The Mail

Robert Mueller ’ s missteps , as Jeffrey Toobin chronicles , all arose from undue caution ( “ The Surrender , ” July 6th & 13th ) .
Mueller kept his investigation ’ s scope too limited , declined to subpoena President Trump , and shied away from claiming that Trump had obstructed justice .
As a result , Toobin concludes that “ his report was , ultimately , a surrender.
” Yet he neglects to mention another failure of the report : the bloat that rendered it unreadable to the general public .
Mueller ’ s four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page document was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a frequent rehashing of facts .
( I confess that I ended up skimming the behemoth . )
Had Mueller followed my twelfth-grade English teacher ’ s advice to “ prune your prose , ” perhaps the evidence of Trump ’ s criminality would have reached more Americans—or at least the ones willing to consider it .
Toobin ’ s assertion that Mueller ’ s “ failures emerged from an excess of caution ” proves the thesis of a recent American Journal of International Law study : leaders ’ “ underreach ” can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of power .
Although this study focussed on executive underreach in the context of COVID-19 , Mueller ’ s reluctance to fully exercise his authority and address the crimes that his investigation uncovered also harmed the body politic .
Because Mueller ’ s decisions have allowed for further destruction by the Trump Presidency—including the Administration ’ s inaction during the pandemic—they will no doubt be the subject of analysis for decades to come .
The Future of the Police Jill Lepore concisely and thoughtfully addresses the history of policing in the United States @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 20th ) .
However , only in passing , citing examples of the violence committed by vigilantes , does she mention the growth of private policing .
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , the number of private security guards in the U.S.—about a million , as of last year—exceeds the number of police officers .
Not all private security officers are employed by businesses .
Many do work for public police departments and the federal government ; some guard military bases .
Often , they are as armed as the police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officers .
When we think about the future of the police , we should also reconsider the roles of those directly accountable to private businesses rather than to the polis .
Lepore could have more precisely noted how police officers ’ fear of the communities they should be serving undermines their ability to provide fair , impartial protection to all of us .
That fear is often motivated by , yes , racism—and people of color , especially young Black men , bear the brunt of the violent consequences .
But , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country “ face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world.
” She also observes that many officers are veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder , which further magnifies their fears and can cause them to take offensive action quickly .
What makes police violence proliferate is the fact that officers ’ inadequate training amplifies and legitimizes fear , resulting in the worst possible police force—heavily armed and afraid .
We should thank Black Lives Matter for drawing attention to policing issues , but we all need to be invested in imagining @ @ @ @ @ @ @ premised on something other than fear .
Our lives depend on it .
Letters should be sent with the writer ’ s 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 can not reply to every letter .

A Flawed Report
Robert Mueller’s missteps, as Jeffrey Toobin chronicles, all arose from undue caution (“The Surrender,” July 6th & 13th). Mueller kept his investigation’s scope too limited, declined to subpoena President Trump, and shied away from claiming that Trump had obstructed justice. As a result, Toobin concludes that “his report was, ultimately, a surrender.” Yet he neglects to mention another failure of the report: the bloat that rendered it unreadable to the general public. Mueller’s four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page document was the victim of a repetitive structure and a frequent rehashing of facts. (I confess that I ended up skimming the behemoth.) Had Mueller followed my twelfth-grade English teacher’s advice to “prune your prose,” perhaps the evidence of Trump’s criminality would have reached more Americans—or at least the ones willing to consider it.
Irene B. Loewenson
New York City
Toobin’s assertion that Mueller’s “failures emerged from an excess of caution” proves the thesis of a recent American Journal of International Law study: leaders’ “underreach” can be just as damaging as their abuse of power. Although this study focussed on executive underreach in the context of COVID-19, Mueller’s reluctance to fully exercise his authority and address the crimes that his investigation uncovered also harmed the body politic. Because Mueller’s decisions have allowed for further destruction by the Trump Presidency—including the Administration’s inaction during the pandemic—they will no doubt be the subject of analysis for decades to come.
Sarah Pascarella
Somerville, Mass.
The Future of the Police
Jill Lepore concisely and thoughtfully addresses the history of policing in the United States (A Critic at Large, July 20th). However, only in passing, citing examples of the violence committed by vigilantes, does she mention the growth of private policing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of private security guards in the U.S.—about a million, as of last year—exceeds the number of police officers. Not all private security officers are employed by businesses. Many do work for public police departments and the federal government; some guard military bases. Often, they are as armed as the police, and some are even former police officers. When we think about the future of the police, we should also reconsider the roles of those directly accountable to private businesses rather than to the polis.
Adelaide H. Villmoare
Wilmington, N.C.
Lepore could have more precisely noted how police officers’ fear of the communities they should be serving undermines their ability to provide fair, impartial protection to all of us. That fear is often motivated by, yes, racism—and people of color, especially young Black men, bear the brunt of the violent consequences. But, as Lepore points out, police in this country “face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world.” She also observes that many officers are veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which further magnifies their fears and can cause them to take offensive action quickly. What makes police violence proliferate is the fact that officers’ inadequate training amplifies and legitimizes fear, resulting in the worst possible police force—heavily armed and afraid. We should thank Black Lives Matter for drawing attention to policing issues, but we all need to be invested in imagining a different future for our society, premised on something other than fear. Our lives depend on it.
Mitch Diamond
Unison, Va.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s 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.


