to stop seeking enhanced punishment for gang membership or for having three strikes, to review all available evidence before charging for resisting arrest or obstructing or assaulting police officers, and to drop cases that rely solely on testimonies of officers who had previously committed serious misconduct. He is also forming a local “truth and reconciliation” commission, to seek accountability and healing for communities affected by unjust policing. Various reforms aimed at providing alternatives to prison, reducing harshness and inequality, and charging and prosecuting less have also been implemented by a slate of progressive prosecutors, notably Eric Gonzalez, in Brooklyn; Kim Foxx, in Chicago; Kim Gardner, in St. Louis; Aramis Ayala, in Orlando; and Rachael Rollins, in Boston. The latter four are following Harris as some of the first Black women to serve as top prosecutors in major American cities.
As chronicled in Emily Bazelon’s book “Charged,” progressive prosecutors’ efforts are being fiercely resisted by police organizations, some judges, and conservative legislators. Some leftist critics doubt prosecutors’ potential to drive meaningful change of such a broken and poisonous system. The law professor and former federal prosecutor Paul Butler suggested, in his book “Let’s Get Free,” from 2009, that “good people” should not be prosecutors, because the effort to change the system from within will instead lead to the system changing them. But, this year, he admitted to being “optimistically skeptical or encouragingly pessimistic” about the progressive-prosecutor movement. James Forman, Jr., whose book, “Locking Up Our Own,” described Black leaders’ role in the rise of mass incarceration, has said in an interview that he is “thrilled” about the progressive onslaught but also cautious about leaders claiming the mantle of progressive prosecutor while continuing “just the same old brutality with a little . . . tweak here or there.” Yet the fact that the mantle may be attractive in electoral politics underscores the promise of the moment.
Prosecutors are the most powerful decision-makers in criminal justice—often seen as too powerful. If past decades drew ambitious lawyers to demonstrate toughness, with destructive consequences, today’s politics are transforming what it means to be a successful prosecutor and what prosecutors consider a win. The Trump Administration has also helped to transform the profile of the profession, as prosecutors have chosen to speak out, as institutionalists, against abuses of government power, even at the risk of seeming political. In May, 2019, a bipartisan group of more than a thousand former federal prosecutors signed a statement that Trump’s conduct, as described in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, “would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.” In October, twenty former U.S. Attorneys, all appointed by Republican Presidents, stated that “Trump’s leadership is a threat to the rule of law in our country,” and that each of them planned to vote for Biden and Harris.
Prosecutors may still be stigmatized as administrators of racial inequality, but that reputation will perhaps be upstaged by the opportunity for public servants to make a name for themselves as fundamentally different kinds of prosecutors, championing measures that are more rehabilitative than punitive. Some have perceived Harris’s conversion to progressive prosecutor as opportunistic, but it is not entirely out of keeping with her record or with evolving public opinion, to which she and other politicians are responsive. And her leadership, as Vice-President, in enacting reform could confirm that prosecution is renewing itself as a noble path to the highest offices, with the ambition to govern by having criminal justice govern less. At the same time, in the wake of Democratic losses in congressional and state elections, some legislators have raised questions about the possibly negative effects of progressive ideas, particularly calls to defund the police. As Democrats evaluate the election results, concerns about achieving majorities might temper some enthusiasm for reform.
Harris’s emphasis on the difference between “serious” and “less serious” crimes suggests that the progressive-prosecution era may cultivate and maintain pockets of harshness and severity. The punishment of historically neglected crimes or those that address today’s social-justice concerns—including sexual assault, domestic violence, police violence, public corruption, bias crimes, and financial exploitation of workers and the poor—may expand rather than contract. Biden’s infamous 1994 crime bill, which increased drug sentences to draconian levels, is still lauded for imposing severe punishments for domestic violence and rape. And, although conventional wisdom has emphasized the role of the war on drugs in increasing prison populations, recent studies have revealed that charges for violent crimes were far more significant drivers in that explosion. Tracing the impact of feminist law reform on mass incarceration, in her recent book, “The Feminist War on Crime,” the legal scholar Aya Gruber suggests that, in the over-all surge of support for criminal-justice reform, there may be far less interest in rehabilitative approaches to gender-based violence.