newyorker--2020-08-17--Catherine Lacey and the Art of Enigma

Catherine Lacey and the Art of Enigma

Like much of Catherine Lacey ’ s writing , the title story of her collection “ Certain American States ” ( 2018 ) only just hangs together : the frailty of coherence is her great theme .
In little more than five pages , a world that is at once hypothesis and presumption fizzles into view .
Lacey certainly knows how to open : “ I was one of those babies who look as if they won ’ t survive to dinnertime , but somehow do , then become toddlers with the tics and nerves of a used-up veteran.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ died “ while the ink was still wet on my birth certificate , ” and that she was brought up by a man named Leonard , who disliked her .
When the narrator is sixteen , Leonard writes her a large check , walks to town , and never returns .
She looks after herself for many years , until one evening the phone rings— “ I answered the phone because it rang and that ’ s what you do.
” Leonard is dying in a hospital in North Dakota , and is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to Tanzania.
” Once at his bedside , the narrator decides to humor him .
“ Madagascar has been beautiful , ” she says , “ and also I find it strange that there are so many Italians here.
” For a second , Leonard breaks the illusion and speaks her name , and the two recognize each other as a living person and a dying person , with assigned tasks : “ The dying and the living have certain agreements about these states we ’ re in.
” But Leonard quickly falls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opium trade and how he is going far away “ to a remote location , in the Commonwealth of Dominica.
” There the story ends , dismantling itself as strangely as it began .
A sparse realism scars the pages—Leonard , abandonment , the phone call , a North Dakota hospital .
Leonard is the one who gives the story its title , when he says that “ the loneliness of certain American states is enough to kill a person if you look too closely.
” That ’ s the kind of great @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the prairies , that burns through American writing , especially American realist short-story writing .
But it is as if Lacey took the frame of something by Raymond Carver or Richard Ford and then emptied it—of sequence , not of consequence .
Events are announced as actual events , yet linger in the text like dreams .
We are not told how or even if the loneliness of certain American states killed Leonard and is killing the chronically nervous narrator .
We know only that this piece of writing is suffused by a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Lacey puns on the word “ states ” ( of being and of geography ) ; that here , on the page , North Dakota is no more real than the hallucinated Tanzania ; and that somehow the spectral prose holds together the assemblage for long enough to haunt the reader .
Wherever we have been , we have been in some kind of “ state.
” “ Certain American States ” compacts many of Lacey ’ s virtues and interests as a writer .
Overwhelmingly , her characters are trying to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and of how this self might function in the world .
Of course , that ’ s one definition of what much serious fiction has traditionally sought to resolve : how should a person be ?
The postmodern difference has to do with the difficulty of resolving that question , and the way this difficulty is foregrounded .
In Lacey ’ s novels and short stories , the coherence that most of us look to in order to make our way in the world is fraught or elusive .
The self hangs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do , with apparently arbitrary filaments .
Like the narrator of “ Certain American States , ” the protagonist of Lacey ’ s second novel , “ The Answers ” ( 2017 ) , has been brought up by someone other than her parents .
She goes by the name of Mary Parsons but was originally named Junia Stone .
Her body , racked by pains and ailments , often seems to be something she is trying to escape .
She has never had a television or a cell phone , and made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ having heard of Michael Jackson .
When asked what she thinks falling in love is like , Mary Parsons answers , “ It makes sense of something that doesn ’ t make sense.
” Estranged from themselves , Lacey ’ s characters go around decoding reality , only to discover how little sense it makes .
The narrator of her first novel , “ Nobody Is Ever Missing ” ( 2014 ) , who suddenly leaves her life in New York to take an open-ended journey around New Zealand , responds like this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A waitress came by and I told her what I wanted to eat , which seemed suddenly a very personal thing to tell a stranger , what things you were going to turn into your body.
” In “ Certain American States , ” when the narrator is trying to tell the dying Leonard what she and her husband now do , she says that he “ has a good job as a manager and I am a manager too , which means I am managing.
” Unsettling , mundane , and funny @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as if characters let loose from Beckett were wandering through a recognizable , even realist landscape .
The world looks solid enough , but her protagonists are wraithlike .
Lacey ’ s third and latest novel , “ Pew ” ( Farrar , Straus & Giroux ) , reads , in several ways , like the logical and relentless development of this bold young writer ’ s previous work .
( Lacey is thirty-five . )
Many of her characters have hazy or incoherent pasts , but Pew , as the narrator of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is nameless , of ambiguous gender and race , and almost mute , barely able to summon or speak a memory .
Pew ’ s body seems a matter of indifference or worse : “ This body hangs beneath me , carries me around .
.
.
.
Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I ’ ve been told.
” Pew is perhaps an orphan , but can ’ t remember .
Occasionally , like an old pain , something resembling a distinct and individual memory begins @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could remember a low , windowless room .
Three paces by two paces .
A damp floor .
The taste of blood .
A child .
A long hunger .
Some years .
Some years , but gone now .
.
.
.
They were mine , or had been mine , but now they were somewhere else , somewhere near and far from me.
” Amid these desperate reductions , it ’ s hard not to hear the voice of late Beckett , who , in , say , “ Company ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ something only to negate it : “ You were once .
You were never .
Were you ever ?
Oh never to have been !
Be again .
Same flat tone .
.
.
.
You are no older now than you always were.
” “ I must have had a mother , ” Pew thinks at one moment , “ but I also knew I didn ’ t have a mother.
” Pew is dressed as if ready for a Beckett play , in a drab , canvaslike material of “ gray-black-brown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and no laces .
The unnamed world the narrator is found in , though , is a solidly realized American community , apparently somewhere in the South ; the plot draws its energy from the abrasions created when Pew ’ s abysmal enigmas rub up against the understandable curiosity and puzzlement of a conservative , God-loving place .
People want to help this refugee-like person , discovered on a church pew one Sunday morning ( hence the name ) .
In order to help , however , they must first know what they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ come from ?
Is Pew a boy or a girl ?
Perhaps Pew is a genuine refugee , in flight from vicious but distant religious and civil wars , like Nelson , a boy whom a family in town is fostering ?
One of the residents , a woman named Kitty , says of Pew ’ s complexion , “ You know I would just about die to have skin like yours—what is that , just genetics ?
” But people are no better at divining Pew ’ s ethnicity than at sorting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and they are certainly not going to get any help from this almost post-human foundling .
Pew is taken in by the robustly conformist Hilda and Steven , and given a temporary berth in the family attic until the church community can work out the next steps .
Like many people in the town , Hilda and Steven are at once religiously well intentioned and religiously punitive , the gestures often indistinguishable and clumsily manifesting as racism , condescension , or angry befuddlement .
The church pastor is brought in , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( Pew says nothing . )
At the Monroe Medical and Rehabilitation Center , a doctor attempts a physical examination .
( Pew declines to undress . )
A picture emerges , slightly heightened and satirical , of a prosperous , fearful , unquestioning , and highly conservative religious enclave , into which Pew has been thrown like a great incendiary Other .
The community ’ s willingness to “ help ” Pew is premised on its eagerness to identify Pew , but that identification is enigmatically withheld .
So people project onto @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dreams—eventually , a couple of old ladies in the Glendale retirement home begin talking of Pew as an archangel .
( “ Happened in the Bible all the time.
” ) For another elderly resident , Pew may be the Messiah himself .

Like much of Catherine Lacey’s writing, the title story of her collection “Certain American States” (2018) only just hangs together: the frailty of coherence is her great theme. In little more than five pages, a world that is at once hypothesis and presumption fizzles into view. Lacey certainly knows how to open: “I was one of those babies who look as if they won’t survive to dinnertime, but somehow do, then become toddlers with the tics and nerves of a used-up veteran.” Our narrator tells us that her mother died “while the ink was still wet on my birth certificate,” and that she was brought up by a man named Leonard, who disliked her. When the narrator is sixteen, Leonard writes her a large check, walks to town, and never returns. She looks after herself for many years, until one evening the phone rings—“I answered the phone because it rang and that’s what you do.” Leonard is dying in a hospital in North Dakota, and is hallucinating about taking a “last ship to Tanzania.” Once at his bedside, the narrator decides to humor him. “Madagascar has been beautiful,” she says, “and also I find it strange that there are so many Italians here.” For a second, Leonard breaks the illusion and speaks her name, and the two recognize each other as a living person and a dying person, with assigned tasks: “The dying and the living have certain agreements about these states we’re in.” But Leonard quickly falls back into gentle babble, about the opium trade and how he is going far away “to a remote location, in the Commonwealth of Dominica.”
There the story ends, dismantling itself as strangely as it began. A sparse realism scars the pages—Leonard, abandonment, the phone call, a North Dakota hospital. Leonard is the one who gives the story its title, when he says that “the loneliness of certain American states is enough to kill a person if you look too closely.” That’s the kind of great, plangent statement, as wide as the prairies, that burns through American writing, especially American realist short-story writing. But it is as if Lacey took the frame of something by Raymond Carver or Richard Ford and then emptied it—of sequence, not of consequence. Events are announced as actual events, yet linger in the text like dreams. We are not told how or even if the loneliness of certain American states killed Leonard and is killing the chronically nervous narrator. We know only that this piece of writing is suffused by a killing sense of loneliness and disconnection; that Lacey puns on the word “states” (of being and of geography); that here, on the page, North Dakota is no more real than the hallucinated Tanzania; and that somehow the spectral prose holds together the assemblage for long enough to haunt the reader. Wherever we have been, we have been in some kind of “state.”
“Certain American States” compacts many of Lacey’s virtues and interests as a writer. Overwhelmingly, her characters are trying to make sense of what a self is, and of how this self might function in the world. Of course, that’s one definition of what much serious fiction has traditionally sought to resolve: how should a person be? The postmodern difference has to do with the difficulty of resolving that question, and the way this difficulty is foregrounded. In Lacey’s novels and short stories, the coherence that most of us look to in order to make our way in the world is fraught or elusive. The self hangs together rather as Lacey’s fictions do, with apparently arbitrary filaments. Like the narrator of “Certain American States,” the protagonist of Lacey’s second novel, “The Answers” (2017), has been brought up by someone other than her parents. She goes by the name of Mary Parsons but was originally named Junia Stone. Her body, racked by pains and ailments, often seems to be something she is trying to escape. She has never had a television or a cell phone, and made it to the age of eighteen without having heard of Michael Jackson. When asked what she thinks falling in love is like, Mary Parsons answers, “It makes sense of something that doesn’t make sense.”
Estranged from themselves, Lacey’s characters go around decoding reality, only to discover how little sense it makes. The narrator of her first novel, “Nobody Is Ever Missing” (2014), who suddenly leaves her life in New York to take an open-ended journey around New Zealand, responds like this to eating in a diner: “A waitress came by and I told her what I wanted to eat, which seemed suddenly a very personal thing to tell a stranger, what things you were going to turn into your body.” In “Certain American States,” when the narrator is trying to tell the dying Leonard what she and her husband now do, she says that he “has a good job as a manager and I am a manager too, which means I am managing.”
Unsettling, mundane, and funny, Lacey’s fictions sometimes read as if characters let loose from Beckett were wandering through a recognizable, even realist landscape. The world looks solid enough, but her protagonists are wraithlike. Lacey’s third and latest novel, “Pew” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), reads, in several ways, like the logical and relentless development of this bold young writer’s previous work. (Lacey is thirty-five.) Many of her characters have hazy or incoherent pasts, but Pew, as the narrator of her new book comes to be known, is nameless, of ambiguous gender and race, and almost mute, barely able to summon or speak a memory. Pew’s body seems a matter of indifference or worse: “This body hangs beneath me, carries me around. . . . Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I’ve been told.” Pew is perhaps an orphan, but can’t remember. Occasionally, like an old pain, something resembling a distinct and individual memory begins to make itself felt: “I could remember a low, windowless room. Three paces by two paces. A damp floor. The taste of blood. A child. A long hunger. Some years. Some years, but gone now. . . . They were mine, or had been mine, but now they were somewhere else, somewhere near and far from me.”
Amid these desperate reductions, it’s hard not to hear the voice of late Beckett, who, in, say, “Company” (1979), is forever adding something only to negate it: “You were once. You were never. Were you ever? Oh never to have been! Be again. Same flat tone. . . . You are no older now than you always were.” “I must have had a mother,” Pew thinks at one moment, “but I also knew I didn’t have a mother.” Pew is dressed as if ready for a Beckett play, in a drab, canvaslike material of “gray-black-brown” and plain shoes with thick soles and no laces. The unnamed world the narrator is found in, though, is a solidly realized American community, apparently somewhere in the South; the plot draws its energy from the abrasions created when Pew’s abysmal enigmas rub up against the understandable curiosity and puzzlement of a conservative, God-loving place. People want to help this refugee-like person, discovered on a church pew one Sunday morning (hence the name). In order to help, however, they must first know what they are dealing with. Where does Pew come from? Is Pew a boy or a girl? Perhaps Pew is a genuine refugee, in flight from vicious but distant religious and civil wars, like Nelson, a boy whom a family in town is fostering? One of the residents, a woman named Kitty, says of Pew’s complexion, “You know I would just about die to have skin like yours—what is that, just genetics?” But people are no better at divining Pew’s ethnicity than at sorting out his or her or their gender, and they are certainly not going to get any help from this almost post-human foundling.
Pew is taken in by the robustly conformist Hilda and Steven, and given a temporary berth in the family attic until the church community can work out the next steps. Like many people in the town, Hilda and Steven are at once religiously well intentioned and religiously punitive, the gestures often indistinguishable and clumsily manifesting as racism, condescension, or angry befuddlement. The church pastor is brought in, to inquire about Pew’s gender. (Pew says nothing.) At the Monroe Medical and Rehabilitation Center, a doctor attempts a physical examination. (Pew declines to undress.) A picture emerges, slightly heightened and satirical, of a prosperous, fearful, unquestioning, and highly conservative religious enclave, into which Pew has been thrown like a great incendiary Other. The community’s willingness to “help” Pew is premised on its eagerness to identify Pew, but that identification is enigmatically withheld. So people project onto this interloper both their anxieties and their dreams—eventually, a couple of old ladies in the Glendale retirement home begin talking of Pew as an archangel. (“Happened in the Bible all the time.”) For another elderly resident, Pew may be the Messiah himself.
Meanwhile, Pew explores the surroundings. With Pew, we meet a number of rebels and misfits, who tell their stories and sound their complaints to the generally mute auditor. There’s a gay counsellor named Roger, who has already worked with Nelson. Roger is a liberal believer among the evangelicals, with a gentle faith: “God really is looking out for each of us.” Pew meets the acidly anti-religious Nelson, who complains that his whole family was massacred in the name of God, “and now these people want me to sing a hymn like it was all some kind of misunderstanding. Must have been some other guy.” A resident named Mr. Kercher shares Nelson’s disillusionment, telling Pew that, as far as he is concerned, the only thing that belief in God makes possible is “a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life.”
Unlike most of her literary peers, Lacey, who grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, has been closely interested in religious belief. More often than not, her characters endure and perform the frailty of their selves in relation to the vaunted coherence of an inherited Christianity: they are refugees from religion. Mary Parsons, in “The Answers,” was raised in a spirit of “complete purity,” and is in flight not only from her body and her past but also from God’s very certain answers—“my parents would have said it was just a part of His plan.” The narrator of the story “Small Differences” was once a teen-ager “heartsick over the idea of Jesus the way that other girls were heartsick over the idea of River Phoenix.”
Lacey’s preoccupation with pain is thus a preoccupation with religious pain, what Mary Parsons calls “just a part of living in the world . . . of not having an obvious god.” In the acknowledgments for “Pew,” Lacey mentions as an inspiration the philosopher of self (or selves, rather) Derek Parfit, but reading this unsettling allegory I was reminded not so much of Parfit’s Buddhist self-dissolutions as of Emmanuel Levinas’s deeply Biblical challenge: how will we respond when the face of the Other shows itself? Lacey seems determined to narrow that challenge to the barest provocation: what if the Other were only a face? No body to see, no gender or race to identify, no past to make sense of, just the cry of the human. How would we do then? Not only does this Christian community largely fail what might be called the Pew test; its members have, it would seem, already failed similar tests. Each year, the town holds a ritual of purgation called the Forgiveness Festival. The novel, set over seven days before and during the festival, progresses ominously toward this culmination, in which hundreds of churchgoers, wearing blindfolds and dressed entirely in white, confess aloud to the bad they have done and the good they have not done. But, quite apart from Lacey’s suggestion, late in the novel, that an awful deed may have been hushed up, the festival appears to fail on its own terms. The lurid confessions, laid out over several pages (“don’t know how to stop hating her” . . . “I know I killed” . . . “I doubt all the time”), seem likely to provoke not absolution but suspicion, fear, blame: after such knowledge, what forgiveness? Moreover, we learn that only half the town, the white half, attends the ceremony. What began as an attempt to bring together the whole community has become a badge of racial and moral separation; Steven boasts that the festival is “what sets our community apart from other communities in the area.”
“Pew” is a brave book, in both concept and execution. These days, few writers would venture a novel structured around an almost mute enigma. Caught in the sombre reductions of the tale, though, I sometimes missed the comedy and verve of Lacey’s earlier writing. One would trade a page or two of allegory for this marvellous line, from “The Answers,” about a fancy Manhattan neighborhood: “a neighborhood full of French patisseries, chocolatiers, and the sort of high-fashion shops that seemed angry to be themselves.” Or her description of what diners are served in the restaurants of such a neighborhood: “They ate blossoms and mosses, saps, uncommon pickles, thin slices of flesh.” Lacey’s tendency to push the hypothetical up against the real, the ghostly up against the grounded, can become, in “Pew,” a kind of drift through genres. It is, in part, an allegory about a Christlike figure, a holy fool, a blessed “idiot” who has gone beyond the human, but it is also a fable about sinister conformist suburban communities, along the lines of “Revolutionary Road,” “The Stepford Wives,” and “Get Out.” And as we, along with Pew, are steadily funnelled toward the festival—its dark secrets staining the oh-so-white raiment—another shift is threatened, and the festival comes to seem more like something from the movie franchise “The Purge.” At such moments, one has the sense of Lacey being a little unsure of where to take her book.
Perhaps my resistance suggests that I have failed the Pew test? Certainly, this difficult and discomfiting book throws down a challenge to our readerly hospitality: in truth, I didn’t always feel inclined to take in this smudged blank of a character, to give Lacey’s cipherlike creation lodgings in the house of empathy. At one moment, Pew muses that “at some point in the future, long after humanity had run its course, after some other creature had replaced us . . . at some point in a future I could not fully imagine, a question might occur in some mind, and that question might be What was the human? What was the world of the human? ” Daringly, Catherine Lacey has attempted that imagining, and Pew is the pioneer of this voyage into speculative post-humanity. One shouldn’t be surprised, amid such a searching experiment, if the novel form struggles to accommodate a deliberate affront to what novels do uniquely well: the human. ♦


newyorker--2020-08-17--Barry Blitt’s “Packed House”

Barry Blitt’s “Packed House”

In June , Barcelona ’ s Liceu opera reopened with a performance of “ Crisantemi , ” a string piece by the opera composer Giacomo Puccini .
The headlines , though , were about the audience : hundreds and hundreds of plants , which were imported from local nurseries and later donated to health-care workers .
In his latest cover , Barry Blitt replaces the foliage with cardboard cutouts , but the basic idea—we won ’ t be enjoying a performance of Wagner , at least in person , anytime soon—remains the same .
We recently spoke with Blitt about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ challenges of drawing daily .
I know you ’ re an ardent hockey and baseball fan—do you think sports events are the same without real people in the stands ?
Honestly , almost all the hockey I watch is on TV .
The playoffs are happening now , and the lack of an audience doesn ’ t change the televised sport at all .
Hockey isn ’ t doing the cardboard-cutout thing ; they ’ re covering all the seats with some kind of tarp .
And it sounds like they ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think there ’ s still the awful rock music blaring between plays—it ’ s hard to tell just what ’ s echoing in the background .
In any case , the players appear to be going about their business as usual .
I don ’ t know how baseball ’ s doing with the cutouts .
I stopped watching when they took the Expos away from Montreal .
Have you ever been to the opera ?
I don ’ t like the tone of your question !
Of course I ’ ve been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sixty-two .
I ’ ve lived in big cities most of my life .
Have you ever been to a hockey game ?
Do you miss crowds ?
What ’ s your most memorable crowd experience ?
I don ’ t miss crowds .
I get very nervous in crowds .
And it doesn ’ t help that I follow an “ away ” team—the Pittsburgh Penguins .
When I go see them play in New York or New Jersey , I have to deal with local fans who don ’ t like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
So I often end up having to sit silently if I attend a game around here .
Watching on TV is more pleasant and easier .
My most memorable crowd experience wasn ’ t a good one .
It was at an Electric Light Orchestra concert over forty years ago , and I still don ’ t want to discuss it .
You now sketch virtually every day for your ongoing series , Blitt ’ s Kvetchbook .
Is it hard to have to come up with more ideas ?
I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hand and filled it with nonsense daily .
It has been a habit for years .
But it does feel like we ’ re living through a particularly target-rich environment .
There ’ s no shortage of craziness from which to draw inspiration right now .
For more covers that celebrate music , see below :