Such exceptions may enable the preservation of tough-on-crime sentiment. And, even if liberals and conservatives reach some consensus on the need to reduce incarceration numbers, pressure from those who continue to emphasize law and order in electoral politics will seek a release valve. As our leading former prosecutor in the White House, Harris will be forced to negotiate the conflict, just as she did as California’s attorney general, when she both addressed racial bias in policing and followed the will of the majority of voters who continued to support the death penalty. How she and progressive prosecutors redirect the human thirst for punishment will test whether reform can rise above toxic incentives and transcend the pathologies that create them.


newyorker--2020-11-20--The Strange Friendships of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness”

I never met Ursula K. Le Guin , who died on January 22 , 2018 , at the age of eighty-eight , in Portland , Oregon , her home for many years .
And yet we became good friends during the last two months of her life , entirely by way of e-mail .
I inaugurated the correspondence on November 21 , 2017 , and she replied on November 24th .
After that we exchanged letters sixteen times , until her final letter of January 16 , 2018 , which concluded : I replied after an interval , during which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 23 , 2018 , not yet knowing that Ursula had died the day before .
I hope , in tribute to her , that I live to edit her poems for the Library of America , thinking that she might have wanted me to do that .
Though I have written about “ The Left Hand of Darkness ” before , in 1987 and again in 2000 , I have forgotten what I said and do not want to consult it now , but , rather , make a fresh start on this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ letters , Ursula remarked that writing “ The Dispossessed ” was liberating for her , and she seemed to prefer it to “ The Left Hand of Darkness.
” Rereading both , I find myself torn between the two .
The protagonist , Shevek , in “ The Dispossessed , ” is far more interesting than anyone in the earlier book , and yet he and his story manifest something of the ambivalence of Le Guin ’ s subtitle : “ An Ambiguous Utopia.
” In a fierce introduction to “ The Left @ @ @ @ @ @ @ charmingly remarks , “ A novelist ’ s business is lying.
” She adumbrates : Always in Le Guin we hear reverberations of Lao Tzu ’ s “ Tao Te Ching , ” which she translated , with J. P. Seaton , as “ A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way ” ( 1997 ) .
We corresponded about her understanding of the Tao , yet I had to confess my permanent difficulty in absorbing this way that is not a way .
I myself always keep to hand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as rendered by Barbara Stoler Miller , which I purchased in the autumn of 1986 , the year of its publication .
After hundreds of readings , I think I know what Krishna means by “ dark inertia , ” “ passion , ” and “ lucidity , ” but a dozen readings of the Le Guin-Seaton “ Tao Te Ching ” have left me muttering that I do not apprehend the water and stone of the Way .
Is it that I am not enough open to my own female component ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ more my late mother than my late father .
What moves me most in Ursula is the serenity .
I lack it utterly .
Commenting upon the fascinating vision of sexuality in “ Left Hand , ” Le Guin continues in gusto : The burden of “ Left Hand ” is whether Genly Ai can persuade the king of Karhide on the planet Gethen , or Winter , to join the Ekumen , or union , of many planets in exchanges of trade and culture .
Genly Ai speaks much of the book @ @ @ @ @ @ @ third-person narration .
Though Ai is a man of good will and adequate intelligence , he can never quite understand the consciousness of the androgynes whom he seeks to win over .
Here Le Guin is admirably subtle .
She tended to distrust Freud , since her heart and mind were with the Tao , and yet she shows what he meant in observing that , for almost all of us , thought could not be liberated from its sexual past .
Rather wickedly , Le Guin devotes Chapter 7 to the field @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a female investigator on behalf of the Ekumen who lands on Gethen/Winter to study “ the Question of Sex.
” Oppong speculates that whoever colonized this odd planet practiced human genetic manipulation in order to produce Gethenian sexual physiology : The sexual cycle averages 26 to 28 days ( they tend to speak of it as 26 days , approximating it to the lunar cycle ) .
For 21 or 22 days the individual is somer , sexually inactive , latent .
On about the 18th day hormonal changes are initiated by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 23rd day the individual enters kemmer , estrus .
In this first phase of kemmer ( Karh , secher ) he remains completely androgynous .
Gender , and potency , are not attained in isolation .
A Gethenian in first-phase kemmer , if kept alone or with others not in kemmer , remains incapable of coitus .
Yet the sexual impulse is tremendously strong in this phase , controlling the entire personality , subjecting all other drives to its imperative .
.
.
.
With the cessation of lactation the female reenters somer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
No physiological habit is established , and the mother of several children may be the father of several more .

I never met Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22, 2018, at the age of eighty-eight, in Portland, Oregon, her home for many years. And yet we became good friends during the last two months of her life, entirely by way of e-mail. I inaugurated the correspondence on November 21, 2017, and she replied on November 24th. After that we exchanged letters sixteen times, until her final letter of January 16, 2018, which concluded:
One of the things I like least about being very old is the unreliability of my energy. Up one day, down the next, bleh! Working at poetry or a story is, always has been, the job I want to be doing, the work that keeps me steady and content. But too often there just isn’t the wherewithal. I suspect your work is central to your wellbeing in much this way, and hope you aren’t suffering such periods of enforced idleness.
I value our friendship.
Ursula
I replied after an interval, during which I was very ill, on January 23, 2018, not yet knowing that Ursula had died the day before. I hope, in tribute to her, that I live to edit her poems for the Library of America, thinking that she might have wanted me to do that.
Though I have written about “The Left Hand of Darkness” before, in 1987 and again in 2000, I have forgotten what I said and do not want to consult it now, but, rather, make a fresh start on this marvellous romance. In one of her letters, Ursula remarked that writing “The Dispossessed” was liberating for her, and she seemed to prefer it to “The Left Hand of Darkness.” Rereading both, I find myself torn between the two. The protagonist, Shevek, in “The Dispossessed,” is far more interesting than anyone in the earlier book, and yet he and his story manifest something of the ambivalence of Le Guin’s subtitle: “An Ambiguous Utopia.”
In a fierce introduction to “The Left Hand of Darkness,” Le Guin charmingly remarks, “A novelist’s business is lying.” She adumbrates:
I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
Always in Le Guin we hear reverberations of Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching,” which she translated, with J. P. Seaton, as “A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way” (1997). We corresponded about her understanding of the Tao, yet I had to confess my permanent difficulty in absorbing this way that is not a way. I myself always keep to hand a copy of “The Bhagavad-Gita” as rendered by Barbara Stoler Miller, which I purchased in the autumn of 1986, the year of its publication. After hundreds of readings, I think I know what Krishna means by “dark inertia,” “passion,” and “lucidity,” but a dozen readings of the Le Guin-Seaton “Tao Te Ching” have left me muttering that I do not apprehend the water and stone of the Way. Is it that I am not enough open to my own female component? That seems not right. I am more my late mother than my late father. What moves me most in Ursula is the serenity. I lack it utterly.
Commenting upon the fascinating vision of sexuality in “Left Hand,” Le Guin continues in gusto:
This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that it’s set in the “Ekumenical Year 1490-97,” but surely you don’t believe that?
Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
The burden of “Left Hand” is whether Genly Ai can persuade the king of Karhide on the planet Gethen, or Winter, to join the Ekumen, or union, of many planets in exchanges of trade and culture. Genly Ai speaks much of the book, but frequently Le Guin moves into third-person narration. Though Ai is a man of good will and adequate intelligence, he can never quite understand the consciousness of the androgynes whom he seeks to win over. Here Le Guin is admirably subtle. She tended to distrust Freud, since her heart and mind were with the Tao, and yet she shows what he meant in observing that, for almost all of us, thought could not be liberated from its sexual past.