In June, Barcelona’s Liceu opera reopened with a performance of “Crisantemi,” a string piece by the opera composer Giacomo Puccini. The headlines, though, were about the audience: hundreds and hundreds of plants, which were imported from local nurseries and later donated to health-care workers. In his latest cover, Barry Blitt replaces the foliage with cardboard cutouts, but the basic idea—we won’t be enjoying a performance of Wagner, at least in person, anytime soon—remains the same. We recently spoke with Blitt about fake crowds, sports, and the challenges of drawing daily.
I know you’re an ardent hockey and baseball fan—do you think sports events are the same without real people in the stands?
Honestly, almost all the hockey I watch is on TV. The playoffs are happening now, and the lack of an audience doesn’t change the televised sport at all. Hockey isn’t doing the cardboard-cutout thing; they’re covering all the seats with some kind of tarp. And it sounds like they’re piping in some crowd noise. I think there’s still the awful rock music blaring between plays—it’s hard to tell just what’s echoing in the background. In any case, the players appear to be going about their business as usual. I don’t know how baseball’s doing with the cutouts. I stopped watching when they took the Expos away from Montreal.
Have you ever been to the opera?
I don’t like the tone of your question! Of course I’ve been to the opera. I’m sixty-two. I’ve lived in big cities most of my life. Have you ever been to a hockey game?
Do you miss crowds? What’s your most memorable crowd experience?
I don’t miss crowds. I get very nervous in crowds. And it doesn’t help that I follow an “away” team—the Pittsburgh Penguins. When I go see them play in New York or New Jersey, I have to deal with local fans who don’t like it when you cheer against their team. So I often end up having to sit silently if I attend a game around here. Watching on TV is more pleasant and easier.
My most memorable crowd experience wasn’t a good one. It was at an Electric Light Orchestra concert over forty years ago, and I still don’t want to discuss it.
You now sketch virtually every day for your ongoing series, Blitt’s Kvetchbook. Is it hard to have to come up with more ideas?
I’ve always kept a sketchbook close at hand and filled it with nonsense daily. It has been a habit for years. But it does feel like we’re living through a particularly target-rich environment. There’s no shortage of craziness from which to draw inspiration right now.
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newyorker--2020-08-17--What Have We Done to the Whale?

What Have We Done to the Whale?

Last November , drone footage was posted on Instagram of a gray whale swimming near the surface just off the coast of Dana Point , California .
In the video , the whale , a juvenile maybe twenty-five feet long , cruises slowly into a lineup of surfers , its undulating tail casting arcing ripples , and then emerges from the water , exhaling through its blowhole .
A few surfers paddle off in alarm , though most seem oblivious .
The whale dips below the surface again , a ghostly silhouette , and glides out beyond the surfers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that spot just a few weeks before .
Had I been in the water that day , and suddenly seen the whale ’ s body beneath me , gargantuan and silent , I would have , for a moment , gone cold with dread .
How could I not ?
To be close to a whale , in the wild , not in a boat but in the water itself , is to encounter an embodied agency that exists , across every dimension , on a scale that swallows our own : its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its polar voyages .
The fear evoked by the whale is not a judgment on its character .
Whales almost never harm humans , and when they do it is invariably the humans ’ fault .
And yet : what am I to a whale ?
After the whale passed , terror would have melted into an abiding thrill : of having met life in its largest , ancient form .
Of having been blessed , in the most pagan sense of that term .
In drawing close to those surfers , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alien dominion , offering the watery communion for which every surfer quietly longs : to be absorbed , returned , dissolved into the sea .
‘ ‘ Would we know it , the moment when it became too late ; when the oceans ceased to be infinite ?
” Rebecca Giggs asks in her masterly “ Fathoms : The World in the Whale ” ( Simon & Schuster ) .
She means the moment when the oceans become so disfigured by human activity that , seeing them , we will see only ourselves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is already here , and most of us are missing it .
For Giggs , the whale is a potent but misleading symbol of the ocean ’ s infinity , its alterity and expansiveness .
We tend to think of the whale as a story of human redemption : a creature almost hunted out of existence by the commercial whaling industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries , and then saved by our collective recognition that , as activists told the United Nations in 1972 , whales are “ the common heritage of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ International Whaling Commission began enforcing a global moratorium on commercial whale hunting , many whale populations , once near extinction , have rebounded .
The laying down of harpoons and the return of the whale appear to speak not just to our empathy for creatures that , like us , care for their young , create culture , and sing songs but also to the part of our humanity that respects what lies beyond it .
In truth , Giggs argues , our mass consumption and globalized supply chains , our carbon emissions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a sea that is “ not full of mystery , not inexplicable in its depths , but peppered with the uncannily familiar detritus of human life.
” In 2017 , a beaked whale washed up onshore near Bergen , Norway .
In its stomach were some thirty pieces of plastic trash , including Ukrainian chicken packaging , a Danish ice-cream wrapper , and a British potato-chip bag .
This is the “ world in the whale ” of Giggs ’ s title : not an alien dominion but the totalized reality of human @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made them , for most of human history , extremely difficult to kill .
Adult grays can grow up to fifty feet long and weigh forty tons .
Blue whales , the largest creatures ever to have lived , can grow almost a hundred feet long and weigh a hundred and ninety tons .
When whales exhale through their blowholes , the vapor is so dense that it produces rainbows .
The earliest evidence of whale hunting is perhaps as old as eight thousand years , in South Korea , where Neolithic-era shale @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lances and makeshift floats .
Traditional whale hunters typically had to harass their prey to death over many days and nights .
They used bludgeons and spears , sometimes tipped with poison , to serially wound and exhaust the animals , while floats were used to prevent them from diving— “ sounding ” —out of reach .
The Inuit created their floats by inflating gutted seals , their orifices stitched shut .
All the indigenous cultures that hunted whales for subsistence—on the coasts of the Korean Peninsula , the Pacific Northwest , Alaska @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Greenland , Iceland , Norway—did so at their peril , and with elaborate ritual and frugality , using the whale ’ s many parts for food , shelter , and amulets .
Then , in the sixteenth century , Basque whalers created a global whale trade .
This was made possible by a technological advance : the attaching of a two-flued iron harpoon to a braided rope that could be uncoiled at great speed off a boat ’ s deck .
Although the harpoon was unable to pierce through to a whale ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with its flared barbs , almost impossible to dislodge from the animal ’ s blubber .
Thus tethered to the boat , the whale could not escape the hunters ’ lances .
Soon Basque whalers depleted shoreline populations in the Bay of Biscay .
Bigger ships , in turn , allowed the whalers to hunt in the open seas—what ’ s known as “ pelagic whaling ” —and to pursue various species at different points in their migration routes .
Near Newfoundland , Basque whalers killed as many as forty thousand whales between @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a time , the world ’ s dominant whaling force .
Their preferred method was to harpoon calves first , followed by the mothers that rushed to their rescue .
Whale hunting became a year-round business .
The Dutch , the Danes , and the British joined in ; by the late eighteenth century , commercial whaling had spread to South Africa and New Zealand .
American colonists pioneered the onboard rendering of oil from whale blubber .
In this process , a whale carcass was chained to the side of the ship @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blades peeled it like an orange ; the blubber was then separated from flesh and skin , and liquefied in huge cast-iron cauldrons , underlaid with water to avoid setting fire to the ship .
By turning their vessels into mobile slaughterhouses , American whalers were able to hunt whales that were then abundant in equatorial waters , whose carcasses would have otherwise rotted by the time the ships returned home .
The whalers also came to use shoulder guns and bomb lances , increasing the possible distance between hunter and prey .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ was the fifth-largest industry in the United States .
Why whales ?
Like traditional whale hunters , early commercial whalers sought out whales largely for their flesh , a food approved by the Vatican for meatless Fridays .
By the nineteenth century , though , whales had become prized as a source of a much more valuable commodity : oil .
In 1854 , whale oil , extracted from blubber , traded at , in today ’ s terms , eighteen dollars a gallon .
A single mature right whale could yield seven @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cogs , lit shop floors and streets , and , deployed as an insecticide , spurred industrial agriculture .
Sperm whales were hunted for the waxlike spermaceti found in their heads , which was used as a lubricant in looms , trains , and guns , and , most significant , as a raw material in fine candles .
New Bedford , Massachusetts , the center of sperm-whale hunting , was called “ the city that lit the world.
” Baleens , the bristly combs that certain whales , including humpbacks , have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in corsets , parasols , hairbrushes , fishing rods , shoehorns , eyeglass frames , hat rims , sofa stuffing , police nightsticks , and the thin canes used to beat misbehaving schoolchildren , which may explain the phrase “ to whale on.
” Increasingly , whales were seen not as prey but as a natural resource to be mined ; whalers talked about migrating sperm whales as veins running through the ocean , like gold .

The International Whaling Commission (I.W.C.) was set up, in 1946, to regulate whale hunting in international waters. But the quotas that the commission initially imposed backfired, sparking a mad rush by whalers who were keen to stockpile whale oil, anticipating a scarcity-driven price surge. Commercial fleets raced to take all the whales they could get, harpooning animals and then abandoning them when fattier specimens were spotted. Whalers hunted out of season and in whale sanctuaries, and illegally targeted whale calves. Aristotle Onassis’s lucrative whaling enterprise ended when his own sailors testified, in the Norwegian Whaling Gazette, to practices on his factory ships: “Shreds of fresh meat from the 124 whales we killed yesterday are still lying on the deck. Scarcely one of them was full grown. Unaffected and in cold blood, everything is killed that comes before the gun.”
The commercial whalers of the postwar period hunted Southern Hemisphere whales to near “commercial extinction,” the point at which the cost of killing an animal is no longer worth the returns. American and European whaling operations shrank, but the cause was taken up by two countries driven by nationalist rather than by commercial prerogatives. The U.S.S.R.’s whaling industry, which had begun in the nineteen-thirties, expanded during the Cold War. The Soviet military needed spermaceti, because Western embargoes cut off its access to synthetic substitutes. More than that, the Soviet state felt that it had not taken its “share” of the world’s whales, and set quotas for its whaling industry that far exceeded domestic demand for whale meat and oil. Soviet ships, frantic to keep up with state mandates that specified the total raw mass of animals to be killed, would often bring back carcasses too decayed for human consumption, or would simply throw them overboard, unprocessed. Between 1959 and 1961, Soviet ships harvested nearly twenty-five thousand humpback whales in the Antarctic.
“I made us margaritas, if you’re not too busy with your magnum opus or whatever.” Cartoon by Colin Tom Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Japan, meanwhile, was suffering from a postwar food crisis that lasted into the nineteen-sixties, triggered by the destruction of supply chains and agricultural land. On the advice of the U.S. overseer, General Douglas MacArthur, the country turned to whaling. Whale meat was served as a cheap source of protein to elementary- and middle-school children, and became a symbol of national resilience. Though whale is eaten in very small amounts today—just one and a half ounces per person a year—whaling is still heavily subsidized by the state, with most of its output stored, uneaten. In 2019, a researcher at Rikkyo University estimated the Japanese stockpile of whale meat at thirty-seven hundred tons. After the I.W.C. imposed its global moratorium on whaling, Japan was undeterred. Until 2019, when the country withdrew from the I.W.C., Japan openly exploited a loophole that allows whales to be killed for research purposes, and any leftover whale meat to be sold as food. Between 2005 and 2014, around thirty-six hundred minke whales were killed by Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean, resulting in just two peer-reviewed scientific papers.
The I.W.C.’s moratorium, perhaps the greatest triumph of the postwar conservationist movement, was spurred by decades of dire news. In 1964, an independent committee of biologists had warned that Southern Hemisphere whale populations faced “a distinct risk of complete extinction.” The scientists reported that there were fewer than two thousand Antarctic blue whales left. A decade later, that number was three hundred and sixty, representing a population decline of 99.85 per cent since 1905. This is the sort of mass destruction that biologists refer to as a “bottleneck” event, a decisive shrinking of a species’ gene pool that may well be irreversible. Once anti-whaling advocates helped bring non-whaling (including many landlocked) nations into the I.W.C., the group’s scientists were able to take a more explicitly conservationist stance. They were also buoyed by a worldwide outcry against whale killing. Greenpeace, employing a strategy that one of its leaders called “more an imagology than an ideology,” used footage of its theatrical high-seas tactics to evoke public sympathy and outrage. A fifteen-thousand-person anti-whaling rally was staged in London, and photographs of it were broadcast around the world. Popular books were written that celebrated whales and mourned their death; Farley Mowat’s “A Whale for the Killing,” from 1972, called whaling a “modern Moloch.” Whale songs—first recorded by accident in the nineteen-fifties by U.S. naval engineers sweeping for Soviet submarines—became, in the nineteen-seventies, a big commercial success. The 1970 album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” went multi-platinum. It provided a natural soundtrack for the decade’s faddish embrace of Eastern spirituality, promising an auditory portal to higher spiritual planes, repressed memories, and past lives. And it was taken as proof of the animals’ intelligence and sensitivity. Animal protectionists, appearing before Congress during a 1971 hearing on whale conservation, played the record as part of their testimony. One of them said, “Having heard their songs, I believe you can imagine what their screams would be.”
This mass gestalt shift, from whales as an extractive resource to whales as symbols of a global inheritance, is striking in part because whales are not typical of what conservationists call “charismatic” animals. Animals that win human sympathy tend to be readily anthropomorphized (elephants, chimps, dolphins), or cute (baby tigers, pangolins), or—the holy grail of animal conservation—both (otters). Whales, by contrast, are too large to be taken in easily by the human eye, let alone imaginatively given human form. They are magnificent but hardly cute. Philip Hoare, in “Leviathan or, The Whale” (2008), notes that the “blue marble”—the photograph of Earth captured by the astronauts aboard Apollo 17, in 1972—became famous before the first photograph of a free-swimming whale did. “We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like,” he writes. Human uncertainty about the whale is reflected in the stories we have long told about the animal. Ancient cartographers used drolleries—hybrid monsters, part whale, part sea serpent—to indicate the limits of their knowledge. In the thirteenth century, Norse sailors said that whales fed on rain and darkness. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when taxonomists began classifying animals according to their internal structures as opposed to their outward appearance, they were stunned to discover the signs of whales’ evolutionary history as land-dwelling mammals: fin bones, a physician wrote in 1820, that resembled “a man’s hand . . . enwrapped in a mitten.”
And there is still much we do not understand about whales. They navigate tremendous distances—some humpbacks swim more than sixteen thousand miles each year, three-fifths the circumference of the earth—aided by unknown sensory apparatuses, and according to migratory routes that are passed, somehow, from parent to child. Scientists know that whale vocalization—the singing of humpbacks, the chattering of belugas, the powerful clicks of sperm whales (at up to two hundred and thirty-six decibels, the loudest animal noise on the planet)—performs an important communicative function. Whales converse, and perhaps commune, at great distances. Songs of humpbacks off Puerto Rico are heard by whales near Newfoundland, two thousand miles away; the songs can “go viral” across the world. Some scientists believe that certain whale languages equal our own in their expressive complexity; the brains of sperm whales are six times larger than ours, and are endowed with more spindle neurons, cells associated with both empathy and speech. Yet no one knows what whales are saying to one another, or what they might be trying to say to us. Noc, a beluga that lived for twenty-two years in captivity as part of a U.S. Navy program, learned to mimic human language so well that one diver mistook Noc’s voice for a colleague’s, and obeyed the whale’s command to get out of the water. A recording of Noc’s voice can be heard online today: nasal and submerged, but also distinctively like English. (Oooow aaare you-ou-ou-ooooo?) At the very least, it’s a better impression of a human’s voice than a human could do of a whale’s.
The whale’s aura lies in its unique synthesis of ineffability and mammality. Whales are enormous and strange. But—in their tight familial bonds, their cultural forms, their incessant chatter—they are also like us. Contained in their mystery is the possibility that they are even more like us than we know: that their inner lives are as sophisticated as our own, perhaps even more so. Indeed, contained in whales is the possibility that the creatures are like humans, only much better: brilliant, gentle, depthful gods of the sea.
The I.W.C. moratorium on commercial whale hunting has some important exceptions. It grants special whale-hunting rights to indigenous communities, including the native peoples of Alaska and of Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula, the Greenlanders, and the residents of the island of Bequia, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It also excludes species classified as “small cetaceans,” such as the long-finned pilot whale, a species of dolphin hunted off the Faroe Islands, an autonomous Danish territory about two hundred miles north of Scotland. (The Faroe Islands, unlike Denmark, are not part of the European Union, which prohibits the hunting of whales and dolphins.) The grindadráp—or the grind, for short—is a traditional Faroese drive hunt that dates back to at least 1298, when the first law regulating the hunt was introduced. Records of the hunt have been kept since 1584 (the longest such archive), and show that an annual average of eight hundred and thirty-eight pilot whales have been killed by the Faroese during the past three centuries. The grind has long been the focus of anti-whaling advocacy: gruesome photographs showing rows of black whale corpses, their necks slit, floating in a sea bright red with blood, spark outrage on Facebook and Twitter. Faroese defenders of the grind argue that the hunt is not only a traditional part of their culture but also a sustainable and ecologically friendly practice. They point out that they monitor the pilot-whale population, and hunt only a small proportion each year, consuming what they kill. In an extreme northerly landscape that does not support agriculture, the Faroese maintain that they still depend on the ocean for their food.
The irony is that pilot whales, like whales the world over, are becoming inedible. Whale blubber stores toxins that have made their way to the sea, in the form of agricultural and mining runoff or condensed emissions—an effect magnified by whales’ longevity. Mercury levels in pilot whales are so elevated that scientists have advised the Faroese to drastically reduce their consumption of whale meat, which might in turn force them to import farmed protein from elsewhere, increasing their carbon impact. The breast milk of Inuit women in Greenland, one of the least industrialized places on earth, has, because of mercury levels in beluga whales and other marine animals, become a dangerous substance. Some studies suggest that the Inuit’s mercury exposure is comparable to that of people living downstream from gold mines in China. Orca in Washington’s Puget Sound have been declared among the earth’s most toxified animals; the carcasses of beluga whales that wash up on the shores of Canada are classified as toxic waste. The most prolific whale killers are no longer the whale hunters. They are, instead, the rest of us: creatures of late capitalism whose patterns of consumption make us complicit, however unwittingly or unwillingly, in an unfolding mass biocide.
Whales consume much of the eight million metric tons of plastic that enter the oceans each year, which gather in swirling trash vortexes known as gyres and can extend for miles. Often, this plastic is from packaging that allows us to consume non-seasonal food year-round. A sperm whale that recently washed up on the Spanish coast had an entire greenhouse in its belly: the flattened structure, together with the tarps, hosepipes, ropes, flowerpots, and spray cannister it had contained. The greenhouse was from an Andalusian hydroponics business, used to grow tomatoes for export to colder climes. Food waste produced by the globalized supply chain accounts for eight per cent of carbon emissions (air travel accounts for only about 2.5 per cent), which melt the ice on which whales depend indirectly for their food. Since the nineteen-seventies, with the loss of ice-fixed algae, Antarctic krill populations have declined by between seventy and eighty per cent. Noise from industrial shipping—eighty per cent of the world’s merchandise is transported on cargo vessels—has shrunk the whale’s world: the distance over which a whale’s vocalizations can travel is just one-tenth of what it was sixty years ago. Whales have washed up on the Peloponnesian coast with ears bleeding from decompression injuries caused by anti-submarine-warfare training.
Ecologists have warned that the dramatic shifts associated with climate change could subject even relatively large whale populations to sudden extinction. There are signs that this is already happening. In 2015, three hundred and forty-three sei whales, an endangered species, were found dead on the coast of Chilean Patagonia, likely because of a toxic algae bloom. The seis, scientists said, could be “among the first oceanic megafauna victims of global warming.” Meanwhile, because whales are enormous carbon sinks, the era of commercial whaling hastened today’s climate crisis. According to one estimate, a century of whaling equates to the burning of seventy million acres of forest. The people of the Lummi Nation, who live on the coast of the Salish Sea, between the U.S. and Canada, have started to feed salmon to wild orca that are starving because of the effects of pollution and climate change. “Those are our relations under the waves,” one Lummi tribal member said.
On an Argentine beach in 2017, a stranded baby dolphin was killed by a mob of tourists intent on taking selfies with it. Something similar had happened in Argentina the year before, when a baby La Plata dolphin washed up at a Santa Teresita beach; the animal was passed from tourist to tourist until it died of dehydration. Ecological historians may one day write about the early twenty-first century as a time of frenzied cultural obsession with wild animals: anime-eyed lorises, badass honey badgers, “trash panda” raccoons. As Rebecca Giggs observes, this frenzy has been facilitated by the rise of social media. On Twitter and Facebook, animal cuteness has become the only antidote to political fury. Instagram encourages us to curate our encounters with the extraordinary, so that we may ourselves seem extraordinary. Driven by a search for the perfectly “grammable” shot, ecotourism is everywhere on the rise, though it rarely delivers on the promise of its name, which is to reconcile the impulse to consume nature with the desire to conserve it. At least thirteen million people worldwide have been going on whale-watching tours each year, leading to more and faster diesel-powered boats. Wildflower superblooms are trampled by social-media influencers. Thousands of recreational drones—like the one that produced that video of the whale swimming through the surfers off Dana Point—disturb the wildlife they so rapturously capture.
Future historians will have the task of explaining how our performative love for animals relates to our relentless extermination of them. It is not simply a lack of knowledge. Could the Argentine tourists not sense the dolphin going limp in their arms? Don’t many of us acknowledge the contradiction of flying across the world to lose ourselves in nature? Who doesn’t grasp the vulnerability of the world to our collective power? Perhaps it’s something more like willful self-deception: a refusal to believe what it is we know. Or perhaps we are simply embracing what we sense will soon be gone, memorializing what does not really exist, as social media has taught us to do. Here is my fabulous holiday; here is my happy wedding day; here is the vast ocean; here is a whale. ♦