Rather wickedly, Le Guin devotes Chapter 7 to the field notes of one Ong Tot Oppong, a female investigator on behalf of the Ekumen who lands on Gethen/Winter to study “the Question of Sex.” Oppong speculates that whoever colonized this odd planet practiced human genetic manipulation in order to produce Gethenian sexual physiology:


newyorker--2020-11-20--Hatch Chilies and Southwestern Hygge at Ursula

On a trip to New Mexico , some years ago , I got off the plane in Albuquerque , took my first look at the high desert , and declared , wide-eyed and with an uncharacteristic lack of cynicism , “ This place is magical.
” In the parking lot of Frontier Restaurant , a beloved cafeteria where I did as the locals do and smeared honey on warm flour tortillas , I realized how far from an original thought it was : the official state nickname , immortalized on license plates , is Land of Enchantment .
( The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ once people arrive , they tend not to leave . )
In September , Eric See , an Albuquerque native and pastry chef who ’ s lived on the East Coast for ten years , imported a bit of that ineffable spirit to New York when he opened Ursula , a Crown Heights café named for his New Mexican grandmother and inspired by his home state in ways both obvious and subtle .
The question of what New Yorkers will do to find solace in what seems likely to be a grim and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ past few weeks .
As I stood in line for a made-to-order breakfast burrito and a warm spiced drink one recent wet , chilly morning , I felt my mood rising—hygge by way of the Southwest .
That the breakfast burritos are the lowest-hanging fruit—available only until noon , they tend to sell out on weekends—does not mean that they ’ re overrated .
Though I can ’ t in good conscience recommend drinking alcohol to excess , I can tell you that the concert of scrambled egg , bacon , shredded hash @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hatch chili , wrapped tightly in a flour tortilla and lightly griddled , is so obviously a cure for a hangover that it inspired in me a perverse desire to be nursing one .
When possible , See gets his Hatch chilies , a category that encompasses several flavorful , mild-to-hot types grown , and often roasted , by farms in New Mexico ’ s Hatch Valley , from the source .
In September , his mother bought seventy-five pounds of fresh green ones near Albuquerque , peeled and chopped them , sealed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the custom in New Mexico— “ If it didn ’ t come in a Ziploc bag , then I don ’ t trust it , ” See told me , only half joking—and froze them , before hand-delivering them to New York .
When circumstances prevent this transport system , he plans to use a mix of a dehydrated stash and a jarred variety from Zia Hatch Chile Company , a Brooklyn-based brand started by a transplant from Santa Fe .
Chilies are crucial to the menu , showing up in the passion-fruit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sopaipillas—a traditional New Mexican fry bread that gets sliced in half to sandwich refried pinto beans and carne adovada ( New Mexico-style braised pork ) , ground beef , or vegan Spanish rice—and in the aioli on the smoked-turkey B.L.T.
, See ’ s twist on a beloved specialty known as the Albuquerque turkey .
( Chilies can also be ordered as stand-alone sides . )
But they ’ re far from his only reference to the region .
Scones are made with blue corn , an essential ingredient in the cuisine of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The idea for a lavender-brined-chicken-and-feta sandwich came out of See ’ s affection for two New Mexican farms : a now closed goat dairy called the Old Windmill and Los Poblanos , which grows lavender in Albuquerque .
In general , the state ’ s climate is good for shrubby herbs and other woody plants ; “ holistic herbalism , ” See explained , holds a place of pride in the culture .
When liver damage stopped See from drinking alcohol , he turned toward tea as a remedy , getting deep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he sells at a Brooklyn bazaar called Oddities Flea Market .
At Ursula , he uses them in oat-milk lattes , combining palo santo with rose petals , cinnamon , and hibiscus , or rooibos with toasted rice , cinnamon , and vanilla bean , in homage to the Mexican drink horchata .
Equal parts comforting and enchanting , they ’ re one idea for fending off the January blues .
( Dishes $ 9- $ 14 . )
♦

On a trip to New Mexico, some years ago, I got off the plane in Albuquerque, took my first look at the high desert, and declared, wide-eyed and with an uncharacteristic lack of cynicism, “This place is magical.” In the parking lot of Frontier Restaurant, a beloved cafeteria where I did as the locals do and smeared honey on warm flour tortillas, I realized how far from an original thought it was: the official state nickname, immortalized on license plates, is Land of Enchantment. (The unofficial version is Land of Entrapment; once people arrive, they tend not to leave.)
New Mexican sopaipillas, a type of deep-fried pastry dough, are sliced in half and used to sandwich refried pinto beans with carne adovada, ground beef, or vegan Spanish rice, then showered in lettuce, tomato, Cheddar cheese or vegan queso, and red-chili sauce. Photograph by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker
In September, Eric See, an Albuquerque native and pastry chef who’s lived on the East Coast for ten years, imported a bit of that ineffable spirit to New York when he opened Ursula, a Crown Heights café named for his New Mexican grandmother and inspired by his home state in ways both obvious and subtle. The question of what New Yorkers will do to find solace in what seems likely to be a grim and isolating winter has been resounding in the past few weeks. As I stood in line for a made-to-order breakfast burrito and a warm spiced drink one recent wet, chilly morning, I felt my mood rising—hygge by way of the Southwest.
New Mexico-inspired pastries include, clockwise from left: a vegan lemon-saffron poppy loaf; an apple-cider doughnut; a rosewater concha; a red chili–passion fruit doughnut; and a Mexican wedding cookie. Photograph by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker
That the breakfast burritos are the lowest-hanging fruit—available only until noon, they tend to sell out on weekends—does not mean that they’re overrated. Though I can’t in good conscience recommend drinking alcohol to excess, I can tell you that the concert of scrambled egg, bacon, shredded hash browns, Cheddar cheese, and green Hatch chili, wrapped tightly in a flour tortilla and lightly griddled, is so obviously a cure for a hangover that it inspired in me a perverse desire to be nursing one.
When possible, See gets his Hatch chilies, a category that encompasses several flavorful, mild-to-hot types grown, and often roasted, by farms in New Mexico’s Hatch Valley, from the source. In September, his mother bought seventy-five pounds of fresh green ones near Albuquerque, peeled and chopped them, sealed them in plastic bags, as is the custom in New Mexico—“If it didn’t come in a Ziploc bag, then I don’t trust it,” See told me, only half joking—and froze them, before hand-delivering them to New York. When circumstances prevent this transport system, he plans to use a mix of a dehydrated stash and a jarred variety from Zia Hatch Chile Company, a Brooklyn-based brand started by a transplant from Santa Fe.
Breakfast burritos are available only until noon. The beverage menu includes espresso drinks and oat-milk tea lattes that showcase combinations such as rose petal, palo santo, cinnamon, and hibiscus. Photograph by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker
Chilies are crucial to the menu, showing up in the passion-fruit glaze on a pillowy doughnut, in sopaipillas—a traditional New Mexican fry bread that gets sliced in half to sandwich refried pinto beans and carne adovada (New Mexico-style braised pork), ground beef, or vegan Spanish rice—and in the aioli on the smoked-turkey B.L.T., See’s twist on a beloved specialty known as the Albuquerque turkey. (Chilies can also be ordered as stand-alone sides.) But they’re far from his only reference to the region. Scones are made with blue corn, an essential ingredient in the cuisine of the state’s Native American tribes. The idea for a lavender-brined-chicken-and-feta sandwich came out of See’s affection for two New Mexican farms: a now closed goat dairy called the Old Windmill and Los Poblanos, which grows lavender in Albuquerque.
The poblano relleno is overflowing with green chili, quinoa, riced cauliflower, posole, and roasted Koginut squash. Photograph by Cole Wilson for The New Yorker
In general, the state’s climate is good for shrubby herbs and other woody plants; “holistic herbalism,” See explained, holds a place of pride in the culture. When liver damage stopped See from drinking alcohol, he turned toward tea as a remedy, getting deep into making his own blends, which he sells at a Brooklyn bazaar called Oddities Flea Market. At Ursula, he uses them in oat-milk lattes, combining palo santo with rose petals, cinnamon, and hibiscus, or rooibos with toasted rice, cinnamon, and vanilla bean, in homage to the Mexican drink horchata. Equal parts comforting and enchanting, they’re one idea for fending off the January blues. (Dishes $9-$14.) ♦