newyorker--2020-08-17--The Militias Against Masks

The Militias Against Masks

Early in the morning on May 11th , the neon “ Open ” sign in the front window of Karl Manke ’ s barbershop was dark .
A crowd loitered in the parking lot .
Spring had not yet arrived in Owosso , Michigan , a small town an hour and a half northwest of Detroit ; people had on heavy coats and snow gloves , or sat in their trucks with the heater running .
Michelle Gregoire , a twenty-nine-year-old school-bus driver and mother of three , looked unbothered by the cold .
Wearing a light fleece jacket emblazoned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she smiled and waved a “ Don ’ t Tread on Me ” flag at the passing traffic .
She said of Manke , “ He ’ s a national hero.
” Seven weeks earlier , Governor Gretchen Whitmer , a Democrat , had added “ personal-care services ” to the list of nonessential businesses required to temporarily close in the interest of containing the coronavirus .
Since then , COVID-19 had killed nearly five thousand Michiganders—at the time , the fourth-highest death toll in the country—but most of the cases were in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ areas had come to resent the statewide lockdown .
In April , thousands of people had attended a pair of protests at the state capitol , in Lansing , and hundreds of thousands had joined anti-lockdown groups on Facebook .
On May 4th , Manke , who is seventy-seven , had reopened his barbershop .
Four days later , Michigan ’ s attorney general , Dana Nessel , had declared it an “ imminent danger ” to public health , and state troopers had served Manke with a cease-and-desist order .
That had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Manke ’ s supporters waited to see if he ’ d defy the order .
A number of them , including Gregoire , belonged to the Michigan Home Guard , an armed militia with more than a thousand members .
Over the weekend , some Home Guardsmen had said that they would not allow Manke to be arrested .
Gregoire , who lives in Battle Creek , had driven ninety miles to stand with her comrades .
Several of them were dressed in fatigues and carried sidearms .
Manke arrived at nine-thirty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had a white goatee and wore a blue satin smock , black-rimmed glasses , and a rubber bracelet bearing the words “ When in Doubt , Pray.
” As he stiffly climbed the steps to the front door , his posture was hunched ; the previous week , he had injured his back working fifteen-hour days , pausing only to snack on hard-boiled eggs that his wife brought him .
Customers had travelled from all over Michigan , and some from out of state—a fact highlighted by Nessel to underscore the extent of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Open ” sign flickered on , people crowded inside .
Manke had been cutting hair in town for half a century , and at his current location since the eighties .
The phone was rotary , the clock analog , the gumball machine out of service .
Black-and-white photographs of Owosso , where he graduated from high school in 1960 , sat on cluttered shelves alongside old radios and bric-a-brac .
Also on display were paperback copies of the ten novels that Manke had written .
“ Unintended Consequences ” features an anti-abortion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” ; “ Gone to Pot ” offers “ a daring view into the underbelly of the sixties and seventies.
” As Manke fastened a cape around the first client ’ s neck , another man picked out a book and deposited a wad of bills in a basket on the counter .
“ My father was a barber , ” he told Manke .
“ He believed in everything you believe in .
Freedom .
We ’ re the last holdout in the world.
” “ We did this in 1776 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ now , ” Manke said .
He had a weakness for pat aphorisms , his delight in them undiminished by repetition : “ Politicians come to do good and end up doing well ” ; “ You can ’ t fool me , I ’ m too ignorant.
” In the several days that I spent at the barbershop , I heard Manke give countless customers the same stump speech .
Until the pandemic , he ’ d never witnessed such “ government oppression ” ; Whitmer was not his mother ; he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dragged him out in handcuffs , or when he died , or when Jesus came— “ whichever happens first.
” His admirers could not have asked for a better paragon of the mythical era when America was great .
Around noon , Glenn Beck called , live on the air .
Manke told him , “ It ’ s hardly my country anymore , in so many different ways.
” “ You remind me of my father , ” Beck said , with a wistful sigh .
Outside , I met a sixty-eight-year-old @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to raise our voices to hear each other over a family of evangelicals singing hymns .
“ This has nothing to do with the virus , ” Ball said .
“ This has to do with power .
They want to take power away from the people , and they want to control us.
” Ball considered the effort to shut down Manke ’ s barbershop an affront to America ’ s most sacred ideals—and he knew that he wasn ’ t alone .
“ We ’ re a trigger-pull away , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re getting to the point where people have had enough.
” From the start , President Trump resisted a national pandemic strategy centered on federal resources , preferring instead for each state to tailor its own response .
By early April , all American governors had declared states of emergency , a move that granted them the power to issue executive orders ( which , unlike the sometimes tedious legislative process , can allow leaders to keep pace with quickly evolving circumstances ) .
In Michigan , the legislature voted unanimously on April @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state of emergency—a rare instance of bipartisan consensus .
The Senate majority leader , a Republican , opened the session by singing “ It Is Well with My Soul.
” The lieutenant governor , a Democrat , presided over the vote in a T-shirt that read “ EVERYBODY VS COVID-19.
” The comity was short-lived .
Two days later , Whitmer imposed additional restrictions , which went beyond those of most other states : she banned travel between counties , any work “ not necessary to sustain or protect life , ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and garden supplies .
The following week , the Michigan Freedom Fund , a conservative organization partly financed by the Secretary of Education , Betsy DeVos , rallied thousands of protesters in Lansing .
It was the first major anti-lockdown demonstration in America , and not by chance .
Michigan , a swing state that is as divided as it is diverse , contains many of the national fault lines that the pandemic has deepened .
The Michigan Freedom Fund was created in 2012 , to lobby for legislation that curbed the collective-bargaining @ @ @ @ @ @ @ right-to-work bill , which would forbid making union membership a condition of employment , had been promoted by Americans for Prosperity , the national Tea Party advocacy group supported by the billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch .
The governor at the time , Rick Snyder , was a Republican , and the day that he signed the bill into law Whitmer , then a state senator , joined a raucous protest in Lansing , which turned briefly violent .
Backers of the law framed the debate as a matter of individual autonomy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s automotive unions , saw a cynical campaign to sacrifice the common good for capitalist gain .
COVID-19 has pitched these same ideological camps against each other , and , just as right-to-work laws spread from Michigan to other parts of the country , so has the anti-lockdown movement .
Within a few weeks of the Michigan Freedom Fund rally , similar events were held in more than thirty states .
In Kentucky , the governor was hanged in effigy outside the statehouse ; in North Carolina , a protester carried a rocket @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones beseeched demonstrators to resist a “ Chinese globalist Bill Gates attack on our freedom .
”

Early in the morning on May 11th, the neon “Open” sign in the front window of Karl Manke’s barbershop was dark. A crowd loitered in the parking lot. Spring had not yet arrived in Owosso, Michigan, a small town an hour and a half northwest of Detroit; people had on heavy coats and snow gloves, or sat in their trucks with the heater running. Michelle Gregoire, a twenty-nine-year-old school-bus driver and mother of three, looked unbothered by the cold. Wearing a light fleece jacket emblazoned with Donald Trump’s name, she smiled and waved a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag at the passing traffic. She said of Manke, “He’s a national hero.”
Seven weeks earlier, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, had added “personal-care services” to the list of nonessential businesses required to temporarily close in the interest of containing the coronavirus. Since then, COVID-19 had killed nearly five thousand Michiganders—at the time, the fourth-highest death toll in the country—but most of the cases were in Detroit, and some residents of rural areas had come to resent the statewide lockdown. In April, thousands of people had attended a pair of protests at the state capitol, in Lansing, and hundreds of thousands had joined anti-lockdown groups on Facebook. On May 4th, Manke, who is seventy-seven, had reopened his barbershop. Four days later, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, had declared it an “imminent danger” to public health, and state troopers had served Manke with a cease-and-desist order. That had been Friday. Now, on Monday, Manke’s supporters waited to see if he’d defy the order.
A number of them, including Gregoire, belonged to the Michigan Home Guard, an armed militia with more than a thousand members. Over the weekend, some Home Guardsmen had said that they would not allow Manke to be arrested. Gregoire, who lives in Battle Creek, had driven ninety miles to stand with her comrades. Several of them were dressed in fatigues and carried sidearms.
Manke arrived at nine-thirty, to cheers and applause. He had a white goatee and wore a blue satin smock, black-rimmed glasses, and a rubber bracelet bearing the words “When in Doubt, Pray.” As he stiffly climbed the steps to the front door, his posture was hunched; the previous week, he had injured his back working fifteen-hour days, pausing only to snack on hard-boiled eggs that his wife brought him. Customers had travelled from all over Michigan, and some from out of state—a fact highlighted by Nessel to underscore the extent of the viral hazard.
When the “Open” sign flickered on, people crowded inside. Manke had been cutting hair in town for half a century, and at his current location since the eighties. The phone was rotary, the clock analog, the gumball machine out of service. Black-and-white photographs of Owosso, where he graduated from high school in 1960, sat on cluttered shelves alongside old radios and bric-a-brac. Also on display were paperback copies of the ten novels that Manke had written. “Unintended Consequences” features an anti-abortion activist who “stands on his convictions”; “Gone to Pot” offers “a daring view into the underbelly of the sixties and seventies.”
As Manke fastened a cape around the first client’s neck, another man picked out a book and deposited a wad of bills in a basket on the counter. “My father was a barber,” he told Manke. “He believed in everything you believe in. Freedom. We’re the last holdout in the world.”
“We did this in 1776, and we’re doing it again now,” Manke said.
He had a weakness for pat aphorisms, his delight in them undiminished by repetition: “Politicians come to do good and end up doing well”; “You can’t fool me, I’m too ignorant.” In the several days that I spent at the barbershop, I heard Manke give countless customers the same stump speech. Until the pandemic, he’d never witnessed such “government oppression”; Whitmer was not his mother; he’d close his shop when they dragged him out in handcuffs, or when he died, or when Jesus came—“whichever happens first.” His admirers could not have asked for a better paragon of the mythical era when America was great.
Around noon, Glenn Beck called, live on the air. Manke told him, “It’s hardly my country anymore, in so many different ways.”
“Harold, I’m really going to need you to sign the divorce papers in blue or black ink.” Cartoon by Suerynn Lee Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“You remind me of my father,” Beck said, with a wistful sigh.
Outside, I met a sixty-eight-year-old retiree named Roger Ball. We had to raise our voices to hear each other over a family of evangelicals singing hymns. “This has nothing to do with the virus,” Ball said. “This has to do with power. They want to take power away from the people, and they want to control us.” Ball considered the effort to shut down Manke’s barbershop an affront to America’s most sacred ideals—and he knew that he wasn’t alone. “We’re a trigger-pull away,” he told me. “We’re getting to the point where people have had enough.”
From the start, President Trump resisted a national pandemic strategy centered on federal resources, preferring instead for each state to tailor its own response. By early April, all American governors had declared states of emergency, a move that granted them the power to issue executive orders (which, unlike the sometimes tedious legislative process, can allow leaders to keep pace with quickly evolving circumstances). In Michigan, the legislature voted unanimously on April 7th to extend Governor Whitmer’s state of emergency—a rare instance of bipartisan consensus. The Senate majority leader, a Republican, opened the session by singing “It Is Well with My Soul.” The lieutenant governor, a Democrat, presided over the vote in a T-shirt that read “EVERYBODY VS COVID-19.”
The comity was short-lived. Two days later, Whitmer imposed additional restrictions, which went beyond those of most other states: she banned travel between counties, any work “not necessary to sustain or protect life,” and the sale of paint, furniture, and garden supplies. The following week, the Michigan Freedom Fund, a conservative organization partly financed by the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, rallied thousands of protesters in Lansing. It was the first major anti-lockdown demonstration in America, and not by chance. Michigan, a swing state that is as divided as it is diverse, contains many of the national fault lines that the pandemic has deepened.
The Michigan Freedom Fund was created in 2012, to lobby for legislation that curbed the collective-bargaining powers of organized labor. A so-called right-to-work bill, which would forbid making union membership a condition of employment, had been promoted by Americans for Prosperity, the national Tea Party advocacy group supported by the billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch. The governor at the time, Rick Snyder, was a Republican, and the day that he signed the bill into law Whitmer, then a state senator, joined a raucous protest in Lansing, which turned briefly violent. Backers of the law framed the debate as a matter of individual autonomy; opponents, such as Michigan’s automotive unions, saw a cynical campaign to sacrifice the common good for capitalist gain. COVID-19 has pitched these same ideological camps against each other, and, just as right-to-work laws spread from Michigan to other parts of the country, so has the anti-lockdown movement. Within a few weeks of the Michigan Freedom Fund rally, similar events were held in more than thirty states. In Kentucky, the governor was hanged in effigy outside the statehouse; in North Carolina, a protester carried a rocket launcher through downtown Raleigh; in Texas, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones beseeched demonstrators to resist a “Chinese globalist Bill Gates attack on our freedom.”
On April 30th, Michigan lawmakers reconvened to vote on extending Whitmer’s state of emergency a second time, and protesters again converged on Lansing. Many were armed. Michigan is an open-carry state, and no law prohibits licensed owners from bringing guns inside the capitol. Dozens of men with assault rifles filled the rotunda and approached the barred doors of the legislature. Facing a police line, they bellowed, “Let us in!”
A widely circulated photograph of the confrontation showed a man with a shaved head and a blond beard, his gaping mouth inches away from two young police officers in blue masks, who gazed stonily past him. The historian Heather Richardson, in her popular political newsletter, summed up what the image represented for liberal audiences: “This is a man who punches down, not up, and who wants to have the power to decide whether his neighbors live or die.”


newyorker--2020-08-17--“Whisk,” by Anna Scotti

“Whisk,” by Anna Scotti

I told my grandmother I am afraid and she made that little wave , each plump finger brushing away my worries just the way she ’ d brush crumbs from around the toaster tray , the way she ’ d sweep the dog ’ s dry tracks from the trailer floor .
Oh , now , it ’ s not so bad here , she said , but I am afraid that when I ’ m gone no one will remember her , her dimpled knuckles , the way her mouth turned down at the corners in a sweet prim @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on her grave ; even I don ’ t do that now , but what I mean is , no one will intend to .
I told my mother I am afraid she ’ ll die alone and she laughed out loud : Let ’ s hope that ’ s the worst thing coming .
I looked down at my own hands , knotted in the dog ’ s fur , and saw that they are like my father ’ s , blue-veined and broad , and I stroked my hair , my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most like his , until the dog struggled to get down , until the kettle whistled ; then I sat alone at the kitchen table and stirred a cup of tea .

Audio: Read by the author.
I told my grandmother I am afraid and she made that little wave, each plump finger brushing away my worries just the way she’d brush crumbs from around the toaster tray, the way she’d sweep the dog’s dry tracks from the trailer floor. Oh, now, it’s not so bad here, she said, but I am afraid that when I’m gone no one will remember her, her dimpled knuckles, the way her mouth turned down at the corners in a sweet prim frown. No one will put flowers on her grave; even I don’t do that now, but what I mean is, no one will intend to. I told my mother I am afraid she’ll die alone and she laughed out loud: Let’s hope that’s the worst thing coming. I looked down at my own hands, knotted in the dog’s fur, and saw that they are like my father’s, blue-veined and broad, and I stroked my hair, my cheek, with the hand that is most like his, until the dog struggled to get down, until the kettle whistled; then I sat alone at the kitchen table and stirred a cup of tea.


newyorker--2020-08-17--Slide Show: New Yorker Cartoons August 24, 2020

“ Ah , this is going to be another one of those series where the only two minority characters , @ @ @ @ @ , fall in love .
”

“Ah, this is going to be another one of those series where the only two minority characters, who have nothing in common, fall in love.”
Cartoon by Sarah Akinterinwa


newyorker--2020-08-17--“Ode to Patrick Kearns, Funeral Director of the Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home, in Queens,” by Diane Meh

“Ode to Patrick Kearns, Funeral Director of the Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home, in Queens,” by Diane Mehta

By blood we go into the fabric of what once felt hymnal at worst ; we are tuned to higher pitches now , in languages invented , not imagined rites of spring but last rites in strange establishments .
Trucks collect the dead and roll uptown to bury in a potter ’ s field corpses we knew , and loved , their long solemn graves together , better here than bodies shelved or stacks of flesh shipped out of state to cremate or left to rot .
We formalized obituaries ( she was first to graduate , he escaped , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ though deaf , was a composer , too ; we pray alone to keep their souls alive ) until this month .
We lived in adverbs , dressed for rainshine half the time and not according to the daily toll , not this running tally , at scale in every borough .
Our minds are lost to gravity again .
By gravity we live .
We move from cell to fingers , toes , our footprint handprint fingerprint alone identifies us as one person in this widening morgue ; you men and women @ @ @ @ @ @ @ say now ; if Whitman could , he ’ d hold us dear , our arms , our feet , our hands , our fingerprinted fingers wrapped in his— “ myself disintegrated , every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme ” — and renew us with varied meanings , rebellious curiosities ; I will miss him in my future , if it is me , and in twenty or a hundred years , history will ask : How did we wear on with so much weeping ?
It was never so beautiful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yellow oaks deliriously blooming despite the trill of siren after siren to the east ; we ignored it , walking west or north , southeast , any which way someone else wasn ’ t .
Sunlight far-flung itself sideways across the arms-up oaks and Olmsted ’ s slopes ; oh I was rapt , convinced this surreal afternoon was magic-cast in lavender and grass-green thickening itself , cardinals flying straight up into that vanishing we are all doing now , minding our eternities—transcendent limbo , this , but cherish the eclipse , our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fugue-walking choices , prelude to nothing , yes , nothing , because when the wind is all C major unravelling in D minor , we are in the neuro-beat of wondering who will stay today and who departs tomorrow , but here are my children , my coffin , my love , it doesn ’ t matter what color the coffin is or that we swooned too long in idioms ; we broke on counterpoint and this is where it leads .
I swear this is not my story .
On our tombstones @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we love most is always free and far irrational , fine with me .
What is true today if not my teeth , my bones , my nothingness ?
Is it near ?
I must endear myself .
I ’ ll think , oh , it wasn ’ t me , I was just a sentence after all .
But my sentence : Was it wrong ?
I am young to be this old , too old to be that young .
When we are all accounted for , someone will surely say @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because we can not lose our minds in facts ; we lose them in the vivid air , thousands elsewhere .

Audio: Read by the author.
By blood we go into the fabric of what once felt hymnal at worst;
we are tuned to higher pitches now, in languages invented,
not imagined rites of spring but last rites in strange establishments.
Trucks collect the dead and roll uptown to bury in a potter’s field
corpses we knew, and loved, their long solemn graves
together, better here than bodies shelved or stacks of flesh
shipped out of state to cremate or left to rot. We formalized obituaries
(she was first to graduate, he escaped, she was a composer, he,
though deaf, was a composer, too; we pray alone to keep their souls
alive) until this month. We lived in adverbs, dressed for rainshine
half the time and not according to the daily toll, not this running
tally, at scale in every borough. Our minds are lost to gravity
again. By gravity we live. We move from cell to fingers, toes,
our footprint handprint fingerprint alone identifies us as one
person in this widening morgue; you men and women of generations,
ever upward, we say now; if Whitman could, he’d hold us dear,
our arms, our feet, our hands, our fingerprinted fingers wrapped in his—
“myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme”—
and renew us with varied meanings, rebellious curiosities;
I will miss him in my future, if it is me, and in twenty or a hundred years,
history will ask: How did we wear on with so much
weeping? It was never so beautiful as this April
in the park with yellow oaks deliriously blooming
despite the trill of siren after siren to the east; we ignored it,
walking west or north, southeast, any which way
someone else wasn’t. Sunlight far-flung itself
sideways across the arms-up oaks and Olmsted’s slopes;
oh I was rapt, convinced this surreal afternoon was magic-cast
in lavender and grass-green thickening itself, cardinals flying
straight up into that vanishing we are all doing now,
minding our eternities—transcendent limbo, this,
but cherish the eclipse, our orbit moving over
our polyphonic voices in fugue-walking choices, prelude
to nothing, yes, nothing, because when the wind is all C major
unravelling in D minor, we are in the neuro-beat of wondering
who will stay today and who departs tomorrow, but here
are my children, my coffin, my love, it doesn’t matter what color
the coffin is or that we swooned too long in idioms; we broke
on counterpoint and this is where it leads. I swear
this is not my story. On our tombstones, what do we see?
What we love most is always free and far irrational,
fine with me. What is true today
if not my teeth, my bones, my nothingness? Is it near?
I must endear myself. I’ll think, oh, it wasn’t me, I was
just a sentence after all. But my sentence: Was it wrong?
I am young to be this old, too old to be that young.
When we are all accounted for, someone will surely say:
Unevenly I conclude we count facts because we cannot lose our minds
in facts; we lose them in the vivid air, thousands elsewhere.